The Good Parts of Old School RPGs.

What do I enjoy most about old school rpgs? It's the mapcrawling procedures.

There's this idea in some rpg design circles that stuff isn't real until it happens at the table—in other words, it doesn't really exist until you introduce it to the group's shared imagined space. But with old school mapcrawling games, that isn't really true. The map IS real, even when only the DM knows what's on it. That map that you the players discover gradually, that the DM reveals to you in play, is the same as it was before you knew what was on it. The true main responsibility of the old school DM is to make sure that map stays real.

This produces a different experience from a game where the setting you are exploring is created by improv. You can have a sense of exploration with improv, but you're not really discovering something, you're creating it. When the DM keeps the map secret from you, and maintains the integrity of its contents, the feeling that you get is one of interacting with a place that is real, that exists beyond both the decisions of your characters and the narrative arcs of their deeds, beyond even the sense of narrative that players try to impose on the game. This can be anti-climactic. It can even be boring for some people. If what you want out of rpg is to experience the dramatic arc of an action movie, a mapcrawl is going to fall short. But it's great if you want the feeling of discovering something with substance, exploring it, and finding out how it works. That, to me, is the heart of old school games.

This happens at the organization level, in procedures. Players need to be committed to exploring the map, the DM needs to be committed to managing it and revealing it. You need to know how much you can explore at a time, what the dangers are, how the map reacts, how much can be discovered, what sorts of tactical options are allowed. And there needs to be opportunities for interactions beyond just the dangers and the rewards. But these things can all be expressed in terms of step-by-step procedures and attitudes the participants should adopt. They're independent of what dice you roll and what stats you make your characters out of.

When it comes to the resolution mechanics of old school and osr games, I can pretty much take 'em or leave 'em. The trend in osr games toward being primarily rules lite systems over refining and exploring the mapcrawling process isn't something I'm excited about at all, really. Some ideas are clever, sure, but I don't think any of them are vital to having a good map-focused experience. I've run games in the old school style using only the rules from Apocalypse World and the only thing that I felt was really lacking was that read a sitch didn't work very well as a mechanism for finding secret doors.

But it doesn't seem like the massive variety in rpg rules these days has ever been fully applied to mapcrawling procedures. Of course, old rules from the 80s aren't the only option anymore, but even so. It feels like a underdeveloped area of game design to me, and I would like more of it. I don't think anybody's likely to listen to me, so maybe if I want something I'll have to write it myself. Which I should probably do instead of writing this.