Old School Roleplaying
Old School role-playing is a term used by grey beards to justify why their version of role playing is better than yours. Usually either clutching a red box edition of Dungeons and Dragons or even a new copy of Labyrinth Lord (a revision of old Dungeons and Dragons rules) that is "old school role-playing". A grey beard of the old school is a hyper nerd, to them it is great and better than the cursed fourth edition, 3.5 etc. In fact the past was so full of awesome today is so bad by comparison. Oldest editions were best and back in those days you had to color in your own d20 with a wax crayon and you had to use the theater of your mind and not use miniatures. It truly was a Golden Age. It is a nostalgia that is now untouchable. You didn't have to worry about fixed simulationist rules that bored you like in 3.5 Dungeons and Dragons. The D.M was right (Gygax said so). Rocks fall you die!
In reality people had different experiences that varied. Using rules that thieves have only 1d4 hit points suddenly every chest trap will kill them and a lot of scenarios were badly written meta gaming such as the Tomb of Horrors, where purely going to the front door gets you killed. The cold horrible truth is that really oldest is not always the best, by this logic , North America should still be driving in Model T Fords. Some groups undoubtedly had a great time with the old rules but plenty of others had a shit time and problems with the rules and went off and wrote Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and such instead (where daggers do more than 1d4 they can kill you in one go). Anyhow if a grey beard bores you with his trip to the shrine of kuo toa and why old school is best just troll them by saying you play WOW which sold more copies than D+D ever did.
Incidentally this article was penned by an old fart from the old days so do not bother regaling me with tales of how good it was. Sadly both you and I are destined to become irrelevant whilst the kids get into WOW or some other new fangled computerised crap. Little bastards will never get to know what it's like to die during character creation in Traveller.