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 edition was 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).

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 kills you. The cold horrible truth is that really oldest is not always the best, by this logic of oldest being best, North America should be driving in Model T Fords still. 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. 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.