Tips for Old School Gaming

This is a new blog series wherein we provide tips to have a quality Old School RPG experience. These posts are aimed at Fifth Edition players coming to Old School gaming for the first time.

In this first post, we deal with some core assumptions.

Core Assumptions

Old School games are very different creatures than 5e. It’s important that your expectations as a player are in line with what the game actually promises. If you expect a 5e game, an Old School game can’t possibly live up to that. Even a 5e game run with Old School principles (like The Mire) can’t satisfy your expectations if you expect it to be a regular ol’ 5e game.

Everything in this article assumes certain baseline facts.

Established Social Contract. You’re all friends, or at least reasonable adults, gathered with the intent of a few hours’ entertainment. You want your characters to get back alive, to survive the adventure. You want each other to prosper. Thus you intend to work together to achieve mutual goals. You don’t want to stab each other in the back.

Out And Down. Old School gaming most often involves what we call “out and down” adventures: Adventurers leave civilization, venture into the wilderness, descend into a dungeon, and return to town loaded with loot and glory.

That said, urban adventure is not just possible but easily accomplished, and most of the tips work equally well.

Player Skill

Player skill is as important as character skill. Your 5e character sheet has skills like Perception and Investigation. In original D&D (BECMI) and 1e AD&D, characters didn’t have discrete skills, so play demanded more of the players. Playing in the Old School spirit using 5e rules means using character skills as a last resort, when you’ve exhausted your own. Some might describe that as metagaming, and maybe it is in a modern-gaming context, but for an Old School game it’s absolutely necessary.

Have a Clear, Specific Goal. No, that doesn’t mean “go adventuring, earn XP, and save the world.” That means “travel to, clear, and loot the Tomb of the Shadow Lord” or “save the abducted princess”. Unless and until you have a specific goal, the other player skills don’t matter much.

That said, your specific goal might be “scout the location of the Tomb of the Shadow Lord” or “find out where the princess is being held” — that gives you something to build on using these player skills. If you’re scouting in the wilderness or casing city townhouses, you have a different set of preparation requirements than delving deep into a long-forgotten tomb.

Reconnaissance. Much of using player skills involves information gathering. Get as much information as possible before making a decision. You should know as much as possible about the dungeon (or whatever you call the adventure area) before you leave civilization. You should know as much as possible about the monster you hear snoring in the next dungeon room before you kick in the door. A tiny piece of information might be the key to survival, much less success.

Rules governing the gathering of information vary from game to game. You shouldn’t need rules, for the most part. Roleplay! Seek rumors from merchants, storytellers, and barflies. Seek concrete knowledge from learned scholars, libraries, and reclusive wizards. Even the bartender at the tavern you use as a home base might know something. Ask! 

A clever GM feeds pieces of information to you in dribs and drabs so you can have the pleasure and excitement of adding it up into crucially important intelligence. Write down the bits and look them over occasionally to discern patterns.

Preparation. Use the intelligence you’ve gathered to prepare and equip your character. In most 5e games, rations and mounts and mundane gear is ignored or at least “handwaved”, because there’s a pretense that players don’t like resource management even though they’re perfectly happy to manage resources like hit points and spell slots and magic items. Eschew this pretense and be open to a different gaming experience. Old School games also have resource management, but it’s just stuff like food, water, and arrows as well as hit points and spells. It may seem boring, but when it becomes a matter of (character) life and death, it becomes a hell of a lot more exciting. 

Leverage Mundane Equipment. Think creatively about mundane gear. Yeah, it’s not as sexy as magic items, spells, and character abilities, but if you can use a lump of incense (that doesn’t even have a cost associated with it in the Equipment table) to do what you’d otherwise need to spend a spell slot or track down a priceless wand of secrets for, you’re that much farther ahead. Here’s a few examples:

• Rope. Sam Gamgee bemoaned his lack of rope, at least until he got to Lorien, and rightly so: rope is damned useful. 
• Iron spikes can be hammered into a door jamb to keep it from slamming shut behind you, trapping you, as well as pitons for climbing. 
• Incense is de rigueur for clerics, but it’s also useful for letting its smoke help you find secret doors and passages. 
• Marbles are better than caltrops, because not only will they slow enemy pursuit, you can use them to see whether or not a surface slopes.
• Extra food and small amounts of money and gems are useful as bait or distractions; the dire wolf might prefer a lump of meat, and the goblins might like a handful of gems. Either way, if they think it’s better than chasing you, you’ve won.
• The ubiquitous 10-foot pole. Poke it in a dark space. Thump the chest with it to make sure it isn’t a mimic. Confirm that’s a sphere of annihilation in that stone face’s mouth.

Balance the Party. Fill the “Core Four” roles — fighter, rogue, healer, wizard — and supplement with other roles if you have extra players. If you lack enough players to fill the Core Four, use hirelings (more about hirelings later). 

Published Old School adventures are designed to provide something for each role to do. If your GM designs their own adventures, they can design specifically for your party, so go ahead and do your all-bard boy band if you like. 

But in an Old School game, even a 5e game with Old School characteristics, having different specialties in classes is a good idea. It lets you approach things from a much wider variety of different angles, which increases your chances of success.

The Best Offense is a Good Defense. While RPGs don’t have winners and losers, encounters and quests do have win conditions. One of those conditions, as mentioned above, is getting everyone back to town alive and reasonably intact. Prioritize counterspell and dispel magic over fireball. If you counter the bad guys’ magic, you can always run away. If the bad guys take you out before you can bring your arcane cannon to bear, you’re humped. Speaking of running away, don’t forget your bag of marbles and their multiple uses. Which leads us to…

Have a Bugout Plan. Have an arrangement with someone who isn’t going on the adventure to come get you (or at least do something) if things go sideways. It’s the same thing as the basic real-world rule of not going hiking without letting someone know your itinerary, or a pilot filing a flight plan. 

This is advanced-level player skill, because it means you’ll have to have developed resources of your own as well as relationships between your character and various NPCs. That takes in-game time. 

If the expedition goes sour, how might you escape? Say you’re going into the sewers to smoke out a gang of wererat thieves. You let someone know where you’re going and what you’re doing, and set a place and time for your return: “If we’re not back at the Dog & Trumpet by midnight, send in the city guard!”

That’s strategically. Think tactically, too. Keep a spell scroll with web or grease on it to cover your escape. Oh, and a couple bags of marbles. 

Next Time

In the next installment, we talk about engaging with the environment.