Old School: Form or Content?

Which one is more meaningful for a role-playing campaign that identifies itself as "Old School": using the old systems (or their modern derivatives) or playing in a style associated with the old times, no matter what the system?

To give a specific example: which one is more "Old School", an adventure focusing on the social problems of truck drivers of the 1960's, using OD&D as the system, or delving into the dungeons of Castle Greyhawk, the original notes stolen from Gary's black suitcase, using a modern, indie system that, say, lets any player be the DM whenever they feel like it?

Most importantly: does any of this even matter at all?

Let's try to begin sorting out this mess. So, there seems to exist a problem in the OSR. Always when we invent a new label, someone wants to understand the exact definition of it, and there's nothing wrong with that. It's just that usually labels get invented before they get defined; then, people come up with their own definitions, and after that, it's hard to come up with a common denominator. Just ask any beer geek about the meaning of the phrases "craft beer" or "extreme beer". All this leads to the fact that when people try to come up with exact definitions after the cat's already out of the bag, those definitions have to be the simplest and broadest possible, to have any meaning. And there's nothing wrong with that, I think. This just seems to be how things go.

I'm not out here to define the term "Old School Role-Playing"; for goodness' sake, I don't even have the street cred for that. Someone like the Grand Master of Flowers can do that; I'm just here to share some of my thoughts about the borders of the term. I'm not even sure whether we indeed need any definition for the term at all.

First: who defines the "true" nature of a role-playing game, the author of the game, or the community of (the first) players? Or, which one is more important? If Gary Gygax wanted AD&D to be a toolkit, a collection of rules from which you could pick your favourites, he certainly didn't make this intent clear in his presentation. Rather, his tone suggests more of an "all-or-nothing" approach: Gary's way or the highway. Whichever the case, it seems that the community of players who adopted AD&D took the toolkit approach. Very few people (except modern revivalists) seem to have played AD&D "by the book"; they took bits and pieces that they liked and amputated the rest. Let's take another, more recent example: Mark Rein-Hagen and his (first edition) Vampire: the Masquerade. Rein-Hagen strongly suggests that the game's focus should revolve around the characters' morality, indeed, their very "Humanity", which is actually represented as a game trait. Again, the reality of the game seemed to be different. V:tM seems to be suited for the morality plays envisioned by the author... if there's only one player. With a larger group, it becomes hard to keep the focus there, and the game tends to shift more towards traditional RPG's. And this is how the community played it. While all groups did not go for the full-on (and later maligned) style of "D&D with fangs, trenchcoats and katanas", very few were able to maintain the supposed focus as envisioned by the author.

So, we had these two games; both some of the most successful RPG's of all time, games that have a strong identity and immediately provoke a reaction when you mention them to any role-player. And in retrospect it seems that neither of them was played by the way suggested by the books themselves. Would anyone have the nerve to say that the early community of either was "not getting it" or "playing it wrong"? That only a careful reading of the books, decades later, with modern understanding, would grant us access to "true AD&D" or "true V:tM"? I guess one could say that.. if one was of a hagiographist bent and indeed had the nerve to ignore the reality of the situation; the very community of players and the understanding of the game that they established.

Of course, neither of those communities had much in the way of uniformity. RPG communities form as more or less isolated pockets, each having the rulebooks from a common source, but otherwise not interacting with each other. This was especially the case before the Internet, but I guess it still is more or less like that. In biology, we have a phenomenon that slightly resembles that; it's called "adaptive radiation". In adaptive radiation, we have a common source of organisms; a place where the species in question exists in a more or less uniform state. From there, the species starts migrating to many other places, it sort of "radiates" around. Small groups of the organism thus reach diverse places, more or less losing contact with each other. Then they start adapting to the environmental and biological conditions of those places. Natural selection leads to evolution, and we end up with several new species or subspecies, who might not resemble each other very much, but they all share a common ancestor... who they all resemble, at least a bit. I think it makes up a nice analogy. Before, I said that the AD&D and V:tM communities developed some sort of a common understanding of those games... but when we look closer, we can see that the "common understanding" only consists of a shared habit of ignoring parts of the rulebook. Some bits were more likely to be ignored (natural selection at work!), like psionics and weapon speed factors in AD&D or the wackiest suggestions at ego-tripping in Vampire, some stood the test of time better, like the interesting and imaginative creatures in the AD&D Monster Manual or the simultaneously simple and complex dice pool system of V:tM. But the bottom line remains: the games were sliced and diced by the community, to the point that while they had some resemblance to the original game (as presented in the books), they might not had much resemblance with each other.

Thus: while I think that we have absolutely no ground to say that the early (or current!) RPG communities were (or are) playing their games wrong, we cannot find any kernel of wisdom about the true identity of a game in the community-generated styles themselves... other than that modifying RPG's to one's tastes (and the demands of the actual gaming experience) seems almost a defining feature, something without which these games might not even be able to exist.

It now seems that while we must stick to the form of RPG's to find a definition for them (as the content seems too diverse and mutable to ever give us any), we cannot take that form seriously, so to speak. We cannot see the form as something that's set in stone. If we want a definition, it's in the form, but if we see parts of the form ignored, or foreign parts implemented in a particular game, we cannot say that it diverts from the definition. Otherwise we would have a defined a game so narrowly that no actual gaming group would qualify as its players.

Now we can go back to the original question: is the "Old School" in the system or in the style? It seems to me now that it is more in the system and less in the style. Styles are difficult to pin down, they are elusive; they are mutable; they evolve over time; and the styles written in the RPG books can have next to no resemblance with styles found in actual gaming. So, to pinpoint "Old School" gaming, you first have to pinpoint "Old School" systems. That's easy, because everyone has a different opinion on that anyway. For example, we might have someone to whom "Old School" systems consist of OD&D, AD&D, Holmes, Moldvay, Mentzer, AD&D 2nd edition, and their respective retro-clones. Then, all this person has to do, is to identify games or campaigns that use those systems, or parts of them --- and voilá, those are "Old School". All that one has to keep in mind, of course, is that labels like this are not binary, on/off things. They are a spectrum with different shades of gray. And on that spectrum, it seems to me that a game using something like OD&D as a system is "more Old School" than a game that tries to go for a style that it percieves as "Old School", but with a different system. This, however, does not make it better, more "true" (whatever that means) or even more interesting. All I'm saying is that if matters like this matter to you, there's no greater Holy Grail than the old books themselves, but even with them, "What did Gary mean?" has no more relevence as a question than "How did the players understand this?" or "Was this bit used at all?". But the question that digs deepest into the black heart of "Old School", to me, seems to be "How could I use this and this bit to have an enjoyable gaming experience next weekend?".