Tuesday, April 14, 2009

I am Locutus of Old Guard.

Lower your stodgy dogmatism and prepare to be assimilated.
I will add your gaming philosophies and techniques to my own.
Your house rules will be altered to service my own game.
Resistance is futile.

Unless, of course, you manage to roll successfully on the save vs assimilation table.

My favorite part of the whole blog and forum scene is trawling for cool new ideas and rules to modify for my own use. All the historical discussion and hair splitting about new vs old, Greyhawk vs Eberon, narrativeist vs gamist vs simulationist vs kewl powrz vs David Letterman is still very interesting to me, but, the stuff I like best is when I run across an idea, or way of looking at something that I hadn't thought of before.
I don't get surprised very often, and I friggin love it when something comes out of the blue and I can say, "Holy crap!, I never thought of that!"
This is the essence of Old Guard Gaming, the omnivorous assimilation of anything that can contribute to The Game.
I visit all sorts of sites devoted to gaming, and I don't restrict myself just to the old school, or tsr, or pre 1983, or whatever. Even if I don't understand the attitudes of the posters in a forum, (ENWorld), I still drag my seine through it occasionally. You just never know when you'll dredge up a nugget of gaming goodness.
I see AD&D as a tool box. I never play completely by the book, I pick and choose what rules to apply at which time to keep the game running smoothly. By extension, I look at all gaming the same way. I will gladly cross editions to pry off a handy bit of one and weld it on another.
I think Old Guard/Old School gaming is this philosophy behind the rules, as much as it is any particular set of rules.

I really meant to make this post longer and more in depth, but, my wife says I have to get in the shower so we can go out. Maybe she'll let me come back out to play more later.

5 comments:

Gamer Dude said...

Absolutely agree!

It's about making your game wicked cool. And old school is just another name for a handy multi-tool.

Ragnorakk said...

I'd rather be a Borg than a (saberhagen) Berserker.
Or was the Borg a kind of a Berserker?
anyway - good post!

E.G.Palmer said...

Damn, what was the name of that berserker story where the berserker captures a starliner and the sole survivor is a psychographic historian who recreates the personalities of people of the past as interactive programs? That's my favorite short story by Saberhagen.

Chris said...

This post is replete with delicious truth. I like the mental image of the old school blog scene as a swarm of greybearded marauding looters descending on an unsuspected world on their vast kitbashed cosmic vacuum cleaner (probably powered by GROG! energy).

Also kewl powrz > David Letterman. ;)

E.G.Palmer said...

Hmmmm, now I'm going to have to work,"greybearded game looter" into a post somehow.