After struggling for a year or so to make my West Marches game feel like an old school exploration game using 5E, I gave up and switched to Classic D&D. Don't regret the change at all. But yesterday, I clicked on this "suggested video" on YouTube and liked what the guy had to say. He's making videos for 5E, but at least this one from yesterday and one more I watched today make me think that he understands old school play and what makes it fun and interesting.
In this one, he talks about how you don't need a lot of game mechanical resolution for a lot of exploration-based play in the game. Thinking of Johnathan Tweet's "Drama-Fortune-Karma" breakdown of how to resolve actions, exploration is mostly a mix of drama and karma, and the rules tell you when you need to involve fortune. Old school play tends to have a different idea of when fortune should come into it (newer school play being very character skill check based, while old school tends to be more about DM systems of management or set abilities with set probabilities), but in both new and old, drama and karma (and some common sense) can manage a lot of it.
The second video, which I just watched shortly before posting, deals with Simulationism (of the dreaded GNS theory). He's got an interesting take on what simulationism means, and his discussion of having a stable and unbalanced world to game in again seems very old school.
I think I'll be watching more from Zipperon Disney.
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