[old school] Reply to Mash's Torg post
I've broken this out into its own post because Mash's original that I'm replying to is multiple pages back in your LJ feed now. If you didn't read it then, go back now, because it's a great post. G'wan.
Mash's choice of Torg as a focus delights me, because it's a great game that also confused all heck out of me for the longest time. In my RPG-collector madness I acquired three or four books for it about a decade before I finally got hold of the rules; they sat on my shelf, utterly confusing in the way they presented adventure situations in a world that had become a battleground for contesting realities. I sensed there was something amazing in there but there was also something not quite right about it. I knew that I never wanted to run a game of Torg like the game expected me to. Mash's post helped me finally figure out why.
At the heart of Mash's post is an interesting way of defining old school vs. new school in RPGs. The old school is all about going on adventures; the new school is about what else there is to do.
I think there's a lot of truth to this. I think in "old school gaming" it's true that adventures and quests were foregrounded - looking through the other posts in this old school series draws a line under that.
There are additional wrinkles. There was another common approach for classic-era games (which may or may not be counted as "old school"), namely foregrounding setting. This was usually framed as a deliberately counter-D&D style, where games are about experiencing life in a detailed world rather than chopping orcs and taking their stuff. This goes right back to TSR's Empire of the Petal Throne game, which put the focus squarely on exploring the extremely detailed world of Tekumel, and has impeccable credientials as being its own beast rather than a kneejerk reaction to D&D's adventure focus. Setting-foreground games are some of the most memorable from the 70s and early 80s - Runequest's Glorantha, Harn, Skyrealms of Jorune, Pendragon, Gangbusters, even Paranoia and Toon were all about experiencing a setting not going on adventures. (Yes, even Pendragon, which celebrated its quests but also placed them very carefully within a larger tapestry.) But this trend of foregrounding setting was always a distinctly second-tier trend in RPGs - the mission-based games had an overwhelming dominance. Even Pacesetter's ambitious Sandman game was fundamentally a mission-based scenario. (So I've heard anyway - I've never seen a copy.)
The new school had a different focus, and this is where I want to look again at one of Mash's points. He implicitly argues that the "new school" was about grappling with moral complexities and ideological conflicts, and points at how these features were not explored in Torg-as-played (or Torg-as-presented-for-play). I don't think that's quite right as the distinction, though. I think the things Mash identifies as interesting about Torg have a long lineage - hell, Tekumel has been confronting players with moral challenges since D&D came in a white box.
I think the New School is actually about foregrounding character. Vampire put the focus squarely on the characters, rather than the missions they went on. The blood points and humanity score on the character sheet and the mechanics for hunger, torpor and frenzy put the focus right on the character like nothing before ever had. Its easy to forget now how radical this was - the idea of character focus was so unfamiliar that Vampire itself provided mission-based adventures for its first two years in publication, unsure how else RPGs could work. A character-based approach required a whole new technology of RPG gaming, one that didn't exist at the time and advanced through rough trial and error over the years. The first editions of White Wolf's Wraith and Changeling games were both beset by this exact problem - one, a game of personal reconciliation with the past, the other a game of negotiating compromise with the complexities of life, and both rulebooks had GM advice sections recommending espionage and monster-bashing as appropriate focus points for games.
So, with that in mind, I think Mash's identification of Torg as a key transitional game is dead right, though for slightly different reasons. It isn't the moral complexities of the setting that make it so, rather it's that the game forces the player characters to be ambiguous figures themselves.
Torg is a high concept game and trades heavily on the idea that anything is possible with its characters. You can play a cyberpunk, a fantasy hero or an occult investigator in the same group - in fact it is assumed that this massive variety is the default. However, from another point of view your choice of character is severely limited. Everyone will have to play a character cut off from their own reality, imbued with significant power and burdened with responsibility, and most crucially given a special and privileged perspective. Torg characters, unlike almost everyone they meet, understand the nature of the conflict - they know what is ultimately at stake. And they are also entirely bound to the weird rules and requirements of their special status. They are adrift from any baseline, existing entirely in a liminal space in which they have to choose an orientation for themselves; this is a softer form of the way Vampire forced every player character to exist in its own state of confusion and necessary drama.
This, then, is where and why Torg fails to pass into "new school". Torg characters are ripe for exploration, but instead the game fills the vacuum around them with one high adventure mission after the other. And there's nothing wrong with that, hell no - but now that I see the most compelling drama in Torg as internal to (in fact hardcoded into) each character, I finally understand why the adventure tone of Torg always seemed so wrong to me, and I get what I was trying to do with my own Torg game (sadly unfinished and certain to remain so now that players have scattered across the world).
Torg, in fact, recommends that play begins weeks after the reality invasion that kicks off the game's internal timeline - at the start of session one, everyone is set up as a "Storm Knight", ready to fight the villains and save the world. The backstory is summed up in the rulebook, and given more detail in the novel trilogy. And that struck me as nuts - the thing that should be defining the characters in the game, their experience of everything they know breaking down around them, left to scribbled background notes? No. In my game I started at the very beginning; I started with the characters. And with that change it all made sense to me.