What are some of the things about Palladium system that I contribute to it being old school or even just old school flavor?
Palladium doesn't not have a rule for every possible action by a player. That is up to the GM to come up with.
Maybe this is not to your taste and you like more rules. But palladium is what it is.
Palladium uses alignment, Its not the good/evil, Law/chaos axis from AD&D. But its not so removed any D&D player cant find a parallel to D&D.
Palladium has hit point. Sure it also has structural points, no matter how you split it thought its hit points.
Palladium has saving throws. while all editions of D&D have saving throws. Palladium's saving throws are way closer to AD&D saves than 3E saves, that is old school flavor to me.
Palladium's system is not obsessed with balance is classes. While this is a turn off to some. I think its great. For a good group it just fine. For a bad group you can always restrict what you don't want. As a GM I would rather have the freedom to choose than have the design of the game choose what is acceptable for a player character. To me this is also old school.
I could go on and on. But the funny thing is I don't think any one else thinks of Palladium as an old school system. Because its still in print. Still the same old system. There is no new palladium system, so I cant go to the forums of the new game and post about how the new edition raped my child hood. There is no out of print edition for me to retro clone.
Can a game be old school if it has not weathered at least one edition war? do you think an in print game be old school?
I think so. Tunnels and Trolls and Call of Cthulhu are both generally considered to be Old School games and they're both still in print. There have been multiple editions of both games, but they haven't really changed compared to how D&D has; you can play with different editions without noticing much of a difference. So, sure, an in-print game can be Old School, even if it hasn't had any edition wars.
ReplyDeleteActually, I think quite a few people do consider Palladium to be "old school" in a lot of ways. However, it is rarely considered part of the "old school" community simply because it is rarely considered part of any community. Palladium fans have a strong tendency to hide away in their own corner. More mainstream fans have a tendency to give Palladium fans a lot of (mostly unwarranted) crap. As such, Palladium is largely its own thing, and neither properly old school nor new school.
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