With 1st ed Warhammer Fantasy Battles (the 'mass combat fantasy roleplaying game') we had to make our worlds up. We also used the same rules for RPGing as well as wargames. For the former, I had to come up with various extras, like price lists, religions, societies, injury rules, etc. And from the start, understandably perhaps considering the game rule writers themselves didn't seem to know what they had created (itself a consequence of the term 'RPG' not having fully settled into clear meanings), we blended the RP with the WG: small battles might be part of a roleplaying scenario, and skirmishes might form a part of a WG campaign sequence.
Before Warhammer (pre 1983) myself and my friends were using the Traveller (RP) rules for RP (sci fi, post apoc, fantasy) and WG (sci fi, WW2, even Napoleonic using 32nd scale Airfix in our gardens) basically because we knew the rules, could modify them as necessary, and that's the only rules I had. We weren't in any clubs, and knew little of the various WG rules out there. My young self had looked at some such rules, and found them unfathomable - they looked like far too much effort and way too restrictive. When I began running Warhammer games, I was just as happy to wring all sorts of uses out of them. (15 years later I ran historical scenarios concerning the witch craze of the 1640s and 1680's highwaymen using 1st ed WFRP rules.)
I never shook off such blending of homerules/WG/RP, although sometimes circumstances (space, transportation) meant tabletop roleplaying was of the more 'usual'/steroetypical kind, with just the scenery/props and figures required for a tabletop experience which looked similar to D&D. For years I always used models and scenery for combat - that itself a left over from my early youth playing with toy soldiers. When I ran Star Wars D6 RP campaigns I went just as big on the models' side. I never ran D&D, nor played for it decades, and then only as one offs occasionally, because my approach to Warhammer Fantasy allowed me to make it into whatever I wanted to explore.
I did, eventually, in my late 20s, start delving very, very deep it RP experiences that involved no toys whatsoever. But I always ran WFB (playing 3rd ed through 4th and 5th, til 6th looked great) and never stopped using models for WFRP. The models I painted for WFRP scenarios would turn into regiments, batallions then armies. 30 years later, the current campaign utilises the full range of all that went before, including the old models and scenery, as well as many new models, and the added extras of e-mails, internet campaign records and YouTube. But my hobby is still, I maintain, recognisably the same as I did from the start. Rules is rules - dice are gods - but as there is a GM (this has always been a crucial part of what I do) then modifications and new rules are always possible, and players can try whatever their PCs could try in the game world. The current affair is a wargaming campaign, but the players are roleplaying one PC and one alone - the leader of a faction or realm.
What I am doing now really feels the same to me as all those years ago. So if what we did all those years ago was Oldhammer, then this must be too?!?
Basically it's like comparing PC games, like Diablo Hellfire and Diablo 2 LOD.
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