The topic of this month’s RPG Blog Carnival, hosted by 6d6 Fireball, is D&D. A pretty broad topic, considering that the majority of RPG Bloggers write almost exclusively about D&D all day, every day. To drill down a bit, the topic has been divided into four themes. Today, I’m going to tackle one of those themes.
The Edition Wars
While I’ve already said my piece on the Edition Wars, there’s one other thing that I feel is worth mentioning. Any desire that I have to play an older version of D&D is based entirely on nostalgia. It’s not that fantasy is my favorite genre, or that X-School is my preferred style of play, or that I think those game mechanics are particularly superior to any other game mechanics. I much prefer espionage, supers, historical and modern horror games, there are other styles of play besides Old School/New School (it’s true!), and both objectively and subjectively there are better mechanics to be found. Yet it will always be my first game, and I will carry the memories of the good times I had for the rest of my life. In many ways, I don’t want to play D&D any more because I can’t match those experiences. 4th Edition doesn’t play the same and isn’t to my personal tastes, and I’m afraid that in playing some legacy edition I’d be exposed to all the warts and flaws that I could overlook in my teens and twenties that would taint those memories. I love D&D for what it is: a pleasant, and important, part of my past. I’m seeking new experience, with new systems and settings, because if they don’t match the salad days of when I played D&D, well, they’re not D&D. If I play high fantasy and recreate the tropes, but don’t quite recreate the feel, I can write it off as not being D&D. But if I played D&D and it didn’t live up to my expectations, that would sting.
Discussion
No comments yet.