Hey, old people.
And yes, I'm talking to you.
I've been tooling around on EN World for a long time, now. I've been immersed in gaming culture for far longer than I'd like to admit.
One thing that jumps out at me, from all this talk of the next edition of D&D, is talk about the fiction that should inform it. From talk about the kinds of art that should be included, to the stories that should inspire its mechanics - the kinds of stories the players grew up on should be considered, when looking at a game.
That is an entirely understandable sentiment. After all, you want a game that can do Conan, and Elric, and Frodo, right? Those are the kinds of stories you grew up on. The kinds of things that drew you to gaming in the first place.
So now I'm going to tell you that you need to go step back, and - in essence - go away.
Your stories aren't relevant anymore. I'm sorry that this has happened, but it has. I have met no one in my age group that has heard of the Dying Earth series, and yet D&D's default casting system is based upon Vance's work. The only reason I'm aware of the guy is because I spend far too much of my time on gaming forums, studying the history of gaming and what-not. I've never read his works, and, honestly, I don't care to.
The same thing can be said for Conan, for Frodo, for the Gray Mouser, for... whatever else traditional sources you can name for D&D. I know there's all kinds of sources, all kinds of books and what-not that no doubt innumerable people that frequent these forums can toss at me.
It doesn't matter anymore.
The old guard needs to start giving way to the new, at some point. Perhaps now is that point. I don't want mechanics steeped in the old, anymore. I want a game that can give me things like what I've seen in the Redwall series, in Last Airbender, in anime like Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo. We've got to be able to follow the style of things like Harry Potter, because that is today's fiction, today's stories, the things my generation is familiar with.
Maybe this post is coming off as harsh, and I'm sorry for that. But I've been thinking about this, and it just seems reasonable to me that gaming needs to understand that the environment in which it was born is changing, and that it needs to change with it to stay relevant. Because if game designers keep talking about Elric and Frodo and Conan... you're going to lose people, and the next generation of would-be gamers aren't going to care. Talking about the old stories and the old lore demonstrates an unwillingness to recognize cultural change, and if you aren't willing to accommodate new takes on fantasy, then you risk becoming irrelevant.
If the next edition of D&D can't do Last Airbender or Harry Potter, then what incentive does the next generation of gamers have to pick it up?
