Are you part of the "Lost Generation" of RPG gamers?

[Orius]

I'll have to say I never really noticed the railroading everyone talked about much, but then I also never bought much in the way of modules, and the only setting I was really into was Planescape. The two biggest modules I have from 2e are Night Below and Return to the Tomb of Horrors, and neither really railroad, to some degree in both the PC need to explore on their own. Beyond that, there's only The Shattered Circle, compliation of modules from Dungeon, and Hellbound: the Blood War from Planescape.

 

[Stouthart]

I started gaming in 1984 with Basic, then quickly graduated to 1st. But the majority of my formative and most productive gaming years were with 2nd edition. I played it during High School, then while in the Army, then all through college. Personally, D&D to me is 2nd edition.

Now, I do think that 3/3.5 (and Pathfinder) are better editions and are what I currently play, but I will always have a soft spot in my heart for 2nd.

Stouthart

 

[jedavis]

Basically, too young to be "Old School", but too old to be "New School"; stuck between the two worlds.

No such thing as too young to be Old School.

(Says the 20-something former 3.x player turned ACKS DM. Grognardling? NeoGrognard? Not sure there's a name for the likes of me.)

 

[Neonchameleon]

I consider myself not part of the lost generation so much as part of the diaspora. The period when D&D wasn't the leader of the RPG market. White Wolf was. And most D&D players were members of groups that had been existing forever - Storyteller was where the main creative energy was, whereas TSR was getting called T$R for churning out over 600 sourcebooks in 9 years to an ever decreasing audience. The rules weren't great. If you want exuberant settings, I don't think D&D can match Vampire, RIFTS, Cyberpunk 2020, WFRP, or even most GURPS sourcebooks (to name what I was playing in the 90s).

And I'm pleased to see that it looks as if there's a second diaspora going on right now. Not as strong as the one I grew up with - the market leaders are both D&D right now. But even a split market between versions of D&D turns things over.

We weren't lost. We were members of the period when something consistently almost matched D&D's sales and was more relevant to us than the dungeoncrawls and settings that bounced off their own rules that D&D was offering. And I think the roleplaying community was richer for it. This isn't to say I like Storyteller. I don't for numerous reasons. But I consider the dominance of d20 to be something that seriously hurt the creativity of the roleplaying market for the first half of the last decade. And I massively prefer the material currently being produced with its clean playing to the games I played in the 90s.

 

[Altamont Ravenard]

Played BECMI in elementary school (started to play in ~86), then discovered 2nd edition in high-school and played the hell out of that edition, until 3e came out and after I convinced my fellow players to switch. The only nostalgia I feel tho is regarding the fact that I had much more time to play than I do now...

AR

 

[Blackwind]

I started in 1994 (aged 10 at the time) with the Classic D&D boxed set, then quickly moved on to 2E. I played 2E from 94 to 2000 and was an early adopter of 3E (implementing changes from Dragon magazine even before the release). I have a soft spot in my memory for a lot of the books that came out during the 2E era, from the Complete Book of Elves and the Complete Paladin's Handbook to the green-cover Historical Reference series. Planescape was great and I liked Birthright a lot at the time. OTOH, the rules were nothing special. I have heard that they were mostly created in order to avoid paying royalties to Gary Gygax (whose 1st edition books are much more fun to read), and they were not very different from the 1st edition rules anyway. If I want to play old-school D&D now, I will use the Red Box (1983) or the second-hand 1E books I have acquired over the years, all of which were printed before I was born.

Probably the strongest influence on my gaming, when I was coming up, were the Dragonlance novels. I started reading them at the same time I started playing D&D and they shaped my expectations of what campaigns should be like more than anything in any of the game books. I would suspect that the expectations fostered by Dragonlance (epic, DM-driven high fantasy stories, etc) are probably the main feature that separates our "lost generation" from the OD&D, BECMI, and 1E grognards. OTOH, those expectations have now become mainstream with the advent of Adventure Path play. I suspect that what separates us (if anything really does) from the 3E/Pathfinder and 4E crowds is a certain nostalgia for the relatively rules-light storytelling facilitated by 2E to the 3E/4E culture of "builds" and tactical miniatures combat. Personally, this has led me to move away from D&D and toward hippie story games like The Shadow of Yesterday.

 

[diaglo]

i'm not lost. y'all just haven't found me.

those who have get to play OD&D(1974) the one true game.

 

[Iosue]

thecasualoblivion kinda touched on this in this thread.

Me, I don't consider myself of the Lost Generation, but am sympathetic to it. In a sense, it's just like how, being born in 1976, I find myself with one foot in Generation X and one foot in the Millennial Generation, but not really truly one or the other.

I started D&D in 1987, and did the lion's share of my RPG purchasing in the 90s, so ostensibly it would seem I'd be part of the Lost Generation. But I actually started by playing B/X, and my first collection of AD&D were all 1e. I eventually got the 2e books, I liked them, and I cribbed from a number of 2e materials, but I was never a "2e player".

On the other hand, if you say "D&D artwork", I'm thinking of Elmore, Easley, Caldwell, and Parkinson. Not that I don't feel some nostalgia for Otus, Sutherland, Trampier, and Laforce. And our playstyle was not in the torch-counting, high-lethality dungeon crawl mode.

Ultimately, I guess I'm the Mentzer Red Box Generation. 1e or 2e, dungeon-crawler or setting-spanner, sandboxer or Dragonlance-style adventure pather, if you mourn Aleena and hate Bargle, you are my brethren.

 

[WayneLigon]

No, not at all. AD&D 2E had only minor mostly cosmetic differences between itself and 1E. Mostly, we noted it used a lot of things we'd already been doing as house rules. I would almost go so far as to consider it a '1.5' rather than a real 'second edition'.

 

[Weregrognard]

Perhaps I'm just conflating personal experience with others' of the time, but during the 90s, it seemed like 2e AD&D was D&D. Everyone I met that "played D&D" was playing 2e, with the occasional person using 1e or BECMI material, but playing 2e at core. What I read online about 2e having been the proverbial "red-headed stepchild" of D&D editions doesn't really jive with my (admittedly anecdotal) experiences. It was well-known and loved (warts and all)...or so it seemed.

So my question is: "what happened?” How did this "popular" game become ludus non grata? I mean, the simplest answer is that 3e happened and it was a hit. That's understandable, but when the luster of 3.x faded, and 4e turned off half the D&D fandom, how many of these people returned to 2e? Not many, I guess. Like I mentioned earlier, it seems these folk are spread out between the plethora of D&D editions, clones, and such.

Nowadays, there's a "D&D" for everyone

So from that point of view, the (2e) generation was "lost".

But then again, you see there are clones of 2e coming out, and they seem popular (esp. Myth & Magic). Every few threads or so online you'll see one about 2e. It's slowly but surely coming back into the public (D&D fan) consciousness. You might surmise that it this was inevitable with the OSR, as a movement of "looking back", gained popularity. And that's what I feel Blog of Holding was referring to in his post. It made me think, but maybe I’m way off base here.

On the other hand, if you say "D&D artwork", I'm thinking of Elmore, Easley, Caldwell, and Parkinson. Not that I don't feel some nostalgia for Otus, Sutherland, Trampier, and Laforce. And our playstyle was not in the torch-counting, high-lethality dungeon crawl mode.

Heh. You probably described what I'm talking about way better than I could in no less than three walls of text