Nice post, Joe. I really enjoy biographical sketches as pertain to RPGs and you wrote yours with eloquence and a kind of contagious nostalgia. I too just recently moved back to the town of my high school at the age of 35, and after having lived in numerous places across the country (and world); yet I did it to become a teacher at my old high school!
My personal view on 3/4 ed is closer to Mircoles in that I feel that 4ed better evokes the "old school vibe" because of its relative simplicity and its emphasis on a kind of cinematic play. When 3ed came out I remember thinking, "Finally, D&D has caught up with the rest of the RPG world and has a core mechanic." But then I realized that this simple core mechanic was overburdened with endless modifiers and an enormous amount of seemingly unnecessary rules.
It is also interesting to note that you are relating a game that came out only nine years ago with your youth. In other words, why do you relate 3.x -- which came out when you were about 30 -- with a kind of imaginative play that you feel characteristic of your youth? Perhaps you crystallized roleplaying-wise 9-10 years ago and thus attached yourself to 3.x as your "RPG Mullet"? Given the overall content of your post I would have thought you would be playing 1e or even OD&D, because many of the aspects you seem to dislike in 4ed are actually quite prevalent--even more so--in 3ed ("builds", class combos, reliance on magic items, etc).
I tend to think that the edition or game itself is far secondary to how you play it, so that what you are looking for in a game can be there if you want it to be there. I suppose it depends upon how much you want to customize the "crunch" for your "fluff." In that sense there are really two factors: the rule system itself and the tone or "vibe" of a game, especially as evoked through its art, but also its "fluff." Correct me if I'm wrong, but my sense is that what you are turned off with about 4ed has less to do with the game mechanics and more to do with the fluff that "coats" it. I personally don't like most of the 4ed art (some of it is quite frankly embarassing); I don't like dragonborn or tieflings, and I wish 4ed better accomodated "traditional" fantasy in which characters didn't start as heroes but became them. But I feel that the game mechanics themselves are an evolution from 3ed, but that the "fluff" is more a reflection of current cultural elements which I resonate less with than previous editions.
Disclaimer Interlude: This is not an edition war!!!
That aside, it has also been my observation that the majority of folks become attached to a self-image of their late teens or early 20s and life thereafter is one of constant disappointment and diminishing returns; however, I don't think we are inherently programmed to follow that relatively tragic route (It is a bleak picture, no?). Most do, but that doesn't make it the healthy or even natural thing to do (Most people eat fast and processed foods, after all). It relates to Aberzanzorax's mention of fluid vs. crystalline intelligence: to some extent the degree to which we crystallize is the degree to which we die while living (become undead!). This is not to say that we shouldn't form a sense of self and knowledge about the world, but that, in my opinion, it should always remain
fluid, as if we have Hamlet's famous line to Horatio tattooed in our consciousness:
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. In other words, I am positing that there healthy and pathological forms of crystallization, and that the prevalent and even culturally accepted is the pathological, which is that of an
inorganic solid; the healthy form is more of an
organic membrane that is able to take on different forms, depending upon context, and continues to grow. Think static vs. dynamic.
To put it another way, when we "crystallize" we stop growing, we stop evolving as human beings. And, I would put forth, we stop feeling that spark of youth and discovery which is, in many ways, what RPG players seek after when they continue to play, or take up again, gaming into their 30s, 40s and beyond. The sense of wonder. Imaginative freedom. Awe.
Ahhh...There is nothing quite like that feeling of cognitive opening, of not simply figuring something out but realizing that the world is much larger--and much more mysterious--than we previously "knew" (or thought we knew).
Many "career gamers" settle into a kind of workaday gaming aesthetic in which those sorts of peak experiences are relatively rare and the normal experience is far more mundane. But, like a musician who seeks to enter the flow of their instrument, my guess is that in the heart of every gamer is the yearning to not only recapture the wonderment of youth's fresh experience of the fantastical, but something even deeper and profound, something glimpsed ever-so briefly by the imagination...a depth of mystery and wonderment that the child's experience was merely just a precursor of. Most don't get there, though, but we all at least intuit it.
The aging former-high-school-football star sitting on his couch with a growing girth, an unhappy (2nd or 3rd) marriage, and a dead-end job is really a tragic figure. But it is not because he (or she) is no longer a high school football star, but because he (or she) crystallized at that age and did not continue to grow but instead atrophied, withered, became old when so young, and thus never really grew up in the fullest sense of human potential. It has to do with upbringing but also the inability of our educational system to teach a true love of learning and the skills to facillitate life-long exploration and consciousness evolution. I would also argue that it has to do with certain cultural factors that actually inhibit imaginative capacity, like video games, TV, and other forms of media. I am reminded of those "blob people" in the movie Wall-E who had lost their capacity to think for themselves, to generate anything from within; they were passive viewers.
So I personally don't see you as an "old guy who is losing it" because you become thrilled at designing a sword and sorcery world (if you are, then so am I...maybe we can start an Asylum together!
; I see you as a maturing man who wants to feel alive within, and who does so through exercising that most precious human capacity: imagination.
