Mercurius
Legend
PREAMBLE
The quote in my title is from the great John Boorman movie, Excalibur, and refers to an understanding that was lost to Arthur and Camelot, leading to Arthur's wounding and the poisoning of the land. But more on that in a moment.
This post was inspired by the thread, What Has Caused the Old School Revival? But being rather self-indulgent, I began to wander far afield from my original intention, so I decided to craft this into an essay, even a manifesto (of sorts).
Before getting into it, let me lay my own bias out on the table, just so that the suspicious veterans of the Edition Wars aren’t wondering as they read this, what’s his real agenda? I say “my bias” not because I’m an advocate of this or that edition, or new vs. old school, but because as a human being I am biased, I speak from subjectivity. I started playing D&D in the early 80s with 1st edition and updated to each new edition of our great game as they came out – 2e, 3e, and 4e. I’m excited to start a 5e campaign up early next year. It might sound facetious to say this, but my favorite edition of D&D is D&D. I love the game itself, in whatever version; I see the specific rules system as being more of a methodology for the game, rather than the game itself. In other words, “D&D” is music, and the edition and specific rules set, is the medium the music is recorded on – whether vinyl, eight-track, casette, CD, mp3, etc.
Like audio media, Dungeons & Dragons has followed a developmental trajectory. But development is not without its pitfalls, it isn’t always “better and better,” although that is how it should be, if we’re able to integrate each stage into the next – or at least the “baby” of each stage, while throwing out the “bathwater.” Unfortunately, as flawed human beings, we tend to do the opposite – we tend to leave behind the good things, while picking up all sorts of baggage along the way. As we develop psychologically, we pick up new pathologies and neuroses. An adult has certain neuroses that a child couldn’t have, partially because they have a more mature mind and self-sense. On the other hand, most children are far more imaginative and without the hang-ups of adults, because our culture “teaches imagination out” as young people are indoctrinated by an education system that is still based upon early 20th century industrialism.
In a way I am saying that early D&D was akin to the childhood of the game, and recent games are the adult versions. But it isn’t so simple as that, and I am not saying that later/more mature = inherently better. If anything, I feel that something crucial has gone missing, the “secret that is lost” – and it is a secret that makes all the difference. But let me get to that later.
Aside from my “bias,” I do want to add a disclaimer – that what follows is not meant to be a strictly factual account, but more of an artistic rendering, an extended philosophical musing (and thus, in the end, meant to be a performance of the kind of approach that I’m advocating, which I’ll explain towards the end). I’m going to incorporate snapshots of the history of D&D and you might find I don’t represent things accurately - or at least not as you perceive them! All I can say is, bare with me – the point is the forest, not the trees.
So let’s get to it.
PART ONE: OLD SCHOOL, NEW SCHOOL, WHO NEEDS SCHOOL?
When talking about the Old School Renaissance (OSR), there seems to be a strange kind of bifurcation. Advocates of the OSR see it as harkening back to "real D&D" before it became obfuscated by excessive rules and filler. An analogy might be the gray box Forgotten Realms versus the later FR supplements, or the 3e white hardcovers. The gray box (or the Greyhawk box set) offered broad strokes of the world, broad indications more than strict directions on how to run a game set in the Realms. The later supplementation filled it all in, giving clearer guidelines, even rules, on How To Do It The Right Way. Of course I'm exaggerating in that the spirit of D&D—if not the resulting paradigm—has always been “Your Way is the Right Way,” but OneTrueWayism felt implied simply by virtue of the wealth of information presented; if something is published it feels like canon that a DM cannot, or should not, disagree with, while if it isn't published then there's tons of room to move.
In some sense this is unavoidable, at least if you want to publish books. The more books you published, or at least rule books, the less open-ended a game feels. Just there’s a huge difference between “You crest the hill and, after looking briefly back at the farmlands of your youth, you see the ruin-dotted northern wilds stretch out before you…” and “The King of Ysperath places the crown upon your head and declares your Overlord of the North.” The former is open-ended simply because its at the beginning, whereas the latter is right in the middle, or near the end, and feels less free.
(I think a good argument could be made that the biggest problem with editions of D&D after 1e is the sheer dumptruck-load of rules supplements, which I’ll touch on a bit more in a moment).
Detractors of the OSR say, in the extreme, that it is a nostalgia-driven attempt to recapture the Golden Age of the D&D we grew up on, which for most of us over the age of 30 was AD&D 1st or 2nd edition, BECMI, or for the true grognards, OD&D. As someone famously said, "the Golden Age of scifi is 12"; I think this applies to D&D as well; “old school” is, sans capitalization, a relative and subjective term that refers back to whatever version of the game we played in our youth, when we were (about) 12.
Compared to more recent iterations of the game, Old School D&D is, these detractors say, a clunky, anachronistic museum piece that has no place in modern gaming. This is a bit of an extreme perspective that few probably actually hold, and I doubt there are any true "detractors" of the OSR, but at least there are those that find the slicker, more complex "new school" iterations of D&D more appealing, and the old school approaches problematic for various reasons.
Anyhow, there's a general view - especially among OSR advocates - that D&D "died," or at least went astray, sometime between the publication of Dragonlance waaaay back in 1984, to the arrival of 3e in 2000. Dragonlance set the stage for the rich settings of the late 80s and 90s, and an approach to D&D that was more driven by setting and story than it was free exploration; gradually the metaplot took over the hexcrawl. With 3e, D&D reached unparalled heights in complexity and customization and the canonical supplementation of the 2e settings became transposed to the rules themselves. You could still modify 3e, but it was less about “making the rules your own” and more about adding feats, classes, and other options to the already established rules system. The OSR became the clarion call harkening back to a simpler, freer time in which D&D was more a game of imagination than of simulation, more about exploring wilderness and dungeons than about optimizing your character with kewl powerz.
Ironically enough, when 3e came out it was a kind of "revival" to a more "old school" style of play after a decade plus of 2e style campaign settings and meta-plots, which had likely been influenced by the story-based World of Darkness games. Think of, for instance, the advertising of Sword & Sorcery Studios/Necromancy Games, which I believe said something like "3rd edition rules, 1st edition style."
In the late 90s AD&D was floundering, partially because it was a big, clunking anachronistic system - at least compared to the last decade or so of design innovation. 1987 saw the publication of two games which had, at first, a subtle but increasingly important influence on RPG design: Ars Magica and Talislanta. Both included variants of the dice roll + attribute vs. target number design paradigm that became the basis of the d20 system more than a decade later. One of the lead designers of Ars Magica, Mark Rein Hagen, went on to design the World of Darkness games, which for the first time provided a challenge to the dominance of D&D in the RPG world, emphasizing story over the game. The other designer of Ars Magica, Jonathan Tweet, not only updated Talislanta a few years later, but was a lead designer in D&D 3e. Tweet and Rein Hagen, along with other designers, led the RPG community into a brave new world of Indie design, while AD&D – even in its 2nd edition – hadn’t adopted this new paradigm.
With 3rd edition, Dungeons & Dragons wasn’t as much brought into the 2000s, but into the 90s. The flagship RPG had lagged behind the rest of the RPG world in terms of rules design. In the early Aughties, D&D experienced a revival in interest that, if not equalling—or even coming close to—the legendary “25 million” of the 1980s, at least saw D&D’s popularity jump from the declining 90s. With 3e, we had the first wave of lapsed players returning – people who hadn’t played since they were in high school or college in the 80s, but now had time and energy to spend on D&D in their 30s and 40s – as well as a new generation of gamers, Gen Y folks who found the modern sensibilities of the 3e game more appealing than “that old 80s game.”
I’m not exactly sure what happened that led Wizards of the Coast to design and publish 4e in the way they did, but I can imagine a few related factors. One, the glut of product of 2000-07, which included literally one hundred hardcover books (including settings) - compare that to the mere thirteen AD&D 1e hardcovers produced from 1977-88 – not to mention thousands of third party products because of the OGL.
Another factor is that ,despite the surge in popularity in the early Aughties, the player base seemed to gradually decline again (note: I don’t have facts to back this up; this is based upon impressions of others and my general observations). This seems inherent to any edition, that there’s an initial surge, then a rise as the game becomes established and even more popular, then a gradual decline. By 2007, while 3e might not have been significantly declining, it probably wasn’t growing – and for a company owned by a larger company, a steady state isn’t acceptable. What is needed is growth, growth, and more growth.
A third factor is more cultural and generational. Where the Gen X kids of the late 70s and 80s were growing up in a world in which Pac Man and Galaga were the state-of-the-art video games, in the Aughties you had a plethora of first-person games, and then the immersion of World of Warcraft, et al. If you’re a 10-year old boy and your options are D&D or Defender, then you might choose D&D; but if your options are D&D or Xbox, well, it’s a lot easier to dive into the latter than the former.
Wizards of the Coast had the idea, noble if perhaps misguided, to try to appeal to “Generation Xbox,” to tap into the milllions of Warcraft subscribers and offer something that they would find appealing. The result, though, is well known: 4th edition arrived and, whatever the initial sales were, was met with rather intense vitriol and quickly dwindled and led to a fracturing in the D&D community due to an Edition War that made its predecessors seem relatively tame. Whatever the merits of 4e were, the overall result was disastrous. Despite an attempt at reviving the edition with Essentials in 2010, it was clear that 4e was a failure, and 5e was announced in January of 2012, just three and a half years into 4e.
That said, part of the upshot of 4e is that perhaps because it was a failure, it led to two things: one, the creation and publication of Pathfinder, in which 3.5 not only “survived but thrived,” and the Old School Renaissance. Older players in particular fled 4e for either the more homey pastures of Paizo—which was a company clearly for the people by the people, with the humble goal of updating the legacy of the recent “golden age” of 3rd edition—or the classic realms of old school gaming, a simpler time and game.
I think the OSR has less to do with rules, though, than it does with a feeling - which includes presentation and the basic assumptions of the game. One of the problems with 3e, in my opinion, is that there was no simple, basic game that could be played without the density of rules that edition (and now Pathfinder) became known for. Castles & Crusades was an attempt to create that, and in my mind combines the best of "old school flavor" and "new school design," although without the production values and support that jaded D&D players of the 21st century have become accustomed to (plus the name itself implies something more medieval than fantastical).
I know that advocates of the OSR see clunky mechanics like THAC0 and descending AC and Saving Throws as, to quote an oft-used phrase, “features and not flaws,” but this is not unlike saying that a typewriter's inability to correct and requirement of an ink ribbon is a feature and not a flaw, or a vinyl record's inability to be recorded over is a feature and not a flaw. Yes, it is true on some level – especially taken out of historical, technological context - but when you compare it with more modern technology, it ends up looking anachronistic (I, for one, don’t miss fastforwarding to the next song on a cassette tape, or having to “be kind and rewind” a VHS, even if I feel tinges of nostalgia for bygone technologies).
When I see “THAC0” or “Saving Throw vs. Paralyzation, Poison, or Death Magic” I get a sense of nostalgia, but I don’t actually miss them on the game table. The game has, well, moved on, and I for one am happy with later developments…to an extent.
PART TWO: THE SECRET THAT WAS LOST
That said, there is something that was left behind with a vinyl record, the typewriter, or plain old pen and paper. A vinyl record has a naturalistic sound that, to the discerning ear, is quite appealing (its also interesting to note that vinyl has become “classic” whereas eight-tracks have defunct). A typewriter has a clickity-clack to it that has a certain beauty to it and, dare I say, inspires nostalgia (a typewriter is also classic, compared to the early word processors, which are defunct). Writing with a pen on paper has an organic immediacy that is lacking with a laptop. Actually, just the other day Quentin Tarantino remarked on Jay Leno's show that he likes to write with pen and paper, that there's nothing like the blank page - which is different from the blank screen. Or we can think of Neal Stephenson’s evocative, if pretentious, claim that he wrote the entire Baroque Cycle by quill and ink jar, and, I believe, by lamp-light.
Another relevant analogy is that of animation. As a child of two daughters, I’ve watched my share of animated feature films over the last couple years and am well aware that Pixar has created some impressive movies, but I can't shake the feeling that something is lacking - that the faces of Pixar characters seem hollow and without life, compared to the "old school" Disney movies like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and even more recently, Beauty and the Beast. I think it has something to do with removing the human hand from the act of drawing, that as soon as that is done the art becomes...in-human.
Actually, in animated movies we can see the problem in a vivid nutshell: the more the technology develops, the less room there is for imagination to “inhabit” the images, and thus to bring them to life. What we’re left with is what is served to us; we cannot bring life to Pixar faces, they rely upon their own – and because they aren’t alive, aren’t analog if you will but digital, they come across as almost undead.
I think the Holy Grail of D&D is to find some way to combine the "feel" of vinyl, or pen and paper, or classic animation, with the technology and utility of the mp3, or the laptop/tablet, of computer technology. I'm not sure if its possible--or rather, I think its very difficult, because there seems to be something about modern technologies that actually inhibits that vitality and life-force I’m pointing towards. Its why I'll preview an RPG on PDF, or a book on Amazon's "Look Inside," but always--always--buy the hard-copy if I like it. There’s just something about the feel of paper, of turning a page, and browsing that can’t be captured by a PDF.
In Excalibur, the Knights of the Round Table go on a quest to find the Grail; as Arthur put it, “We must find what was lost.” Over years the grail knights die or are ensorcelled by Morgana and her false grail, yet finally Parzival – after failing at first – is eventually successful. He discovers the secret, that “the King and the Land are One.” This resonates back to something Merlin said to Arthur early on: “You will be the land, and the land will be you. If you fail, the land will perish; as you thrive, the land will blossom.”
I first saw Excalibur when I was a kid, shortly after it came out in 1981, and since then I’ve seen it perhaps two dozen times; it still is one of my favorite movies of all time and I enjoy re-watching it every couple years or so. Excalibur looks rather dated today; the acting is over the top in a Shakespearean way—Boorman cast British stage actors—and it is focused more on atmosphere and story than on action and effects. In a similar way that the great Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan seems slow to the generation whose first exposure to Star Trek are the JJ Abrams films, so too would Excalibur seem old fashioned and slow to those brought up on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films.
Yet I feel that there has been something lost in (most) modern cinema, something in Excalibur that is less present in Lord of the Rings (although Jackson did a good job of bringing some element of it in), something in Wrath of Khan that is completely lacking in Star Trek: Into Darkness. It is atmosphere, but not only that. It is a kind of mysticism, but not only that. Excalibur is a deeply esoteric film, drenched in mystical symbolism, which those “without the eyes to see” miss. The “secret of the Grail” sounds prosaic, but is a profound spiritual/metaphysical truth, resonating on both the collective (and ecological) level, but also on an existential individual level: that the “King” (human being) and the “Land” (world, one’s life) are “One,” are interconnected – that to the degree that we, either individually or collectively, “fail,” the land “perishes,” and if we thrive, the land “blossoms.”
How does this relate to Dungeons & Dragons? Well, I would argue that the “secret that was lost” is a quality that is natural to childhood, but that, in the Adult World of Wallstreet, taxes, and ulcers, and other Serious Things, we are taught out of. It is something that is becoming increasingly rarified in this age of smartphones and tech-at-will, in which every spare moment can be filled with a text message, a tweet, or an instagram.
What am I talking about? It is quite simple, something intrinsic to everything we do – especially roleplaying games like D&D. It is Imagination.
Of course it isn’t truly lost, especially to those few that might still be reading this. By and large, tabletop gamers are people that love the “theater of mind” at whatever level, from the relatively shallow waters of laughing at the game table, to the vast depths of wonderment.
As a child, imagination comes naturally. As we grow older, it is either taught out and/or applied to Serious Things, or filled to the brim with pre-packaged imagery. For those into science fiction and fantasy literature, there’s a clear trajectory from the more minimalistic and impressionistic fiction of the 60s and 70s, to the more detailed and simulationist works of the last couple decades. A Michael Moorcock novel of the New Wave 1960s might be 150 pages but packed to the brim with adventure and fantastical places, while a Robert Jordan novel of the 1990s might be 900 pages, most of which is excruciatingly (in my opinion) detailed description. The parallel to D&D is obvious: minimalist OD&D vs. complex 3e or 4e.
For imagination to thrive, we have to make room for it – we have to give it space to grow. The more detailed a description in a book, the less the reader creates – the more they passively receive. Some writer once said that a story is “written” by both the author and reader, to varying degrees. Over the last 30+ years, as our media technology has developed, the story has been written more and more by the author, and the reader has become more and more passive. A blatant example of this is the difference in experience between a simple tabletop RPG and a video game. In the latter, the participant just interacts with a pre-created environment. There is absolutely no imagination, no creation – just immersion into a simulated environment. In a classic tabletop RPG, the GM and players co-create a Theater of Mind; each creates their own imagery, yet in a shared context.
This is not nostalgia, at least not in the pejorative sense of the world as a kind of pointless sentimentality. It is not escapism, either, in the same light; or if it is, as Tolkien put it (in paraphrase), escapism is a healthy response to being in an unhealthy imprisonment, just as nostalgia is a heart-felt longing for something precious that is gone. What I am talking about, this urge that exists in all (or at least most) D&D players is a desire for something that we have lost, or at least is in danger of atrophy, yet that we deeply yearn for – and that no simulative experience can satisfy, no matter how advanced.
PART THREE: BEYOND OLD & NEW
Ultimately this isn’t about old or new school. Yet I do think that old school games better facilitate the imaginative experience, and that it is that which tabletop RPGs excel at more than any other game, more than video games, board games, poker or chess: the play of the imagination. This is why, or one of the (core) reasons why the classic hexcrawl is so appealing, why OSR folks disavow railroading metaplots: there is a sense of immense freedom, a shared mind-space in which—quite literally—anything can happen. This is also why I’ve never found CRPGs particularly drawing: I can’t lose the sense that I’m in a simulative environment crafted by algorithms and with limited possible outcomes, rather than the human mind and imagination, which is limitless.
In a CRPG, I might not know what is over that next hill, but I do know that it is based upon a programmed formula. In a tabletop RPG, I know that whatever is over that next hill is based upon the human imagination, and even if it isn’t particularly innovative, it is somehow real.
If you made it through the last 4,000+ words, I applaud you for your attention span and thank you for your time. I feel strongly about this because it reaches far beyond gaming – it has to do with our very human existence, and what I’m interested in as both a teacher and counselor. I don’t want to be all doom-and-gloom about this, but I see this issue in RPGs as being microcosmic of a larger process, that has to do with human imagination – a quality so intrinsic, so unique to human beings (as far as we know), so important – yet also in danger of being lost, atrophied, or at least, as I said, filled to the brim with second-rate and comparatively paltry simulations of living, breathing imaginations. I actually think that tabletop RPGs can be a positive cultural influence, that a true revival – not simply of old school vs. new school – but all schools, can benefit human culture and society through inspiring the use of that most vital human capacity: imagination.
Imagination is the juice of life. Like sex without love, life without imagination can still be enjoyable, at least for a time. But eventually one gets the sense that something is lacking, something vital misplaced – and one cannot find it. The usual response is More and better! More and better sex and lovers, more and better experiences, technologies, stuff-to-fill-the-void. I’d even say that its an important part of development to go through this process, in whatever way. But it won’t satisfy. Why? Because the void cannot be filled because it is endless. If we realize that we have an amazing opportunity, to “turn around,” so to speak, and rather than trying to fill the void with More and Better!, we can instead explore the possibilities of the void, create within it (and as it, for it is us). That is the function of imagination – to envision, to dream up possibilities, and then to bring them into being via our creativity. And in so doing, the King will thrive and the Land will blossom.
The quote in my title is from the great John Boorman movie, Excalibur, and refers to an understanding that was lost to Arthur and Camelot, leading to Arthur's wounding and the poisoning of the land. But more on that in a moment.
This post was inspired by the thread, What Has Caused the Old School Revival? But being rather self-indulgent, I began to wander far afield from my original intention, so I decided to craft this into an essay, even a manifesto (of sorts).
Before getting into it, let me lay my own bias out on the table, just so that the suspicious veterans of the Edition Wars aren’t wondering as they read this, what’s his real agenda? I say “my bias” not because I’m an advocate of this or that edition, or new vs. old school, but because as a human being I am biased, I speak from subjectivity. I started playing D&D in the early 80s with 1st edition and updated to each new edition of our great game as they came out – 2e, 3e, and 4e. I’m excited to start a 5e campaign up early next year. It might sound facetious to say this, but my favorite edition of D&D is D&D. I love the game itself, in whatever version; I see the specific rules system as being more of a methodology for the game, rather than the game itself. In other words, “D&D” is music, and the edition and specific rules set, is the medium the music is recorded on – whether vinyl, eight-track, casette, CD, mp3, etc.
Like audio media, Dungeons & Dragons has followed a developmental trajectory. But development is not without its pitfalls, it isn’t always “better and better,” although that is how it should be, if we’re able to integrate each stage into the next – or at least the “baby” of each stage, while throwing out the “bathwater.” Unfortunately, as flawed human beings, we tend to do the opposite – we tend to leave behind the good things, while picking up all sorts of baggage along the way. As we develop psychologically, we pick up new pathologies and neuroses. An adult has certain neuroses that a child couldn’t have, partially because they have a more mature mind and self-sense. On the other hand, most children are far more imaginative and without the hang-ups of adults, because our culture “teaches imagination out” as young people are indoctrinated by an education system that is still based upon early 20th century industrialism.
In a way I am saying that early D&D was akin to the childhood of the game, and recent games are the adult versions. But it isn’t so simple as that, and I am not saying that later/more mature = inherently better. If anything, I feel that something crucial has gone missing, the “secret that is lost” – and it is a secret that makes all the difference. But let me get to that later.
Aside from my “bias,” I do want to add a disclaimer – that what follows is not meant to be a strictly factual account, but more of an artistic rendering, an extended philosophical musing (and thus, in the end, meant to be a performance of the kind of approach that I’m advocating, which I’ll explain towards the end). I’m going to incorporate snapshots of the history of D&D and you might find I don’t represent things accurately - or at least not as you perceive them! All I can say is, bare with me – the point is the forest, not the trees.
So let’s get to it.
PART ONE: OLD SCHOOL, NEW SCHOOL, WHO NEEDS SCHOOL?
When talking about the Old School Renaissance (OSR), there seems to be a strange kind of bifurcation. Advocates of the OSR see it as harkening back to "real D&D" before it became obfuscated by excessive rules and filler. An analogy might be the gray box Forgotten Realms versus the later FR supplements, or the 3e white hardcovers. The gray box (or the Greyhawk box set) offered broad strokes of the world, broad indications more than strict directions on how to run a game set in the Realms. The later supplementation filled it all in, giving clearer guidelines, even rules, on How To Do It The Right Way. Of course I'm exaggerating in that the spirit of D&D—if not the resulting paradigm—has always been “Your Way is the Right Way,” but OneTrueWayism felt implied simply by virtue of the wealth of information presented; if something is published it feels like canon that a DM cannot, or should not, disagree with, while if it isn't published then there's tons of room to move.
In some sense this is unavoidable, at least if you want to publish books. The more books you published, or at least rule books, the less open-ended a game feels. Just there’s a huge difference between “You crest the hill and, after looking briefly back at the farmlands of your youth, you see the ruin-dotted northern wilds stretch out before you…” and “The King of Ysperath places the crown upon your head and declares your Overlord of the North.” The former is open-ended simply because its at the beginning, whereas the latter is right in the middle, or near the end, and feels less free.
(I think a good argument could be made that the biggest problem with editions of D&D after 1e is the sheer dumptruck-load of rules supplements, which I’ll touch on a bit more in a moment).
Detractors of the OSR say, in the extreme, that it is a nostalgia-driven attempt to recapture the Golden Age of the D&D we grew up on, which for most of us over the age of 30 was AD&D 1st or 2nd edition, BECMI, or for the true grognards, OD&D. As someone famously said, "the Golden Age of scifi is 12"; I think this applies to D&D as well; “old school” is, sans capitalization, a relative and subjective term that refers back to whatever version of the game we played in our youth, when we were (about) 12.
Compared to more recent iterations of the game, Old School D&D is, these detractors say, a clunky, anachronistic museum piece that has no place in modern gaming. This is a bit of an extreme perspective that few probably actually hold, and I doubt there are any true "detractors" of the OSR, but at least there are those that find the slicker, more complex "new school" iterations of D&D more appealing, and the old school approaches problematic for various reasons.
Anyhow, there's a general view - especially among OSR advocates - that D&D "died," or at least went astray, sometime between the publication of Dragonlance waaaay back in 1984, to the arrival of 3e in 2000. Dragonlance set the stage for the rich settings of the late 80s and 90s, and an approach to D&D that was more driven by setting and story than it was free exploration; gradually the metaplot took over the hexcrawl. With 3e, D&D reached unparalled heights in complexity and customization and the canonical supplementation of the 2e settings became transposed to the rules themselves. You could still modify 3e, but it was less about “making the rules your own” and more about adding feats, classes, and other options to the already established rules system. The OSR became the clarion call harkening back to a simpler, freer time in which D&D was more a game of imagination than of simulation, more about exploring wilderness and dungeons than about optimizing your character with kewl powerz.
Ironically enough, when 3e came out it was a kind of "revival" to a more "old school" style of play after a decade plus of 2e style campaign settings and meta-plots, which had likely been influenced by the story-based World of Darkness games. Think of, for instance, the advertising of Sword & Sorcery Studios/Necromancy Games, which I believe said something like "3rd edition rules, 1st edition style."
In the late 90s AD&D was floundering, partially because it was a big, clunking anachronistic system - at least compared to the last decade or so of design innovation. 1987 saw the publication of two games which had, at first, a subtle but increasingly important influence on RPG design: Ars Magica and Talislanta. Both included variants of the dice roll + attribute vs. target number design paradigm that became the basis of the d20 system more than a decade later. One of the lead designers of Ars Magica, Mark Rein Hagen, went on to design the World of Darkness games, which for the first time provided a challenge to the dominance of D&D in the RPG world, emphasizing story over the game. The other designer of Ars Magica, Jonathan Tweet, not only updated Talislanta a few years later, but was a lead designer in D&D 3e. Tweet and Rein Hagen, along with other designers, led the RPG community into a brave new world of Indie design, while AD&D – even in its 2nd edition – hadn’t adopted this new paradigm.
With 3rd edition, Dungeons & Dragons wasn’t as much brought into the 2000s, but into the 90s. The flagship RPG had lagged behind the rest of the RPG world in terms of rules design. In the early Aughties, D&D experienced a revival in interest that, if not equalling—or even coming close to—the legendary “25 million” of the 1980s, at least saw D&D’s popularity jump from the declining 90s. With 3e, we had the first wave of lapsed players returning – people who hadn’t played since they were in high school or college in the 80s, but now had time and energy to spend on D&D in their 30s and 40s – as well as a new generation of gamers, Gen Y folks who found the modern sensibilities of the 3e game more appealing than “that old 80s game.”
I’m not exactly sure what happened that led Wizards of the Coast to design and publish 4e in the way they did, but I can imagine a few related factors. One, the glut of product of 2000-07, which included literally one hundred hardcover books (including settings) - compare that to the mere thirteen AD&D 1e hardcovers produced from 1977-88 – not to mention thousands of third party products because of the OGL.
Another factor is that ,despite the surge in popularity in the early Aughties, the player base seemed to gradually decline again (note: I don’t have facts to back this up; this is based upon impressions of others and my general observations). This seems inherent to any edition, that there’s an initial surge, then a rise as the game becomes established and even more popular, then a gradual decline. By 2007, while 3e might not have been significantly declining, it probably wasn’t growing – and for a company owned by a larger company, a steady state isn’t acceptable. What is needed is growth, growth, and more growth.
A third factor is more cultural and generational. Where the Gen X kids of the late 70s and 80s were growing up in a world in which Pac Man and Galaga were the state-of-the-art video games, in the Aughties you had a plethora of first-person games, and then the immersion of World of Warcraft, et al. If you’re a 10-year old boy and your options are D&D or Defender, then you might choose D&D; but if your options are D&D or Xbox, well, it’s a lot easier to dive into the latter than the former.
Wizards of the Coast had the idea, noble if perhaps misguided, to try to appeal to “Generation Xbox,” to tap into the milllions of Warcraft subscribers and offer something that they would find appealing. The result, though, is well known: 4th edition arrived and, whatever the initial sales were, was met with rather intense vitriol and quickly dwindled and led to a fracturing in the D&D community due to an Edition War that made its predecessors seem relatively tame. Whatever the merits of 4e were, the overall result was disastrous. Despite an attempt at reviving the edition with Essentials in 2010, it was clear that 4e was a failure, and 5e was announced in January of 2012, just three and a half years into 4e.
That said, part of the upshot of 4e is that perhaps because it was a failure, it led to two things: one, the creation and publication of Pathfinder, in which 3.5 not only “survived but thrived,” and the Old School Renaissance. Older players in particular fled 4e for either the more homey pastures of Paizo—which was a company clearly for the people by the people, with the humble goal of updating the legacy of the recent “golden age” of 3rd edition—or the classic realms of old school gaming, a simpler time and game.
I think the OSR has less to do with rules, though, than it does with a feeling - which includes presentation and the basic assumptions of the game. One of the problems with 3e, in my opinion, is that there was no simple, basic game that could be played without the density of rules that edition (and now Pathfinder) became known for. Castles & Crusades was an attempt to create that, and in my mind combines the best of "old school flavor" and "new school design," although without the production values and support that jaded D&D players of the 21st century have become accustomed to (plus the name itself implies something more medieval than fantastical).
I know that advocates of the OSR see clunky mechanics like THAC0 and descending AC and Saving Throws as, to quote an oft-used phrase, “features and not flaws,” but this is not unlike saying that a typewriter's inability to correct and requirement of an ink ribbon is a feature and not a flaw, or a vinyl record's inability to be recorded over is a feature and not a flaw. Yes, it is true on some level – especially taken out of historical, technological context - but when you compare it with more modern technology, it ends up looking anachronistic (I, for one, don’t miss fastforwarding to the next song on a cassette tape, or having to “be kind and rewind” a VHS, even if I feel tinges of nostalgia for bygone technologies).
When I see “THAC0” or “Saving Throw vs. Paralyzation, Poison, or Death Magic” I get a sense of nostalgia, but I don’t actually miss them on the game table. The game has, well, moved on, and I for one am happy with later developments…to an extent.
PART TWO: THE SECRET THAT WAS LOST
That said, there is something that was left behind with a vinyl record, the typewriter, or plain old pen and paper. A vinyl record has a naturalistic sound that, to the discerning ear, is quite appealing (its also interesting to note that vinyl has become “classic” whereas eight-tracks have defunct). A typewriter has a clickity-clack to it that has a certain beauty to it and, dare I say, inspires nostalgia (a typewriter is also classic, compared to the early word processors, which are defunct). Writing with a pen on paper has an organic immediacy that is lacking with a laptop. Actually, just the other day Quentin Tarantino remarked on Jay Leno's show that he likes to write with pen and paper, that there's nothing like the blank page - which is different from the blank screen. Or we can think of Neal Stephenson’s evocative, if pretentious, claim that he wrote the entire Baroque Cycle by quill and ink jar, and, I believe, by lamp-light.
Another relevant analogy is that of animation. As a child of two daughters, I’ve watched my share of animated feature films over the last couple years and am well aware that Pixar has created some impressive movies, but I can't shake the feeling that something is lacking - that the faces of Pixar characters seem hollow and without life, compared to the "old school" Disney movies like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and even more recently, Beauty and the Beast. I think it has something to do with removing the human hand from the act of drawing, that as soon as that is done the art becomes...in-human.
Actually, in animated movies we can see the problem in a vivid nutshell: the more the technology develops, the less room there is for imagination to “inhabit” the images, and thus to bring them to life. What we’re left with is what is served to us; we cannot bring life to Pixar faces, they rely upon their own – and because they aren’t alive, aren’t analog if you will but digital, they come across as almost undead.
I think the Holy Grail of D&D is to find some way to combine the "feel" of vinyl, or pen and paper, or classic animation, with the technology and utility of the mp3, or the laptop/tablet, of computer technology. I'm not sure if its possible--or rather, I think its very difficult, because there seems to be something about modern technologies that actually inhibits that vitality and life-force I’m pointing towards. Its why I'll preview an RPG on PDF, or a book on Amazon's "Look Inside," but always--always--buy the hard-copy if I like it. There’s just something about the feel of paper, of turning a page, and browsing that can’t be captured by a PDF.
In Excalibur, the Knights of the Round Table go on a quest to find the Grail; as Arthur put it, “We must find what was lost.” Over years the grail knights die or are ensorcelled by Morgana and her false grail, yet finally Parzival – after failing at first – is eventually successful. He discovers the secret, that “the King and the Land are One.” This resonates back to something Merlin said to Arthur early on: “You will be the land, and the land will be you. If you fail, the land will perish; as you thrive, the land will blossom.”
I first saw Excalibur when I was a kid, shortly after it came out in 1981, and since then I’ve seen it perhaps two dozen times; it still is one of my favorite movies of all time and I enjoy re-watching it every couple years or so. Excalibur looks rather dated today; the acting is over the top in a Shakespearean way—Boorman cast British stage actors—and it is focused more on atmosphere and story than on action and effects. In a similar way that the great Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan seems slow to the generation whose first exposure to Star Trek are the JJ Abrams films, so too would Excalibur seem old fashioned and slow to those brought up on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films.
Yet I feel that there has been something lost in (most) modern cinema, something in Excalibur that is less present in Lord of the Rings (although Jackson did a good job of bringing some element of it in), something in Wrath of Khan that is completely lacking in Star Trek: Into Darkness. It is atmosphere, but not only that. It is a kind of mysticism, but not only that. Excalibur is a deeply esoteric film, drenched in mystical symbolism, which those “without the eyes to see” miss. The “secret of the Grail” sounds prosaic, but is a profound spiritual/metaphysical truth, resonating on both the collective (and ecological) level, but also on an existential individual level: that the “King” (human being) and the “Land” (world, one’s life) are “One,” are interconnected – that to the degree that we, either individually or collectively, “fail,” the land “perishes,” and if we thrive, the land “blossoms.”
How does this relate to Dungeons & Dragons? Well, I would argue that the “secret that was lost” is a quality that is natural to childhood, but that, in the Adult World of Wallstreet, taxes, and ulcers, and other Serious Things, we are taught out of. It is something that is becoming increasingly rarified in this age of smartphones and tech-at-will, in which every spare moment can be filled with a text message, a tweet, or an instagram.
What am I talking about? It is quite simple, something intrinsic to everything we do – especially roleplaying games like D&D. It is Imagination.
Of course it isn’t truly lost, especially to those few that might still be reading this. By and large, tabletop gamers are people that love the “theater of mind” at whatever level, from the relatively shallow waters of laughing at the game table, to the vast depths of wonderment.
As a child, imagination comes naturally. As we grow older, it is either taught out and/or applied to Serious Things, or filled to the brim with pre-packaged imagery. For those into science fiction and fantasy literature, there’s a clear trajectory from the more minimalistic and impressionistic fiction of the 60s and 70s, to the more detailed and simulationist works of the last couple decades. A Michael Moorcock novel of the New Wave 1960s might be 150 pages but packed to the brim with adventure and fantastical places, while a Robert Jordan novel of the 1990s might be 900 pages, most of which is excruciatingly (in my opinion) detailed description. The parallel to D&D is obvious: minimalist OD&D vs. complex 3e or 4e.
For imagination to thrive, we have to make room for it – we have to give it space to grow. The more detailed a description in a book, the less the reader creates – the more they passively receive. Some writer once said that a story is “written” by both the author and reader, to varying degrees. Over the last 30+ years, as our media technology has developed, the story has been written more and more by the author, and the reader has become more and more passive. A blatant example of this is the difference in experience between a simple tabletop RPG and a video game. In the latter, the participant just interacts with a pre-created environment. There is absolutely no imagination, no creation – just immersion into a simulated environment. In a classic tabletop RPG, the GM and players co-create a Theater of Mind; each creates their own imagery, yet in a shared context.
This is not nostalgia, at least not in the pejorative sense of the world as a kind of pointless sentimentality. It is not escapism, either, in the same light; or if it is, as Tolkien put it (in paraphrase), escapism is a healthy response to being in an unhealthy imprisonment, just as nostalgia is a heart-felt longing for something precious that is gone. What I am talking about, this urge that exists in all (or at least most) D&D players is a desire for something that we have lost, or at least is in danger of atrophy, yet that we deeply yearn for – and that no simulative experience can satisfy, no matter how advanced.
PART THREE: BEYOND OLD & NEW
Ultimately this isn’t about old or new school. Yet I do think that old school games better facilitate the imaginative experience, and that it is that which tabletop RPGs excel at more than any other game, more than video games, board games, poker or chess: the play of the imagination. This is why, or one of the (core) reasons why the classic hexcrawl is so appealing, why OSR folks disavow railroading metaplots: there is a sense of immense freedom, a shared mind-space in which—quite literally—anything can happen. This is also why I’ve never found CRPGs particularly drawing: I can’t lose the sense that I’m in a simulative environment crafted by algorithms and with limited possible outcomes, rather than the human mind and imagination, which is limitless.
In a CRPG, I might not know what is over that next hill, but I do know that it is based upon a programmed formula. In a tabletop RPG, I know that whatever is over that next hill is based upon the human imagination, and even if it isn’t particularly innovative, it is somehow real.
If you made it through the last 4,000+ words, I applaud you for your attention span and thank you for your time. I feel strongly about this because it reaches far beyond gaming – it has to do with our very human existence, and what I’m interested in as both a teacher and counselor. I don’t want to be all doom-and-gloom about this, but I see this issue in RPGs as being microcosmic of a larger process, that has to do with human imagination – a quality so intrinsic, so unique to human beings (as far as we know), so important – yet also in danger of being lost, atrophied, or at least, as I said, filled to the brim with second-rate and comparatively paltry simulations of living, breathing imaginations. I actually think that tabletop RPGs can be a positive cultural influence, that a true revival – not simply of old school vs. new school – but all schools, can benefit human culture and society through inspiring the use of that most vital human capacity: imagination.
Imagination is the juice of life. Like sex without love, life without imagination can still be enjoyable, at least for a time. But eventually one gets the sense that something is lacking, something vital misplaced – and one cannot find it. The usual response is More and better! More and better sex and lovers, more and better experiences, technologies, stuff-to-fill-the-void. I’d even say that its an important part of development to go through this process, in whatever way. But it won’t satisfy. Why? Because the void cannot be filled because it is endless. If we realize that we have an amazing opportunity, to “turn around,” so to speak, and rather than trying to fill the void with More and Better!, we can instead explore the possibilities of the void, create within it (and as it, for it is us). That is the function of imagination – to envision, to dream up possibilities, and then to bring them into being via our creativity. And in so doing, the King will thrive and the Land will blossom.
But what next? 
