NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercurius" data-source="post: 6680621" data-attributes="member: 59082">Lots of good posts, too many to individually reply to, even though I want to engage with many further. I find it interesting how everyone takes a slightly different angle on what a "Golden Age" or "Age" is in general. It seems that there are two broad approaches:1. Ages as periods of time that relate to D&D and/or specific editions. We could call this "objective time."2. Ages as phases of personal experience with the game. This would be "subjective time."In the former, the general consensus--although not necessarily shared by all--is that the Golden Age is the time from the game's inception in 1974 to sometime in the early 80s. Some would consider Dragonlance in 1983 as the threshold moment, which is also around the time that sales began to drop off drastically. The Silver Age would be mid-80s to mid-90s, focused on 2E. The Bronze Age would start with 3E and end with 4E, which would be the Iron Age. Another perspective to throw into the picture is that between each age is a time of transition and instability, a mini Dark Age - like we saw with the Gygax/Williams drama in the mid-80s, and then the bankruptcy of TSR and switchover to WotC in the late 90s, and then the Edition Wars of the 2008, and the "blackout" of 2012-14 as 5E was in development.And of course a variant on this perspective is that each edition goes through a mini-cycle.But perhaps the more meaningful of the two is "subjective time." In that regard, I would posit the following:Golden Age: The early years, when you first get into the game and there is a feeling of newness, excitement and wonder. Silver Age: A time of maturation and fruition, when you really get in the groove of the game, your knowledge and collection blossoms, yet there is the first tingling that Something Is Missing.Bronze Age: A more advanced stage of the Silver Age, perhaps when rulescraft becomes more prominent. It may even be that playing becomes a bit more by rote, without the original freshness.Iron Age: Your experience reaches a crisis and play feels stale. The feeling of Something Missing has become palpable.After the Iron Age there may be a period of not playing, a hiatus from the game until, at some point--if you are a life-long RPGer--something reignites your interest, and a sense of newness is reborn.I am reminded of the famous and beautiful T.S. Eliot quote: "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."Mythologically speaking, this is "Paradise Regained." We have explored, tried different approaches to the game, and different games, and in a sense exhausted ourselves. In a way what we have been searching for is that initial sense of wonder and joy. In the process we have become further and further focused on technique and "technology" - the "stuff" of the game, books and rules and optimization - which has in turn covered up the quality that existed during the Golden Age. But in this "New Golden Age," our fascination with Stuff and Techne has been re-contextualized with a rebirth of wonder and imagination.At least that's one way of looking at it. Just riffing here. And no, I'm not saying that this is how everyone experiences things, but I think there is a universal quality to this "journey" that finds resonance in mythology, as described in Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey.</blockquote>

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