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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 5736155" data-attributes="member: 2205">I think that that only works if you consider D&D in isolation and not as part of a greater roleplaying game community, with other roleplaying games that did a lot of other things, including things that your "new skool" games incorporated, but which did them many years earlier.  And, frankly, maybe it'd be fair to do that, I guess.  You could make the argument that D&D was always big enough and enough people always only played D&D, that the other games in the market had minimal impact on them.From my perspective, I'd say most of these so-called "new skool" innovations were happening in RPG space almost immediately after the hobby was created, either as houserules and homebrews, or later as various fantasy heartbreakers and other games attempted to do things differently than D&D to scratch other itches.  Indeed, from my perspective D&D remained in a curiously fossilized "legacy mode" with regard to design direction that was more and more obsolete relative to demand in the marketplace over time until, at about the same time, 1) TSR went backrupt and 2) White Wolf games actually put forth a somewhat credible challenge to D&D's leadership in the hobby.When WotC took over, they applied actual market research to the hobby (probably for the first time) and the changes in design direction, that led to 3e, were the direct result of that... attempting to give the market what it had been demanding for some time.  Not to say that 3e did so perfectly, of course, but to me, the break you see in terms of old skool and new skool lagged very considerably within D&D relative to the player base and what they wanted, and for that matter, what other games were doing as well.Also, I think that your definition of old skool with regards to the style of the game itself (not the design of the mechanics) can't very well be placed at the timeframe you put it at.  The tendency towards longer stories over one-shot dungeon crawls was very evident throughout the lifetime of 2e as well.  So that change doesn't match the mechanical changes... and in fact, came many years earlier, even within D&D... without regards to whatever may have been going on in other games.</blockquote>

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