Are our standards too high, or too low?

[ggroy]

And yet, people claim all the time about going back and playing OD&D, AD&D, 1E, 2E etc. etc... despite the fact that at some point they moved on from those games to play newer editions.

I would assume the counter to this point would be the amount of time between first playing a game and then going back to it... the longer the gap, the rosier the glasses of your time playing it. If true, then Kzach and others might some day return to 4E and find their enjoyment of the game again. And in this regard, it just comes down to personality I guess.

Recently I played some old arcade games (on an emulator) I haven't played in over 20+ years. Initially it was exiting to relive the experience of playing such games. But after a few minutes of playing these old arcade games, the nostalgic novelty wore off very quickly. I was feeling more like "how the hell could I have ever been into these arcade games?".

Outside of games, I've had similar experiences with music I use to listen to when I was younger. 20-25+ years of not listening to vinyl records I use to listen to a lot, one day I pulled out and listened to some of these old records I had in storage. After a few hours I was wondering how the heck I ever found these record albums fascinating, which I use to listen to over and over again hundreds of times when I was younger.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Oh, believe me... I'm well-versed in the rose-colored nostalgia glasses ending up being rather broken when I later go back to things I loved as a kid. But in actuality, that point is neither here nor there when it comes to Kzach's original post.

I will concede to Hermann's point that it is possible to "overspice" something to the point where the entire dish is ruined... and you cannot even enjoy the "unspiced" meal anymore. And this is certainly possible in Kzach's case. I myself have a hard time understanding it, but that in no way makes it any less true. Basically, all I can say to Kzach in this case is that I'm sorry that it ends up being this way for him... because the risk of destroying things he enjoys appears to be a tightrope difficult to walk. I know I wouldn't want to be stuck that way, because it seems an easy way to basically blow through hobbies at an astronomical rate.

 

[The Shaman]

I would assume the counter to this point would be the amount of time between first playing a game and then going back to it... the longer the gap, the rosier the glasses of your time playing it.

Nothing about this matches my own experience.

I picked up Traveller again because I had an idea for something I wanted to do with d20 Modern. In re-reading the rules, my reaction was along the lines of, "Hey, this still works." I didn't return to it out of nostalgia - I started playing it again because it's a great game.

Right now I'm running Flashing Blades; I considered a number of other systems for running a swashbuckling campaign, including Swashbuckler, The Riddle of Steel, and Savage Worlds, but the combat systems in the first two are much too fiddly for me while SW is fiddly in all the wrong ways for my tastes, and none of them provide the depth of campaign materials which FB does. I picked Flashing Blades because it's the best game for what I want to run.

This "rose-colored glasses" thing is really dismissive and, at least in my case, demonstrably wrong.

 

[Umbran]

And because they have opened up this digital doorway where updates and improvements to the fundamental system mechanics of 4e occur on a regular basis, I feel there's no value in buying the hard copies of the rules either.

I'd like to point out - this is what I'd call making perfect the enemy of good.

For decades, a static printed tome with maybe some notes or house rules was sufficient. We (I presume, including Kzach, here) have had countless hours of enjoyment from such. Even when we knew that Dragon magazine may have had some corrections, not all of us cared that much. The books and our own sense was good enough.

But now, the more perfect scenario, where there's updates far more frequently, exists. And somehow the hardcover books, which a mere couple of years ago were great and fun, have "no value"?

The grass may be greener on the other side of the fence, but that doesn't mean your lawn is actually bad!