What do you think? Can you go home again? Can you return to old games and old campaigns and recapture what you felt 5 or 10 or 30 years ago?
In general, no. Not only have we changed, but our ability to understand games and rules, and our ability to imagine has changed, often for the better. I say that about 10 or 30 - 5 is more likely. A lot of people have campaigns and characters that old!
What you definitely can often recapture is some of the "weird vibes" certain adventures and settings have. We were talking about Dungeon World in another thread, and it is remarkable to me that my group found that running a couple of one-off old AD&D adventures in Dungeon World (to help introduce people to the system - the vibe changed once we shifted to the more standard way DW works), they somehow felt more like playing D&D than "back then" than we we'd actually tried to play 2E again a couple of years before!
On the flip side, a lot of RPG rules don't have the same vibes they used to when you go back to them, and some have stunning flaws that they feel almost impossible to use - I won't name names in the spirit of the thread, but there were a couple of games I was thinking yeah let's try that old boy again, and then as soon as I refamiliarized myself with the rules and tried to create a character for them, that idea was very rapidly dispelled. We had so much time, and so much ability to absorb tons of rules information in the 1990s, when we were teens and early twenties, and so much more tolerance for overcomplicated rules. We still sometimes play for eight hours or whatever, but now we'll tend to more disciplined ourselves, and more demanding re: whether a game respects our time, rules-wise.#
I think a big part of the modern OSR movement, including things like Worlds Without Number and Shadowdark (moreso than say, DCC, which is I think often recreating something people never actually did at the time) is about people wanting to "go home" vibes-wise, but finding that, rules-wise, old games just aren't doing it for them, but that more modern rules-sets can somehow be more like what they remembered (at least in terms of feel/experience) than the thing itself.
I've found that I cannot go back to many games.
I still know where to look in the AD&D 1e and 2e books, but I will never again use them for anything but reference materials and answering questions.
My tastes have evolved; as I stated elsewhere, I prefer metacurrency moderated hybrid rules, and don't mind bespoke dice. None of which existed when I started... tho', at the time, Polyhedral sets were effectively bespoke dice...
I started RPGing in 1981 with AD&D 1e. My playstyle them was narrative wargame with almost no roleplay. We quickly "downgraded" to BX with multiclassing and the AD&D races. For two years, that was all gaming I experienced. I knew of Boot Hill and Gamma World from the PHB; I knew of Star Frontiers from comics...
I finally got to try Star Frontiers in Sept 1983... game was fine, GM was good. Love the setting. But the group was too large.
I got invited to a Traveller game...
note: My avatar is a recolored version of the MegaTraveller Shattered Imperial Starburst... which many don't realize is also an overview of the factions of MegaTraveller...
Running MegaTraveller last year, I realized I could have a better player experience and similar stories with Alien and FFG Star Wars.
Running D&D Cyclopedia currently, have decided it's time to get rid of the dead tree; I'm not going to run it again. And it's the least problematic edition for me.
Running d6 Star Wars shortly before the pandemic, I found myself preferring to run FFG.
I've plenty of nostalgia — for the physical artefacts —about many old games, but little desire to actually ever play them again. D6 I can run without emotional distress, but it's not the first choice.
Interesting, I relate to most of this, but WEG D6 SW 1E is, for the people I play with at least, one of the few "anciente tymes" systems that still works well for us. I do think it could benefit from some additions, but they're not the route that later editions of the same system really took. I take note of your comment re: RC D&D too - it's the form of "old school" D&D I've considered re-running most, but I suspect I'm fooling myself that I'd actually do it.
