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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ariosto" data-source="post: 4848965" data-attributes="member: 80487">I see an important distinction between the texts as artifacts on one hand, and their interpretation in "gamer culture" on the other.This occurred to me in the context of associations of 2E with the "golden age of railroads" and the play philosophy espoused even in the core books -- associations that for some posters seem to outweigh the essential continuity of rules systems (albeit perhaps with some "improvements" that some of us might regard as actually demonstrating a poor grasp of those systems).Although there are probably some aspects of 3E with which I would take issue in any case, I think my great problem with its rules heaviness is really more a problem with some player attitudes -- basically, "rules lawyering" taken not as a vice but as a virtue under the guise of "system mastery".(My problem with 4E's rules heaviness is that when it is not going out of its way to offend my -- presumably "old school" -- sensibilities it is simply boring me to tears.)I am not going to laud as a great virtue the scope of necessity of ad hoc rulings in OD&D, or the occasional opacity even of 2E AD&D that can inspire almost Talmudic debates online. None of that is to my mind a great asset. A number of possibly greater minds than mine sometimes seem to disagree -- but most of them seem not to have been refereeing OD&D for 30+ years.More tools in the toolkit is not a bad thing, and The Strategic Review and The Dragon (at least into the early 1980s) were full of rules to handle this or that topic that had come up in campaigns.The observations of people looking at the original "little brown booklets" with fresh eyes are often insightful and inspiring. Even people who actually "played AD&D" for years are sometimes surprised at what they find when they at last sit down to read the books carefully (as opposed, say, to injecting  reflexively a Basic/Expert Set gloss at every turn). To this day, I discover overlooked gems in the gloriously Gygaxian Dungeon Masters Guide, and not just because I was 13 years old at my first reading.Just as the old games are often misrepresented, so I think that even (and indeed most significantly) fans of 3E have tended to read into it inferences that the designers did not mean to imply.There is a feedback loop of ideas going from a generation of designers to a generation of gamers, and then coming back -- mutated -- to influence a new generation of designers.There may be rather literal generations involved. My impression is that the 3E design team had cut their teeth on 1E, whereas much of their audience (rather naturally) was younger and had started with 2E. Almost a decade later, the relevant editions (or at least sub-editions) have probably advanced chronologically. Yes, there are always a few of us longer in the tooth -- but I suspect that the teens and 20s have remained more commonly the prime years for getting into D&D (after which real life tends to get in the way for a while), and that the design teams have not been recruited from successively older demographics.</blockquote>

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