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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gorgon Zee" data-source="post: 6223228" data-attributes="member: 75787">"This new stuff isn't as good as the old stuff was", or is it "new, improved, better than before!" ?There are many biases driving both ways, but the mention of the Beatles brings up one that hasn't been explicitly brought up in this thread -- survival bias. This is basically the fact that bad stuff gets forgotten about. RPGs are a relatively new phenomenon -- it's much easier to see in things with a much older history, like plays, books, opera and so on. Opera is an excellent example -- if you go to random modern opera, it will probably not be as good as a random old opera. The reason, obvious if you think about it, is that no-one revives old, bad operas; they die out. Whereas new operas we have to find out if they are good or not.Same for RPGs. In this thread most people are contrasting *all* modern games with *one* older game -- D&D. Why D&D? Because it's the one that has survived; it might be the best of the old ones! If we look at the next tier of older games -- Traveler, RQ, Tunnels and Trolls -- it becomes harder to say they are close to random modern games. And that's still looking at top tier games. From a full decade.For a fair comparison, we'd have to look at maybe the top 5 games invented in the 1980s with the top 5 games invented in the 2010s. But we have no idea what they will be. We might guess a couple, but what we're currently doing is looking at comparing a selection of *random quality* modern games with the *best quality* old games.In other words, it is perfectly possible to state "Of all the games I've played, the older ones tend to have better rules than the modern ones" and "Modern games have better rules than old games", without contradicting yourself. It's basically because you have never been forced to play a whole host of bad, bad games from the 80s ...</blockquote>

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