I recall their being a distinct dichotomy, as needlessly divisive, and nearly as vitriolic as that of the edition war, marking (or marring) the 90s RPG community: Role vs Roll. You had the Storyteller (V:tM &c) side claiming to be real ROLE-players, and pointing to D&D as the worst example of vile ROLL-playing. The elitist philosophy culminated in the infamous "bad rules make good games" meme - the idea that, because a good enough DM could run a great game using a bad system, bad rules were actually desirable. I guess the success of Storyteller was 'proof' of the maxim.
Absolutely. One wonders what it might have been like if the interwebs were about back then. Having experienced it first-hand, I have little doubt it would have been as rough and tumble as the recent edition wars. It was pretty similar in a lot of ways.
I suppose 2e did knuckle under to it enough in the end to make 3.0's unapologetically rollplaying "Back to the Dungeon" slogan mean something.
But it was little more than a slogan because 3.x beyond 5th level (CLW wands and Scribe Scrolls?) wasn't particularly fit for that playstyle.
But, if anything, that was the opposite of inertia, since it was a change in the hobby's landscape that actually impacted D&D, if only just a little. D&D, itself, though, had been practically made of inertia prior to that. D&D Inertia proved itself, again, with the success of Pathfinder, and 5e prettymuch banks on it (so far with clear indicators of success).
I think its been a series of step changes for mainstream RPG culture. During the intervening periods, there has been a tendency for the greater culture to go head down, full bore in a direction and be resistant to change backwards (eg back to Wargaming from Storyteller/Gm-Force/Illusionism) and a resistance to revolutionary ideas (eg OSR culture/system and Storyteller culture/systems vs Story Now/Narrative systems...or rules-heavy vs rules-lite). Then, there is another step change, either forward or backward. Sort of like the waxing and waning of the American electorate due to party/policy fatigue.
Finally, we seem to have come to a point in the RPG marketplace where it is saturated with a fairly matured understanding of what each of us want to do while RPGing and matured systems that support that understanding. 5e's "big tent" idea (at the outset at least) appeared to have been an acknowledgement of that. However, in reality, I think that they ultimately (and likely, at least in part, wittingly) made mainstreaming the OSR (exploration rules, tables, and subsystems) and Storyteller ("rulings not rules", "natural language", impromptu DC establishment that "feels right", all serving to maximize the prospects of GM illusionism or system being subordinate to GM whim/interpretation/metaplot) crowd again a priority. They're hopeful of drawing in the rules-heavy, 3.x simulation crowd with a la carte multiclassing, a lot of system familiarity (basically a ported saving throw paradigm and familiar layout), dials and widgets for maximum crunch and "rules as physics". They're hopeful of competing for the PF crowd with robust adventure support and a "living" D&D system that looks familiar enough to what they have been playing. And they're hopeful of bringing in the 3.x disenfranchised part of the 4e player-base that only wanted a 3.x with more spellcaster/martial character parity and quicker combat resolution.
That is a pretty big book of business. I think what they have created with 5e (pending some modules) may be agile/versatile enough that they can cater to most of that crowd. What they can't do is simultaneously cater to the Story Now crowd nor the 4e crowd that liked 4e for its unique "4eishness" and not its "having D&D on the cover"; basically its amazing ability to functionally marry Gamist and Narrativist interests/ideas. My guess is that they probably have realized this for a fair stretch (or at least they probably have by now even if they were "true believers" when all the "big tent" tenets were being espoused). Which is probably A-OK by them so long as they keep getting our yearlies for the online tools!
i'm getting such good vibes locally for it
