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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Storm Raven" data-source="post: 4885422" data-attributes="member: 307">Old school gaming was what it was. No more and no less. The problem I have with the trumpeting of the alleged enormous virtues of old school gaming compared with current gaming, usually involving one (or more) of the following (non-exhaustive) list of claims:1. Old school gaming and old school players were tougher than those namby-pamby kids playing now;2. Old school DMs were more inventive, because they made up a lot of rules;3. Old school players role-played a lot more, or simply role-played better; and4. Old school players weren't interested in obtaining in-game power, they were in it for the fun of the gameAnd so on. The problem is, that most of these don't seem to hold up very well. Looking back on the adventures published in the old days, or accounts from old school gamers made at the time (or close to it), and the adventures, characters, and notes that I have from my youth, the adventures are hackneyed, the characters shallow (how deep is a character named "Melf the Elf" really?), the players obsessed with accumulating treasure, experience, and followers, and so on and so forth.Extolling the virtues of that time frame (in my case, the late 1970s and early 1980s), and putting them on a pedestal as somehow being a great era of role-playing excellence is simply not putting them in their proper context. By way of analogy, in the same time frame, I loved Gil Gerard's Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, and remember how much fun it was to watch it then. I don't, however, try to argue that it was better written and better produced than say, Babylon 5. I also look back fondly on the old Battlestar Galactica, but to try to argue that it was better made and had more in-depth character development than the new version would (rightly) be considered silly.</blockquote>

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