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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5738277" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yeah, I don't know that IME there's a lot of correlation between age and opinions about the game. I started playing in '75 for instance, yet I have no special fondness for old fashioned early period D&D. I can appreciate it for what it is, but that doesn't keep me from being interested in 'modern' RPGs or unfriendly to newer ideas. I find that to be mostly true of other gamers I play with as well, a lot of whom started in the early 80's or earlier. I'm not convinced that there is a particularly great increase in ideas about RPGs or vastly different diversity now than there was in the early days. The whole hobby grew FAST in the beginning. D&D first came out it '74 and by '76 there were dozens of RPGs, and by '78 there were 100's, if not 1000's and virtually every existing design of RPG had already been tried. Some concepts took a while to mature and get much traction, but they were around and we were aware of those concepts. Narrative story-telling games were definitely less developed back then, but they have certainly been quite present since the early 80's. There really hasn't been anything 'new under the Sun' in RPG design since then, just waxing and waning popularity of different styles and some gradual polishing of implementations (and a LOT of improvement in writing quality, settings, etc).Some people seem to pick up their first game they like and they're set in stone from then on and want to constantly recapture the same exact experience. Other gamers like to explore a lot of different concepts and are pretty flexible. If a 'stick to what I like' type started with Basic then we call them "Grognards" or "OSR fans" or whatever. If what they happened to start with was 3.5 then they tend to get labeled 'h4ters' or whatever. They're just people who want a specific type of experience. The opposite type are the people that are always out there trying new games and tinkering. The two can overlap or be the same person too in some ways. I've run into people that will play ANY RPG except if you want to play a fantasy RPG with them Basic D&D is IT, nothing else will do, etc.Now, its hard to say what categories the WotC devs fall into. What we can say is it is tough to go from basic concepts and brainstorming to a solid production game. I think it is fair to say though that the people at WotC are well-versed on the history and different concepts of RPGs. Whether Mike Mearles is really some kind of "OSR Grognard" or something I don't know. I doubt it. I think to be a successful pro you really can't be that narrow. All of those guys have produced a pretty wide variety of games. They have the tough job is all, trying to make an actual game product out of ideas and make it pleasing enough to all camps that it will make money. By contrast coming up with interesting ideas in a forum is trivially easy. Anyone that doesn't like them will just go read something else or post an "I don't like that". It all doesn't ever have to work and the downsides of all our clever ideas rarely show.</blockquote>

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