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Message: <blockquote data-quote="transmission89" data-source="post: 8246563" data-attributes="member: 6688441">I guess I’m a neo grognard? I enjoy old school and new school games (Currently playing pf2, AD&D2e and OSE)Never had d&d growing up as a kid in the 90’s (too poor to buy myself and no one else interested in my immediate family to buy it).  But the occasional curious glances at my cousin’s books, images from fantasy games at the time (beefcake art, warrior women with impossibly feathered hair) left an impression of what d&d was to me.When I grew older, and went to university, I thought I’d check out this d&d stuff. Ended up buying a couple of 4e books, I found them a little dry and puzzled, was this what d&d is? Lurked in this very site during the height of the edition wars and saw a name, Pathfinder, crop up over and over. I checked it out. Yes, to me, this was it, a sense of wonder and mystery and magic, it’s here.I ran some games for friends, joined PFS to play, but struggled with the idea of all these complex moving parts and rules checks. I felt suffocated, unsure of the “correct“ decisions to make (especially as the crb as published kinda expected you to move from 3.5 where things were perhaps explained more). Things also felt off.I looked into 1e when the reprints came and bounced off. How the hell do you play this? How do I balance an encounter? What’s the right level of treasure to give without wbl? Fool that I was...It mattered not, for 5e was just around the corner, a return to an older style of play, a promised modular system. I played it, I enjoyed it, but something was still missing, a yearning from my childhood fantasies, for me, a lack of sense of peril, excitement, adventure.The growing Community also brought growing pains. Calls for changes and tweaks that has begun to distort it from “not my” d&d. Changes to AL as suddenly xp has become difficult, instead there are milestones, treasure points and it’s all about the character arc etc. Calls to change this that and the other to morph it to our preferences.  All power to them, just not the game I enjoy. If it’s not to your tastes, why pick up a game and change it to those? why not just play a game that already supports that?Incidentally, I find calls against reactions to this as “gate keeping“ dismissive. Both sides seem to talk past one another and resort to insults. Gate keeping is not allowing people to play, because they don’t meet your criteria. It’s not expressing valid concern that new entrants want to change everything to be a different game, changing what the base game is. Again, if you want to customise it at the table, go for it, fill your boots, I’m a live and let live guy. I have no real stake in it, this paragraph beyond the first sentence  is more  a musing rather than declaration of opinion or call to arms and I don’t wish to de rail the thread.So I tried again. i read the mentzer basic pdf, everything started slotting into place. Reading the 2e reprints proved more accessible, they provided a lens to better understand 1e for me.Suddenly, I felt free. I had structure to run my games without being over burdened. Monsters were manageable, my mental processing could be devoted to adventure rather than mechanics.For me, the older games give a sense of wonder, liberation, mystery and adventure at the table in a way the newer games don’t. Not that one is better than the other, just they give me different feels....</blockquote>

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