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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 6250212" data-attributes="member: 2205">I suspect that the schism is partly an artifact of your perception--there never really was nearly as much "community" and unification as you percieved.  (As a guy who used to hang out at RPG.net before coming to Eric Noah's Third Edition News site, or whatever it was actually called in about 2000, I can attest to the great diversity in the hobby that existed outside of D&D specifically.  And as a guy who was at least aware of Dragonsfoot, even if I wasn't interested in anything that they were talking about, the incipient proto-OSR movement, as it were, I'm not convinced that D&D itself was ever so unified as you assume.)But also--and this is wandering a bit into armchair psychoanalysis--why is this something that you care about?  If you have a game that you like, and players to play it with, then why does it matter to you about the "greater community" and what everyone else is (supposedly) playing and all that?  I'm a firm believer in the notion that I'd rather have options I don't need than to need options that I don't have.  Diversity in the marketplace is generally held to be good for consumers as a truism.  This is certainly true for me; if I were forced to swallow any edition of D&D, then I'd probably choke on it these days.  Having the OGL, and tons of options to give me a very targeted niche product, is a much better situation for me than a one size fits all big-tent approach, in which I'm forced to accept all kinds of compromises.The diversity has also greatly contributed to both the content of my conversations about gaming--because I now have all kinds of interesting things to talk about that I wouldn't have without that diversity--and the content of my games, because I can borrow all kinds of interesting and neat ideas from multiple systems.  And because of the internet, these options are now laid out in front of me in a way that I'v enever had before.  Instead of having to be an amateur game designer house-ruling the heck out of my system, I can pick and choose like at a buffet of options, without having to actually create much, if any, rules of my own from scratch.This is the Golden Age of gaming.  The prior ages were Stone Ages or Bronze Ages at best.  The only reason I can think of why this would not be the case is the psychological desire to feel part of a big tent, or community, of completely like-minded individuals, who all do things the same way.  That, frankly, sounds terrible to me.</blockquote>

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