Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercurius" data-source="post: 5011997" data-attributes="member: 59082">It seems like a common belief, almost an axiom of the online Dungeons & Dragons community. But is it true?A couple things come to mind that, I think, "color" this perspective. One is the fact that a significant portion (even the majority) of D&D players are Gen-X (born in the 60s or 70s) who came of age RPG-wise in the early 80s when AD&D spiked in popularity. So there was a combination of our falling in love with the game at the same time that it was increasing, and then peaking, in popularity. Later troughs (late 80s, mid-to-late 90s, mid-to-late 00s) proved disappointing, but were followed by further plateaus.There is also the basic nostalgia effect: "Back in the good olde days." This may simply be the D&D player's version of that. (We're getting old, fellow Gen-Xers <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />).This is not to say that the 80s were not a Golden Age, but I think it is just that: a golden age, not the Golden Age. Some gamers would call the early 90s the Golden Age, if you're into story-focused games like Vampire and Mage, as well as the boom of the Indie market and innovations in game systems that caused D&D to fall far behind, at least until 3E came out (which was, in a sense, Jonathan Tweet compiling the best of previous game mechanics that he himself designed and D&Difying them...but I digress).The early 00s was certainly another Golden Age with 3E and the OGL. The early years of 4E seems comparatively tame, and that may add another factor to the axiom. This is not to say that 4E itself is not a fine product--I believe that it is--but that the excitement around it seems much less than in the first couple years of 3E, mainly because of the OGL; back then you just didn't know what would come out next and it seemed there was always something new in the game stores. Now it is a new hardcover from Wizards of the Coast once a month with a random product here and there from another publisher, although usually as a PDF.Yet if we look beyond Dungeons & Dragons there is much to be excited about and you could say that now is the (or a) Golden Age. It is easier to produce a quality RPG book (or PDF) than ever before; the fantasy genre and its related sub-genres (scifi, horror, superheroes, etc) are more popular than ever thanks to Peter Jackson, comic book movies, and various TV shows, if only in a media-diluted way. It may even be that 30-somethings are coming back to the hobby now that they have stable families and careers (or that could be purely anecdotal based upon some of the guys in my group).What do you think? Were the 80s the Golden Age or a Golden Age?</blockquote>

Verification