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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4974219" data-attributes="member: 4937">In the original 'Back to the Future', Marty goes back to the 50's wearing what was in the 80's fairly ordinary dress.  He is made fun of for being a dork, and even people who aren't trying to be mean can only imagine that he's in the coast gaurd.I think you'd have a similar problem if you took 4e back to the early '70's. The first problem that you'd run into is that there is no market for your product.  No one plays RPGs.  Virtually no one games.  The Parker Brothers/Avalon Hill board gaming reinaissance of the 1950's is over.  No one has the slightest idea what an RPG is.  No one has the slightest interest in playing RPG's.  The very first reaction you'd get from most people would probably be, "Is that some sort of book about Occultism?"  If you're lucky, this might entice some people to play, but 1970 outside of the counterculture is still a pretty conservative era.  Compare television and movies in 1970 to TV and movies in 1980 and you'll see that if you aren't on the front lines of the counter culture, the average home is far more insulated from the cultural changes going on in the world than they were in 1980.  In quite a few parts of the country, people have never even seen a hippy except on TV - check out a few high school yearbooks from the period.So most people would react to you as if you were a Satanist dork.There is however at this time a proto-RPG culture - war gamers.  The problem that you would have marketing 4e to 1970's war gamers is that they'd have no idea what they are looking at.  The 1970's gamer geeks are steeped in a culture of historical reinactment, Conan, The Dying Earth, The Lord of the Rings, HP Lovecraft, Elric of Melniboné, and Ffard and the Grey Mouser.  They are bemoaning the cancellation of the original Star Trek.  Star Wars hasn't happened yet.  Modern fantasy barely exists yet.  You have no real way of communicating to them what was 'cool' about the new game.  The historical grognards would turn their noses up at its lack of authenticity and its lack of concern for modelling the world of the 11th century.  The Pantheon of dieties is utterly foreign and nothing like the familiar legends of mythology.  The fantasy nerds would find the game completely unsuitable for playing Conan or The Lord of the Rings.  The Ranger of 2009 is nothing like Aragorn, it's source material, and neither are the halflings or the elves.  These are derivitives of derivitives of derivitives which run by game logic laid down over 40 years.  They are nothing like you'd create if you were trying to be Conan or Aragorn, and are even in the eyes of modern players which don't find the concepts so alien still utterly unsuited for such a task.  You have to recall that for the first 20 or so years of the game, the main thrust of RPG players was trying to achieve greater and greater realism.  Realism was practically the Holy Grail of RPG design for the first two decades of its existance. Introducing 4e wouldn't change that, and I think early players would utterly reject 4e's complete rejection of realism (even more so than the most avid haters of 4e today) because they have no real basis for understanding why it would do so precisely because they haven't seen the results of striving for more 'realistic' play.I think that the majority war gamers would think you were a total dork playing a children's game that wasn't worth their time - which is how they reacted to oD&D even with its clear wargaming roots and culturally familiar references.A few would see the power of the concept, and be intrigued by it, but its not at all clear to me what they'd make of it.  The game that they'd probably make and want to play would probably be nothing like either 4e (with its alien culture and proud lack of realism) or oD&D (because you'd introduced some higher tech tools for solving problems).  I think you'd very soon get the same sort of divisions in the RPG world that we have now and probably always will have - rules 'light' vs. 'heavy', simulation vs. game, player ability vs. character ability, imagination vs. tactical depth, and so forth.   I think the best that can be said is that the game would evolve faster, because you wouldn't have to invent a gaming system from scratch, but would at least have a template of a mature system that has considered all sorts of areas of gaming.</blockquote>

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