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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ariosto" data-source="post: 4899352" data-attributes="member: 80487">The D&D brand exerts too great a draw.That's a reason why successive waves of players -- rather than either contenting themselves with making it their own game as per page 36 of the original Volume 3, or choosing RuneQuest or Ars Magica (or whatever) instead -- have insisted that the "official" game must change to fit their vision, however radically different it might be.That's also a reason why we "outmoded" sorts continue to give a damn. It's hard to shake the notion that at least some of the people drawn to the brand might actually be interested in the games that built it in the first place. I use the plural because with 2e and 3e (especially the gulf between them), we departed from the conventional meaning of "edition".Besides the people who honestly dislike X with a passion, there are those who don't really even know what it is. Even having played every edition since whichever, one might not have attained a deep understanding of all their aspects. "How we played when we were 12" seems often to inform impressions of what was being played more than the work itself informs engagement with it at a later age.One need not know much about something to lack interest in it. First impressions can be enough to decide "that's not for me", and the physical constraints of mortal life make that necessary! Much ado about others' closed-mindedness tends to be hypocritical.However, that kind of lack of interest also results in a lack of knowledge. I don't know much about video games or MMORPGS. If I were to draw comparisons with D&D, maybe similarly naive people would "get" whatever I might say -- but it would doubtless drive the initiated up the wall!The shoe is on the other foot when I encounter the claim that old D&D is all about "killing things and taking their stuff" or the like.We've got people trying to communicate about different phenomena just to understand them. We've got people who see the expression of different preferences as attack and lash out. We've got people who launch preemptive strikes against the mere drawing of distinctions.Fans of different old things at least have in common that we're all "behind the times" and "not with the program". We don't have much vested interest in "boosterism" for WotC. That might help to put partisans of the latest new thing on edge, making them more mindful of the frontier between "us" and "them". I don't know whether this was a feature of the previous disjunction, but the cognitive dissonance of simultaneously claiming to be "better" and "just the same" struck me from the start this time even in WotC's evangelism. There's a love-hate relationship with terms and concepts such as "old school".</blockquote>

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