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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Vanveen" data-source="post: 7769774" data-attributes="member: 6874262">A few points, from someone who got started in 1979 with Blue Book. The main difference between OS and NS is simple: professionalization. That's all. In this context, "professionalization" means modern product professionalization. This includes some or all of the following: design and development by people with paid experience, advanced education or training, or all three; customer-driven or at least customer-responsive design and development; design and development intended to promote the ease of use, sale, scalability, and/or lifetime customer value of a product; and sustained, effective efforts to promote product use, e.g. "D and D nights," tournaments, etc.OS games had none of these. The one unexamined thing in this monstrous thread is *time*--what seems to middle-aged me like unimaginable desert stretches of time. No matter how you played back then, kids, you played for LONG stretches of time ALL THE TIME. There was literally nothing better to do, and in lots of cases nothing else to do. In college in the late 1980s, we frequently played 8-hour stretches two or three times a week, with a ten-hour stretch on the weekend (our longest session was fourteen hours). You can't have a product like that. Modern D and D is designed to be played satisfyingly in four hours. It also has a lot fewer dependencies--there are a million subtle changes to make it possible to run something for strangers, say at a bar's Dungeons and Dragons night, in a finite, brief period of time. In that time you will get your quantum of solace, as it were: a regularized experience which will typically be Ok to pretty good, occasionally HELL YEAH, very occasionally truly awesome. It will almost never be terrible. If it is, the causes are easy to spot by the participants: players who use playing with strangers as an outlet for their nerd psychopathy, a crappy GM, etc. Even *that* is the sign of a professional product--you'll note the users don't blame the product, but other users.This design serves the purposes of a professional consumer product. There's nothing wrong with that. But it's an overwhelmingly strong explanatory force for a lot of the issues raised in this thread.</blockquote>

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