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: 5418073" data-attributes="member: 59082">No, I don't think they'll lose their imagination completely but I do think that there are more tools and cultural influences that encourage imagination loss than there were, say, thirty years ago.Imagination is, in my opinion, one of the most precious, intrinsically human qualities. It cannot be destroyed but it can be neglected and through neglect, atrophy. My obversation of students is that they are hungry for inspiration, for real imaginative experience not just simulated imagination (e.g. TV and video games).In some sense our culture has taken a step forward in that play is more accepted than it was forty or fifty years ago. Back then children grew up and didn't play; or rather, their version of play was reading the sports page or assembling porcelain figure displays or playing golf or poker. Play was for kids - and so were myths and imagination. Now we have all kinds of variation of adult play, including tabletop RPGs. Play has been, to some extent, legitimized. Adults love stories, love to play.So it isn't all bad. I just worry about a future in which movies have entirely replaced books and video games replaced storytelling games (including TTRPGs). That would be a grim world indeed.Sounds intriguing but I'm honestly not sure what you (and evidently TaiChara) are talking about. What sort of story-telling games are you referring to?Interesting stuff, Ariosto. You describe why I think that early phase, the early 70s up until maybe the AD&D hardcovers came out in '77-'79, was the Golden Age of RPGs. Not only was everything new and fresh, but there was an emphasis on create-it-yourself. DM's Fiat ruled the day and didn't even need to be named, afaict, because it was simply how you did things. In other words, the rules were meant to serve the imaginative experience; imagination wasn't meant to flavor the rules, as may be the case now.Somewhere along the way D&D stopped being a grassroots movement. It definitely was up until the end of the "Golden Age" in the late 70s, and was to a certain extent through the "Silver Age" of the 80s. One big step away from that may have been when Gary Gygax left; another was when WotC bought out TSR; another was when Hasbro bought WotC. This doesn't mean that there aren't real gamers involved; I would guess that every designer at WotC is a gamer, loves to play. Maybe I'm overly pessimistic to say this, but it would seem that the bottom line is profit margin, not what makes for fun gaming. It is a strange, depressing assumption that Americans make that this has to be the case, that profit can't come after quality.What I think we have is a case of D&D perpetually unable to fulfill its potential. What I think we need is to find again a kind of Edenic early 70s inspiration, yet with the wealth of the last 40 years of game design experience. Remember that slogan from Necromancer Games I think, "3rd Edition Rules, 1st Edition Feel" - or something like that. How about "5th Edition Rules, OD&D Feel." That would be the shiznitz! <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/laugh.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":lol:" title="Laughing    :lol:" data-shortname=":lol:" /></blockquote>

Verification