D&D General Younger Players Telling Us how Old School Gamers Played

[darjr]

You know... Gen X actually seems to have gotten away scot-free in the Aging Wars. You don't see anyone hating on them or blaming them for anything.

Who?

 

[Maxperson]

Lots of people thought TSR was a bit bonkers. And TSR thought lots of the players were too.

Reality was probably everyone was.

And still are!

 

[Vaalingrade]

Such an angry young man!

It used to be an admonishment for being a bad example.

I see it as a missed bonding moment.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Who?

The guys that invented heroin-chic and apparently nothing else.

 

[Sacrosanct]

It is this thing, called "journalism".

But getting journalism separate from funding is a problem. When you need the clicks for revenue, being controversial, rather than factually correct, has significant draw.

Like, how many older gamers are now going to watch to see how wrong they got it? That's clicks, people! Paying him for being wrong about you is fun stuff.

True with some, but this person seems genuinely sincere in his claims. He's just leaping to assumptions and hasn't bothered to actually talk to anyone who played back then. We're still around, so it's not a hard thing to do. There's even groups (like the OSR RPG group on FB that is full of old school gamers who are also inclusive) where it's easy to ask these questions without dealing with the toxic element.

 

[Sacrosanct]

You know... Gen X actually seems to have gotten away scot-free in the Aging Wars. You don't see anyone hating on them or blaming them for anything.

LOL, well THAT'S not true. The Boomers blame us for everything. Even for raising millennials the way they are.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I gotta tell ya, it's starting to get old constantly hearing from people who weren't even born yet telling us all how old school gaming was back in the day. How about just asking us? We're not all dead yet. The premise of this argument is false. What lent to old school gaming was not that we followed the passage of real life time between sessions into the game itself, but that the game was a living world where time in that world kept going regardless of what the players were doing, but the passage of that time was up the DM for what made the most sense for the adventure and not a real world calendar.

I understand it can be frustrating. I'm getting older and I am sometimes surprised by peoples sense of things. Outside of gaming, I was just involved in an online discussion about guitar tone and there were a lot of younger people very hostile to some of the ideas I was bringing to the discussion about the sorts of guitar tones I appreciated in the late 80s and early 90s. But I also understood they grew up literally listening to music on a different medium than me, and that music is recorded completely different. So their tastes aren't going to be the same and it is going to be hard for them to understand the context when they are talking about stuff that happened from an era they didn't live through. But I think staying positive is pretty important in these discussions because mostly people are just coming from a place of enthusiasm.

One, it is just a youtube video from someone who is excited about a rule he hadn't heard about before. I think talking about the text is fair. And unless I am missing something he quoted it accurately, he sourced it. And it isn't like there weren't people who played this way. If he asked around, which he may well have, he would probably get ten different answers and people who remembered things differently from one another.

I also think we have to keep in mind we were just operating in our own narrow sphere at the time. I am constantly amazed how different peoples descriptions are of the time when I was getting into gaming, and how different their reactions and attitudes were to the game lines I liked.

Also you can't expect a person who wasn't there, who is exploring these things, to have an omnipotent understanding of the past. They are mostly going to be going by text, by what they see people say online, and what what narratives are out there about how things were done. But I wouldn't want to kill someone's enthusiasm by getting angry that they got some detail wrong or they missed some context that only a person who was there might know. I think it's better to share that with them in a positive way.

 

[payn]

You know... Gen X actually seems to have gotten away scot-free in the Aging Wars. You don't see anyone hating on them or blaming them for anything.

It's nice.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Nah. If I'm doing a video on what it was like to be a Dead Head (Grateful Dead) based on something I read (and make incorrect assumptions) without actually talking to any of the Deadheads, that's on me. Even if some of them say the GD is the best music ever to come into existence.

The responsibility is on the one making the claims to be accurate.

If you do this though, don't be surprised if people lose interest in the grateful dead because people are afraid anytime they talk about it publicly, they will be told they go details wrong in a way that kills enthusiasm. You can correct people without making it seem like they committed a massive transgression or causing them humiliation. Also living through an era doesn't make one an expert. I was a metal head in the 80s and 90s. Fully unvested in the scene. But I had a very narrow view of what was going on everywhere. I can give some interesting context to people if they are interested, but I am always learning things I didn't know about that period (and to be honest it is often from young people who weren't there but are super into the nerdy details of metal history).

 

[GMforPowergamers]

I also think we have to keep in mind we were just operating in our own narrow sphere at the time. I am constantly amazed how different peoples descriptions are of the time when I was getting into gaming, and how different their reactions and attitudes were to the game lines I liked.

even today look through a dozen threads on enworld and half of them will have people argueing that they know the right RAW ruleing and/or have the correct house rule to handle the RAW...