It looks like this post generated a good amount of discussion in the blog comments, which I think tends to happen when a taxonomy is introduced (I guess we like to talk about organizing things). For me personally, I don’t find this breakdown very helpful, and I haven’t encountered much use of the ages in the OSR blogosphere. It probably doesn’t help that each spans a short period of time.
Although I think the spans of the proposed ages are reasonable and the general idea is fine, I tend to think that ages detached from underlying causes are useless.
A “Golden Age" is something a propogandist hearkens back to when whipping up nostalgic masses. Historians would more likely refer to Iron Age because the introduction of iron mattered. Renaissance, prehistory, interwar, all these periods say something tangible, not propogandistic.
In that light, I feel like the eras might benefit from considering as:
Wargaming (prehistory in the blog, wargames existed and TTRPGs did not)
Unstructured (golden, the period where it was all about your table playing how it wanted and the zines were chaos as everyone said whatever they wanted.)
Competitive (electrum, when there started being lots of other options to dnd)
Narrative (silver, when dragonlance shifted how dnd was played and marketed)
Cross-Promotional (bronze, when dnd novels and video games became core elements of the overall strategy, and a major way new players discovered ttrpgs; I feel like this definition is weak, with the first Dragonlance novel setting off the narrative age; not sure what else to call it, although from a historical standpoint it could maybe start later and be merged into the next, as TSR’s decline took a while.)
Transitional (dark, when TSR was collapsing and being replaced by WotC; may be some better name, but matches late antiquity historically, when western rome collapsed and europe reorganized.)
Not very different. I guess I just dislike how judgy gold/silver/bronze/dark is.
Not my area of expertise, but I also got thinking about the more recent eras. I think I’d break these down as:
Structural Openness Era (2000-2008): 3e reoriented the whole design of DnD around consistency and rules. In parallel, it added the OGL, resulting in a vast array of third-party development.
Era of Independent Coalitions (2008-2015): 4e was the first actual failure of a core release. When TSR collapsed, it was while making smaller product lines. 2e and 3e both did quite well. While OSR stuff had already started, it really took off while 4e flailed. In parallel, 2010 sees Apocolypse World and the PBTA scene lighting up. These both formed what I think of as design coalitions: neither is one product, but moving between the games in the coalition is extremely easy, sorta like how moving through the EU coalition is easy but it’s not a single country. (To mirror world history, OSR calling to original DnD feels like the HRE: it is not actually a renaissance of the old school, but it is very important.) ((Also, older major game studios shone a bit here, similarly to these newer coalitions.))
Reconstruction Era (2015-2022): After seeming like dnd might have real problems, 5e is designed to take a lot of cues from the OSR, simplifying and loosening its rules, picking up some older elements that 3e and 4e dropped. It didn’t immediately gain dominance, but with critical role switching in 2015 and Stranger Things in 2016, it reasserted its cultural dominance. It also returned to 3e’s OGL, and in 2016 opened the DM’s guild, letting people even use their IP. This openness drew much independent development back to DnD.
Second Coalition Era (2022-present): The first coalition formed when 4e failed and the void encouraged innovation. Those games were still around, and when WotC tried to change the OGL, they got a lot more sunshine as designers sought protection from WotC’s threats. WotC backed down, but we’re still early in this span and it will likely have a different defining element in retrospect. A lot depends on how well dnd2024 does, and how long it does that well.
Anyways, those are my train-ride-home musings on more recent DnD-centric TTRPG eras. Interested in what others think.
I think the date of this one - 2009 is pretty important. Long before the revival of D&D’s fortunes with 5E or the real flowering of the OSR. I also dislike the use of Toynbee style prescriptive labels here, but I do think its interesting to see early efforts at contextualizing the OSR’s role in D&D and RPG culture and I think this post is important. Not right headed exactly (though far less harmful then some of the approaches that edition war stuff takes), but somewhat definitive in providing a context for what exactly people like James wanted from their RPGs when the OSR was still struggling to define itself or even form a community.
I would add that it’s interesting to compare James’ largely elegiac sentiments to the current ones in some area of the Post-OSR about both 5E and the rest of the Post-OSR. Furthermore, if we get to the OSR’s generally positive early response to 5E it will also be worth thinking back on.