NSR:
I’ve heard that a lot of well known game designers from the forge era, who were pushing hard against flaws or gaps in d&d or issues in the play culture of d&d, are sometimes going back to Basic/Expert D&D and playing that again - why do you think that happens, when before it seemed folks were “done” with or had “graduated” beyond d&d?
Meguey:
I would say it’s not “going back”, it’s playing a diverse array of games.
D&D is fun. It’s good at what it does, and if you sign up for that, you will have a blast, even if it’s a nostalgia-fueled blast. What’s not fun is trying to make it be all things to all people, and whats really not fun is having other people try to enforce that and shut down new games or new ideas about play as though that somehow takes away from their fun. There are more humans on the planet now than at any other time in history, we have an exponentially easier time connecting with folks who have a similar schedule and interest, and there’s thousands upon thousands of games available a few clicks away.
As Vincent said, about the Forge and D&D, it was not an adversarial or confrontational relationship at the start, it was just “Wow pizza is good, but what if also salads?” The food-fight and name-calling came later.
I hope, and I think this server is a sign that hope is well-founded, that we are all moving forward to a gaming buffet with less anxiety and judgement that someone somewhere might be enjoying something else.
Vincent:
I’ve heard that a lot of well known game designers from the forge era, who were pushing hard against flaws or gaps in d&d or issues in the play culture of d&d, are sometimes going back to Basic/Expert D&D and playing that again - why do you think that happens, when before it seemed folks were “done” with or had “graduated” beyond d&d?
I think that’s not quite right. It’s hard to believe now, but back in the Forge days, D&D didn’t have much of a play culture. None of us took D&D very seriously or pushed back against it much at all, it was really the World of Darkness / Shadowrun / GURPS type games of the 90s that we disliked. 3e was barely building steam. Pathfinder came out in the last years of the Forge. The worst people in the OSR hated the Forge, but that was pretty one-sided.
I played basic D&D for the first time in 2008, in a group entirely of Forge friends, and it was one of the immediate inspirations for Apocalypse World. I ran a short-lived OSR game sometime after that, part of a small but genuine OSR movement at the Forge. We rediscovered D&D at the same time everybody else did!