I plan on returning to this blog once summer is upon us again. This may evolve into a summer blog, even. As much fun as it is to speculate on the psychology (or would it be sociology?) of effective and enjoyable gaming, I think I'm just going to crank out cool adventures and supplements.
I'll be starting with some vanilla OGL/SRD work; D&D 3rd Edition is what I'm most familiar with, although the most fun I've had playing 3rd Edition never, with the exception of character creation, had anything to do with the rules. In fact, I often threw the written rules out and made up something simpler and more relevant "off-the-cuff."
I also kind of like 4E. I wish I had more chances to play it, so playtesting a short adventure could be a good opportunity for that. I'd also have to send in a Statement of Acceptance for the GSL. So exciting!
But what I'll really be excited about is "retro-clone" adventures (OSRIC? Labyrinth Lord? How shall I choose!?). Now, some of the oldschool conventions are bothersome, or didn't make any practical sense. For example, THAC0. I think we like to add more than subtract; we prefer to use positive numbers, and THAC0 encouraged the acquisition of negative AC. But all-in-all, classic gaming can be forgiven, because that was over a decade ago. I can be nostalgic now.
For me, it started with The Hobbit, far earlier than most people (or so I am told). Fantasy was amazing to me. A whole world, totally different and removed from our own. Totally under the influence of its creator without having to address disparity between the setting and reality. I'd learned by then that even the "future" was not immune to conflicting with reality: the 1990s were no longer the age of moon colonies and superhumans. So The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings shortly afterwards, opened my eyes to new expressions for creativity. And then my uncle brought out an old box full of books. But these weren't novels or storybooks. They were rulebooks. They were Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks, and modules. They were a framework for my creativity. Not only could I create a world of make-believe, I could share it with my friends, and AD&D could give us a common point of reference. Rules for the world we would play with.
Yes, I have a god complex.
And I've also got a soft-spot for those old memories, rolling my first dice, planning my first dungeon. Those old rules might be excessively "arbitrary" or lack the streamlined design philosophy of modern systems, but they worked. We had fun. So if the module is fun, and the DM is cool, and the players are there to have a good time, there's no harm throwing some nostalgia into the mix.