Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Not all Old School gamers are Old grognards

Oddysey of How to Start a Revolution in 21 Days or Less has a well written post on the relevance of old school gaming for today's teenagers. If accurate bodes well for the continuance of what we love as a hobby and as a cottage industry.

I find the comments on what young adults are doing with freeform play on the internet very interesting. Sometimes we forget that our hobby is as much about the roleplaying as the game. Properly presented that aspect of our hobby could be very appealing to many. I am a firm believer in the "Soap Opera effect" of good roleplaying.

Again the object of using observations like this isn't to reignite the fad that was D&D in the 80s but rather get our portion of the hobby on a sustainable basis and have some fun along the way.

Again thanks to Oddysey for a well written post. We need more young whipper-snappers like here. I am adding her to the blogroll so we can see what next she has to say.

4 comments:

Rusty said...

Thanks for pointing this out. I had been reading her blog from time to time. This post was one her best.

Timeshadows said...

Rob,

I really appreciate your Middle Path stance, and think you are also doing a great job at broadening the appeal, while still retaining the best aspects of the Old School.

All the best to you,

trollsmyth said...

Be sure to poke around. She's had a number of excellent posts on the place of the industry in gaming and Old School gaming in general.

Natalie said...

Wow. Glad to see people enjoying that post. This is something I've been struggling to say for a while, and think is really important, so it's nice to see people get it, and get something out of it.

It'll be really interesting to see where the OSR goes from here. Right now most of the active work is being done by the Red Box crowd (just like in most areas of gaming...) but I know more than a few younger folks who really grok "old school" and things like it. I'm hoping they'll go places with those games.