(I also referenc Marc Miller's article about the Traveller session he ran -- which you summed up amazingly well.)
Not
that post! You better be prepared for a lot of whining in your comments section!
Did you read the collective panty bunching that took place after I wrote it? Almost nothing but repeated
Fallacies of Composition in the various responses despite my taking care to use phrases like "almost", "tended to", and the like. They all bleated that their experiences weren't like that despite my never even suggesting that. Hell, one of the mods even gave me an infraction because I dared type the phrase
"autism spectrum", although I can understand why
GURPS players and GMs are sensitive on that subject.
Of course, the actual point of the post was lost entirely on them. To whit:
That so-called
"Old School Role-Playing" was just one
many activities social groups of the era enjoyed and that the RPG hobby's memories of role-playing the 1970s are actually the atypical memories of those who I called "Die Hards"; gamers who picked up RPGs in the 70s or 80s and have continued to play RPGs ever since.
It was my contention that the vast majority of role-players in the 70s never played in another RPG session after the early 80s and the style of play those "social" RPGers enjoyed was markedly different from the style of play the "Die Hards" remember.
I pointed out that Hef, James Caan, Miss April, and the rest of the Bunnies were playing
D&D in the Mansion in the late 70s and that they weren't exactly grousing about unrealistic fall damage. Most RPG players were playing for fun, generally on the spur of the moment, and most likely with a published adventure or very bare bones set-up - something Mr. Miller's article about running
one encounter out the entire
A:4 campaign during a holiday weekend night neatly illustrated.
Yes, there were very serious RPG players back then. People who made up their own detailed settings and ran campaigns in the same. I mentioned that, including the fact that running into a few of them - whom I referred to as
Rainman et Fils and which really chapped the mods - and how their style of play at that time turned my gaming group off
D&D.
The "Die Hards" became the market for the simple reason that they're the ones who continued to buy RPG materials while everyone else skipped off to the new fad. More importantly, the "Die Hards" memories of "old school" play became the "truth" because they're the ones who still talk about playing RPGs.
Anyway, here are the four paragraph headers that got them squealing:
More playing than prepping
More descriptions than spreadsheets
More role-ing than rolling
More talking than shooting
Sounds like fun, doesn't it?
