I am not a grognard. I’m not even the son of a grognard, really.
I played 3rd edition first. Then 3.5. I pulled my middle school friends in. We all cut our teeth with Wizards of the Coast, not TSR.
4 was a revelation for me when it released in my freshman year of high school. This was a game that knew what it wanted to be and designed toward that goal. It left behind parts of 3 that I loved, but I had to respect the confidence.
My friends were not impressed. They were not alone.
I started to fiddle with my own rules. Scribbling in notebooks spilled over into reading blogs, which spilled over into blogging.
I watched the old school scene slowly congeal.
Then the “D&D Next” play-test. Ah, those forgotten forums. What a time to be alive.
I watched the old school scene become more than a scene. I bought dozens of cool little books to put beside my big professional books.
5 was a different sort of revelation. People wanted generic. Focus was not a virtue for “the world’s most popular” version of what we were all doing. Better expressed by Mister Coville for those with time to kill.
Still I played that edition. I played it all through the pandemic with my friends via video call.
But I wanted something different than a poor man’s Critical Role. I wanted a game that made the players say “I want to go there” and “After this I want to do that.” I wanted a game that told the players to make their own adventure, rather than one that promised them 20 levels of cool abilities if you just followed along with the DM’s song and dance for a few years.
The contrarian irony of the whole situation was that as soon as the tabletop experience I had been having for over a decade became popular via Crit Role, Stranger Things, etc., I lost interest in it.
The OSR, which preempted the D&D culture bomb, was already reacting to it. Both forces grew in popularity at the same time.
But time festers all infections.
Hasbro flopped on multiple PR and legal questions and burned a few thousand bridges in the process.
The OSR had a few multi-million dollar crowdfunding events that all but ended the indie sensibility of the whole thing. Now they sold better than the “world’s greatest” regularly.
Good for them. Honestly.
But nothing will beat the spirit of those first years when a poorly formatted pdf and a blog with no theme customization was the cutting edge in ttrpgs.
In those days, the idea was king.
The king is dead. Long live the king.