The D&D Castrati

Over at B/X Blackrazor, JB has his finger in the dike trying to deconstruct what the OSR claims are tenets of early D&D and what early D&D really is, supported by this subsequent post.  Frankly, I'd weigh in with a post of my own but, sigh, I can't say I give a fuck what D&D was 45 years ago.  There's far too much pretentious bullshit surrounding the question, such as this pile of horse pucky cleaned from a stable by one Adam Dickstein, writer of the blog, Barking Alien, who claims to have been playing RPGs for 44 years, but sounds like he has yet to crack a book.

Amidst the disparaging of various internet voices (we know how these things go), JB explains exactly why wading into this kind of discussion is a waste of our time:

"... I am more than a little fatigued by individuals who started playing D&D in the last 20 years telling me how and what "old school" D&D is ... or even just what ANY kind of D&D is. But you try to correct someone's ignorance and they just tell you to fuck off because, you know, it's just an opinion and you're telling them how their particular brand of fun is bad-wrong-dumb. Please let us NOT be preached to."

Well, yes.  To someone with 20 years experience, that seems like a long time.  To a high school student, 3 years of high school seems like a long time.  I'm sure that to anyone with 62 years of experience in D&D, I sound quite ignorant.  That's how it goes.  You can't explain to a millennial that when actors used to play a sex or a nationality or a race that was not their own, that was acting, not racism.  You can't explain to a Gen-Xer that when, after the sex act, if the sex partner LIKED what happened, then it wasn't rape, by definition, because no one involved thought so.  People with limited comprehension due to their limited time on the planet will be annoyingly ignorant of how ignorant they are, and there's nothing to be done about it.  Eventually, the world will hit them in the face often enough they'll get wise, so they can roll their eyes at people dumber still.

Far more interesting is the question JB asks: "have people forgotten how to play D&D?" ... and in relation to this a list of four "usual elements":  a group of players, peril, a responsible DM and a set of rules.  JB then spends two posts infering that these things are under siege ... while the comments section of both posts he's written (with a third to come) seems to support that yes, game culture is busy shattering our former conception of the game.

Uh huh.

Okay, agreed.  People out there aren't playing D&D the way we used to.  On this front, unquestionably, 5e was a literal gamechanger.  But then, not because it's all that different a game, but because the politics of "friendly gaming" were ruthlessly beaten into the heads of 7-12 year olds, the demographic the company decided to focus on in 2014 ... a demographic that's starting to graduate high school today.  This focus included drastically changing norms regarding social interactions between gamers at game cons and stores, on a draconian level, if you'll forgive the pun.  Anyone who disagreed with the policies of safe cards and game league conduct rules were — and are — ostracized according to the ancient Greek model.  Should we wonder that these children, just now entering young adulthood, should view the game very differently, especially when their authority model dictated that any and all negativity must be expunged from a game traditionally full of negativity?  

The present generation of new players have been warped by a meat grinder that viciously slams individualism unless it follows approved guidelines ... and we're well aware that those guidelines include that EVERYONE must be included and NO ONE should ever be hurt by the activity.  So much for rules, a DM's judgment or peril.  The only thing left is "group play" ... which is mediocritized to the kindergarten level of human communication.

The fish has been caught, gutted, speared and roasted until it looks nothing like a fish.  This was the company's agenda.

And you motherfuckers, with your shock and surprise and confusion, wondering what happened to the dear old game, and oh gosh it isn't like it used to be, argued tooth and nail with me for 12 years when I told you, repeatedly and at length, that it was happening.

"Oh no," you said.  "5e is just like the old game.  5e is rich and wonderful and filled with new things."

Yep.  Wonderful and new.  Arranged for singing high-C.

Well, it doesn't matter.  Because none of these "experience-not-play" participants will have the least influence over what the game is ten, twenty or fifty years from now.  They have no creditable knowledge to adapt, no intellectual principles upon which to expand, no sense of self-advancement that's been gained, no wisdom to share, no purpose to reveal and nothing of interest to say.  They are political creatures.  Expect them to gather together and form a clique of some kind that demands "Equal Respect among Other D&D Players" or some other such bullshit, like their other political peers raised in the same infantile political atmosphere.

They certainly have nothing to do with me or what I'm doing.