Someone posted the One Page Dungeon Contest 2010 on Metafilter. It's a pretty popular site, one of Time Magazine's 50 best websites of 2009 and pulling in almost 7 million pages views a month.
This can only be a good thing. I'm sure that at some point, the OSR is going to tip over that crucial threshold and suddenly become viral. For some of us, who are desperate for new players, this will be a good thing. For others, who like thing just the way they are and suspect (wrongly, I reckon) that an expansion of the OSR will lead to dilution of quality and crass commercialisation, not so good.
FWIW, I had not really heard of Metafilter but then when the Penny Arcade hoo-ha with Jim Raggi's antipathy theretowards blew up, I thought "What's Penny Arcade?"
There certainly must be a big population of people who took part in the D&D fad back in the 80s that don't realize yet what's going on and might get a kick out of gaming again.
I'm not convinced we have a clear introductory module for those folks (our Keep on the Borderlands) and I don't think we make it clear the distinctions between retroclones. It would probably be a good idea to make a document that has a pic of the old version of D&D and says "Did you play this? Try this"
But if we get more folks to game with and share ideas with us then it seems like it's all upside to me.
And no worries about Metafilter, I spend my life on the web so you don't have to ;)
In all seriousness, it's a good example of why it's cool to share something you like on your blog because it's hard to predict what people have seen already.
Even if people aren't really sold on the system itself I think the OSR attitude and process of gaming and DMing has a lot to offer people. Both for people who are new to the hobby and people like me who have been doing it for years but are looking for a different approach.
The Primer on Old School Gaming isn't a module but it's one of the first things I ran across and I thought it was really well written and informative.
Thanks for the comment Amanda. I think the Primer on Old School Gaming is a great resource and I'm glad Matt wrote it.
But I think its aimed at newer gamers, those that came in with 2e and later.
When I came back to gaming after my long hiatus, I didn't need someone to tell me how cool old school style play was. I needed to know what the difference was between White Box and S&W Core and what all the other games were about-- Basic Fantasy, Spellcraft & Swordplay, etc.
Maybe I'll try to mock up a simple pdf later that points people to clones of the games they used to play.
This can only be a good thing. I'm sure that at some point, the OSR is going to tip over that crucial threshold and suddenly become viral. For some of us, who are desperate for new players, this will be a good thing. For others, who like thing just the way they are and suspect (wrongly, I reckon) that an expansion of the OSR will lead to dilution of quality and crass commercialisation, not so good.
ReplyDeleteFWIW, I had not really heard of Metafilter but then when the Penny Arcade hoo-ha with Jim Raggi's antipathy theretowards blew up, I thought "What's Penny Arcade?"
There certainly must be a big population of people who took part in the D&D fad back in the 80s that don't realize yet what's going on and might get a kick out of gaming again.
ReplyDeleteI'm not convinced we have a clear introductory module for those folks (our Keep on the Borderlands) and I don't think we make it clear the distinctions between retroclones. It would probably be a good idea to make a document that has a pic of the old version of D&D and says "Did you play this? Try this"
But if we get more folks to game with and share ideas with us then it seems like it's all upside to me.
And no worries about Metafilter, I spend my life on the web so you don't have to ;)
In all seriousness, it's a good example of why it's cool to share something you like on your blog because it's hard to predict what people have seen already.
Even if people aren't really sold on the system itself I think the OSR attitude and process of gaming and DMing has a lot to offer people. Both for people who are new to the hobby and people like me who have been doing it for years but are looking for a different approach.
ReplyDeleteThe Primer on Old School Gaming isn't a module but it's one of the first things I ran across and I thought it was really well written and informative.
Thanks for the comment Amanda. I think the Primer on Old School Gaming is a great resource and I'm glad Matt wrote it.
ReplyDeleteBut I think its aimed at newer gamers, those that came in with 2e and later.
When I came back to gaming after my long hiatus, I didn't need someone to tell me how cool old school style play was. I needed to know what the difference was between White Box and S&W Core and what all the other games were about-- Basic Fantasy, Spellcraft & Swordplay, etc.
Maybe I'll try to mock up a simple pdf later that points people to clones of the games they used to play.
Is that why the 1PDC site is/was down?
ReplyDelete@Norman: Yeah, they were all trying to download and after a while were commenting that it was unresponsive.
ReplyDelete