Kumbaya

As you’ve probably guessed from the kinds of posts I’ve been writing lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how the hobby has changed, not just since I was young, but in more recent years, too.

In my younger days, what bound us together wasn’t ideology or identity or even agreement. It was something much simpler and, I think, more powerful: a shared love of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and roleplaying games. We didn’t always see eye to eye. We didn’t always get along, but we read the same dog-eared books (gaming and otherwise), argued about alignment and racial level limits, and gathered around the same tables to roll dice. That was enough.

We were a ragtag lot, diverse not so much in the narrow, contemporary demographic sense (though that too, to a degree), but in personality, taste, and temperament. There were the older, bearded guys who got their start with Tactics; the teenagers who smelled like patchouli and wore jackets covered in band patches; the metalheads, the comic book obsessives, the Tolkien scholars-in-training, the stoners, the would-be novelists, and that one guy who knew way too much about the Wehrmacht’s order of battle in 1944 and wouldn’t stop bringing it up. Somehow, we all managed to coexist – or at least we played together and that, I think, is its own kind of getting along.

What I find disheartening now is how often that spirit seems absent. There’s a growing impulse, coming from multiple directions, to draw hard lines about what’s acceptable to play, read, like, or even talk about without a disclaimer. I’m not talking about politics, at least not primarily. I mean the way taste itself is increasingly treated as a moral signal. “You still play Empire of the Petal Throne? What’s wrong with you?” Or: “You’re using Mörk Borg? That’s not real old school.” I’ve heard both this year, more than once, along with others, just as silly.

There’s nothing wrong with preferences. No one should be shamed or pressured into liking what they don’t like. That was true in 1982 and it’s true now. Back then, plenty of people I knew scoffed at Arduin or rolled their eyes at RuneQuest. I’m not going to pretend we didn’t argue fiercely about whether, for example, spell slots or spell points were “better.” That kind of good-natured rivalry was part of the fun. Even now, I enjoy lobbing the occasional jab in the direction of certain games or game mechanics. I’m not claiming the moral high ground.

However, I think there’s a difference between ribbing your friend for liking Rolemaster and declaring that certain games, creators, or communities are beyond the pale and that merely engaging with them puts you under suspicion. That’s not rivalry. That’s excommunication. It's coming from all sides. Depending on who's speaking, the OSR is either a toxic boys' club of crypto-fascists or a co-opted safe space for woke poseurs who don’t really “get” old games. Try saying that not every game choice is a political act and that maybe you just like what you like and you’ll find yourself viewed with suspicion by both camps.

It's exhausting and, frankly, it's absurd.

When I was a kid, the fact that someone played Chivalry & Sorcery instead of AD&D might earn a few barbs, but no one was exiled. No one cared whether you thought the best sci-fi RPG was Traveller, Space Opera, or Universe (even though it's obviously Traveller). If you were into Tunnels & Trolls, sure, we might’ve thought you were a little weird, but you were our kind of weird. You were one of us. You knew where the lavatories were on the USS Enterprise. You could quote Monty Python and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy from memory. You subscribed to Dragon and read every page, even the fiction. You liked pretending to be a wizard or a starship captain or a mutant with a laser rifle. That was enough.

I miss that.

I’m not arguing that we all need to agree. We never did and, honestly, that was part of the joy – the clashes, the rivalries, the heated debates about initiative systems and critical hits. There’s a difference in my opinion between spirited disagreement and gatekeeping disguised as virtue. The hobby is big, messy, and contradictory. It always has been; that’s part of what makes it beautiful.

We could all stand to be a little more charitable, a little less quick to sort people into boxes, a little more willing to extend the benefit of the doubt. Curiosity, not conformity, is what brought most of us here in the first place.

When you strip away the noise, we’re all still what we’ve always been – Weirdos.