D&D through the ages

There are a lot of discussions about old-fashioned gaming vs modern gaming. Some of them are substantive in the sense that they use objective, measurable comparisons, but the majority of them are more subjective, and have to do with the presentation or approach or something like that. Because it's subjective and not measurable, it's often difficult to determine if these differences actually exist, or if it's just in the eye of the beholder (no pun intended.) And regardless of the presentation or "vibe" or approach that the rulebooks themselves seem to have, naturally the actual experience would have varied considerably from one DM with one group to another DM with another group, or even the same DM with another group, or the same group with another DM. In general, I'd suggest that most of these types of subjective changes happened because the customer base wanted them to happen, or something like them to happen, because they found certain elements of the earlier game frustrating or not to their expectation. Presumably, the revised versions of the game cater to the greater demand from the market.

Of course, that's part of what the whole OSR thing is about. Many such gamers feel like the changes to the game have gone too far, and they liked most of what was already there better than what they have now and are attempting to roll back the changes, at least in their own groups. I suspect that there's also a fairly broad coalition, if you will, of gamers who are roughly my generation who have mixed reactions; they are sympathetic to some of the aims of the OSR, but equally sympathetic to the modern gamer. This is part of what I mean when I say that I'm old-fashioned, but I'm not old-school. I like the very rules lite approach that is highly dependent on GM rulings, for instance, that is the hallmark of the OD&D gamestyle and which was carried forward (mostly) in the B/X books and that line. Which contrasted sharply with the direction that AD&D was going, for instance. I'm a fan of lower-powered, "lower fantasy" (although I'm using that loosely the way that it is often mis-used in these types of discussions) characters who need to be a bit fearful when they come across monster spoor, rather than carefully balanced encounters that players are meant to overcome. This is an old fashioned play paradigm, but I equally despise the notion of making identical characters Ringo, Mingo, Bingo and Dingo because the first encounter with a goblin killed you three times before you could get past it and actually enter the dungeon. (Which you spawned, as it were, pretty much right next to. Sometimes the old-schoolers who gripe about video-game aesthetics are in denial about how old-school games were actually played by most.)

In any case, I'd like to show you two pictures. These are probably quite familiar. They also showcase a very similar concept, but they do so in a very different way; the Erol Otis cover (I'm not even sure that that is a dragon, given that it's coming up out of the water) ambushing what would likely be two PCs looks like a desperate situation, while the Wayne Reynolds one of a green dragon fighting four PCs looks less like one; the fighter leading the charge of a stereotypical 4-man PC group while shouting huzzah. I think that there definitely is a difference in approach there, and I've tried to describe that by migrating towards the former. Maybe even migrating beyond the former, by calling my preferred gaming approach dark fantasy, sword & sanity, fantasy Yog-Sothothery, a fantasy/horror hybrid, etc. 

I'm not sure what the Wayne Reynolds piece was for. I remember when it was released by WotC as a hi-res image file, and I'm sure it was the cover to something. I found a different version that seems a bit more faded (the original version was much more vivid and saturated—and maybe flipped the other way; I can't remember now.)