RPGs and Time

Yesterday, as I pointed it, it occurred to me that 2026 is an interesting year in the history of RPGs. And that hinges on the fact that 2000 was an interesting year. 2000 was the year that the first edition of D&D that was developed by WotC (instead of TSR) was sold. It was the advent of the Open Gaming concept, the OGL, and the huge wave of third party publishers. It was the end of D&D systems that were all broadly compatible with each other (as OD&D, BD&D, B/X, RC, BECMI, AD&D 1e and 2e had all been.) Even today, it's kind of seen as the hinge where "old" gaming transitions to "modern" gaming; although that's usually a perspective promoted by people who dislike modern gaming. I'm not sure that 5e players necessarily think that. Or, for that matter, players of games other than D&D; games like Call of Cthulhu and other BRP based games have had only minor updates to the mechanics since their inception in the late 70s and early 80s. But given the preponderance of D&D and d20, other than making that caveat up front, I can now proceed to ignore it for purposes of the rest of this post.

Personally, it's also when I got back in to gaming and D&D specifically. I'd just finished grad school and started my "real" job, and had enough money to buy a lot of books in the 00s, and I did. My collection of 3e related and derivative stuff is still quite large, and I still enjoy it even today. I had already gotten back into RPGs in the 90s, but I was playing old out of print Top Secret and buying some of the World of Darkness stuff. And "playing" is generous; mostly I was buying and reading, but too busy to play; I was after all working full time, going to grad school, and had two small children. After moving for work and the release of d20, I actually started playing again much more regularly than I ever had been previously. 

But 2000 and the release of d20, and D&D 3e was a major watershed moment both for my own personal investment in the hobby as well as a clear dividing line between what came before and after in the hobby at large. Which is why it's so interesting to me that sometime in 2026 we'll hit the point where 2000 is the midpoint of the hobby; it will have been as long since 2000 and the "OGL Revolution" as it was between the inception of the hobby with the publishing of the first edition of OD&D and 2000 itself. That's a huge deal. I don't feel like the magnitude of changes in the first decade and a half or so of the hobby has been anything at all like it's been since, with the exception of 2000. There was a brief flourishing of new ideas in the wake of the OGL, but the pace of innovation has certainly been more staid in general for some time now, and people generally "seem" to think of 3e, 4e and 5e has similar in many ways in their thrust. At least people who don't typically play those systems anymore think that.

Pre-3e D&D, like I said, went through many versions, but they are all quite similar to each other, and were broadly compatible. You could say that they were more like iterative minor details and tweaks to the same system rather than calling them all separate versions of the same game, and you'd be pretty accurate, all things considered. But 3e lasted quite a while, depending on how you count it. Technically, 3e was replaced by 4e in 2008. But Paizo (and many others) continued to make 3e compatible product for some time; they issued four adventure paths, which means two years worth. And then they released the Pathfinder game in 2009; nine years after the release of 3e. Pathfinder made some updates to the system, but it was still "broadly compatible" with 3e and 3.5, and can be seen as another iteration of the same system. It lasted until it was replaced by the more radical remodeling of Pathfinder 2e in later 2019, so it essentially added an additional 11 years to the lifecycle of 3e, making it last almost twenty years. Not quite as long as the 1974-2000 period with interchangeable versions of the game, but nearly so. 

And for that matter, after the radical remodeling WotC did itself to D&D with 4e, 5e came back and feels like a streamlining and major refreshing of 3e. I don't think I'd go so far as to say that it's broadly compatible in the same way that B/X was to AD&D, or that 3e was to 3.5 and Pathfinder, but at the same time, it is still remarkably and notably quite similar again. 

In any case, after the four 3.5 adventure paths (two of which were later updated and combined in omnibus format for Pathfinder) there were twenty Pathfinder 1e adventure paths. At one volume a month, and six issue arcs for each path, that means two adventure paths a year. Combining 3.5 and Pathfinder 1e, that means twelve years of adventure paths. I do have a problem with adventure paths in some ways, and I think the one volume 5e campaign books is a better model (certainly that's true for the way I play, where a lot of the details and stats aren't going to matter to me). That said, as I was deciding which trawl to pursue last night, I started Rise of the Runelords #1: Burnt Offerings and read about a third of it last night. I do still need to read the last part of Ghoul Island, but I like leapfrogging rather than being stuck in a single campaign for a long period. My attention span is, probably, not very good.

UPDATE: I did finish Homeland but rather than immediately picking up Exile, I went for Ghouls of the Miskatonic instead, the first of the Dark Waters trilogy. I'll leapfrog those two trilogies, so after Ghouls will be Exile, then back to Dark Water 2 (Bones of the Yopasi) and so on until both trilogies are done. Once both are done, I'll go to the James Silke Horned Helmet quadrilogy, which I'll leapfrog with Steven Savile's Vampire Wars trilogy. I probably don't need to think too far past that; that's a dozen novels ahead still. For my game books trawls, I'll be leapfrogging between more than two streams; I should finish Burnt Offerings today, then I'll read the last Ghoul Island book, then back to the Bleeding Edge subseries within the Freeport trawl before going back to book two of Rise of the Runelords, the first book of the next SPCM Saga (Yig, I think?), etc.

The Rise of the Runelords Adventure Path begins here, in the small coastal town of Sandpoint. Five years after a tragic fire and spate of brutal murders, the people of Sandpoint eagerly anticipate the Swallowtail Festival to commemorate the consecration of the town's new temple. At the height of the ceremony, disaster strikes!

In the days that follow, a sinister shadow settles over Sandpoint. Rumors of goblin armies and wrathful monsters in forgotten ruins have set the populace on edge. As Sandpoint's newest heroes, the PCs must deal with treachery, goblins, and the rising threat of a forgotten empire whose cruel and despotic rulers might not be as dead as history records.