An unfortunate number of "new school" partisans turn the question of why people like old D&D (and similar games) into a rhetorical one. They seem to think that there are right and wrong answers in entertainment just as in mathematics.

In practice, I see a lot of cross pollination and mixing of different schools of thought on particular points.

Quote from: Rincewind1;694249The way I see it, people never just stopped playing Traveller or BRP in numbers so high it needed a renaissance to bring it back.

OSR= what OSRIC and C&C started.  The two have a contentious and murky past relationship that I am not fully aware of, but that was the seed.    Apparently C&C was to be a full retroclone of 1e, but the Trolls were afraid of Wotc legal (this was untested waters at the time), so the Texas and British chaps told them to brass off and made their own "publishing system."  Gygax was even directly involved in all of this at some level as he was on the Troll payroll.  I'd actually like to know how all this really went down.  It seems much of the bile has subsided over the years.  

One could even argue that HM 4e (with actual AD&D Gygax text) was the real instigator.  A mostly unbroken line could be drawn from WI D&D, Seattle D&D (late 2e/Basic), HM 4e, C&C/OSRIC, to the OSR, and now back to Seattle D&D (with the reprints and pdfs back online).  

Also, notice the first few letters in OSRIC...

Quote from: Teazia;694505OSR= what OSRIC and C&C started.  The two have a contentious and murky past relationship that I am not fully aware of, but that was the seed.    Apparently C&C was to be a full retroclone of 1e, but the Trolls were afraid of Wotc legal (this was untested waters at the time), so the Texas and British chaps told them to brass off and made their own "publishing system."  Gygax was even directly involved in all of this at some level as he was on the Troll payroll.  I'd actually like to know how all this really went down.  It seems much of the bile has subsided over the years.  

One could even argue that HM 4e (with actual AD&D Gygax text) was the real instigator.  A mostly unbroken line could be drawn from WI D&D, Seattle D&D (late 2e/Basic), HM 4e, C&C/OSRIC, to the OSR, and now back to Seattle D&D (with the reprints and pdfs back online).  

Also, notice the first few letters in OSRIC...

The OSRIC and C&C camps had a bitter online feud that lasted for years. And yeah, the open raging bile between them is definitely less now than it once was...

A newbie isn't going to know what OSR even means.  They don't even have to know about it.  It doesn't matter.

"I got this cool role-playing game.  You want to play it some time?"

It helps if the newbie is at least interested in adventuring games.  Or reads/watches adventure movies.  Not so much action.  Because that is what FPS gamers are more into.  TBS gamers won't be interested.  Wargamers might be interested, but then you'd be playing a wargame with an RPG which kinda sucks.

So... adventure, make your own character, create a destiny, blah blah.

Quote from: Phillip;692136Just so. I didn't learn any rules the first time I played.

The first role-play session I was in, I didn't know any rules.  The DM was doing open world, and told me what die to roll after I told him what my character was doing.  I had no idea what numbers I was supposed to be "hoping" for because the DM never said, "You need to roll an 11 or higher".  That was never said by the DM.  I was just told what die(s) to roll.  The story/adventure was worth more than any numbers rolled.

Later on I read some rules for the game to see how the system worked.  It immediately went on a computer to game in.