Back in the 2e days, I was a teen and had little money. I'd get some money for birthdays, Christmas, a good report card, and had to choose my purchases wisely. I could only make a few purchases a year. Even a Dungeon magazine was a treat to be cherished and savoured.

I always remember going into the game shop and seeing the huge amount of D&D product. What a feeling! I wanted it all. So much goodness and awesomeness everywhere to explore. Vast worlds of imagination everywhere! If I only could buy it all!! Mind reeling. Like a kid in a candy store. So hard to make a single purchase!

Nowadays, I have the money to buy everything I want, multiples of it even. But when I walk into the game store, there's nothing that I want to buy.

I hope that 5e once again fills the shelves with awesome stuff that I want to buy. I hope that 5e is a renaissance.

On a related note, one of the most recurring dreams that I have is discovering a game store that is just packed with every item of AD&D, shelf upon shelf of new old stock, and I go on a shopping spree and get everything I want. It's like the best dream ever.

Some guys dream about sex with beautiful women. I dream about AD&D 2e.

Quote from: 1989;696298Back in the 2e days, I was a teen and had little money. I'd get some money for birthdays, Christmas, a good report card, and had to choose my purchases wisely. I could only make a few purchases a year.

I always remember going into the game shop and seeing the huge amount of D&D product. What a feeling! I wanted it all. So much goodness and awesomeness everywhere to explore. Vast worlds to explore. If I only could buy it all!! Mind reeling. Like a kid in a candy store.

Nowadays, I have the money to buy everything I want, multiples of it. But when I walk into the game store, there's nothing that I want to buy.

I hope that 5e once again fills the shelves with awesome stuff that I want to buy. I hope that 5e is a renaissance.

On a related note, one of the most recurring dreams that I have is discovering a game store that is just packed with every item of AD&D, shelf upon shelf of new old stock, and I go on a shopping spree and get everything I want. It's like the best dream ever.

Some guys dream about sex with beautiful women. I dream about AD&D 2e.

I dream aout beautiful women that find male dnd players irresistable like in the Axe Effect commercials.

Quote from: 1989;696298Some guys dream about sex with beautiful women. I dream about AD&D 2e.

Get outta the house man. Most of my dreams that feature rpg related stuff still include hot chicks.

Part of that is personal attitude and cynicism though.

It's hard to compete with your own "golden age" of nostalgia.  Before anybody gets mad about the "N" word used--what I am specifically talking about is accessing the same level of "magic" that you felt when you read things for the first time.  A common term used in comics when people were debating "the golden age", was the term "the Golden Age is 12", which means, when you were 12 years old, that was your golden age.

Granted, there are objective ways to measure quality as well as your own personal preferences, but I think people need to take internal inventory--is everything new out there crap, or did your tastes become more sophisticated or did you get jaded after seeing several variations on the same theme.  Is the reason you like the earlier works of Stephen King, Chris Claremont, or Gary Gygax better than their later stuff really because they changed, or did you change (or did you both change).

It's tough to compete with your own memories.

Quote from: Exploderwizard;696304Get outta the house man. Most of my dreams that feature rpg related stuff still include hot chicks.

Are they wearing kneepads?

Oh wait, that was Ron's dream...

Quote from: YourSwordisMine;696311Are they wearing kneepads?

Nah, just polyhedron based jewelry.

I agree with the feeling of walking into the FLGS and not finding anything on the shelf I want to buy, or it at least being hit and miss. But there's still a ton of great material being produced, it's just that lots of it isn't in the FLGS by default. There's POD material on DTRPG and Lulu, stuff available direct from the publisher like Frog God and LotFP, and Kickstarter material galore. On top of all that, pretty much every title TSR ever produced is available online, and most of it goes for less than cover price (once adjusted for inflation). Some of the above can even be ordered in to your FLGS. Really, considering all that, it feels like a golden age of RPGs to me.

Yeah, it's been a long time since I've walked into a game store and found anything that interested me that I didn't specifically go in to get.

Probably not since the advent of d20.

But, to be fair, it takes a lot more to capture my imagination these days. Most games it's"been there, done that".


Also, Toys R Us sucks these days. Two small rows of action figures, 50% Star Wars and any other line I might be interested on never reordered so just the same 2-3 second string characters. And then a handful of bad-looking hip modern revisions of superheroes.

Video stores are dead, and used bookstores ate not only getting rarer, but it's getting impossible to find "treasures" as everyone checks eBay selling prices (not auction end prices mind you) on stuff. (gee, wonder if those two are connected at all?)

Used to be, I'd spend a whole day shopping at all the aforementioned stores. Nowadays I get in, get out, and spend twice the amount of time shopping online.

Quote from: 1989;696298Back in the 2e days, I was a teen and had little money. I'd get some money for birthdays, Christmas, a good report card, and had to choose my purchases wisely. I could only make a few purchases a year. Even a Dungeon magazine was a treat to be cherished and savoured.

For me, it was the 1e days, but it was the same sort of situation.  We'd pass around modules so each one got used 3 times or so.  I didn't know anyone who had more than a handful of Dragon mags.  I was also into wargames and comics so I had to choose carefully and eventually dropped comics.

2e was the poor college student and poor grad student days.

Quote from: JRT;696307Part of that is personal attitude and cynicism though.

It's hard to compete with your own "golden age" of nostalgia.  Before anybody gets mad about the "N" word used--what I am specifically talking about is accessing the same level of "magic" that you felt when you read things for the first time.  A common term used in comics when people were debating "the golden age", was the term "the Golden Age is 12", which means, when you were 12 years old, that was your golden age.

Granted, there are objective ways to measure quality as well as your own personal preferences, but I think people need to take internal inventory--is everything new out there crap, or did your tastes become more sophisticated or did you get jaded after seeing several variations on the same theme.  Is the reason you like the earlier works of Stephen King, Chris Claremont, or Gary Gygax better than their later stuff really because they changed, or did you change (or did you both change).

It's tough to compete with your own memories.

I went through such a "phase" over the last few years, in a niche unrelated to rpg games and comic books, but was otherwise very big in my life when I was younger.

After I stopped buying 4E D&D splatbooks and Pathfinder APs, I started buying and watching a lot of dvds of movies and tv shows from my youth and young adulthood.  Television shows like:

- The Incredible Hulk (from the late 1970's and early 1980's)
- the original Knight Rider
- Dukes of Hazzard
- The A-Team
- Miami Vice
- Airwolf
- the original Hawaii Five-O (from the 1970's)
- Magnum PI
- MacGyver
- Wonder Woman (from the late 1970's)
- the original Charlie's Angels
- the original Battlestar Galactica (1978-1979)
- Simon & Simon
- X-Files
- Babylon 5
- the original Starsky & Hutch
- Rockford Files
- etc ...

(Most of this stuff I found for $15 per season or less.  Basically 20-25 episodes for less than the price of a 4E module or Pathfinder AP issue).

After watching through most of these old tv shows, I was wondering how the hell I was ever into these tv shows in the first place (back when I was a kid or teenager).  Most of these tv shows were a huge disappointment watching again, after not seeing any of them in decades.

Basically I was watching these 25-30+ year old tv shows through the eyes of a middle aged adult, and not as a kid or teenager.


There is a lot of truth in the notion that one cannot compete with one's own youthful memories.  One cannot "go back home again".

Yeah, after having a few childhood memories ruined by DVD, I've gotten very reluctant to research stuff I loved as a kid.

Some stuff, however, has held up or even been better in reviewing-

Twin Peaks
The original Max Headroom film (not the tv series)
Daria
The State
Batman: The Animated Series/Batman Beyond
The Prisoner
The Avengers (Emma Peel era)
Red Dwarf ( the first 4-5 series, before the new Kochanski showed up)
Fawlty Towers
Peter Davidson era Doctor Who
Granada's Sherlock Holmes adaptions
Gargoyles ( though the animation quality is lower than I remember)
MTVs The Maxx
Profit
Fraser
Adventures of Brisco County Jr
Brimstone
Parker Lewis Can't Lose
The Outer Limits

Quote from: TristramEvans;696354But, to be fair, it takes a lot more to capture my imagination these days. Most games it's"been there, done that".

I too find this to be the case as I get older.

I didn't really watch X-Files or Babylon 5 in their original first-run broadcasts back in the 1990's (other than a few random episodes via channel surfing).

When I was recently watching the dvd season sets of these two shows, I found that I was very skeptical and had a hard time suspending disbelief.  If I had watched X-Files regularly back in the mid-1990's, most likely I wouldn't have been as critical with the "been there, done that" mentality.  Most likely I would have really liked these two shows back in the day.

These days, I find that I am a lot more skeptical when watching more recent sci-fi tv shows, such as Fringe, Eleventh Hour, Heroes, Continuum, Orphan Black, the 2009 Star Trek movie, etc ...

Quote from: TristramEvans;696354Yeah, it's been a long time since I've walked into a game store and found anything that interested me that I didn't specifically go in to get.

Me too.

Isn't this board completely against game companies releasing new content anyway?

Quote from: Arturick;696528Isn't this board completely against game companies releasing new content anyway?

Uh...what?