Quote from: WeeklyStill, there is definitely something to be said for an old-school beer-and-bretzels system like this : for all its wonkiness, it does have a feel of simplicity and immediate familiarity. And I have this monday evening game that has every difficulty to get rolling because people show up tired and stressed from their workday. If things don't get better, I'll have a talk with my players about the merits of good old orc-bashing. Maybe the perspective of going completely back to the origins will win them over...

It can work, if that's what the group is into.  My old ftf group was burned out after our RM2 campaign (about 2/3 of them hated the character generation), and a quick nonsensical dungeon run with Moldvay Basic D&D recharged their enthusiasm.  Of course, then everyone decided that financial security was more important than gaming and half of them moved away for better jobs.

What really worked for our group was re-discovering the simplicity that games can have.  While we really got into RoleMaster, it tended to focus our attention on rules to solve problems that came up in play.  With D&D, things were suddenly wide open and crazy again, and we found playing in the "without a net" style refreshing.  And we found that, after experimenting for a couple of years with other systems, we just really loved the game we started with.

Which is why OSRIC is pretty cool with me.  I'll be checking out the new stuff and storing it away for the next time I run a fantasy game.

So yeah, if your group needs a recharge, an old school romp might be just the thing.  If that's what they're into, of course.  Sometimes it just takes a change of genre to accomplish the same thing...communication is the answer to just about any group's ills.

CS should play whatever games he enjoys, and if these aren't them I'm cool with that.

On the nostalgia point though, often it has nothing to do with nostalgia.  When I play older games I do so because I think they are great games, just like when I watch old movies I watch them because they are great movies.

I play great games, whether they were released twenty years ago or twenty days ago is an irrelevance as far as I am concerned.

Edit:  To be clear though, I think ADnD was one of the worst rpgs ever published that had any success and as such have zero interest in recreating it.

Quote from: Casey777Obligatory Advanced Dungeons & Dragons® Initiative and Combat Table link. (A4 version) Warning: reading A.D.D.I.C.T forces a SAN check.

The goggles!  They do nothing!

I don't play games for nostalgia. I play old games because they're fucking cool. I play RQ 3e Vikings because it keeps being the roxxorz. Just that.

Maybe that's the reason why I don't get the games that try to recreate the feeling of older games. If I want to recreate the feeling of the Rules Cyclopaedia, I will play the fucking thing.

On the other hand (re: A.D.D.I.C.T.): what the fuck is that thing? 20 fucking pages of rules for determining the initiative? Man, I didn't remember AD&D 1e as fucking unbearable.

Heh well A.D.D.I.C.T. is an annotated analysis of AD&D combat with multiple sources quoted, but in my experience nobody played full on by the book AD&D1E combat. One word, segments. Coming from Basic/Expert D&D it was easier and faster just to use that with the AD&D to hit charts or just roll d20s similar to how d20 works.