Recapitulation
One thing I’m keenly aware of these days is that my personal journey with running and playing D&D is in large part a microcosm of the larger OSR movement that unfolded while I was away from the hobby.
I played D&D back in the 80s, drifted away, came back with third edition, fell away, tried to get my kids into the hobby with Pathfinder, bounced off that (although it really hooked one of ‘em) got invited to play fifth edition, bounced HARD off that, and then rediscovered the old ways and the old school. That is to say, I did what everyone else did, only 15 years later and at my own pace (including, apparently, starting a blog).
And I’m only just now starting to really understand why people start hacking systems and how powerful that really is. Before, I was always kind of the opinion that the world doesn’t really need another version of D&D, but now I get it. No one version is perfect, and maybe these are less rules and more toolkits anyway. There’s nobody who’s going to care whether I’ve mixed and matched rulesets – I’m not going to get kicked out of D&D!
In fact, while writing this , I just so happened to stumble across this post on Travis Miller’s Grumpy Wizard, which basically says this perspective has existed from jump and ends with this simple, brilliant advice:
Do not seek to play The game. Play Your game.
Thus, here I am trying to decide if I should use BX or Swords & Wizardry or OSE for my next campaign, and clearly, the real answer is to start with whatever, begin adding to and subtracting from it, throw in some of my own sauce, and come away with “my” D&D, which is what people in the hobby have been doing from the very beginning, including Gygax and Arneson themselves.
In fact, this even solves the secondary problem of having too many systems to play because I can just play them all at the same time by using the pieces and parts that make sense for me and my table. Very demure, very Jeet Kune Do.
To that end, I’m building a “Players Handbook” in Quest Portal for easy access during the game (though I think I’m going to shift that documentation to a neutral location), and it’s going to be a living document. I think it’s important to have a canonical home for it, so everyone who plays in my games is using the same rules, but there’s no reason why we can’t collaboratively decide we like the initiative system from this one but we like the resource management from that one. And when someone publishes a new spin on the game, we can borrow from that as well.
Anyway, I’m about to burn a Christmas gift certificate on The Elusive Shift so I’m sure I’m going to get a lot worse about these theoretical meanderings before I get better.