Change a few names and you couldn't tell it was from 13 years ago

It troubles me to see what seems to be a major shift among the young gamers of today in how they use the FRPG format. We always had seen the rules and game constructs (e.g., the cleric character class) as mere conveniences; what we did with them was to enter the world of heroic fantasy. But gamers today who have been introduced to the world of fantasy through FRPGs see it differently; for them, the rules and game constructs are often the primary reality.

We enjoyed using the AD&D game to play at being vikings or Arthurian knights or the dwarves out of The Lord of the Rings. And if the rules didn’t describe those possibilities exactly, we adjusted. We made it up. But I see kids today who wonder what sort of AD&D game wizard Merlin is: not would be, but is. These kids read the rule books before they read the stories that inspired the games. That means their palates have been trained in some strange ways.

In a module outline I once submitted to TSR, Inc., I attempted to take the party into the Garden of Hesperides out of Greek mythology. To be successful, a player would have to sense that she had really stood in that wonderful place, and reached out his hand to grasp the Golden Apples of the West. Quite an undertaking—but how if it were to succeed? Would this not be a worthy adventure?

Since I had no AD&D game stats for the kind of beings the triple moon goddess’ avatars would be, I adapted. In one of her phases, she would appear more or less as a hag, I guessed. So I had a hag in the module, as a means of representing this legendary encounter in game terms. The editor’s cryptic comment in the margin was, “Did hags,” meaning that a recent module had featured this creature.

We are reduced to that. No longer do we find many gamers for whom the rules and game constructs provide a magical key to enter the worlds they have longed for all their lives. I meet far more who know only the games themselves. The result is that they either become bores, or they burn out on gaming quickly. They run through all the neat stuff published, and it’s just not enough. They eat and eat, but are still hungry. They cannot see the legendary
being the monster stats represent, but only more and more stats.

Dragon #216 (April 1995)