It's been a while. I've been gaming plenty, just not posting. Current events have me thinking though, so here you go:
After taking a long hiatus, I got back into DnD in the aughts. At the time, 3rd edition was the current DnD so we tried that and we liked it. We did a long running campaign in 3rd edition, played it for years. Then, 4th edition came along and during the kerfuffle over that I started reading about this OSR thing. I realized that we could run the old basic game or one of these retroclones that were coming out. They presented old style rules and often had little tweaks to make things more fun, more pulpy, more streamlined or easier to run. I ran a campaign starting with Keep on the Borderlands and we never turned back. The games I ran and played in used simple rules with some of these tweaks from retroclones, from other blogs and house rules we came up with ourselves. We have tried some things and they stick but sometimes we'll implement a new bit of rules but they don't end up working very well for us. We have also experimented with other types of games from time to time (we even ran a 5e campaign to try it out) but we always come back to the classic, this amalgamation of old school and "old school". Throughout this time the actual rules at our table and the details of the campaign world (or worlds) evolved and were experimented with. And we always called the game DnD. But what was it really? It became something different from the original rules and it wasn't anyone of the retroclones either. It never had anything to do with whatever WotC was doing at the time.
With this recent gnashing of teeth and rending of garments that has been occurring I have begun to question if we should call what we run at our table DnD. But what should we call it? Turns out the answer has been pretty obvious.
See, it's right there on the cover of Moldvay Basic.
This is a Fantasy Adventure Game. That's what we've been playing, a fantasy adventure game! Its like this whole time we've been saying pass the Kleenex when what we really wanted was a facial tissue.
