Although born in the early 1970s, I grew up into the 1980s as a middle- and secondary-school teenager. My tastes in music, ranging as they do from the 1960s through until today, are unashamedly rooted in 1980s rock and pop. It’s the same with my gaming tastes, growing up as I did as a young adopter of RPGs in that era.

By the early 1990s the RPG scene was abandoning the so-called “primitive” era of early Dungeons & Dragons – you know, dungeon crawls and hex crawls, modules set in sandboxes – and was embracing “storytelling” and the narrative “plot-driven” play styles that came to dominate the market. I tried to go along with it but ultimately failed.

As the hobby moved on after 1989 – when I went to University and lost my original gaming group – I found myself adrift in a hobby now dominated by games lavishly built to emulate specific worlds and imagining increasingly cinematic concepts. Vampire is an early example: a game that gives players supernaturally endowed protagonists in a secretive political war. Sadly, these games didn’t provide much useful guidance on how to run them.

Today, I find myself repeatedly drawn back to a tension between two facets of the 1980s RPG scene that were foundational to my experience but not entirely comfortable bed-fellows. The first is the classical D&D fantasy which I learned to enjoy via AD&D and the Red Box BECMI set; the second is the desire for “simulationist” systems championed by games like Rolemaster. In the 80’s these elements went together without a problem.

As I’ve said before, I like the idea of a D&D-type old-school fantasy game but I feel heartily disappointed by the typically abstracted system elements from those original games. I am attracted to the long game of characters building the reputation, wealth, and power to become rulers of a realm while noting the lack of rules that simulate this rise satisfactorily.

I’ve noticed a separation between the classical fantasy worlds and the systems that might provide a more satisfying experience, finding myself adrift. You can find plenty of old-school fantasy games with advice on running a great dungeon- or hex-based game but almost all of them default to versions or hacks of classical D&D.

At the other extreme, those interested in telling a great story are suspicious of rules. The perception that rules distract from the story has come to dominate the RPG scene so much that it is believed to be axiomatic. That wouldn’t matter if I wasn’t instead a believer in emergent story and the value of high-levels of player agency.

So you end up in a kind of no-man’s land between the RPG camps. On one side are those who are comfortable playing a 40-50 year old system that’s good enough for the kinds of sandbox play they enjoy. On the other side are those who want to tell stories and drive the game through plot-laden scenes where roleplaying (making choices in-role) has been side-lined by dramatic expectation.

The loneliness is, at least on occasion, overwhelming. Running games for your player’s tastes is important so you side-line your own preferences. You learn to not voice your desire to play certain systems because, frankly, you’ll get told your tastes are inappropriate. Even worse, being a child of the 1980s, you’ll be made feel that you are too old and out of touch to play RPGs any more.

But I am a child of the 1980s. It’s not my fault when I was born. I grew up in a world that was seriously messed up at a time when children were being literally scared into compliance. Our games were an escape from existential doom: nuclear Armageddon, rampant STIs, Cold War. Today, escapism is equated to cowardice and compliance with a new raft of horrors. But escapism is nonetheless what I seek at the gaming table.

I suppose I will just have to either lay down my dice or lean into the fact that I am a cultural dinosaur. It seems that returning to my roots, to that blend of old-school adventuring mixed with coherent simulationist systems, is something that I need to quietly get on with. If I can find like-minded old fuddy-duddies to enjoy them with, so much the better. At the very least, I can thankfully lock myself away alone and play solo.

Game on!