Updates & Stuff: Me, Old School, & D&D 5e

Hey everyone, been quiet for a day or two. I've had some health concerns that I'm ironing out; my network got hijacked so I had to reinstall a bunch of stuff; but I did update Page IV with a Hackmaster blurb of sorts. I'm not entirely pleased with it so I'll probably change it. But I'm still trying to organize and complete all the pages. Not sure how they fit in exactly, so expect more than few changes there in the future. The central core of the blog will always, of course, be the blog though. And you can count on that.

Some entries I'm working on that should be done today are on, 1) the definition of Old School and 2) more 5e stuff. As to item #1, well I've done lots of reading on old school meta stuff and am still confused on what exactly constitutes old school. In fact as I finish my blurbs/reviews on HM, C&C and DCC RPG, I'm even more confused than ever. For it seems that these games are really more innovative than retro and my experimental title of variant clone is little troubling to me. Perhaps it's being persnickety about semantics, but old school is different in so many people's eyes. So I'll be finishing a post that looks at various people's definitions of "old school" and considering the idea of style of play in relation to game design theory as a whole. As to point 2, well I'm still intrigued about 5e. Not so much because it may convert me or anything, but because it may be a grand departure of the direction that WoTC took D&D since 2000. But the real question that arises. If I can get comfortable with a definition of old school then the natural question is: do certain games not allow certain styles of play? In other words can any game be played old school style?

Oh, and Mike Mearls still hasn't responded to my email letter. I have a feeling he's not going to because doing so would leak a 5e release before GenCon. Not only is he probably under contract to not do that, he likely doesn't know much himself. Either that or he read my follow up post and got ticked off. *shrug* So I suppose we'll have to wait and see what comes out at Gen Con. I'll do my best to keep you updated in that regard. But as always there will probably be those better than I at timely new coverage. What you can expect is my high quality (snicker) editorials on any news I find of relevance.

Until this pm when I get those posted: Game On!!