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| Day & Night by M.C. Escher |
For the past four plus years now, I have actively played Fifth Edition D&D with a home based group of twenty somethings and my teenage children. That has been my direction. Sadly, it has not been "myself".
Aligning the direction you're traveling with the truth of your inner self, is something I've rarely managed to attain.
If you were to ask me I would say that I am still more comfortable and more at home with First Edition AD&D than any other ruleset. However, I have come to believe even this isn't exactly true for me. There is the age we remember and the age that really was.
If you asked me to dig a bit deeper and be more true, more real with myself ... In the case of D&D, as mentioned in my last post, what I thought I was playing and what we actually played was not in perfect agreement. This has become clearer the more I have listened to old 1e players talk about AD&D and their play. As we revisit the rules as they were written we begin to see what we didn't see, realize or play by back in the day. There are exceptions, of course--guys who played with 1e rules and were very strict in enforcing them. And then there was my group.
And not just my group, but a whole network of guys who only agreed upon the loosest interpretation of what might be called 1e rules. Instead we were bound by an idea of imaginary worlds flexibly defined as D&D. And the closer I get to being real with myself, I probably know 5e rules better than I do 1e rules. But yet I still feel more comfortable, more at home in 1e; when I am designing 1e adventures, creating 1e characters, and playing (what I consider) 1e.
