I am not too proud to admit I’ve watched every episode of Netflix’s That 90’s Show. Unlike the first attempt at a spinoff, That 90’s Show is nakedly and obviously a sequel to That 70’s Show while also fishing in the shallow pool of 90s nostalgia, including groaningly obvious musical numbers and cameos specifically meant to induce memories of going to high school in the 90s. I’m technically a bit too young for the target market, as well as someone who thought themselves too aware of tropes and psychological ploys to get sucked into this kind of TV. And yet, get sucked in I did. It’s a blatant comfort-watch, calling back to the original series, the magical time before social networking, and also the bygone era when multi-camera sitcoms were still the bulk of network TV programming (remember network TV?).

Nostalgia plays aren’t limited to TV, and of course in the TTRPG world we see them all over. There’s arguably two angles to nostalgia within TTRPGs: The RPG as nostalgia tendril, where the game is simply the marketing device used to exploit the audience’s existing love for Star Wars, or Marvel, or My Little Pony. These games can be good or bad, but they’re built around their existing property and serve that property (and its licensors) first. There’s also nostalgia for the TTRPG itself. While a cynic may call the OSR solely a nostalgia play, there’s much more obvious examples at play here; Goodman Games is clearing half a million dollars in crowdfunding for what is effectively a reprint of a module from 1979. They’re making a t-shirt as part of this campaign, so it’s definitely at least a little bit for the money. That said, I don’t think the Caverns of Thracia reprint is entirely indefensible. Goodman is doing a service by taking a great old module and keeping it available, including updating it for new rulesets; it’s still arguable whether that’s worth half a million dollars and t-shirt sales. And that’s the primary issue with nostalgia: Where do we draw the line between archiving and reviewing the past, and wallowing in it?

My concerns with nostalgia primarily crop up first through other media, and the great science fiction dichotomy of Star Wars and Star Trek illustrates this well. Star Trek is not immune from flights of nostalgic fancy (case in point: Picard), but ultimately I think the stewards of the setting are doing a pretty good job of making sure that the canon is pushed forward and stays relevant. While Picard and Strange New Worlds hew to existing stories, Lower Decks, Prodigy, and Discovery are trying to tell different stories within the universe, and we’ve seen enough momentum that there’s a noticeable generational difference between the original series, the runs of Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager, and then the new batch of Discovery, Prodigy, and Lower Decks.

Star Wars does also have three distinct generations, but that journey’s been rocky. The prequels came out when I was the target age for them, and I’ll admit Phantom Menace dazzled me on first viewing (I was 11, cut me some slack). When the sequels came out, though, things were rough. Star Wars basically became irredeemable for me when the words “the once deceased Emperor Palpatine” scrolled across the screen in The Rise of Skywalker. While the setting is currently in prestige TV purgatory, I can’t say I’m all that impressed in that arena either. Even The Mandalorian, arguably one of the high points in the canon’s corpus, is obviously trading on the dress and mystique of Boba Fett (and it is ironic that the Book of Boba Fett was just worse). Star Wars, to me, is a cautionary tale of nostalgia, where any vitality in the universe has been sucked up to sell to vocal (toxically so) existing fans.

What’s the equivalent in the TTRPG world? Licensed RPGs are their own thing, and while many of them sell based on nostalgia an equal number sell based on simple fandom; given how little licensed RPGs are allowed to muddy the waters of the properties they’re based on I’d be hard-pressed to argue that a nostalgia play licensed game looks any different than a simple marketing play one. On the other hand, RPGs themselves induce a lot of nostalgia, and it doesn’t even have to take that long. The glow-up of D&D Fourth Edition was caused by Fifth Edition, in large part because Fifth Edition just didn’t continue the trajectory that Fourth Edition was set to take. Regardless of which one you think is better, one must not forget that Fourth Edition was launched in bad shape, had a messy supplement rollout, and basically had to be relaunched with Essentials before it got to the form where people started looking back to it and sighing wistfully. D&D Fourth Edition is a perfect example of gamer nostalgia because how it’s viewed now is absolutely not how it was viewed then (and it’s only been 14 years).

D&D is a great place to find examples of rose-colored glasses, but there is something to be said about yearning for days gone by versus having a real preference for play styles that are now out of fashion. Admittedly D&D Fourth Edition had some of both; its laser focus on grid-based combat hasn’t yet found a good successor, but at the same time it sold poorly because it was executed poorly. In other areas, though, the play’s the thing. I don’t necessarily consider the OSR a nostalgia play, at least among its designers. There is a real difference in play style between OSR play and more traditional play, and simple core concepts like giving the GM leeway to be a core arbiter above and beyond the rules really do push against the norms of other play styles. That said, the OSR doesn’t necessarily hold up games like B/X D&D as some inviolable standard; while games like Old School Essentials which do the lightest of rework are popular, so are much more radical games like Into the Odd, Dungeon Crawl Classics, and The Black Hack.

So where does that leave us with the reprint of The Caverns of Thracia, or much of the marketing of D&D in general? There is certainly plenty of direct marketing to the inner child of older gamers, and as we’re approaching the GenCon that coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of Dungeons and Dragons, we’re going to see a whole lot more. Overall, though, I’m more optimistic about the trajectory of TTRPGs than I am about, say, Star Wars. There is an old saw about Star Wars being ‘kid’s movies’, and while I’m not interested in getting into that particular argument, I will say that new, young audiences, those who have never seen any of the old movies or read any of the old books, are the key audience for any media that wants to grow. Star Wars made fundamental mistakes by continuing to drive connections back to the original trilogy, and as a result the most active fans I know are my age or older. That’s a problem. On the other hand, my experiences at cons and bookstore events are more likely to make me feel I’ve aged out of D&D. A few of my peers and a few old grogs, sure, but mostly I see kids, college students, and tons of people who are discovering the game for the first time. I lament that D&D is the only pathway into roleplaying, and that its few competitors in that respect look a lot like it. That said, as an entrée into the hobby it’s doing a good job.

From that perspective, the nostalgia plays we see in the market are ones we need to look at critically. As I said at the beginning, I’m hardly immune to the warm fuzzies of ‘remember when’ and I don’t think indulging is a bad thing, especially if you’ve been in the hobby for twenty, thirty, or forty years. That said, we need to be honest with ourselves about indulging in nostalgia. ‘I played this game in my friend’s basement when I was 13’ unlocks a whole great set of memories, but it doesn’t make the game better. There are absolutely valuable ideas in older games and even ideas that newer games have abandoned, but we have to thread that needle. I think that’s one reason that a lot of OSR designers are younger than the game mechanics they’re building with. The other risk with nostalgia is that our memories of how things used to be can be exploited by people who want to pull the hobby back to where it used to be in terms of openness and inclusion, and our nostalgia must offer no quarter for that kind of retrograde thinking.

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In a departure from his typical cocktail recipes and techniques, Greg from How to Drink recently posted a video about his experiences discovering the video game Fallout back in 1997. In that video he said something particularly insightful about not only first experiences with new media, but the context in which those new experiences happen. In the context of Fallout, Greg posited that the sort of open, choice-driven video game RPG that Fallout was hadn’t really existed on the market in 1997. Whether that’s exactly true or not, Greg’s point was that experiencing something that you didn’t even know could exist is a unique experience and, in the heavily promoted and marketed video game world, is an experience that only happens in a small sliver of time. I think, as far as tabletop games are concerned, that the hobby being relatively niche and somewhat hard to explain to a bystander opens up this sort of unique experience to everyone. You really don’t know what a roleplaying game is until you experience one, and once you do, it can have a profound effect. To Greg’s point, though, there is certainly something different about playing D&D in the 1970s compared to now. And as such, Greg’s point still stands: As much as it can sound fogey-ish, there really was something different about gaming when nobody around you knew what it was, when your only resources were the booklets at hobby stores and maybe amateur press materials. And hell, gaming before the internet was different. And gaming before social media was different. And…and…

Respect your nostalgia. I gamed twice a week in high school and I ran whatever game I wanted because nobody else wanted to be a GM (with one exception, but that’s a story for another time). We had mid-session breaks where we got pizza or went to Burger King. I never got heartburn from any of that food, and I could drink three Cokes a session and not worry about my teeth, my caloric intake, or caffeine jitters. Does that mean that the games were better then? Well, no, but I also kept playing the same games and saw my relationship with them change. I’m so glad I’ve had a chance to grow and change by continuing to game throughout the last twenty years. But, just like That 90’s Show, I’m not afraid to admit that if someone sent an invitation to game in Jesse’s basement one more time, I’d jump at the opportunity. I’d still want to bring some newer games…and maybe a roll of Tums.

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