Continuation of the D&D brand (from a business perspective)

[Fhaolan]

But on the other hand, I've seen enough sexual harassment, misogyny and enforced gender stereotyping justified either through "That's what the rules say" or "that's how our it was historically" (usually with very little knowledge of history), that I'd say a fair dose of sexism is standard fare in classic games. It's not necessary, but it's common, in part due to the culture of older gamers.

I wouldn't say that it was the culture of older gamers as much as it was the culture of the 70's-80's when most of those games took place. Having lived through that time as an adult, I can attest that the misogyny and enforced gender stereotyping was a common theme outside of games as well.

Of course to me classic gaming is also: the guy relating excitedly how his character was slowly dismembered as he fled through his first and last dungeon; The custom random encounter table where there was an equal chance to meet any monster (roll of 186: the first level party on the road encounters a liche- they all die); DMs eagerly installing everything from Grimtooth's Traps in a dungeon; the DM getting annoyed that the players can't figure out the simple riddle solution to the trap, and "no you can't just disarm it, tell me exactly what you're doing"; parties of ten players, 20 characters, and 60 henchmen and hirelings; extensive lists of magic items, and no character backgrounds; writing a BASIC program to print out hundreds of PCs; and the Bard getting mugged by another players demon henchmen, while the paladin is carefully far down the hallway.

Unluckily, I've seen people do similar stuff to the highlighted with modern games within the last ten years. And these were *not* old-school gamers. Mind you, they were teenagers and possibly testosterone had something to do with it.

And nowadays they just download someone else's program to generate hundreds of PCs. Probably on their 'smart' phone.

Of course back in the day, the idea of standard D&D was a lot more flexible than it is today. We grabbed anything that took our fancy, and stirred it into our games. Classic D&D included stuff from Arduin Grimore and Traveller, if someone wanted to take a Jedi Knight through Greyhawk, well that was what the psionics rules were there for, and so on. This is why I don't get a lot of the purist attitude; it's like someone saying beef connsume is the only REAL soup, and adding vegetables to broth renders it not-soup. I really blame Third Edition for that attitude.

I agree with that, mostly. Though I think it's an attitude that actually started with 1st edition AD&D with some of Gygax's writings. He would occassionally put things in Dragon magazine about how you should only use officially sanctioned AD&D stuff or you weren't playing D&D anymore. Third Edition was really bad for it, I agree.