I found the opposite to be true; the Golden Age is today! As my understanding of the real world has broadened, my ability to immerse myself in a character and a world has deepened. In a fantasy world I can play around with the various philosophies of economics, foreign affairs, religion and other social issues, and have a substantive impact on the fantasy world. That is far more engaging than what I was doing at 12.

Apart from the obvious naivety of youth, what I had then that I don't have now is simply the spare time and mental space for roleplaying. If I had that back, I'd say I now have more imagination and all that experience to draw on that could make my roleplaying even more immersive.

Quote from: The Traveller;710282Winning the lotto won't help. Being less and less willing to swallow bullshit is a feature of advancing years, not a bug.

Most of my stress is professional. Being unemployeed should be less involved.

I have right now a petition to run a d6 game online and it isn't the lack of want-to that keeps me from agreeing to run it.  I am just so tired these days...

Again, I blame the internet.

RPG forums are great for sharing cool ideas, but there is also this unstated pressure than your next campaign MUST be some transcendental experience of gaming awesomesauceness.

Quote from: The Traveller;710282Being less and less willing to swallow bullshit is a feature of advancing years, not a bug.

I find I am more zen about bullshit these days. I don't give a fuck as much, thus I stress less and let the people and the world do their frantic panic around me, but not to me.

Quote from: mcbobbo;710309I am just so tired these days...

Drink green tea. Matcha if you can afford it. Dollar store teabags if you can't. Not kidding.

I blame Werther's Original commercials.

I wouldn't touch anything I played when I was 12 with a barge pole.

Gaming leaped upon me like a tiger when I realized that there was a way to formalize all the day-dreaming I'd been doing all my life and by adding structure and extension, I increased my enjoyment of all those hero stories a thousandfold.

Writing also magnifies those wonderful moments when you can be somewhere else, be someone else. I studied writing in college (yes, I am one of those useless bits of drek that graduated with a BA in English who fortunately learned to code before the invention of degrees in Computer Science), and one of my professors once pontificated to me that writing for oneself (as opposed to writing for an audience of imaginary readers) was akin to masturbating.

When I was young, I had a horror of masturbating in public. Now I do it all the time.

Gaming/writing -- story telling -- are among the oldest and most powerful tools we have for pleasure. And you don't have to be nice to someone else. I will be gaming in the old folks home and jerking off with my pen in my hand until the day I die.

Quote from: Kaiu Keiichi;710283I am now having a better time than I did when I first started gaming, because I am wise and patient enough to know how to spend my time better and to engage with people I know won't be a waste of my time, and have better social skills so as to be a more enjoyable gamer to be around myself. There is less time, sure, but knowing more and having more experience means that I can fight my battles better and get the most bang for my time-buck. Also, in terms of output, the RPG hobby is sizzling with great stuff. I'm having a great time with awesome things to come.

Very well said.

Heck, the tools are just so much better.  I don't have to GM from scribbled notes, using laboriously typed houserules.  I have access to professional publishing tools that we would have passed out fantasizing about in the 70s.  In a near-future campaign where our party was about to do relief work in an earthquake-zone a couple years back, we didn't have to come up with equipment on the fly, a couple of us logged onto appropriate vendors on the Internet and started shopping.

But as far as sense-of-wonder goes ... The Traveller is right: we just need to let go.  Beyond that, though, there's a significant element of RPGs that never goes away: agency.

Sure, a lot of settings depict pain and suffering, the way it happens in the real world.  But my longstanding belief is that the true attraction of RPGs is that we can do something about it.  The bad guys aren't faceless, omnipotent corporations we can't possibly touch -- we can whip out our swords or lasers and do them in.  

And isn't that something that -- if anything -- is more fun as we age, and the lifetime of putting up with bullshit just keeps on stacking higher?

For me, the golden age of most things I'm into is right now.

Being an historian tends to teach you, more than anything else, that in spite of history's awesomeness, the best time to be alive and kicking is the present.

RPGPundit

Except for the year 999. Hoo boy, was that the best damn year ever.

The greatest thing about being 15 years old (when I started to game) was having no sense of self-criticism and no sense of shame about gaming stuff I ran for my friends. In retrospect, a lot of it was cheesy as hell, and a lot more blatantly derivative from various sources, and we misinterpreted the rules horribly, but back then, it was FUN!

I still find "blatantly derivative" works very well for RPGs. There's a world of difference between reading about/seeing a situation in media and roleplaying it out and what would otherwise be cheesy cliches tends to be great hooks for player imaginations. Similarly fond of stereotypes for much the same reason.

I enjoyed the gaming of my youth but love it as much or even more now. The only thing I envy from the 'golden age' of youth was the amount of time Inhad to game! Oh to have weekends, nay weeks of damn near non stop gaming...

Quote from: TristramEvans;711080I still find "blatantly derivative" works very well for RPGs. There's a world of difference between reading about/seeing a situation in media and roleplaying it out and what would otherwise be cheesy cliches tends to be great hooks for player imaginations. Similarly fond of stereotypes for much the same reason.

I agree - IMO with RPGs derivative is good, it creates a shared imaginative space. Exotic, original stuff can be much harder for players to get into. And taking NPCs, plots etc from fiction is fine. Steal shamelessly!

Quote from: S'mon;711090I agree - IMO with RPGs derivative is good, it creates a shared imaginative space. Exotic, original stuff can be much harder for players to get into. And taking NPCs, plots etc from fiction is fine. Steal shamelessly!

By 'Blatantly Derivative' I meant BLATANTLY derivative - in a way which was cheesy even in a game. Same goes for stereotypes. It's all a matter of dosage of cheese. Of course a lot of what I game today is derivative (my Outer Veil setting book for Traveller, for example, is inspired by Alien(s) and System Shock), but a little bit less blatantly so.