Quote:
Originally Posted by sir_pudding
It mainly seems to me that Jeff likes a more wargamey beer-n-pretzels approach to games than I do, and I don't think that has anything to do with age.
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I don't think you realize how big of a deal micro-games were. If you were a kid at a particular time, these were an incredibly huge deal. You could buy one with your lunch money, carry them in your back pack, and... most importantly... you didn't need a referee or a dungeon master. There were a lot of kids that were too young to really get the role playing thing down. As they came of age, role playing systems saw their complexity rise exponentially too meet the needs of older gamers and convention crowds. Micro-game kids are sort of a lost generation in that respect-- orphaned by the way things played out.
The people that supported CAR WARS could not understand why kids like me were so crazy for "official" rules. We needed them desperately because we played
competitively without a referee. But this made no sense to the older, convention going gamers that supported and developed the game. It really aggravated them. They were initiated into gaming by people that already knew how to do it. Micro-game kids had to be able to get a game together without the benefit of an expert gamer and with only the rule books to go by. (Actually... thats not quite true-- I actually learned to play from the ADQ&A, Backfire, and AADA tournament columns from Autoduel Quarterly.)
CAR WARS was as big as Dungeons & Dragons when I was in middle school. Maybe bigger. Battletech was the first game to give it a run for its money. Magic the Gathering's deckbuilding aspects crowded CAR WARS out of the "design a thing" game market. The last nail in its coffin was when the multiplayer first person shooter games took off, taking over the "every man for himself in some kind of arena" niche.
Look at the AD&D hard backs and show me the 11 year olds that could run that without having someone around to mentor them. Yeah, they exist... but CAR WARS, Autoduel Quarterly, and scads of cheap "expansion sets"... that was massively more accessible. Even as an adult, I can only understand Basic D&D with the assistance of several fanzines and dozens of OSR bloggers carefully explaining all the things that the Lake Geneva gamers did but that were completely unelucidated in the horribly written rule books of TSR!