In this post A Few Planned Posts for 2023, I talked about some of the posting I was planning for 2023. This is the first of those posts.
As I said, 2024 is the 50th Anniversary of OD&D. Fifty years occurs in January of 2024 and will be celebrated (at least by me) for the whole year. Since no one knows the date the first copy of OD&D was sold, I have been using January 25th (last Friday in January 1974) as the arbitrarily chosen date and that will be a Thursday in 2024. Other people may use another date, which is also arbitrarily chosen.
Also as I said, I will be posting around the first of the month, for the next 12 months in 2023 and along the way I will discuss various things about OD&D and later on I will talk about what I plan to do during 2024.
In my opinion WotC blew it for both the 40th and 45th Anniversaries of OD&D. And IMO they are going to blow it for the 50th Anniversary. Why do I think that, well lets just say that I will be mightily surprised if within the next 8-10 months, they start teasing plans for a celebration for the 50th Anniversary.
Here is what I expect them to do. Likely no mention of the 50th Anniversary of OD&D at all until January 2024 when they give it a little bit of lip service. No mention of OD&D at all. No recognition for Dave Arneson or Gary Gygax, let alone their gaming groups which were the playtest environment for OD&D. No mention of people like Rob Kuntz or David Wesely or any of the other people that should be remembered at such a time.
No what I expect them to do is launch "One" D&D aka 6E and then try to pretend that has something to do with the 50th Anniversary of OD&D. No this is the 50th Anniversary of Table Top D&D, and launching a virtual game with the *fleece the customer model of other products is not the way you celebrate a 50th Anniversary. All this talk about D&D being under monetized, is all you need to hear to know quality and a good game experience is not even on their radar, IMO.
No they have, IMO, no focus at all on honoring their history and the legacy of TTRPGs, specifically OD&D, their focus is trying extract every dime they can from as many people as possible.
So because, again IMO, WotC is not going to do anything reasonable or tasteful to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of OD&D, it is up to the old school fans to do it. I am hoping that a lot of people post at least one post a month talking about this each month of 2023. I also hope with the lead time of talking about this that every blogger will commit to do 10 posts in January of 2024 including one on the 25th of January to make some noise during the anniversary month. It would also be great if during the remainder of 2024 the subject is not allowed to die, but discussion continues, on forums and various social media platforms and on blogs.
Also let's talk about our personal celebrations, our gaming at tables face to face and the good times with our friends that we are going to have in January of 2024. When it comes to virtual games, I have no interest in them, I want to game with real people that I can look in the eyes and here their voices and read how things are going in the game.
*Note: I am not saying it is bad for a corporation to want to make money. I am saying it is IMO unethical to pay for a game and then you don't own the game because it is virtual and they can pull it any time they want and now you don't have what you paid for or they can revise and it automatically updates and now you don't have what you paid for. On top of that if you have to pay between $50 to $100 a week to get full enjoyment out of the game in the virtual space after you already "bought" the game, that is unethical. What they seem to want to do is price some people out of the gaming space and those people don't matter because they don't have enough money to matter.
Fortunately for me, I have OD&D, so it does not matter in a practical sense to me what they do; however, I know younger people that game the new versions and those people are going to get, IMO, scammed and cheated.
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