When you’re a blogger, and you dare to speak about Dungeons & Dragons that isn’t the shinier side of 5th edition, one thing is guaranteed: critics will come crawling out of the dungeon like goblins who heard a dinner bell.

Now, normally, I don’t pay them much attention. I live by the sacred mantra: “I don’t care about your opinion about my opinion.” It’s served me well over the years. Keeps the blood pressure low, keeps the writing flowing. But every now and then, against all odds, someone lobs a comment that isn’t just noise. Something sharp. Something worthy of debate.

And I’ll admit it: I like those.

Because buried beneath the usual internet bravado and keyboard-warrior energy, there are occasionally questions or comments that actually challenge you. The kind that forces you to stop, think, and, best of all, write another article. (Content creators, you know exactly what I’m talking about.)

So today, we’re diving into a piece of “feedback” I received about my Old School D&D articles. Now, it’s no secret I’m a fan of the Old School Revival, OSR for those of us who enjoy acronyms almost as much as we enjoy arguing about THAC0. I’ve written about it plenty, and I’m not exactly subtle about my bias.

But this particular comment? Short. Sharp. No fluff. The kind of statement that kicks the door in instead of knocking:

“The only reason anyone likes Old School Dungeons & Dragons is nostalgia. If it wasn’t for that, no one would be playing it.”

Oof. Straight to the hit points.

Now, it is a bit reductive. But is it entirely wrong? That’s a much more interesting question. There are layers here to unpack, because the accusation is obvious, but the hidden context is that old school D&D is not a good game. That we are playing an inferior mechanic on purpose.

And that’s exactly what we’re going to dig into in this In Theory article.

Real History vs. Imagined History

Let’s start with something that tends to short-circuit the whole “it’s just nostalgia” argument before it even gets out of initiative order.

The Old School Revival, the OSR, and the adoption of old-school style of play by a modern audience have been around as long as old-school D&D originally was itself.

Yeah. Let that one sink in for a second. Time flies when you’re rolling dice and arguing about encumbrance, but this isn’t just fuzzy memory talking; it’s math. Cold, unfeeling, rules-as-written math.

Dungeons & Dragons was released in 1974. If we’re being generous, the “old school D&D era” wraps up around 2000 with the release of 3rd edition. That’s 26 years of old school D&D.

It’s been 26 years since then. We are, officially, living in a world where “modern D&D” is no longer new, it’s as old as old school D&D was when it became old school D&D. At this stage, modern D&D probably has back problems, and is thinking about getting into woodworking.

The point is that the original D&D was as old in 2000 as 3rd edition; the first modern edition of D&D is today.

Now, let’s make this personal.

I’m 50. Born in 1975. My first brush with D&D was around age 11, somewhere in 1986, right at the tail end of 1st edition. And when I say “played,” I use that term very loosely. We had the books. We had the dice. We had character sheets.

What we did not have was any earthly idea what we were doing.

It was less “playing Dungeons & Dragons” and more “ritualistically flipping through mysterious tomes while occasionally rolling dice and arguing.” I don’t remember any of it in a meaningful way, no campaigns, no stories, just vibes and confusion. We sort of pretended to play D&D.

My real introduction to D&D, the kind where you actually read the rules and attempted to follow them, came much later, in the late ’90s, when I was around 16. Which, as it turns out, is hilariously bad timing if you’re trying to be nostalgic about “old school.”

Because by then, the old school era was basically over.

TSR was circling the drain, Wizards of the Coast was gearing up to take over, and 3rd edition was about to kick the door down and rearrange the furniture. The point is that even at 50 years old, I’m not actually old enough to have been part of the “old school D&D era”.

So here’s the uncomfortable truth for the nostalgia argument that people still make today about old school D&D.

I like most people today have played more old school D&D in the last five years than I (we) did in the previous thirty combined.

For me, this isn’t some warm, fuzzy return to childhood. It’s not nostalgia, it’s discovery. Old school D&D wasn’t a formative memory; it’s something I found later, with more context coming from modern era D&D, more experience, and insight.

I don’t love old school D&D because of my memories playing it, I don’t actually really have any, I discovered old school D&D in the modern era, with modern D&D as my primary experience being the reference point of comparison. This type of experience is the overwhelmingly most common one in the OSR.

If I were going to be nostalgic about anything, it would be 3rd edition, the system I actually played from 2000 to about 2014 (yes, I skipped 4th edition, and no, I will not be taking questions at this time).

So that’s point one: I don’t really have anything to be nostalgic about here. Most people don’t.

And when you look at who’s actually playing old school D&D today, it’s not just a bunch of ancient grognards sitting around reminiscing about the good old days while polishing their dice collections and muttering about THAC0.

It’s young players. A lot of them. In fact, the most prolific members of the OSR creative community, the people making the biggest moves are all people who weren’t even alive when old school D&D was in print. Shadowdark, Old School Essentials, Five Torches Deep, Naive, Index RPG, Basic Fantasy, and so many more, all of these games were created and published by people born well after the 80’s and 90’s.

Sure, the OSR was kick-started by the old guard unhappy with what Wizards of the Coast was doing with D&D in the 2000’s, the wise, the weathered, the “back in my day we had one saving throw, and we liked it” crowd, but they didn’t sustain it. They just lit the torch. They exposed the modern audience to old-school principles through modern releases of old-school games.

The people carrying it forward are the modern players who discovered old school D&D after it was already “obsolete” with modern D&D as their main reference point.

Which makes the nostalgia argument a little… awkward. Because it’s hard to be nostalgic for something that existed before you did.

And yet, here we are.

The Driving Force Behind The Old School Movement

There’s something interesting hiding underneath the nostalgia argument, and it’s worth dragging it out into the light. Because when people say, “Old school D&D is only popular because of nostalgia,” what they’re often really implying is that the game itself doesn’t hold up. That it’s clunky, outdated, and ultimately inferior, and that the only reason anyone would play it is their emotional attachment to it.

In other words, people aren’t choosing old school D&D because it’s good as a game. They’re choosing it in spite of it being bad.

It’s a tidy argument. It almost sounds reasonable on the surface. It’s also completely detached from how people actually engage with games. People seeking entertainment are not going to make sacrifices for a “stance” in an argument. This is not a cult, ready to sacrifice their free time in the name of ritual.

Here’s the thing: people play what they enjoy. This isn’t a political position, and it’s certainly not some kind of ideological sacrifice. No one is sitting down at the table thinking, “I could be having more fun, but I’ve decided to take a stand for outdated mechanics.” This is entertainment. If the experience isn’t delivering, people move on. They always do. It’s that simple. Occam’s Razor.

Which is why I think the nostalgia argument misses the mark so badly; it starts from the assumption that players are irrational, that they would spend their free time playing a game that is obviously terrible as a matter of virtue and stance in some abstract argument.

If we’re going to talk about hidden motivations, we should probably acknowledge one that actually has teeth: the sunk cost fallacy. Modern D&D, especially 5th edition, is not just a game, it’s an ecosystem. Books, supplements, digital tools, miniatures, subscriptions… it adds up. Quickly. Once you’ve invested that much time and money, there’s a natural tendency to want the system to work. Not just to function, but to deliver the exact experience you imagined and invested in when you bought into it. The sunk cost fallacy is a major factor in how and why certain ecosystems continue to thrive despite competitive products being objectively better. Warhammer 40k, iPhones, and John Deer Tractors, just to name a few.

So people adapt. They tweak. They adjust. They patch. They literally accept failure in the name of protecting their investment. They rebuild sections of the game to get closer to what they’re actually trying to achieve rather than exploring other systems. This is what is suggested we are doing in the name of nostalgia with old school games, but the reality is that this is actually happening in the modern D&D community with modern games.

And that’s where the cracks start to show.

When most modern players say they’re playing D&D, what they’re often trying to create is a very specific kind of experience, cinematic, character-driven, collaborative storytelling. The kind of thing that feels fluid, immersive, and narratively satisfying. The kind of thing that looks effortless when you watch it online, but the modern 5th edition game actively does not support. In fact, it is designed to derail that effort quite purposely. The reason is simple: if you are able to play the game with just the books, you don’t need all the other stuff they are trying to sell you.

Modern D&D relies on the idea that it cannot just be played with the books, that you need “other stuff” like subscriptions and updates in order to continue to play. So it’s designed to try to enforce that mentality.

Mechanics interrupt pacing. Combat drags. Resolution systems pull focus away from the fiction at exactly the wrong moment. Instead of supporting the experience, the rules frequently feel like something you have to manage, negotiate with, or quietly sidestep in order to keep things moving. But of course, there is a solution you can buy to fix it. How about DnD Beyond? How about Dungeon Tiles or that fancy initiative tracker? etc.. etc.

Not to mention the 3rd party opportunities to make money, like YouTube. How many influencers have turned fixing D&D into a profession?

You can see this reflected everywhere. Look up advice for modern D&D and you’ll find an endless stream of solutions, not for how to play the game, but for how to fix it. How to streamline combat. How to make storytelling smoother. How to handle edge cases. How to “build” characters. How to avoid certain mechanics altogether. Entire libraries of guidance are built around making the system behave the way people want it to behave, rather than simply using it as designed and getting that result.

In fact, if you play 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons as designed, meaning you have no other reference than the books and you simply play the game that is there, I think most people would have wildly different experiences at the table. It would look nothing like what you see on Critical Role, nothing like what people are trying to actually achieve at the table or assume the game is about.

What’s particularly ironic is that many of these “fixes” aren’t new ideas at all. They’re rediscoveries. Approaches and assumptions that were already baked into old school D&D play, now being reintroduced as house rules and best practices in a system that didn’t prioritize them in the first place.

I understand this cycle because I’ve been through it myself. For years, across multiple modern editions, I tried to make modern D&D deliver the experience I wanted. I adjusted rules, ignored others, added new systems, borrowed ideas, and generally treated the game like a project that needed ongoing maintenance. And for a long time, I assumed that was just part of the deal. It was “how” you played D&D. You had the rules, but the game was this other thing you had to design and enforce yourself.

But eventually, the pattern becomes hard to ignore. If you’re constantly working around a system to make it function the way you want, it raises a fairly obvious question: is the system actually designed for that experience in the first place?

That question is what pushed me, and many others, toward the OSR. Playing the game as written, is exactly what you see on Critical Role. A narrative, collaborative storytelling experience that unfolds in a conversation. All you need is the rulebook, character sheets, dice, and friends.

That’s not nostalgia. Not reverence for the past. Not a belief that old school rules are inherently superior in some abstract sense. Just a very practical realization that the experience we were trying to create aligned more naturally with a different game. The fact that it happens to be old school D&D is just a coincidence.

That’s the part of the story that tends to get overlooked. The growth of old school D&D isn’t being driven by people clinging to what they remember. It’s being driven by people searching for something that works as designed, that does not require “fixing” or digital solutions to play like DnD Beyond.

They start with modern D&D, run into friction, try to solve it, and eventually, out of frustration, begin looking elsewhere. It’s a tough process as it requires the admission that the hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars you have spent on books didn’t actually deliver what you wanted. It’s a rather brutal realization, it requires a harsh acceptance, and people often are unwilling to make the transition, trying to protect their investment. That sunk cost fallacy is real in modern D&D communities. But when they do make the realization and try out other ways, they find that old school play doesn’t require nearly as much effort to produce the kind of experience they were aiming for all along. It turns out for 20 bucks, and a single book is all that is needed to get that Critical Role experience with very little additional effort.

That’s not nostalgia. That’s problem-solving.

And it’s a much better explanation for why the OSR continues to grow exponentially year after year.

The Future of D&D is not Digital, It’s Back to Basics

There is one more thing, a subtle thing in the background that is also driving a wedge between modern and old school D&D. It’s already happening, and I think Wizards of the Coast has completely missed it.

The future of tabletop gaming isn’t more digital. It’s less.

You don’t need to be a psychologist to see the direction things are moving. We live in a world where nearly every aspect of life is mediated through a screen. Work, a computer. Banking, an app. Social life, Notifications. Even the simplest, most practical tasks now come with a digital leash attached. Want to fix your car? Better hope you’ve got the right software. Want to maintain a tractor? Congratulations, you now need a login and a firmware update.

There was a time when technology made things more convenient. Now it often makes them more dependent. And people are starting to feel it.

Because it’s not just work anymore, there’s no escape hatch. Even our personal lives have been absorbed into the same ecosystem. Dating, socializing, entertainment, shopping, it all routes through the same glowing rectangles we’ve already spent the entire day staring at. At a certain point, convenience stops feeling like freedom and starts feeling like an obligation.

And when that shift happens, people begin to push back.

Not in grand, revolutionary ways, but in small, deliberate choices. They start looking for spaces where they can disconnect, even temporarily. Places where interaction is direct, where attention isn’t fractured, and where the experience isn’t mediated by a device.

That’s where tabletop gaming comes in. The rising popularity of board games, miniature wargaming, and role-playing games isn’t an accident. It’s a response. A conscious move toward something more tactile, more social, more immediate. “Unplug and have fun” isn’t just a marketing slogan; it’s becoming a genuine value proposition. And it’s only going to grow stronger as digital fatigue continues to set in.

Which is why the push toward fully digital D&D feels like such a fundamental misread of the room. What people want from D&D isn’t a better app. They want very specifically a non-digital experience, an escape from the screen.

They want something that feels like Critical Role, not in production quality, but in spirit. A table. Friends. Conversation. Laughter. The unpredictable, human moments that don’t translate well through a screen and don’t need to.

What they don’t want is to recreate that experience through a layered stack of software, subscriptions, and digital tools.

And yet, that’s exactly the direction things have been heading with modern D&D. It’s the intent of modern D&D to become a digital game.

Projects like Sigil Virtual Tabletop weren’t just ambitious; they were built on the assumption that the future of D&D needed to look more like a video game. More visual, more integrated, more digital.

But that assumption ignores a very simple reality: the more digital you make tabletop gaming, the more you risk stripping away the very thing that makes it appealing in the first place.

The lukewarm reception and practical stagnation of projects like Sigil isn’t just a development hiccup. It’s a warning sign, clearly ignored by Wizards of the Coast. A cause and effect. And it won’t be the last.

While D&D has been moving toward screens, a growing number of players have been moving away from them. That’s where the OSR fits into this picture.

At its core, the old school movement isn’t just about rules, it’s about returning to a style of play that is fundamentally built for the table. Face-to-face interaction. Minimal barriers. Systems that get out of the way rather than inserting themselves into every moment of play. A way to get together, pull out some dice, and have fun with your friends offline.

Could you run old school D&D online? Of course.

But it doesn’t need to be online. It doesn’t rely on tools, platforms, or digital infrastructure to function. It was designed, intentionally or otherwise, for a group of people sitting around a table, talking, imagining, and playing together.

And that matters more than I think Wizards of the Coast realizes.

Contrast that with modern 5th edition, where digital tools have become so embedded in the experience that it’s fair to ask: how many people could actually run character creation from scratch, by the book, without something like D&D Beyond?

It’s not impossible, but it’s telling that the question even needs to be asked.

When a game begins to assume the presence of digital assistance, it’s no longer just a tabletop game. It’s a hybrid system, one that quietly depends on the very infrastructure many players are starting to push back against.

And that’s the tension.

If the broader cultural trend is moving toward less screen time, not more, toward intentional disconnection rather than deeper integration, then doubling down on digital isn’t forward-thinking. It’s misalignment.

Old school D&D, whether by design or by accident, sidesteps that problem entirely. It offers something increasingly rare: a complete experience that exists fully offline, requires very little overhead, and delivers exactly what many players are starting to look for.

Not nostalgia. Not spectacle. Just a table, some dice, and a group of people actually present in the same room.

And in the years ahead, that might turn out to be the most valuable feature of the OSR of all.

Conclusion

I could make a bold prediction about where D&D is heading, but if there’s one thing history has shown, it’s that modern D&D is remarkably adaptable. Whether it’s an adaptation the company wants to make is another question entirely. Profitability has a gravitational pull, and right now, that pull is clearly toward digital ecosystems, subscriptions, and integrated platforms. That’s where the money is. Still, it would be unwise to assume they won’t pivot if the ground shifts beneath them; they’ve done it before.

That said, I think we can safely put one argument to rest: old school D&D is no longer about nostalgia. If it ever was, that phase has long since passed. What started as a retrospective curiosity has evolved into something much more independent, something that stands on its own merits rather than its memories.

And that matters, because it changes the entire conversation.

I don’t believe official D&D is on the brink of collapse, nor do I think it’s heading toward some dramatic downfall. But I do think its cultural relevance will continue to erode, slowly, almost imperceptibly, unless Wizards of the Coast takes a hard look at what the game actually is, and more importantly, what people want it to be over the next fifty years.

Because at its core, the appeal of D&D isn’t complicated.

People want to sit around a table. They want to roll dice. They want to laugh, argue, improvise, and create something together in real time.

And they want to do it without needing a login, a subscription, or a second monitor.

That experience needs to be approachable, immediate, and, crucially, free from digital dependence.

Whether that aligns with the current direction of official D&D is… questionable.

If the trajectory continues toward deeper digital integration, then what we’re likely to see isn’t a sudden break, but a gradual drift. Players won’t leave in protest. They’ll simply start exploring alternatives, games that deliver the experience they’re actually looking for with less friction and fewer layers between them and the table. I think when we talk about the OSR, that’s exactly what is happening already.

That’s exactly where the OSR and old school D&D are waiting.

Not as relics of the past, but as ready-made solutions. Systems that already assume face-to-face play. Games that don’t need to be propped up by tools because they were never designed to depend on them in the first place.

That transition, quiet, steady, and already underway, has nothing to do with nostalgia.

It has everything to do with clarity.

Because strip everything else away, and D&D is still what it has always been: a tabletop game. Not a platform. Not a service. Not a digital product suite.

A table. Real people. Real dice.

The kind of experience people see in things like Critical Role or Stranger Things and think, “Yeah… I want that.”

Not the production value. Not the polish.

Just the real part.

And increasingly, that’s exactly what old school D&D is giving them.