All Next Week: School's Out for Summer

What with the edition kerfluffles and the coming End Times, I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to turn the Society's attentions on games that do not fall comfortably inside the OSR's tent. Watch in horror as Mike turns in his old school membership card with posts on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday of next week! The Old School's out for summer. Maybe even forever...

Hip-deep in the Mainstream

Although it's easy to disparage such MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft or Everquest, one can't deny that they have introduced the formerly enigmatic terms and concepts of roleplaying into mainstream culture. Even at the height of the D&D Boom of the 1980s, to see the following in a mass market syndicated comic strip would have been unimaginable. Behold Friday's The Wizard of Id:

The only thing about the above which saddens me is that, while there is a larger percentage of the population than ever who now gets that joke, only a fraction of it understands where those terms originated. And of that percentage, many of them would never consider playing a pen-and-paper roleplaying game and would be insulted if it was suggested that they share the same heritage of those so-called "nerds" who were indulging in this form of recreation more than three decades ago.

It's hard to be a trend-setter.