As a 20-something myself, I find myself in somewhat of an awkward place in this conversation.
Of course, my interest in role-playing started on the internet; my brother and I are the only role-players in our family, and then only because I developed an interest and dragged him kicking and screaming into it (Shadowrun 3rd Edition, in case anyone's curious).
I do find it interesting to note how my role-playing peers have changed from the people that I adopted the habit from (which would've probably been in the mid 2000's, but I don't have a solid time-frame). Only three of my peers have ever created any content for a game, to my knowledge, and two of those don't focus on traditional tabletop roleplaying.
There has definitely been a change in the industry. Back when I started playing, only D&D players even talked about things like "balance"; we played for fun and power level was less important than eking out a story. This hasn't been my experience with my current group; only I and one of my players who alternates GM roles with me have really ever been interested in ars gratia ars roleplaying, and he's only into it because I've rambled at him about it for hours.
The problem is that I feel like when I play a modern game, I've got as much worrying about numbers as I do about storytelling. Even in 5th Edition of D&D, which largely got back to basics and prevented some of the more egregious cheese of 3/3.5/Pathfinder, it's still so heavily focused on "playing" the numbers rather than getting into the game.
Honestly, that's part of the reason I still play games that are as old as I am/even older than I am; they've got less thought put into how to "make the experience good for everyone" and actually offer engaging, authentic experiences.
|