No one would have believed in the last years of the twentieth century
That internet arguments fuelled by alcohol could lead one to do silly things….

Actually, all too believable

The year 2000 was, actually, the last year of the C20th and I was one of a group of people writing a 4th edition of the venerable role-playing game “Chivalry and Sorcery”, a tidied up version of 3rd trying to recapture the feel of the 2nd.

In the world of the biggest gorilla in the room, Wizards of the Coast had just released 3rd edition D&D, with the innovation that its system could be used as the basis for games by other companies as part of its “Open Game Licence”.

Somewhere, probably on Usenet, this was being discussed, and a comment by Matt Johnston, an RPG author for, at that point, Crucible Designs, asked why not, rather than write a niche game with its own system, instead get on the d20 OGL system bandwagon, and produce a worldbook to give D&D players a proper medieval game world.

It is a question that deserves a better answer than it got, the short version being one that it would mean starting again from scratch, the original authors would not have supported that and it would have meant perhaps losing the game’s unique identity. However, I had been drinking, so my actual answer was to try and produce a version of Chivalry and Sorcery that used a d20. Now it didn’t use the WoTC d20 system, in part because I didn’t know that system until years later, it used my own d20 system.

I knew I couldn’t recreate all of C&S, I was aiming for one page, and so went for “general feel”. As it turned out, that was too ambitions. I got it down to four sides of paper and that was with using a tiny font, which is fair enough, C&S 1st edition also had a tiny font.

So that was finished the next week, as C&S Essence, and went onto the Brittannia Game Designs website as a free download. I could do that as I was webmaster at the time and actually wrote or, at least, transcribed, a lot of the content. You can see the final version of the website here http://www.its-them.me.uk/marak/ with C&S Essence under “Freebies”.

That was well received. The fan club, the “Loyal Order of Chivalry and Sorcery” was still active, and two members did translations, Stefano Bartoletti translated it into Italian, Guy-Franck Richard into French. More than that, we found out that an anonymous Italian person had produced a version sent in a Fantasy Imperial Rome. This was without asking us and only years later did I find out that the setting, Lex Arcanum, was actually an existing RPG by Francesco Nepitello (renowned, rightly so, for “The One Ring” RPG).

For some reason, I don’t know why, but I suspect because I had been reading far too much “Flashman” at the time, I used the same system for a game of Victorian adventure, “Vis Imperium Victoriana” (ViV). Given the character background based on the Flashman version of Lady Sale in the First Afghan War, that has to be it. This was also available on the BGD website.

One weird thing to come from that was that someone started, but did not finish, a version of ViV for “The Fantasy Trip“, itself kickstartered back to life in 2018. Being a game of Imperial Adventure Literature, I put into the game that the attitudes of the time were racist and sexist, and the opportunities for characters reflected this. A review spoke of this as how unfun it was, and discussions later on convinced me that I had handled this badly.

I ran C&S Essence for the group I was with. I did that in the “Darken” setting I was writing for as a Dragon ruled kingdom of Men, Orcs and other usually enemy folk for BGD’s “Marakush” Game world, so the additions I made for the system were low fantasy and gritty.

Having written a more modern game with the system, Steve Turner of BGD asked if I would write a Science-Fiction version, well, Ed Simbalist, one of the authors of C&S had written the classic “Space Opera” SF RPG. I thought it would be 32 pages and quickly done, but I ended up trying to do my game as Pulp SF covering a similar scope to “Space Opera” and it took two years, play-testing it with the group I was playing with then.

Some of us even play-tested the spaceship combat system at our local wargames club.

Part of the problem with the system I wrote is that I am, or was, I am getting old, fairly handy with mental arithmetic, and the system had mechanics like “how much did you succeed by mechanic” and derived range and magic effect statistics that were a necessity of lack of space in the original C&S Essence. This new game, “Rocket Jocks”, simplified the skill success mechanic, and that made it more playable for everyone.

That did not see the light of day. The reasons why are valid, and not in the main, mine to tell, but years were to pass, and we come from 2003 to 2011. Over the years I had suggested to Steve Turner than sites like DrivethruRPG and RPGNow, might be good sales venues for his products. Print on Demand had matured to be worth considering too. Nothing happened though.

Suddenly he had this bright idea “Maybe sites like DrivethruRPG and delivery methods like Print on Demand are worth doing! Colin, why didn’t you suggest that”. He is lucky he doesn’t live in slapping distance ;). He started putting BGD products on DriveThruRpg and in 2011 asked about putting up C&S Essence.

I agreed, and started to increase the font size, add in some clip art and update the system to that found in, the still unpublished, “Rocket Jocks”. Steve then told me he planned to put it up for sale. For actual money. For that I thought it needed some more stuff in it before asking people to part with their hard earned cash. So I added in the Darken “enemy character” information and an adventure I had written years ago.

That got published, nominated for an award but some of the reaction was that the system/setting was too low key and the adventure had no obvious lead in. I did a free download to address the adventure lead in and add some extras to the system. I then thought about the lack of a “High Fantasy” fee to it and decided to create one or rather to use the Arthurian Mythos, as “everyone knows that”!

Famous last words. Turns out I don’t generally know as much as I thought I did about the Arthurian mythos and, in any case, it morphs, changes, twists with less concern for continuity than Brannon Braga. However, I got on with it, first as a setting for C&S Essence and later as a complete game with system in its own right. However work got more involved and I had less time to devote to this and, by late 2013 I got burned out, with most of the game written and I just couldn’t continue.

2013 seeing me with an insane early commute, knowing I couldn’t devote time to this, I asked Andy Staples if he would finish it for me. He told me, straight out, that he did not have much time himself, but if I could accept that then he would try his best.

A few years wind on. Andy’s situation doesn’t let him do much, which is as he warned me, and I took the Arthurian project back in 2016. Around that time Steve told me that he was finally able to get “Rocket Jocks” into getting edited and later on, actually have art commissioned. A bit of a change from my art-free or clipart games of the past.

I was a bit apprehensive about this. Since I had delivered the manuscript Pulp SF had become a bit of a thing again. There was even a game in the interim called “Rocket Jocks”, so the “Unique selling point” of my game was no longer there. Moreover, I was aware that my system written in 2000, would be a bit crunchy and old fashioned by today’s standards. However by late 2018, when I started to see the art, I reread my manuscript for the first time in years, and I was heartened that the system, apart from Psionics, wasn’t that bad, and the level of my corny sense of humour, I hope, makes it a lot more fun.

I also wrote a spaceship combat game, but I do not know if it will ever see the light of day. It is a complex, Star Fleet Battles/B5 Wars kind of box marking system for damage. If I can ever figure out a lighter system for this, and a way to get counter art, I may get this published as a free download later.

So, at the turn of 2019, Rocket Jocks – Blast into the Future is now available as a PDF and it, and C&S Essence v1.1 are to be made available as Print on Demand books and then Steve Turner asks me, “You remember that ‘Vis Imperium Victoriana’? Could we publish that again?”.

Obviously the basic answer is “Yes”. I had thought about doing it again back in 2011. Believe it or not I had even spoken to a musician to see if I could write his character into the new version. However I needed to correct the flaws identified all those years ago, to make opportunities more even for characters, without denying the inequality of the colonial age.

Changes to the system were fairly simple, to update it and to reduce some of the maths. The biggest time spent has been in research, to try and give enough of a feel of the time, without turning it into a sixty volume setting series covering seven continents and eighty years of history.

This is intended not to be free, but “Pay what you want” which puts me into “adding more of value” mode. Clipart has been added, free to use fonts for flavour used and I even put some photos of my own through filters to try and make them of the time and made a few pieces of art to illustrate it, Amazing given my own lack of talent in drawing.

It’s been a weird road. Basically three pieces of work written between 2000 and 2003 coming back to life nearly two decades later. It has involved machines using MacOS, Linux of various flavours, iOS, Android and several generations of Windows, storage systems including Floppy Disks, Zip Disks, USB Flash drives and cloud, and all sorts of text editors. Changed world.

I was planning to finish the Arthurian book this year, still do, but first ViV needs to be completed, and then I have promised myself that I will write a short story, just to get back into fiction.

Thanks then to Ed Simbalist, Wilf Backhaus, Wes Ives, Matt Gilbert, Phil McGregor, Mark Ratner and, accidentally, Matt Johnston for getting me down that strange road. And doubly thanks for all the contributors, translators, readers and play-testers for their help.

West End Games, best known for its Star Wars licence, also produced some Star Trek games, including three solitaire games in a box as a tie-in licence to Star Trek III – Search for Spock. It has to be said that the games aren’t anything to do with that film, or with Star Trek: The Next Generation, these are firmly set in the universe of the original series.

Designed by Greg Costikyan, John M. Ford and Doug Kaufman. The three games are “Free Enterpri$e”, “Kobiyashi Maru” and, the subject of this post “The Sherwood Syndrome”.

I guess that “Free Enterpri$e” is, in part, inspired by John M. Ford’s book “How much for just the Planet”, as both feature the Federation and Klingon Empire competing for planetary loyalty through commerce. I’ve not read the book, but I have read John M. Ford’s “The Final Reflection”, which I can heartily recommend “The Final Reflection” is a term from a Klingon game.

“Kobiyashi Maru” is the closest to a movie tie in, but that, is, of course, the second film, “Wrath of Khan”. Apropos of nothing, Julia Eckhar’s book “Kobiyashi Maru”, which will give you Kirk’s, Chekhov’s, Sulu’s and Scotty’s solution to that Kobiyashi Maru problem, as well as episodes from each’s life, is also worth a read.

So, onto “The Sherwood Syndrome”. It is a sad fact of life in the Federation that unsupervised Federation sociologists and nostalgia buffs will have adverse effects on planets. If it isn’t turning them into Nazi Germany then it’s Chicago in the Roaring 20s. In this case a rogue sociologist from the USS Archon is trying to boost the planet Syngreal version of King John into power over the barons and set himself up as the power behind the throne. Maybe given the name of the planet it is Mordred that is the model.

He has imprisoned all of the Archon’s crew, he thinks, and it is up to the Enterprise Bridge Crew, plus McCoy and Scotty, to free the prisoners and stop the takeover. The trouble is that the population is already wary of witchcraft, and, in a first for Kirk, he has decided to observe the Prime Directive, therefore use of Federation technology is discouraged. This makes the only logical decision is to don Lincoln Green and take to the Greenwood! The background for all this is contained in a short story by John M. Ford.

The board above shows the starting positions. The road with arrows is the path taken by the Royal Party. They will travel from city to city demanding fealty from towns, following the arrows. If they manage to gain fealty from all the towns then the Federation loses.

The Archon crew and 8 random neutral people drawn blind from a cup are placed in towns with an imprisoned marker. You are allowed to know, the colour, so crew or Syngrealian, but not the identity. Eight others are drawn at random from the cup, placed on the areas as you wish. That leaves others unused, so the game should be different each time.

There are office holders in each town and castle, and garrison troops in towns. All the people counters, except the Royal Party and the garrison troops, represent people, on the flip side there are numbers for how persuasive, useful in a fight or able to raise funds. If the character has a number on the picture side, then there is a paragraph in the rules giving information for that character and any special rules. E.g. Spock can add his persuasion score to another characters, the Mayor of a Town, if recruited, might be able to release any prisoner held in their town.

You need to keep track of the morale of the Royalist Party, the funds available to the Rebels and the how much of a Witchcraft scare there is. If Witchcraft ever reaches 10, then you automatically lose (this is noted under “Aiding the Poor”), so you need to keep that down. Using Federation technology, phasers, healing or the transporter will increase Witchcraft.

Royalist morale is uses as a modifier to the Royal Party gaining fealty of a town. As it starts at 10, then unless you can reduce it, all towns will swear fealt automatically and the Royalist will win in turn six.

You start with just the Enterprise crew and your aim is to recruit allies, and rescue prisoners. Other actions include move, rob from the rich (increases Warchest), give to the poor (reduce Witchcraft), heal injured characters, request Sanctuary and get horses.

The Warchest funds your groups on the planet, one per group per turn. If you have zero funds then recruited Syngrealians will start deserting you, and Enterprise crew will start getting injured. The Enterprise can supply you, but it will increase Witchcraft.

To and win you need to free the crew and any captured Enterprise crew, get a town in open rebellion and ensure Witchcraft is less than ten. To get a town in open rebellion means reducing Royalist morale by a lot. One of the problems is that you cannot directly reduce Royalist Morale, you can only get it as a side effect of recruiting certain characters or as a result of demanding money in castles, towns and the palace. If you reduce the morale enough that a town defies the King, that will accelerate the loss of morale.

All actions are resolved using a F10, with the “0” being a zero. For Federation/Rebel actions, high is good. When rolling for Royalist actions then low benefits the player. Most can be modified by spending gold or by the relevant ability of the character carrying out the action and any support from allies.

Meanwhile the King’s guards may home in on the rebels, seeking to capture them. Their initial orders are for a more lackadaisical “Patrol”, but can shift to a more aggressive “Search” then “Seize” as the game continues.

The game is more difficult than it might appear at first. You need to reduce Royalist morale enough that the Royal Party gets delayed, thus giving you more time to achieve your goals and get that town into rebellion, and that means recruiting Royalists and guards. The rules don’t say what happens when a Royal Guard is recruited, but, as one result for something else, can have the Guard removed, so I did that, as they don’t have any game stats so have no game effect on the rebel behalf.

While it can be a game with some fun stories with some of the characters you can recruit, and the actions you take, and the random draw of neutrals does make each game different, if the dice hate you then it can be frustrating. The Star Trek theme seems light, until you remember how often the original series did odd stuff like the “Roman Empire in the 20th Century”, “Vietnam allegory done hamfistedly”, “Gunfight at the OK Corral” then I think this “Robin Kirk and Little Spock” is just fine. This is well worth pulling out now and again for a bit of fun and frolics.

The figures (updated 02/01/2019)

My eyesight is so bad these days, that looking at the 8mm figures is better through the camera than with the naked eye. They have enough detail that, if painted, they should be enough for table effect. You will see here that the infantry only has one rank in place. This is because I haven’t decided yet if I am painting these. The units being on the diagonal signifies being formed in square.

The artillery is just two pieces, the wheels and axle flanked by two soldiers being the first, and the gun, trail and third soldier being the second piece.

Overall I wish they did more. I can buy extra sprues, though it might be better value to buy an extra set. As you can see above, the figures occupy enough space on the table on this initial set up.

It is obvious that the figure scale bears no relationship to the ground scale, otherwise the figs would be 2 mm. Only artillery have a range greater than the next square (6 squares), but if you look at the size of the farm, accepting the distance of one square to the next as being within musket range seems reasonable.

Infantry, by the way, over-spill the stand, so no lining up these infantry nicely. If you see the blue infantry in the middle, you notice squares with two ranks of infantry. Those are two stands (because only half the ranks are on each infantry stand) and in open squares you can have two units of infantry, as long as neither is in square.

Here are a Red Guard infantry (with colours) in front of 10mm GW “Battle of Five Armies” Goblins and beside Baccus 6mm Macedonian pike. The Baccus figures are not on a unit base, just the sort of tab base they are moulded onto. From this it looks like, if you wanted to add additional figures from other manufacturers, 6mm might be the better compromise. At time of writing, you could get 22 line infantry and 2 Guard infantry from Baccus for £7.50. That gets you 48 strips of infantry, two with colours and two strips per base would be like the supplied figures. I also photographed the Red light cavalry by some 6mm Baccus Cavalry. Sorry, didn’t dig out 10mm cavalry.

The Battle

Travel Battle is a IGOUGO game. The boards are oriented randomly, you each have three brigades, led by a brigadier on the round base, who need to trace a line for a unit to be able to move. Players place brigades down in turn until each has placed their three.

In the turn photos, Red will have moved and fired, Blue will have moved but not yet fired.

Turn one

Red starts. They moved forward. Initially the Blues were mostly hidden behind hills and buildings, limiting the targets for the Red artillery. What Red fire there was was ineffective.

The Blues move forward and start spreading out, you don’t see it yet, but the Blue artillery strike lucky, causing one unit of Red artillery to retreat, fail to rally, and disappear, and the other is just plain destroyed. This put a gap in the brigade on the hill, leaving one unit of infantry isolated and out of the brigadier’s command.

Turn two

Red Heavy Cavalry attacked the Blue infantry and initially did badly, losing one unit and causing one to retreat, but Heavy Cavalry (and Guard Infantry) get a re-roll, if they want, and on re-roll the Red Heavy Cavalry pushed the Blue infantry back.

The Blue’s advance on the right and centre, on the left the infantry on the road form square. The Blue artillery fire is ineffective.

Turn three

Red cavalry attacks the Blue infantry in square and comes off the worst. The Blue are closing down their right with thir other infantry and cavalry brigades.

The Blue artillery causes another unit to be destroyed. The problem with going into square, you make a much more inviting target, in this case artillery gets a second dice to roll to affect you.

The blue infantry flanking the artillery attack but are pushed back, also pushing back the brigadier.

Turn four (last turn)

The Red Heavy cavalry tries to force the infantry out of the woods, but are driven back in retreat, but rally on the board edge. The Reds have more success with their infantry in the middle, managing to destroy unit of Blue infantry.

The blues advance and close in across the front. The Blue artillery destroys a Red Guard infantry unit and causes another to retreat to the board edge where it rallies, the blue infantry repeat the feat.

At this point I call the game, as I have to do something else. However it does not look good for the Reds so that seems fair enough.

Conclusions and comments on the rules (update on 01/01/2019)

This was a nice fast game that, if you are going to be brutal, are more boardgame than wargame. However the rules, while simple, have adjustments for troop types and situations. Eg Cavalry that charging infantry which have not formed in square get two dice to roll, and choose the best.

You can put two infantry units in one square, giving them two dice for attack/defence.

Pushbacks can cascade, pushing other units out of position. In the FAQ it suggests units unable to retreat should lead to auto-destruction

Any unit that isn’t a brigadier itself, can push a brigadier aside, possibly leading to loss of control of a brigade.A nice wargaming point that, that there is a command and control feature.

Infantry in square get two dice Vs cavalry (attacking or defending), but artillery gets two dice when attacking them.

Corner to corner attacks are a thing, so units can support others. (Or just attack corner to corner, but it looks better as part of a line)

Roads increase travel along them, infantry can defend buildings, etc, etc.

All this in a few sides of A5. The system means that both sides can affect the other in their turn and their enemy’s, giving agency and helping lead to the speed of the game, even looking over the rules for my first battle and taking off the time photographing, these four turns only took just over half an hour.

Simple or not, I got a couple of things wrong, you need a whole turn to go into or out of square, but they did not affect the game much. Having diagonal movement/range may offend some folk, but it simplifies things.

There is a faq and some additional rules. I would like to try and find some figures I could use for skirmishers and horse artillery for the additional rules.

I am very much glad I bought this. I think I will end up painting this, perhaps as Russians versus French. This is my first Napoleonic large scale battle rules, but the results seemed reasonable this first time.

I can see that the retreat and rally rules might cause a lot of back and forwarding, as brigades may have to retreat to be able to recover rallied units, as they cannot move without contact to a brigaadier. If that occurs then that is going to be unrealistic.

I do not think the Perrys have totally closed the door on doing more with it, but it is what it is, a wargame, with all you need, in a very portable box, a bit of fun to be had in a small space.

My first impressions on unboxing “Travel Battle” from Perry Miniatures 
£50 though you might find it cheaper.

In the summer I had an idea of playing (and kind of reviewing) three Napoleonic board wargames. Well, I got one done. A few months later I saw this in the local shop. It is as it says, a complete wargame in a box. Figures, terrain, dice and rules for a Napoleonic wargame. It is based on a game that the designers came up with when one was recovering from a serious injury, that used a gridded board and 6mm figures. The rules are very simple, the rule-book thin and even has advice for painting the figures and terrain.

I had been tempted to get it for a while, it was reduced a bit so I got it for myself as a Christmas present. Inside are two board, which together give you a battlefield of 51 cm x 25.4 cm. They are isomorphic so can be arranged in any manner and they will match up.

It looks like something you could put in a day pack alone with a laptop and a few things and the board, if you were travelling on a UK intercity train, would fit on a table if four of you could grab one of the seats with the big tables. Obviously trains shudder about a bit, not tested it but the rough terrain board tilted about 40 degrees before a base slid off, so hopefully it will be OK.

Each side gets two sprues, enough to make four brigadiers (you only use three), two units of Heavy Cavalry, two units of light Cavalry, two artillery pieces and eight units of infantry (2 guard, six line). Cavalry and infantry are three figure sets to a base, one brigadier or artillery group to theirs.

My first thought was “can I get more? These are 8mm in size, not a scale anyone else produces. They seem to be pretty much in proportion and to have a decent level of details for the size, as far as I can tell without putting them under a magnifier, which would be a silly thing to do, until you want to paint numbers on buttons. I may compare them to some 6mm Ancients I have to see how noticeable the difference might be. You can buy extra sprues from Perry Miniatures but, although they had planned to produce other units, they haven’t. I get the feeling they still might, in theory, but it is way down the priority list.

A Farm using three of the six supplied buildings. Each building comes in two halves and need to be glued together

Which brings me to a quandry. The idea of this is that this is a complete game. And it is. I will get into rules and gameplay in the next post, but you can play each side with slightly differing arrangements of the divisions, and the boards can be placed differently to give variety. But the instinct to expand with larger armies and boards is a fairly natural one. By the way, it is cheaper to buy an extra boxed set than buy the component boards and sprue equivalent.

The other issue for me is to paint or not to paint. This is a travel set, complete and playable out of the box, at least if you blutak or glue the buildings together (not the treetops, back to that) and the figures to the bases. Once glued the figures are going to be hard to paint the insides of ranks/columns of, so if you are going to paint then better to do that first and then glue in place. I think, for trying out the game-play, I’ll glue just one figure set to a base, and, if I decide to paint them, then I can do that then finish the job.

I mentioned not gluing down the treetops, the pictures above and below shows why, if troops move into the woods then you take the treetops off and stick the troops in.

“and what is good is not original” goes the quote from Samuel Johnson, in response to someone who sent him a manuscript to read. To quote someone else, the TL:DR version of this post would be “Do not do unto others as you would have them do unto you, their tastes might not be the same”

Fantasy Flight Games recently announced they wet reprinting the D6 West End Games Star Wars RPG, I assume the 2nd Edition revised. A brief twitter conversation with Matt @chimpy20 Hayward about this and reading Grant Morrison’s “super Gods” get me thinking about old game nostalgia and the proliferation of new RPGs.

Grant Morrison’s book talks about the waves of new comic book artists and writers and the need of some, including himself, to denigrate the work of established artists/writers as fuddy-duddy,  churning out safe standard work, as part self-publicity, of making their own name.

Fashions change, new work builds on the old and very often what was old is resurrected, either as part of nostalgia by those who was then or rediscovered by a new generation. This is as true of RPGS as it is comics, but, speaking from my own experience, nostalgia is probably the stronger pull in RPGs, just witness the eBay prices for old RPGs. Reprints for collectors are nothing new, neither are games that try to recapture the feel of an older game, usually Original D&D or AD&D.

I was not in the first wave of RPG players, but I was playing in the late 70s, starting with D&D, and following the same path of discovery that the writers of the second generation of RPG writers carved out. D&D has problems with logic and reality, never mind an obsession with weird pole-arms. The Vancian cast and forget magic system, the abstraction of combat, the limitation on non-human advancement, even the whole notion of class and level, went through house-ruling and fanzine variants, them new RPGs arodse to address these perceived shortcomings.

Complex systems meant to model reality in combat, task resolution, skill learning and magic were tried. I loved these. Different character paths were possible, different tactics in combat, without needing huge books of extra feats and options some laters RPGs tried, a complex but concise system as opposes to a simple but encyclopaedic one.

There are some systems that seem perfect for their world, like RuneQuest 2’s implementation of Basic Role-Playing others might have a elegant system, but no compelling world, still more have a terrible system but a world people love to play in, Palladium’s Rifts falls into that category for me, neither part of that appealed but I know people who love it, clunky as the system is.

The attractive thing about a fair few modern RPGs, like Symbaroum, is that they come wrapped in their world. That is not a new idea, but we build on the ideas that came before and try to prove we can do better. This is as true of long lived games like Chivalry & Sorcery as it is of the retroclones like the Old School Renaissance D&D a likes. In the latters’ case they aren’t just trying to recapture Dungeon style gaming, they aim to do something better, for example more consistent rules and/or a better entanglement in the gameworld, both true of Astonishing Swords and Swordsmen of Hyperborea. Doesn’t always work of course, Johnson’s quote is as true of RPGs as it is of music.

At long last we are at the reprint of WEG Star Wars. FFG has it’s own in-house system. They are not proposing to bring the D6 game back to life however it is the one I would play given a chance, not the “living” FFG game. I have not played the FFG game but I read some of the material, which seemed wooly in style and limiting in scope, and it did not enthuse me as did the WEG game. The Ghostbusters descended system and game material of the original strike me as suiting my tastes better.

This isn’t just a grognard disdain for the new though. Venerability does not mean playability, I point you at the original SuperHero 2044 just as neither is novelty. Neither is this about “having fun wrong”. Policing another’s fun, unless it is illegal and/or scares the horses is not only wrong, it’s pointless. Tastes differ and it can be worth playing a game not to your taste if part of a group because that’s what friends do for each other (Doesn’t mean that you can *always* find fun it it, sometimes despite everything it can be a chore).

However whether you might prefer one game over another is not just down to absolute taste. Context also important. These days for me the most important type of context is the amount of time real life gives you and your group to play. I still prefer “crunchy” systems in an absolute sense, but I will prefer to play simpler, more abstracted systems because they resolve system calls more quickly and the story can progress. I used to play 10 hours on a Saturday so I had time to be involved in epic tactical combats, now a couple of hours play a week is a rare luxury.

The point I am building up to is this. While policing someone else’s fun is wrong, if someone says that your way of having isn’t, then getting outraged is probably not worth it, particularly if it is an off-hand remark or a remark in a space limited forum like Twitter. If you get a chance to find out why, maybe a bad experience of other preferences then you may find that useful, but unless you are in a face to face over a beverage, a protracted discussion will probably do neither of you any favours nor will it be fun.

From my own PoV, I will try to stop making easily misinterpreted blanket statements of preference and qualify them where possible. It’ll save time and heartache