We Didnt Start the Fire

When “Keeping the Fires Burning” Becomes Holding the Hobby Back

Some of the classic-gaming dungeon-tubers and social media personalities are actively holding the tabletop RPG hobby back.

And I want to make that distinction right up front. I’m not talking about the old-school grognard who has been playing AD&D for forty years and still gets together with his buddies every Saturday night. Hell, I love old games. There is absolutely nothing wrong with sitting down with AD&D, Basic D&D, Traveller, RuneQuest, or whatever game you fell in love with decades ago. There’s nothing wrong with preserving those games, studying their history, or introducing another generation to them.

The problem starts when preservation becomes an ideology, and especially when that ideology becomes content. You see it constantly from a certain corner of old-school social media: “classic gaming,” “keep the fires burning,” and the endless insistence that tabletop RPGs were somehow purer, better, or more authentic when everybody was sitting around a table in 1981.

Keep the fires burning?

Brother, the fire is not going out.

Tabletop role-playing games are bigger than they have ever been. There are more games, more designers, more publishers, more ways to play, more ways to distribute games, and more people experimenting with what an RPG can actually be. The fire isn’t dying. Some people are just angry because other people started building different fires.

And look at Critical Role. A lot of people in the old-school crowd scoff at Critical Role, and that’s fine. You don’t have to like it. You don’t have to watch it. But these people turned Dungeons & Dragons live plays into a multimillion-dollar business and then turned that success into two D&D-inspired animated series on Amazon Prime. Whatever you think of the way they play, they helped take tabletop role-playing into new places.

You’re not hurting them, brother. They’re doing just fine.

And here’s the weird part. Imagine applying this philosophy to video games. Imagine a bunch of fifty- and sixty-year-old gamers declaring that the original Nintendo Entertainment System represented the proper form of video gaming and everything that came afterward was a corruption of the medium. (Watch, Someone in the comments will tell me it should actually be the Atari or Commodore 64 that represents the proper form of video gaming) Keep the cartridges burning! Eight bits forever! Real gamers blow into the cartridge!

Want to play Elden Ring? Sellout. Baldur’s Gate 3? Not real gaming. Online multiplayer, open worlds, VR, digital distribution, modern controllers? Kids these days have ruined video games.

It would be absurd, and I would bet a considerable percentage of the same social media personalities preaching the sanctity of 1970s and 1980s RPG design happily play modern video games. They own modern consoles. They play games on Steam. They enjoy decades of technological and design evolution without feeling like they have somehow betrayed Pac-Man.

They understand perfectly well, at least when it comes to almost every other form of entertainment, that things change. Mediums evolve. Audiences change. Technology creates new possibilities. New generations take old ideas and do strange things with them. Nobody demands that movies still be made like they were in 1978 or that every new band sound like the one you listened to when you were sixteen.

Yet tabletop RPGs have developed this strange little corner of the culture where nostalgia has hardened into orthodoxy. It isn’t enough to enjoy the old ways.

Everyone else is expected to acknowledge that the old ways were the right ways.

That’s where I think this particular corner of social media genuinely starts hurting the hobby.

Preservation is valuable. History matters enormously. We should know who Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson, Dave Wesely, Rob Kuntz, M. A. R. Barker, Greg Stafford, and the rest of the early designers were. We should preserve their games, documents, stories, and contributions. You cannot understand where tabletop gaming is going if you erase its origins.

But history is supposed to give you a foundation to build on, not become a fence around what came before. There is a difference between keeping the old books on the shelf and insisting nobody is allowed to write a new one. There is a difference between remembering how the fire was started and demanding everyone spend the next fifty years staring at the same flame.

I don’t want tabletop gaming preserved in amber. I don’t want 1978 forever. I don’t want 1983 forever. Hell, I don’t want 2026 forever. I want people twenty years from now to look back at what we’re doing today and believe they can do something better with it. That is what a living creative medium is supposed to do.

So play AD&D. Play OD&D. Play B/X. Play Shadowdark. Play 5e. Play some weird indie game somebody made in their basement last Tuesday. Use miniatures or theater of the mind. Play online or around a kitchen table. Build elaborate terrain or scribble the dungeon on a sheet of graph paper. Make something completely new that barely resembles what Gary and Dave were doing in Lake Geneva and the Twin Cities.

Just stop confusing preservation with progress.

The tabletop RPG fire was always burning, since the world’s been turning, and it’ll still be burning after we’re gone.

Take the fire and build something with it.