One of my regular players had relatives in town this weekend and brought his cousin Debra to our Sunday game. She had played AD&D2e in college in the late 1980s and had a great time playing Serge (the NPC sergeant in charge of the hirelings). During breaks in the game we were talking about “old school” threads on some of the gaming boards where many seem to put down old school play as either “nostalgia” or some type of refusal to see the supposedly obvious improvements each new edition brings to the game. It turns out the Debra is a master-rated tournament chess player. She says the same thing happens in chess. A few of the proponents of a variant form of Chess championed by the late former World Champion Bobby Fischer are equally obnoxious about people who refuse to see the “obvious advantages” of Fischer’s new chess. I guess all those people still playing the old chess instead of Fischer’s new and improved version are playing it out of “nostalgia.”