My OSR

   It's been almost four years since I started this blog and began to take part in the excitement of what we came to call the Old School Renaissance. It seems that the community has already coalesced around a narrative of what the OSR was.  The story that will probably be told in thirty years is something like this:

   In 2000 Wizards of the Coast created the Open Game License which several years later allowed folks like Matthew Finch, Daniel Proctor, and Stuart Marshall to create clones of old Dungeons & Dragons rules systems that were no longer being published.  These retroclones were unexpectedly popular and led to a flourishing of amateur and independent products designed for the older systems.  In 2012 WotC began selling reprints of first edition D&D hardbacks and 2013 made many of the old TSR products available as pdfs and discussion of the upcoming D&D release, D&D Next, indicated that some old school sensibilities were taken into account when developing the rules.  The OSR had succeeded!  A community of enthusiasts bridged the drought of old system availability and re-introduced a whole new generation of gamers to the fun of old school style play.

That's not my OSR.

The accepted history

    My OSR goes something like this: After a multi-year break from the game, I was hungry to play again and ready to try and find some fellow players.  About that time I stumbled on to the Swords & Wizardy retroclone.  I don't remember how, to be honest, but it was probably articles on the death of Gygax leading me to the Grognardia blog and then a larger search of D&D online.  My initial excitement was based on a misunderstanding.  You see, I missed out on the 3rd edition branch of D&D entirely, so when I saw some of the changes made to D&D in Swords & Wizardry I saw them as awesome revisions.  I didn't know that ascending armor class and a simplified saving throw were backported by Mr. Finch because of copyright infringement worries.  I thought he came up with those as house rules and included them because it made the game better.

   To me, the retroclone as a clone, allowing for playing the old systems, was kind of a silly idea since I had multiple copies of most the old D&Ds.  I'd seen them for years like flotsam on thrift store shelves.  No, to me the retroclone was a license to embrace the old rules while revising them.  Not nostalgia, but innovation.  Not carefully filling the gaps of a corporate product line but reinvigorating the idea that I could do it myself.

   Well, not by myself exactly.  The real thrill of the OSR, and it sure as hell seemed like this was shared by a lot of other bloggers at the time, was a conversation between a lot of makers about what they were making and why.  I had been thinking about the game on my own for almost thirty years and almost every blog I checked had cool approaches and ideas I'd never had a glimmer of a thought of.  So my OSR was the best combination of the permission to do my own thing and a community of people sharing and helping each other.
   Back to the accepted history.  I think the reason you see some arguments in the community about whether the OSR includes just D&D or other games from the old days is because this complicates the narrative.  I know there were blog posts about Tunnels & Trolls and Traveler back when I started, but those games had never gone away so they don't fit the story of the OSR as a bridge.  It's true that most conversation circled around D&Ds, but there were whole series of posts about Fantasy Wargaming and Warhammer Fantasy and porting some of their ideas back into those D&Ds.  If you focus on the fact that  the emphasis was on D&D in the OSR because you think it was the product we all wanted and couldn't buy, you are misunderstanding that it was just the dominant dialect in a wide ranging conversation about role playing.  We were looking everywhere for ideas with merit.

   Another common discussion is whether there are too many clones.  Again, this is based on the assumption that the service that was needed was to fill in for the lack of published older games.  And once you have a viable stand-in why would you need another?  But Vornheim should be the beautiful burr under that saddle.  It isn't cloning anything.  It isn't even a system.  And surely everyone agrees Vornheim came out of the OSR.  What about Carcosa?  What about Lamentations of the Flame Princess?  It is certainly a system, but it just as certainly isn't cloning an old D&D.  Even if you limit your view of the highly polished, published products of the OSR they don't really fit the common narrative.

   I guess the reason I wanted to make this post is that, while sure, there is truth in the story of the retroclones providing old school gamers with the game they loved when WotC wouldn't, it leaves out a lot of the best of what happened.  The open minded review of the old ways, the crazy innovation, the sharing, the punk rock ethos (we jammed econo!), was also the OSR.

   But I also realized that these narratives are the result of people thinking about roleplaying much the way people think about writing.

Process vs. Products
   In my day job I try to help people become better writers.  In that field there is the concept of Process vs. Products.  I'll spare you most the details, but the basic idea is that if you focus too much on the texts you're writing, you make it very hard to become better as a writer.  The most obvious reason is that if you write an unsatisfying text the way to make it more satisfying is probably not located in the particular sentences of that draft.  You really need to push the draft aside and explore the possibilities, the assumptions, the questions that aren't in that draft.  I don't know if this is because of Western Culture, a legacy of traditional teaching, or the fact that products are far easier to evaluate than how they were made, but all anyone ever sees are products.  I see this same thing with the OSR.

   If you find someone talking about the OSR, its impact, its value, its achievements, invariably they will focus on published products like stepping stones across a stream.  The exciting thing about Secret Santicore was not making stuff for others or the surprise of what someone would make for you, it was the awesome pdf at the end of the process.  The awesome thing about Petty Gods is not riffing on an old school product, the bunches of kooky gods many different people come up with, or even the cool way the illustrators interpret these.  No, it is the book that will eventually be published.  And if the book is not published all those drawings, all those ideas, may as well have never existed.

   But I'm not writing this just to lament the fact that people think of this all too commercially (Secret Santicore was free after all).  Product here doesn't mean something for sale so much as an object or artifact.  So many times on G+ I've seen someone pose a question that goes something like: "I want to run a game that is more Swords and Planet than Swords and Sorcery.  What system would be good for that?" or "I want to have a post-apocalyptic game with a strong element of survival horror, what system would be good for that?"  This assumes there are discreet systems that would fulfill every odd niche of a game a DM wanted to play.  And even if someone comes up with a decent answer to this question it assumes that's the best anyone can do. (People that ask "What makes for a good swords and planet game?" are framing it more in terms of process.)

   When folks proudly advertise what system they're playing it always seems odd to me because the system I'm playing has drifted so far from where I started, it is hard to call it anything.  And to call it Telecanter's D&D wouldn't even be right because I make changes to it after almost every session.  My "system" is better thought of as my goals for a night of D&D and how I go about trying to do that.  Rules are just part of the equation.

   And when people announce they are playing DCC or Tunnels & Trolls 2nd edition, or whatever, I always wonder, if I observed them DM, how much they would be bringing to the table from their own experience of gaming over the years?  How much of the "system" was all the things they'd had to figure out about making rulings, and improvving, and time management, and so on, but nowhere in the rule book?

   I'm not saying System Doesn't Matter, because I think that is often ham-handedly used to justify that rules have no effect on play.  I'm saying you shouldn't be talking about systems as if they were cooked dishes, things that no one can change.  I'm saying that a large part of my OSR was realizing that "Hey, all these D&Ds do a really crappy job of handling wilderness travel" and not only feeling okay about telling people about it, but feeling empowered to fix it myself.  I didn't need to hunt for a system that had solved the problem or wait in breathless anticipation to see if D&D Next would do a better job of it.  I could do my best to fix it myself the way I thought Matt Finch had fixed descending armor class.

   And isn't that what Vornheim was?  Zak saying "Hey all these D&Ds are crappy at running city adventures" and then doing his best to provide his solutions?

   The OSR was more than a bunch of objects.  It was a feeling of power.  It was a license to create.  It was a conversation.  It was about examining our beliefs and revising them.  It was messy and recursive.  There was no end goal.

   So, anyone writing about the history of the OSR that talks about Vornheim in terms of numbers sold or quality of printing — anyone who writes about the OSR as a timeline of products or systems like OSRIC or ACKs, — anyone who insists on framing discussion of the OSR in terms of WotC and decisions they made about what they would offer for sale, is missing, if not the real story, at least the whole story of the OSR.

   They'll be missing my OSR.

Anecdote

One of my employees excitedly shared with me that she had tried roleplaying for the first time.  

They all know I'm into D&D and blog, though I don't think any of them really know what D&D is except something you laugh at on an episode of Community.

She went on to say they played Fiasco.

I thought, hmm, interesting that these indie games are getting some mainstream reach.  I wonder if part of it is that they avoid any stigma attached to D&D and its "basement" players.

Then she said they all watched some of Wil Wheaton's YouTube video to learn how to create characters.  Then, after creating characters, watched more of the video to see what to do next . . .

And my heart sank.  I've got nothing against Fiasco and if you play it and love it, that's cool.  But if I care about anything I care about making D&D accessible to folks who would otherwise never try it.  And the thought that the stigma and hermetic nature of old school rpgs is so strong that a fresh-face-of-a-game can be more attractive to new players, even though you need to watch a video to understand how to play it, is just depressing to me. 

Can you imagine any other game in this context?  "We're playing bridge tonight so let's all watch this video on how to play."

Of course, I'm assuming stigma is at play here.  One other thing she mentioned is that the DM for the night was big into D&D back in the day.  So I wonder if another thing going on with indie games is "games for experienced gamers."  You've played rpgs for more than 20 years and you want to stretch your wings a bit, try something more daring with more improv required, or maybe something more focused on one aspect of what can be fun about rpgs in general-- you play an indie game.  And then you invite your non-gamer friends to play too.  And maybe they'll have fun.  But it seems to me like taking a friend who has never seen a movie before to see a Bergman film or Fellini or something.

The D&D Movie

Yeah, not the one you're thinking of.  I saw a Sinbad movie long ago (when I was 10? earlier?) and it has always stayed with me.  It was hard for me to find because I would re-watch all the Harryhausen pics thinking it was one of them, and they are all good and I remember them too.  But the one that stuck most was the German production Captain Sinbad.

I think it pretty much epitomizes D&D for me, especially the last 25 minutes.

To start you have a film ostensibly about Sinbad and the Middle East, but really that's only an excuse to have lavish costumes and fantastic events.  I mean the villain, El Carim, looks like a Hun with a sheepskin vest.  And his name, is he from Spain?  Sinbad fights in a full-blown gladiatorial arena!  What era is this?

As Sinbad and his crew attempt to reach a tower that holds the key to El Carim's power they struggle through a weird amalgam of jungle/swamp.  There are crocodiles and strangling vines, screaming monkeys and whirlpool-suck-holes.  The conflation of the exotic terrain is similar to the conflation of decorations and clothes from many different cultures considered exotic.

It's basically something the Academy calls Orientalism.  Folks in the West see cultures to the east of them as exotic, sexual, indolent, brutal, etc.  You basically project your own ideas onto a place you find foreign.  Even though that place has thousands of years of culture and probably considers your own culture strange.  And then you use those ideas to justify colonization, exploitation, and war.

Anyway, I didn't mean for this to be an essay on Orientalism in D&D which is something I'm very wary of and try to guard against, but is also, I think, at the root of D&D (It's the pseudo in pseudo-medieval and pseudo-middle eastern that even makes it possible-- adventures in a fantastic world that never existed.  And exotic means new and interesting to you even if it's old hat to someone of another culture).  I mostly wanted to point out a root source for my own conception of D&D.

Watch the last 25 minutes if you can, see the hirelings drop like flies.  Watch the crazy guardian Sinbad has to fight at the end in all its Rientsian glory.  See the villain immune to all harm unless a fairy tale-like condition is fulfilled.

Minecraft and Audience

A few months ago Steamtunnel at the Hydra's Grotto proposed the re-release of the 1e books as a census.  Trollsmyth guesses there aren't much more than 10,000 in the OSR.  A commenter mentions ~58,000 downloads of OSRIC.  Meanwhile this one dude I've been watching play minecraft on YouTube has close to 130,000 subscribers.

What the hell.  Now hold on, yes it's visual and you can sit there by yourself; no need for a game group or products or anything.  And yes, I'm guessing a lot of his viewers might be younger, kids in the 11-14 age group, maybe.  But this is not action packed Transformer stuff-- I find my self dozing off sometimes when he gets into the minutiae of moving monsters around with pistons.  Here's a slow paced technical video where he tries to figure out a conveyor for two monster spawners in Minecraft's version of Hell.

I think a lot of his appeal is that you can learn how to do something he shows you, then go back and do it yourself in your own game.  Heck, if you get stuck, you can even download his save game and look at his design in person.  It feels similar to some of the blogging we do about D&D rules, like the recent exchange about fatigue and me discussing with John how disease might play out in a campaign.  Surely some of Etho's viewers would be interested in playing some simple, streamlined D&D. Or maybe, more than playing, tinkering with the rules and making them their own.  So, where are they?

Discovery!

Look Familiar?  If you're a grognard it should.  I was trawling through the public domain books at archive.org when I found this picture by H. J. Ford in the Green Fairy Book.  I recognized it immediately as the model for Dave Trampier's cloud giant:

It's cool how many features he kept, though I think Ford's tilted torso seems less static, has more character.   And I'd always wondered a bit about those long canines, but it makes sense now, Ford uses them a lot to indicate non-human bugaboos: goblins, djinn, giants etc.

It's odd because I thought I'd gone through all the colored fairy books looking for art already.  But I must have missed the Green book, because I don't recognize the other illustrations.

The Trouble with &

The cool thing about having five or six (seven? eight?) versions of D&D rules (and their clones) to pull from is that their very existence underscores the idea there is no "One Way," that you are, in fact, expected to pick, cut, and whittle a system of your own.

The downside for me is that I'm always getting confused which parts come from where.

On Friday a player asked me how many XP he needed to level up.  I proudly whipped out my visual experience chart.  Confusion ensued.  I realized we had been using the Swords & Wizardry Core progression tables while the chart I made used Swords & Wizardry Whitebox values.  And they were different! (and yes, Labyrinth Lord is different, too)

I've searched several times through the S&W Core rulebooks for spells with no luck, to have it finally dawn on me that they were introduced in 1st edition.  Sanctuary is one of my favorites of those.  Command is another.

During a game at the SoCal Mini-Con I was asked to pick a magic item for my character (we were starting at higher level).  I chose Robe of Wizardry which sounded comfortingly familiar, but then realized I didn't remember ever seeing such a thing-- Charm, Hold, and Polymorph powers in one item of clothing?!  Turns out it was introduced in the Greyhawk supplement of OD&D as a Wizard's Robe, and disappeared thereafter.

Have you ever been tripped up by the plethora of versions?  Looked for a spell or magic item in the wrong place, maybe had some confusion with monsters from different editions?

D&D for Me

Pretty much all of the pictures in the first edition players handbook are indelibly etched into my brain. I don't know how many characters I rolled up or how much time I spent reading that book, but it was enough to be formative for me, for who I am.  But to answer Maliszewski's question: If I'm limited to covers, then, yes, I'm with him and go with the PHB.  But, if I can go to interior art, then this pic is what sums up D&D for me:

This small reproduction doesn't do it justice, it's a full page illustration in the book.

Some things I like about it: these guys are not heroes, but they are serious, wary.  The magic mouth is talking and they're paying attention, but not in awe of it, and not frightened by it.  They've seen this kind of thing before.  They have a goal and won't be denied.

Two side notes.  All the years I've loved this pic, I never noticed the eyes in the darkness below, until today.  And in searching for a digital image of this picture I found a post by Raggi, in which it seems we are in complete agreement on this picture.

What RPGs are About

Noisms posted a while back that D&D is about Ambition. I thought that was interesting and have been turning it over in my mind since I read it.

First, ambition has negative connotations from my middle-class perspective (it's blind, it's selfish). I might say D&D is about Progress, or Mastery. You start out being crappy at everything and with luck, smart decisions, and perseverence you get better at things.

It seems analogous in many ways to the stages of life we all go through, or even the Heroes Journey. If you want an answer as to why D&D is the most predominate rpg and that mechanics of progress, either levels or skill levels, exist in 90% of rpgs, I think this is the reason.

It's hard wired into our brains isn't it? Why the hell do thousands and thousands of people spend hours of their life playing Farmville?

Noisms mentions some rpgs that are about other things than ambition. I'm unfamiliar with those he mentions. I was thinking about games a little more familiar to me. So what about these:

• Traveller
• Call of Cthulu
• Boot Hill
• Any Superhero Game

Is Traveller about ambition too? I don't have extensive experience with it, but from what I recall, getting better at abilities or learning new ones is much more time consuming. It certainly didn't seem like the point of the game was to become the best pilot in the galaxy. I'm sure you could play it that way, but it didn't seem like the system was crafted with that in mind.

I've never played CoC, but from what everyone says about it, it's just a matter of time before your character dies or goes mad. So, what is that about? Is there even such a thing as a CoC campaign or are they by nature necessarily one-offs? I'm not criticizing here, actually curious.

Boot Hill was my second attempt at being a DM, and way back then as a proto-gamer, I was puzzled by what we were supposed to do. Ok, yes, this may have been influenced by my having experienced D&D first. I knew there should be tension, a gun fight, but then what? I wanted the game to give me some kind of framework. I remember very clearly noticing in the rule book how the playtester campaign had set a time limit and a boundary distance: whoever crossed that boundary with the most money by the end of the time limit "won." I remember thinking that very odd at the time (I suppose all law men were run by the DM?) and also thought "Aha, I'm not weird, they had to impose a framework too." So, what's Boot Hill about? And again, does anyone play Western campaigns, or are these all one-offs, situations?

Superheroes! The games I played as a youth (Champions, Marvel, DC) made only the barest nod at character improvement. I mean, Batman did all that before he walked onto stage, right? He doesn't get any better, he's at the top of his form. He may craft individual gadgets to deal with threats but that's different. So, the hero you made, was pretty much always going to be the same hero. So what was that game about? Our games had a lot to do with balancing secret identities/normal lives with hero lives. Also a lot of personal interactions/rivalries within our hero groups.

It strikes me that people really unsatisfied with D&D because there isn't enough roleplaying should really be flocking to hero games. That doesn't seem to be the case though, is it because that genre is traditionally drenched in testosterone, and that there is always the violent confrontations spaced between all the drama?

My hypothesis is that as humans, we tend toward some idea of progress, even artificial, and that games that don't incorporate this (by design or because of genre constraints) end up being one-off games, played as a fun session in-between long stretches of games that do allow for progress.

But I freely admit I may be blinded by my own desires (I crave a sense of progress and accomplishment). In fact, I'm intrigued by the idea of an ongoing game that is about the characters interacting with each other, without worrying about ambition. But I'm having trouble envisioning what the characters would be interacting about, if not goals, and aren't goals the small steps of progress?

Thoughts? Comments?

Apocalyptic D&D

I understand now that what people were meaning when they said D&D was apocalyptic, was just that it requires empires past. So, apocalyptic in the sense that some old cultures had to bite it for us to find their magic items. Which, again, I think is mostly true.

But as a child of the eighties, apocalypse makes me think not of looking at Indian petroglyphs, or finding arrowheads (which I've done), but of Mad Max eating dog food because all of civilization has collapsed (which thankfully I haven't had to do yet).

Apocalypse makes me think of Humungus calling out for me to "just walk away . . ." which I know is a death sentence because the only reason he wants in is because there is no better place to walk too.

I thought it might be interesting to see what D&D pushed along these lines might be like.

I think two causes are most likely for the end of civilization in our campaign world: 1) the Fey Realm returns and 2) the Black Death. In the first the king's castle disappears one evening to be replaced with a dark wood, in the second the king's castle is laid barren by plague until some medieval Humungous takes it up as headquarters.

No gnomes, halflings or half-elves. They are gone, dead. No elf player characters, they are not sympathetic with human survival anymore. The Dwarves have vanished deep into the rock.

Water is hard to come by, to drink it brings either sickness or magical bewitchment. Food can be hunted but the hunter can quickly become the hunted.

Humans live in small roving bands and are constantly worried about infiltration by doppelgangers, and vampires. The woods are full of woses and driads.

Gold is useless. Magic items are unstable and dangerous. The most valuable thing is people you can trust.

The biggest challenge is to secure a place of safety with food and water. Perhaps there are magic bare lands on the boundaries of the world, perhaps magic doesn't work at high altitudes. Maybe the disease comes in the water and a new continent is the goal.

Ruins would only be interesting in the ways they might keep you safe until daybreak. Magic is frowned upon and gods require hierarchies-- only shamans and wild mages exist anymore.

What do you think? It certainly doesn't sound like it would feel like D&D in play. Might be fun to try a mini-campaign sometime.

The Fewest Rules

How little do you need to game? I don't mean diceless games or improv theater or anything. What I mean is if you're going to game somewhere inconvenient, say a cave ;), what can you get by with if playing your favorite rpg?

How many pages do you need to run a game?

I remember having a camping expedition that required hiking into the Sierras and back in to a small lake. I was DMing 1e and I made myself some traveling rules.


Though I doubt you could tell it from my room, or my life, I seem to have some kind of efficiency fetish; I like things doing more with less.


That's one of the reasons I loved the randomizing chart in the back of the Lone Wolf gamebooks. It was a grid filled randomly with numbers from 1-10 and the idea was that you would close your eyes and pick one out with a pencil. No dice needed! Perfect for mountain D&D. So I preceded to make similar charts for all the die types. A fact which much amused ze Bulette and Marcus on our recent trip. ( Just wait, one day you'll lose a die down a gully and you'll see! haha).

You can see me d4 diceless randomizer in the pic below. I don't think we ever really used them; seem to recall the players bringing their own dice.


Anyway, on my recent trip I was surprised at how little I really needed to play my slightly tweaked version of Swords & Wizardry. And I want to push in that direction, streamlining and eliminating what I don't need.

Before you answer the question of how many pages you'd need let's make two qualifications 1) you haven't memorized anything through sheer dog-headed persistence. I mean I'm sure there are grognards out there that have all of 1e's charts memorized. But let's limit it to what a newbie DM on their first or second session might remember. And 2) lets assume that play will involve consistent levels. In other words if it isn't a starting party, at least everyone will all be near the same level.

Okay, it took me forever to remember the AC of leather armor, so I'm going to want a list of armor classes. I also don't remember all the weapon stats including ranges and rates of fire, so I want that. And . . . not much else.

See, I know that 1-2 level characters have the same chance to hit, and they have the same chance to save. (If you really have something odd, discrepancies can be written on the character sheets.)

Monsters

How about monsters though? Oh, this is what surprised me with how easy it was. A monster gets a to hit bonus equal to its HD. So a 2 HD creature adds +2 when it rolls to hit. Its challenge level, barring special powers like paralyze, is its HD. How many experience points are they worth? A 1HD creature has 15xp and it doubles every HD after that. So if you remember 15 and can multiply by two, you're good to go. How much treasure should a monster have? The core rule book recommends 2-3x xp which you just figured out. Are you seeing a pattern here? If you know a monsters HD you know all you need to know.

Well, except maybe attack damage, movement rates and saving throws. If you're familiar with S&W you may notice I tweaked the saves in the chart below to follow a linear progression. I know this is probably breaking some powerful hoodoo that protects high level monsters from mighty adventurers, but right now it doesn't seem important enough to make me need to lug around a rule book just to jump a 3HD creature's save by 2 instead of 1.


Super elegant, but that leaves us with attack damage and movement rates. So I might want a creature reference sheet with some exemplary monsters. If I need a monster that I haven't prepared in advance and not on the sheet, I'm confident I can extrapolate. Something like this:


Spells

What else? How about spells? You'll most likely only need to know the spells your players can use. In a beginning campaign first level spells will go a long way. Most of them are self explanatory. You might just need a list of names with notes for those that need it- maybe a digest-sized page.

You might even tweak the spells to make them easier to remember. The one spell that always had me digging out the rule book is sleep. Here is the chart I would consult:


And here is my house rule tweak:


Does that mess things up? I doubt it. It only shifts the curve for creatures of 1 HD or less, and not by much. And the benefit is that I'll never need to look it up again.

Spurs

What else? I don't need them but I'd probably want all my spurs to help improv. Hireling Traits, Spell Like Effects, Outdoor Encounters, etc. That adds a few pages but provides me with a ton of support and possibilities.

Dungeon

One page dungeon with encounter tables and maybe some rumors.

Total

1. Starting Equipment
2. Armor Class/Weapons Stats
3. Cleric Spells/Magic-user Spells
4. Creature Reference Sheet/Custom Monsters
5. Hireling Traits/Spell-like Effect
6. Outdoor Encounter/Minor Malevolent Effect
7. Dungeon map/encounter tables/rumors

I'm actually trying to work this package up, but I'm estimating I'll need 5-8 U.S. letter size pages or less. And I don't mean micro font, that's with 12 point font.

You might be able to make a mid-level pack/high-level pack with spells and monsters for those level ranges and take whichever one you needed for a particular party.

I have images of laminated plastic pages and DMing while floating in the Salton Sea, or from under a waterfall! Buwhahahah.

What do you think? I'm guessing some of you must have crafted your own traveling D&D kits.

The D&D Treadmill

Some people feel very strongly about their chosen edition of D&D and those that have chosen the currently supported ruleset get upset at the implication that a new edition of D&D is released solely to earn corporate revenue. But, reading blog comments today by supporters of 4e angry at comments critical of it, I began thinking sympathetically about how they will be in the position of outsider soon enough.

Briefly, the publishing history since WoTC bought TSR:

2nd Edition 1989
3rd Edition 2000
Edition 3.5 2003
4th Edition 2008

That's 11 years from 2nd to 3rd and 8 years from 3rd to 4th. But, really, WoTC was earning revenue from the revision of 3 to 3.5, so that's 5 years. So, you get a republish of core rulebooks in:
11
3
5
years.

I'll go out on a limb here and predict that 4 Edition Dungeons and Dragons will have the core rule books revised and republished, or a new 5th edition of D&D will be published, within 3 years. Yes, you can throw tomatoes at me if I'm wrong, by 2012 you'll see a major republishing of D&D. That's, of course, barring some major corporate restructuring in our currently apocalyptic economy, or something crazy like the Swords & Wizardry and Labyrinth Lord taking over the market.

I think the downsides to wanting to play an edition not currently supported have been blogged about extensively elsewhere. I'll just say, the biggest seems to be: in a game where it's hard enough to find good players, good luck finding said players that are also interested in a rulesystem from 5+ years ago.

So, regardless of what you think of the 4e rules, these people really like them. And in a few years, playing the D&D they like, will be like swimming upstream. So I sympathize with them. Maybe in ~5 years we'll see a 4e simulacra developed by fans.