I started playing right at the beginning of the 80s, so I'm not old-old skool.
Since you talked about RP in general, and not just D&D, our group hardly played fantasy at all. Perhaps that was unusual, but my friend's father owned a hobby store, and back in the 80s, the TSR stuff didn't fly off the shelves more than any other game.
So I'm as much puzzled about OSR roleplaying as everyone else. Of the fantasy that we did play, I recall playing about as much MERP (Middle Earth Role Playing) as AD&D 1st ed. So the style of play was quite a bit different. Though admittedly, when I ran the games, being as young as I was at the time and not being that steeped into Tolkeinology, rather than dungeon romps, they were mostly scenes reminiscent of The Hobbit, or the Barrow Downs.
What we
really played back in the day was Champions, Justice Inc, and Twillight 2000. The vast majority of the games we played had mundane real-world settings. We played a lot of Recon (both from Palladium and the original RPG Inc version) and when Phoenix Command came out in 1986, I made a home brew using it for the combat rules. We enjoyed a lot of Roaring 20's/30's era stuff more in the vein of Indiana Jones than Doc Savage or The Phantom.
If there's one thing I've noticed that's very different from the 80s compared to today's roleplaying, it's that many of the popular systems of the time had characters who were just above-average skilled Joes in a mundane world. No super powers, no magic, and even in Sci-Fi settings, often the tech was limited in nature. For example, in Traveller, you often had to visit low-tech worlds, and skill with a blade was still useful so as not to puncture the hull of a star craft. The post-Apocalyptic game Living Steel had fantastic power armor, but with limited endurance and always having to scrounge for parts for repairs.
So here's my cranky old man list about today's games:
- Give me games where you're just a regular schmoe and might progress to something like James Bond, but not some epic god-like being
- Give me rules in 128 pages or less; I don't want to read 300+ pages of fluff to find the 30 or so pages of actual rules
- Bring back simulationism (I care about weapon reach, encumbrance etc) because I have a feeling I'm not the only engineer or tweaker who likes to play games
- Karma points to re-roll is all the meta game influence I need; the GM should be the visionary of the story, because "design by committee" doesn't work (the GM can take cues from the players, but that's as far as it goes)
I miss the days of crunchy gaming. Take a look at the complexity of Phoenix Command Combat System or
Powers and Perils. My theory as to why this form of gaming has effectively died out is two-fold. First, roleplaying evolved out of the wargame community who
were used to that kind of detail and simulationism. Over time, to appeal to a bigger market, the detail was watered down. This served two purposes, it made it less intimidating to learn and also less
time to learn. As technology improved in the 90s, notably home computers and the internet, consumers now have far far more entertainment choices than ever before. As a result, any form of entertainment had to be quick to pick up. I believe the ultimate progression of this has become Tik Tok, where for many people, 3min videos has become about the limit of their attention span.
Before the internet, and you had to wait until 8pm once a week to watch your favorite TV show, I recall many a night after school reading for hours poring over a book. That will only happen with a tiny minority of players nowadays. And honestly, it wouldn't even include myself (my main hobby today isn't gaming). On the flip side, technology makes it much easier to find rules than ever before, with hyperlinks and hovers giving summaries at a glance. We're already seeing the hybridization of TTRPGs with Computers with things like Roll20 and DnDBeyond. But I think the game systems themselves will evolve (or at leas
should evolve) so that they can take advantage of the power of computers so that you can have more detailed rules, without sacrificing time to play or time to learn.