Reconsiderations: Old School

Believe it or not, at the very dawn of what came to be called the Old School Renaissance, there was a lot of handwringing, both within its ranks and outside them, over just what was meant by the term "old school." Now, I don't recall when I first heard the term applied either to Dungeons & Dragons specifically or to roleplaying games more generally, nor can I pinpoint its precise origin. I have a vague recollection that it was one of those things that was spontaneously generated on the pre-social media Internet in the late '90s or early 2000s, but, as I said, I can't be certain. Regardless, I am pretty sure that the term predated the OSR by some years and generally meant something roughly equivalent to "D&D/RPG from the 70's and/or '80s," with some degree of fuzziness around the edges, both temporally and conceptually.A lot of people assume that the Old School Renaissance was simply a reaction to the excesses of late 3e and I think there's much truth in this. In my own case,…