Slate article on Gary's legacy (Merged with Gary Gygax Slandered)

[+5 Keyboard!]

Slate articles are pretty much universally written to offend and get a knee jerk reaction from you. Go through their archives and read some of the other garbage they post on that site. It' not worth your time to put together a petition and only "feeds the Troll" as they say.

 

[Ogrork the Mighty]

Petitions???

Yawn. *hits ignore*

 

[Delta]

* Essentially Wick made part of being an RPG having a systematic reward for acting in character. Since D&D has never explicitly had this sort of a rule, it's not an RPG by his definition.

This is totally tangential to the thread, but actually the 1E AD&D DMG had rules which did refer to this. As part of the training rules (1E DMG p. 86), acting against your class or alignment description penalized your training times for a new level.

 

[PoeticJustice]

I really don't think anybody should waste their time reading it. I actually buy the conceit of the article (Gygax is not the greatest game designer ever) but enough of this article is trash (because Steve Jackson is not the greatest game designer either) and the presentation is sooooooo bad that I really have no time for it.

 

[NewJeffCT]

Slate articles are pretty much universally written to offend and get a knee jerk reaction from you. Go through their archives and read some of the other garbage they post on that site. It' not worth your time to put together a petition and only "feeds the Troll" as they say.

A few days earlier, they (Slate) actually had another article on Gygax's passing that was very positive... I'm not going to find a link, but I'm 90% sure that it was also in Slate.

And, in terms of impact, nobody had more impact than Gygax - he led the way in creating the 800 pound gorilla of RPGs. While other games have their niche, I'm pretty sure D&D has an overwhelming percent of the market share when it comes to face-to-face RPGs. And, D&D is known outside the gaming circles - it's why you get D&D references on TV on Colbert or The Daily Show, and elsewhere. You don't see them dropping references to "Call of Cthulhlu" or other games beyond D&D, unless you're talking online games like WoW.

yes, you can argue that other systems are better, easier, more pure, etc, but none of them are D&D.

 

[Mean Eyed Cat]

A few days earlier, they (Slate) actually had another article on Gygax's passing that was very positive... I'm not going to find a link, but I'm 90% sure that it was also in Slate.

You mean <this link?> If this is the article, I found it a little more positive. It still threw in a few quips and jabs at D&D and those who play the game.

 

[Felon]

Read the article. Didn't see any slander.

The guy has a low opinion of D&D, and apparently has been give an editorial forum for expressing it.

I think he's met the burden of articulating his position. Moreover, nothing he says hasn't been said in this very forum repeatedly. Doesn't the following sound slightly familiar to anyone other than me?

What's wrong with Dungeons & Dragons? It plays like a video game. A good role-playing game provides the framework for a unique kind of narrative, a collaborative thought experiment crossed with improvisational theater. But D&D, particularly the first edition that Gygax co-wrote in 1975, makes this sort of creative play an afterthought.

If the multiplayer online game World of Warcraft is the direct descendant of D&D, then what, exactly, has Gygax bequeathed to us unwashed, nerdy masses? The notion that emotionally complex story lines are window dressing for an endless series of hack-and-slash encounters? There's a reason so many players are turned off after a brush with D&D. It promises something great—a lively (if dorky) bit of performance art—but delivers a small-minded and ignorant fantasy of rage, distilled to a bunch of arcane charts and die rolls. Dungeons & Dragons strips the "role-playing" out of RPGs; it's a videogame without the graphics, and a pretty boring one, at that.

The way I see it, Gary was an innovator. Innovators get some slack for the imperfections of their work, because they were building from whole cloth. There's no blueprint for them tow work from. It's easy to criticize in hindsight. Freud's notions about psychoanalysis are easy to deride in the present day. But the basic notion of sitting people down and figuring out what's wrong with them still was a major shift away from treating all mental disorders as a physical defect.

 

[jdrakeh]

Eh. This isn't news, really. I've decided to go on hiatus from another forum that I post to as, immediately following Gygax's death, there were several self-important threads about how D&D was two dozen flavors of bad and wrong in need of saving by the posters starting said threads.

 

[haakon1]

I'm not really sure I understand the "reprehensible moral" part of D&D comes into play. . . . The RPG wasn't just about "role-playing", it's very combat/wargame generated.

I believe that in this author's world view, anything remotely connected to war or violence or weapons is "morally reprehensible". The fact that mostly males and often whites play Gygax's game also makes him inherently evil.

But if the author stepped back for a moment, he could take a happy hippy view of Gygax as a self-published creative type whose work helped a lot of "differently-abled" folks -- both emotionally and physically -- to find a wider world of friends. Somehow, that version of fantasy world coverage is reserved for Second Life, though. :\

 

[Relique du Madde]

You don't see them dropping references to "Call of Cthulhlu" or other games beyond D&D, unless you're talking online games like WoW.

OFF TOPIC:

You do know that HP Lovecraft wrote Call of Cthulhu in 1928, and that he was DEAD at least 35 years when the idea of making a RPG based on his works was being pitched by Chaosium.