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General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
Understanding History: Why Serious Scholarship of D&D Matters
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<blockquote data-quote="Mannahnin" data-source="post: 9078288" data-attributes="member: 7026594"><p>Physician, heal thyself.</p><p></p><p>This thread is about scholarship in D&D history, of which we've seen some good and some genuinely great examples in the last ten years.</p><p></p><p>You appear to be talking a lot of trash about people and books you don't seem to have read. Either that, or you're just sounding off about some other unspecified and unnamed "scholars" you have a beef with who aren't the topic of the thread. <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" alt="🤷♂️" title="Man shrugging :man_shrugging:" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f937-2642.png" data-shortname=":man_shrugging:" /></p><p></p><p></p><p>Exactly!</p><p></p><p>That's not my point. My point is that your evidence for your date of birth is no more solid than, say, Jon Peterson's evidence of the terms of Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax's royalty contract for D&D. It's the exact same kind of documentation.</p><p></p><p></p><p>Nah, that's just your "rabbit hole that everything is a lie or fake or whatever".</p><p></p><p>Absent contrary evidence, if, e.g., Gary wrote a postcard to Dave dated Feb 1, 1974 saying that the first two books for OD&D are back from the printer and look great, and he's looking forward to getting the third in his hands shortly, that's established factual documentation for when the OD&D boxed set was almost done being printed.</p><p></p><p>From that, we can, for one thing, draw a reasonable conclusion that OD&D was assembled and sold in boxed sets starting in February of 1974. That's not the ONLY piece of evidence we have for that date. We have, for example, a surviving advertisement from a newsletter from that January saying people could come play at Gary's house on Sundays and it would be available for sale. Previously, before the postcard came to light, we could estimate that it was probably first available for sale at the end of January. That was always an estimate, and a serious scholar makes that clear in their writing. That this is their best guess. As Peterson did around 10 years ago when first making an estimate for when D&D was first available for sale and thus when the 40th anniversary would be. And then he revised it later when the postcard was found and updated the info we have.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Mannahnin, post: 9078288, member: 7026594"] Physician, heal thyself. This thread is about scholarship in D&D history, of which we've seen some good and some genuinely great examples in the last ten years. You appear to be talking a lot of trash about people and books you don't seem to have read. Either that, or you're just sounding off about some other unspecified and unnamed "scholars" you have a beef with who aren't the topic of the thread. 🤷♂️ Exactly! That's not my point. My point is that your evidence for your date of birth is no more solid than, say, Jon Peterson's evidence of the terms of Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax's royalty contract for D&D. It's the exact same kind of documentation. Nah, that's just your "rabbit hole that everything is a lie or fake or whatever". Absent contrary evidence, if, e.g., Gary wrote a postcard to Dave dated Feb 1, 1974 saying that the first two books for OD&D are back from the printer and look great, and he's looking forward to getting the third in his hands shortly, that's established factual documentation for when the OD&D boxed set was almost done being printed. From that, we can, for one thing, draw a reasonable conclusion that OD&D was assembled and sold in boxed sets starting in February of 1974. That's not the ONLY piece of evidence we have for that date. We have, for example, a surviving advertisement from a newsletter from that January saying people could come play at Gary's house on Sundays and it would be available for sale. Previously, before the postcard came to light, we could estimate that it was probably first available for sale at the end of January. That was always an estimate, and a serious scholar makes that clear in their writing. That this is their best guess. As Peterson did around 10 years ago when first making an estimate for when D&D was first available for sale and thus when the 40th anniversary would be. And then he revised it later when the postcard was found and updated the info we have. [/QUOTE]
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