Sundragon2012 said:
What is it that is so compelling about Gygax except the romance of old familiar names like Xagyg and Mordenkainen or the broken bindings of your lovingly fondled 1ed DM's guide with the efreet on the cover? In fact I think that the 1e DM's Guide was more interesting by far than the later incarnations of the same book. There was cool, obscure stuff in that book.
Well, that's one thing that I think of as Gygaxian right there - the rules were (are) fun to read!
Sundragon2012 said:
When people talk about gygaxian I see a set of assumptions that seem IMO reminiscent of the RPing experiences of adolescents at best and my brother and I at 11 at worst. I am not trying to be insulting, but the things I read about Gary's campaigns ie. the nazi soldiers in a dungeon and other wacky crap seems to me about as similar to mature RPing as Hercules, The Legendary Journeys is to real greek mythology.
It sounds like your assuming that everyone has the same idea of what defines "Gygaxian" as you.
My one-and-only 3.0 D&D character was a barbarian 3/bard 1 (or thereabouts), called Chases-the-Wind. Chases-the-Wind wanted to become the chief of his tribe, so he set off in search of adventure, to gain skill as a warrior and to return covered in glory and riches. To me, THAT is Gygaxian - no childhood trauma, no racial angst, no family misfortune, just go out into the world and come back a hero, or die trying.
What else do I consider Gygaxian? I don't think dungeons need to have a reason to exist, beyond a mad wizard listening to the voices in his head. I think that a world with magical sustenance can find plenty of work-arounds for dealing with ecological constraints. Any player who ran a paladin like the one you described would end up running an ex-paladin fighter (after his horse beat him up, that is) in my games - then again, if something detected as evil, it was probably there to threaten the paladin at best, kill him at worst, since in my games, EVIL is an inimical force of nature, not a collection of abstract concepts painted in shades of gray. I think Conan was a 3-D character who's motivation could be described at times as "the next gold piece" - I think for Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, a gold piece was more than enough most of the time, and they were both 3-D characters, too. I think a steady diet of "morally-complex plotlines" is suitable only for anemic, angsty navel-gazers - give me red-blooded, flash-seared adventure, thank you, and serve it with a frosty-cold mug of ale carried by a blond-and-buxom wench before I trash the common room.
That's Gygaxian to me, not badly written adventures or shallow characters or inconsistent game worlds.