The "I Didn't Comment in Another Thread" Thread

[CleverNickName]

Was Gary Gygax a sovereign citizen?

I'm just sayin', D&D is closer to Calvinball than chess.

 

[Mad_Jack]

I won't even get in to how the DM added new "reinforcement" PCs during a dungeon run. Suffice to say some of the techniques were worthy of a Warner Brothers cartoon.

I once had a guy who wanted to change characters mid-dungeon...

His current character died when he was looking up at a hole in the ceiling and the new one fell on him from 100 ft. up...

 

[RealAlHazred]

One of the first rules in every DMG has always been some variation of "make your own rules." In that regard, there's no such thing as a house rule in D&D. If you use a house rule, you're following the rules-as-written.

Uhhh...

 

[CleverNickName]

Uhhh...

Well that's really strange. That reply from Gygax doesn't show up in any of my rulebooks for some reason.

 

[Thomas Shey]

One of the first rules in every DMG has always been some variation of "make your own rules." In that regard, there's no such thing as a house rule in D&D. If you use a house rule, you're following the rules-as-written.

If it wasn't written in the book, its a house rule. After all, its different from game to game (and thus "house").

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Well that's really strange. That reply from Gygax doesn't show up in any of my rulebooks for some reason.

As I have always stated, if you don't agree with something Gygax wrote, keep reading ... because he will give you the exact opposite position at some point. Sometimes within the same book, sometimes within the same sentence.

Gygax really struggled on this particular issue- Gygax himself didn't run AD&D as it was written! For that matter, I do not think it is actually possible to run AD&D completely as written if you are using all the PHB and DMG rules.

More importantly, he was always waffling back and forth due to a basic schism- on the one hand, he was a hobbyist, and he understood that people would take games and run them their own way and he loved that. On the other hand, he was recently removed from poverty thanks to the success of this product, and he was constantly worried about other games trying to muscle in on D&D's turf. You see this battle playing out in the contradictory statements he would make- he would attack other games and tell people that they could only play AD&D as written and standardized (aka, by the books that TSR had made and sold) ... anything else was something else! But then he would wax poetic about people making it their own game.

On a tangent ... it's been a while since I've dropped into this thread. What is wrong with y'all???!!! This is perilously close to a serious discussion.

 

[billd91]

As I have always stated, if you don't agree with something Gygax wrote, keep reading ... because he will give you the exact opposite position at some point. Sometimes within the same book, sometimes within the same sentence.

<snip>

On a tangent ... it's been a while since I've dropped into this thread. What is wrong with y'all???!!! This is perilously close to a serious discussion.

But the real question is:
What kind of pizza did he feed his gnome bards?

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

I once had a guy who wanted to change characters mid-dungeon...

His current character died when he was looking up at a hole in the ceiling and the new one fell on him from 100 ft. up...

In one case, the DM running that game I was talking about introduced a new PC to the scene by dropping them out of an overhead chute that fed into the pit trap that had produced the recent casualty that had let the new player join the game. They were told they didn't take any damage because the corpse cushioned the fall - and that the new PC was luck because said corpse had been a magic-user and therefore softer and squishier than someone in armor would have been.

It was that kind of game. There are times I question why I'm nostalgic about the old days.

 

[RealAlHazred]

More importantly, he was always waffling back and forth due to a basic schism- on the one hand, he was a hobbyist, and he understood that people would take games and run them their own way and he loved that. On the other hand, he was recently removed from poverty thanks to the success of this product, and he was constantly worried about other games trying to muscle in on D&D's turf. You see this battle playing out in the contradictory statements he would make- he would attack other games and tell people that they could only play AD&D as written and standardized (aka, by the books that TSR had made and sold) ... anything else was something else! But then he would wax poetic about people making it their own game.

Agreed. He had written quite positively to Lee Gold in Alarums & Excursions early on, and then after the success of D&D, he wrote to the APAzine threatening them with legal action for their D&D/AD&D coverage of houserules. I suspect as time went by he decided "his" version of the game (the one he was running at home) was the correct one and others were "playing it wrong" -- a very common attitude among gamers at the time. Heck, Ron Edwards basically says those same things when he talks about the games people play: "you're playing it wrong," "you don't know what good gaming is," "stop having fun with things I don't like!" (Okay, I made that last one up.) This is one of the reasons all of the new classes in Dragon were "NPC classes" -- if they're meant only for the NPCs, then there's no impact to the player-facing side since only the DM will ever need to know the specifics of abilities.

 

[overgeeked]

I think that part of that is our original poor understanding of the rules created effective house rules for each and every individual gaming group. Imagine trying to play using just the 1e Players Handbook, because the Dungeon Masters Guide hadn't come out yet. We did.

So did a lot of people. A lot used Holmes Basic and/or OD&D to fill the gaps. Like how to hit.