I remember perhaps six months ago there were several posts that made me wonder. Low post-count accounts, and all with a completely empty analysis of the topic that just presented generic line after generic line, completely ignored what had gone before in the thread, and ended with an "In conclusion, when analysing this issue it's important to be aware that it's an issue, and that analysing it requires careful analysis of the issue that's the subject matter of this discussion."
D&D General Let He Who Is Without Sin Cast the First Magic Missile: Why Gygax Still Matters to Me
- Thread starter Snarf Zagyg
- Start date
Voadam
Legend
From the Ben Riggs thread.
Writing in EUROPA, a European fanzine, Gygax said: “I have been accused of being a nasty old sexist-male-Chauvinist-pig, for the wording in D&D isn’t what it should be. There should be more emphasis on the female role, more non-gendered names, and so forth."
"I thought perhaps these folks were right and considered adding women in the ‘Raping and Pillaging[’] section, in the ‘Whores and Tavern Wenches’ chapter, the special magical part dealing with ‘Hags and Crones’...and thought perhaps of adding an appendix on ‘Medieval Harems, Slave Girls, and Going Viking’. Damn right I am sexist. It doesn’t matter to me if women get paid as much as men, get jobs traditionally male, and shower in the men’s locker room."
"They can jolly well stay away from wargaming in droves for all I care. I’ve seen many a good wargame and wargamer spoiled thanks to the fair sex. I’ll detail that if anyone wishes.”
I think it's some kind of universal rule on all discussion forums that you have to create a new account each time you post something written by AI.
I read what you said, and I understood it as, "You should see if you can feed all of your posts into an AI model, and see what happens when it tries to create a post in your style."
Snarf hallucinations FTW!
Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
I met him at a local game store in Central California back in the early '90s. Seemed like a nice guy. Got him to sign my 1e PH (Trampier art). I still have it.
Greg Benage
Legend
I know you said "watch for it in the comments," but the hero worship is not something I ever experienced in the hobby, even entering as I did in 1980, until...probably these forums, when he started posting, certainly in the OSR--the retrospectives on Grognardia and the like. I don't think anyone I played with thought about Gygax much at all, but if we did, it was probably with some form of bemusement. Everything from his name, to the rules, to the writing style, to many of the naming conventions, to the D&D "setting" or "genre" itself was just so intensely weird and sometimes outright goofy that no one I knew took it very seriously. We sure had fun with it, though.
We read Dragon every month, but not especially for the Gygax contributions. My first visit to GenCon was in Kenosha, so '83 or '84, and I have no recollection of Gygax whatsover--not a panel, not a game, not a sighting. I literally have no evidence that he was even there, and assuming he was, none of us sought him out as some kind of celebrity. When I got to college and encountered my first actual grognards, the prevailing attitude was basically "this is just fantasy wargaming and we'd been doing it for years before 'D&D' came along." Whether or not this was true in the sense they intended it (I suspect not), that was the attitude. This is also when I started to meet a lot of gamers among whom D&D was not highly regarded. They were more likely to hero-worship Steve Perrin, Greg Stafford, Sandy Petersen, Marc Miller or Steve Jackson.
All of this is just to say that when I did finally encounter Gygax hero worship, it was more as a revisitation of his legacy as a game designer. It was like, "Holy naughty word, this guy did something really amazing, and he was underappreciated, uncelebrated, sometimes derided and even run out of his own company, let's take another look." I'm always a little surprised to learn he had devoted fans back in the day, even if intellectually I know someone had to be writing all that fan mail!
We read Dragon every month, but not especially for the Gygax contributions. My first visit to GenCon was in Kenosha, so '83 or '84, and I have no recollection of Gygax whatsover--not a panel, not a game, not a sighting. I literally have no evidence that he was even there, and assuming he was, none of us sought him out as some kind of celebrity. When I got to college and encountered my first actual grognards, the prevailing attitude was basically "this is just fantasy wargaming and we'd been doing it for years before 'D&D' came along." Whether or not this was true in the sense they intended it (I suspect not), that was the attitude. This is also when I started to meet a lot of gamers among whom D&D was not highly regarded. They were more likely to hero-worship Steve Perrin, Greg Stafford, Sandy Petersen, Marc Miller or Steve Jackson.
All of this is just to say that when I did finally encounter Gygax hero worship, it was more as a revisitation of his legacy as a game designer. It was like, "Holy naughty word, this guy did something really amazing, and he was underappreciated, uncelebrated, sometimes derided and even run out of his own company, let's take another look." I'm always a little surprised to learn he had devoted fans back in the day, even if intellectually I know someone had to be writing all that fan mail!
Caio Torben
Villager
Yes, I did. My language is not English, so sometimes I need help to make everything cohesive and not seem like a jerk writing long texts. So I used it to translate and organize my writing
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