D&D General Let He Who Is Without Sin Cast the First Magic Missile: Why Gygax Still Matters to Me

[Belen]

I have no clue what @EzekielRaiden wants.

What is he looking for?

 

[MGibster]

I have fallen out with 2020's system, but not before I got several years of fun out of it.

I would rather use 2020 than Red to run a Cyberpunk game. That said, 2020 has a lot of problems. I think some of them were fixed with the free Interlock Unlimited project that you can still find online. I was searching for a cyberpunk game to run and seriously considered 2020 but decided against it. I still haven't found a game that replaces it though. But like you, I got a lot of good, fun years out of 2020 even if I don't care to run it now.

 

[Myrdin Potter]

I tried.

I have been pretty successful for decades getting my groups to switch from system to system. Often for just one shots to try it out, sometimes ending being years long campaigns.

One thing that makes a big difference is that I sell the new system as fun. My groups are widely divergent in terms of age, gender, political views, heck even on what the weather is that day. I sell trying the new system because it is fun.

There are a few not-D&D that are pretty popular and with the ability to piece together groups online, you are not even limited to your specific geography.

Going back to the OP, there are minorities of view in the greater RPG space that emphasize attacks on Hary Gygax to add clout to their argument about what they say is wrong about D&D. I think that is a not a great thing to do. I recognize that Gary was not perfect and I have no hero worship of him, but I am grateful that he helped invent and develop and distribute the game because of the large positive effect it has had on my life.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

It certainly was, and can be a toolkit, but that's not what you asked for. You want the golden age of Islam or whatever.

So it cannot do those things--y'know, the like dozen different cultural backdrops I referenced. How does that not explicitly reject the idea that it's a toolkit?

Shouldn't we be showing people how the toolkit type stuff can be done? Or is this another example of throwing DMs to the wolves and expecting them to come back with pelts?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I have been pretty successful for decades getting my groups to switch from system to system. Often for just one shots to try it out, sometimes ending being years long campaigns.

One thing that makes a big difference is that I sell the new system as fun. My groups are widely divergent in terms of age, gender, political views, heck even on what the weather is that day. I sell trying the new system because it is fun.

Is any of this actually useful for someone who wants to play, rather than run? Because I already run a game and I don't have the mental capacity to run a second.

There are a few not-D&D that are pretty popular and with the ability to piece together groups online, you are not even limited to your specific geography.

I'm aware. I tried to play them. At least half a dozen different systems I was already certain, or at least quite confident, that I would enjoy. I spent the first few months looking for just 4e. I then expanded to include several other games, including 13A, Masks, Dungeon World, and SR5. After spending a few months trying and failing to find those, I expanded further, accepting PF1e (2e was still very fresh at the time so I was hesitant on it) and 3.5e D&D. Finally, after another few months of bupkis (I had one game I managed to pull together from a handful of different folks....the group didn't gel and it collapsed after the fifth session), I broke down completely and started applying for 5e games. Game after game after game after game, I was not picked among the applicants. Then when I finally was? Both games I applied to failed within the first month.

I tried. Hunting for a gaming group had proven completely fruitless. So if purely pursuing my own interests got me absolutely nowhere after more than a year's worth of work, I figure I have nothing to lose from activism. It's not like I'm losing out on something else I would've enjoyed more, because as far as my experience has shown, the things I enjoy more don't exist.

Going back to the OP, there are minorities of view in the greater RPG space that emphasize attacks on Hary Gygax to add clout to their argument about what they say is wrong about D&D. I think that is a not a great thing to do. I recognize that Gary was not perfect and I have no hero worship of him, but I am grateful that he helped invent and develop and distribute the game because of the large positive effect it has had on my life.

Er...do you have an example of this? Because frankly it just comes across as dismissing pretty valid and serious complaints (like, as noted, the misogynistic comments from Gygax)--TTRPGs still have some pretty big issues with being a "boys club" and treating women extremely poorly--as merely being someone trying to exploit an easy target for self-promotion purposes.

 

[jasper]

Nearly every collected works of HP Lovecraft that I have on my shelf has a forward that discusses Lovecraft’s racism in his writing, basically saying to some effect that his position was inexcusable and we need to at least address that before moving on.

Or as Snarf said, sunlight is the best disinfectant.

However, even today some people are dancing in the moonbeams, calling it sunlight and casting shade on their detectors.

 

[jasper]

Gygax wrote and spoke at volume (and with as many syllables as possible) for quite some time; if you look long enough, you will always find that he wrote something that contradicted what he said earlier, sometimes within the same paragraph.

Do the words of the Mighty Gygax contradict themselves? Very well then, they are in contradiction. (For High Gygaxian is verbose, and contain multitudes.)

Gary and a lot of gamers needed an mess of editors. Copy editor, content editor, etc. etc.

 

[Warpiglet-7]

D1-2…

Just wow. The imagery and the fiction are just wicked cool. I am more impressed with gygax’s game fiction than his game design.

Big fan of that…

The hindsight bias with game design stuff is a call to arms for armchair quarterbacks everywhere. But the cool worlds…evocative weirdness…it still hits me right.

 

[Scribe]

So it cannot do those things--y'know, the like dozen different cultural backdrops I referenced. How does that not explicitly reject the idea that it's a toolkit?

Of course it could do those things, but thats not, as you pointed out, what D&D is.

 

[O-Castitatis-Lilium]

Good article, as far as always (I have only had the pleasure of reading two so far). I have to agree with it, personally. To be fair, never really "worshipped" Gygax, never really thought much about him outside of just 'the guy who invented DnD'; he was just an author and nothing else growing up. Not even my dad and family "worshipped" him like some people do. I don't understand how people can look at a person and just...fawn all over them and act like that person is some sort of Deity or God...they are human just like the rest of us with flaws and issues. To me, it doesn't matter how Gygax was in his private life, as it has no bearing on how I play and run games; much like I have said in a few posts about this whole thing. I don't think I could ever "worship" a celebrity or anyone else like that for that matter, as it just seems weird to me. Sure, I have people like that, that I like more than others in the same category, but none that I would absolutely loose myself over and treat as a God or Deity. Gygax gave me a great game, he wrote books to explain how to play this amazing game, and even then the books were just tools for myself and my family to make our own adventures and stories up. Again, how he was in a very small section of his life means nothing to me 50 years after he made the game.

Sure, he had some sexist views, and? that doesn't really bother me all that much. I was raised to view those views as idiotic and move on, not to take offense to them because that's what some people want you to do; and by allowing those views to effect you in some way, means you are giving that person some form of hold over you. Being and adult, I can see where his views on women seeped out into his game, but as a kid and even a teen that just wasn't something I was looking too deeply at. Even now that type of stuff doesn't bother me, and looking at the harlots table and stuff now; I laugh at it because I think it's funny. It's funny because it's nonsense to me, it makes no sense because of the way I was raised to believe that I could do anything that my brother and my male relatives could (I had FAR more of them than female lol). It's funny to me because I don't view it as a personally attack towards myself, or women in general, because it truly is just an idiotic point of view to have and the only response it should get is laughter and being ignored and not acknowledged as a legitimate argument.

I guess Gygax and original DnD still hold a place in my heart, but more so because I have so many great childhood memories of spending weekends with my family and playing this game for hours on end. Ordering out for the weekend and setting up the living room and bedrooms as camp sites. Listening to the din of my family laughing, talking, joking, and everything else. With that, I still reference those book sand use them when I don't like something in 5E now. Not only that it shaped the way that I do creative writing and how I view magic as a whole in the entirety of the fantasy genere. Also, I think it still holds a special place in my heart because it was how my parents and myself realized that I had a learning disability believe it or not. I think that if my dad hadn't of introduced me to this game so early, that it wouldn't really have been caught an I probably would have fallen through the cracks...and my education would have faultered considerably. I was about 8 when we discovered I couldn't do math as fast as others, and while I could count and read numbers as written I was struggling to read larger groups of numbers, anything into the 100's, and do basic numerical things. with that my parents had a small bit of evidence and I was able to start testing for it. At the time Dyscalculia wasn't truly recognized, even though the term had been made official in the 70's. Children were still considered not to have it and were just lazy well up to the late 90's. I'm going off topic though. Point is, Gygax to a very little degree, and the original game more so, still hold a place in my heart for different reasons, reasons that really don't disappear despite the man's flaws.