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Have you seen some of the discussions here and on other forums about something as innocuous as preferred game play styles? Those discussions can be really, really heated. I'm with you though. I never really had a glowing admiration about Gygax because I knew nothing about him other than he...

I'm a simple man. I just want 1-2 books, preferably one I can hand to players, an adventure, and some maps. While I'm open to having other items, I don't want any dice. I can understand dice being included in a starter set though.

During the ambush, someone said to Gary something along the lines of, "We hope you will continue with TSR in a creative capacity." Did they mean it? Maybe? After all, the company was selling a lot of books with Gary's name on it. And given that Gary had been there from the beginning, they...

I would be curious to learn if Williams took the issue to TSR's board of directors. It did occur to me that Gygax himself had a major conflict of interest with his royalty payments. It was in his best interest to focus on D&D to the exclusion of other projects because he would personally...

So just your normal, every day office chit-chat?

I don't know if I ever saw a Black person in my local hobby shop during the 80s and I don't think I saw one until the 90s when Magic the Gathering was, heh heh, gathering steam. It was rare enough to see a woman or a girl at the game store. I only met a handful of girls who played AD&D when I...

I came under some (mild) fire here for having the temerity to suggest it might be time to reevaluate the legacy of Lorraine Williams. I didn't offer a blanket pardon for her actions as CEO, and at the time I wasn't fully aware of how she took control of TSR, but I thought her role in the story...

I can't say FFG didn't make a successful Star Wars line. Not counting adventures, they've produced something like thirty Star Wars books over the years and that's nothing to sneeze at. Someone likes it. While I dislike the proprietary dice, it's not all that bad. My biggest grip is that it...

It's like seeing a restaurant shut down even though it was always busy. It's amazing how a seemingly healthy company can go under fairly quickly because of cash flow. Hats off to those brave enough to start a business. Like all human beings, he was complicated, and I certainly don't want to...

It looks great! Every time I think about anything terrain related I start to wonder where I'm going to store it and how often I'm going to use it. I don't know why frequency of use should be important, it's not like I don't have a ton of minis that just sit around looking pretty.

I'm smart guy. No, really, at least I think I am, but without the experience or education on how to run a large business, I likely wouldn't be able to run what unexpectedly became a multi-million dollar company. I'd probably make some of the same mistakes TSR made by hiring a lot of my friends...

Funny enough that's kind of what got Williams in the end. She structured TSR's cash flow with the assumption the money would always be rolling in. When it stopped, there was nothing TSR could do to stop the coming avalanche. You're absolutely correct that Williams deserves plenty of...

In the pre-COVID days, I was at a Michael's, a crafting store in case you live outside the United States, looking at some Halloween decorations. A nice young lady working there, maybe 19 or 20, walked up to me while I was looking at something and said, "That's something fun you can do with your...

We tend to hold Williams to a higher standard than we do good old Gygax, but yes, she engaged in some serious skullduggery to take control of TSR. All of which might have been avoided had Gary been a bit more serious about running TSR instead of running to LA to live the high life. It might...

When I was younger, I wasn't particularly interested in any of the designers behind the game or how TSR the company worked, but this was pretty much the narrative as I understood it in the late 1980s and stayed with me until the 2010s. Bingo. His face and voice also appeared on national...

As crazy as it sounds, it can sometimes be very difficult to track down who owns a copyright or who has the rights to produce something. For one of their Grand Theft Auto games, Rock Star Games wanted to use a 1980 song called "Walk the Night" by a group called The Skatt Brothers. Rock Star...

I don't see this as a flaw at all. The whole point of SkyNet becoming self-aware is that it gained the capability of examining its own thoughts and evaluating its own actions. i.e. SkyNet grew beyond its programing. I'm sure SkyNet was fully aware Los Angeles was a friendly, but when...

It worked for Futurama. You're right, an AI might be very alien to us in how it thinks. If we're talking about an AI with a mission of some sort, they'd almost certainly care about their ability to fulfill their mission.

There's a Mad Orc 5k run I plan on participating in at Game Hole Con this October. My regular afternoon walk is 4.2 kilometers (2.6 to the moon units) and I've started jogging part of the route in preparation. I'm hoping by October I can job most of the run.

It's a game I've never played, but I think you're right that you need to get the right group together. One that won't take things too seriously or personal and maintain the absurdities of the game without devolving into something too silly to play.