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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 6312231" data-attributes="member: 18">So, if you liked a band's first album, and then you thought everything they'd done after that was pretty much horrible junk, would you think they were an amazing band? Or a band who were great for one album, then really lost their way?I ask because, like, seriously, have you read stuff like Dangerous Journeys?I can't really explain how excited I was when I saw it, back in like, 1992, in an Oxford (UK) gaming shop (a weird little place, I forget it's name, be unsurprised if someone else here knows it - run by an older couple, I bet it's closed now), Dangerous Journeys, all the books, by GARY GYGAX (OMG!) on the shelves. Why had I not heard of this game? Why were people not talking about it? It was by Gary "D&D" Gygax! My brother and I bought it all at once!Only then we actually tried to read and play that game, and oh god, so bad. That'd be a whole thread by itself. Basically everything that could be wrong with an RPG, except for perversion or horrible art (it was so-so instead), was wrong with it. Terrible rules, terrible organisation, didn't play well, wasn't focused or exciting, etc. etc. Probably the greatest disappointment of my gaming career. I thought I'd found gold. I'd actually found mud.It was not the work of a master game designer. Nor was anything Gary made beyond 1E, that I am aware of. This doesn't mean he wasn't a really cool, fun, charming, imaginative and creative guy who started an amazing hobby (it might have started without him, but it'd have been very different in form, and a bit later), but by any normal measure, he was not a "skilled" game designer, or a creative or imaginative one when it came to mechanics (Dangerous Journeys is far LESS imaginative than D&D in terms of mechanics, for example - which makes one wonder how many mechanics in D&D were influenced by Arneson or others). He is perhaps the most important game designer. He is not the most skilled game designer. If one can't see the difference, I don't know what to tell one. Every field of human endeavour features people more important than they were skilled.Further, describing every single RPG designed by every game designer as "horribly designed, wonderfully organised", is such intensely shallow and meretricious tripe (and obviously in error, given how many are horribly organised!), that it's almost beyond comment (even if you limit it to D&D, Retro-Clone and OSR games it's pretty risible). That may well be your opinion, but it's the lowest-value kind of opinion - purely subjective, having no value to others, even those who might, in this case, also like 1E.</blockquote>

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