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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DDNFan" data-source="post: 6312441" data-attributes="member: 6776483">Gary and Arneson designed and built a transformative, groundbreaking game out of nothing, correct? That involves game design, last time I checked.Anyone who achieves such a thing cannot be referred to as a bad game designer. You can't separate the game from the man (or men, or women), who created it, for without them it wouldn't exist. Ergo, since D&D is a work of pure genius that took off like wildfire and spawned an entire industry still thriving to this day, he can't be reffered to as a "poor game designer", because those two statements are not compatible. Either he was a bad game designer and made terrible games as a result, or he was a genius and designed a great game. The proper way to refer to such a person, if we're being honest here, is to call him a game design genius.Otherwise we're just attributing the success of D&D to non-human agency. Maybe he was given the PHB in a stone tablet and merely applied for the business license. That's what I would call an entrepreneur. But since he created it out of nothing, himself, he deserves the entire credit for his creation, and all subsequent praise of this hobby owes him a tithe of respect.And just because he made some stinker RPGs later on, doesn't retroactively change his status as a game design genius. George Lucas made some stinkers later in his career too, but I don't think anyone would have much credibility to call him anything but a genius filmmaker. Star Wars isn't necessarily the be all and end all of movies, but it's probably pretty close to it, for a large segment of the human race. What I would say is that as men get older, they can tend to jump the shark and Gygax is no exception. I would definitely say his career arc mimicks Lucas in the way they fell out of grace. But their original work was most definitely pure genius by popular estimation, and influence. It just lacks credibility for me to read that he wasn't a good game designer. People since him WISH they could be as bad a game designer as he was, in that case, for all the notoriety their own inventions achieved.By that standard, he was the Einstein of game design. Nobody else comes close in table top. If they do, where is their D&D? They should just admit that maybe their inventions just aren't that great, and go back to the drawing board until they come up with something worth arguing about on internet forums 40 years from now.</blockquote>

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