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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SteveC" data-source="post: 6313241" data-attributes="member: 9053">I was going to say that if all Shakespeare had written was Hamlet, he would likely be remembered as Christopher Marlowe, which is to say largely not remembered.I think this is an interesting turn for this kind of discussion: bringing in the larger body of work for a designer, which is usually not something that's really discussed. Gives me a lot to think about, so huge kudos to that.When I think about what Gary did, it was amazing: he essentially introduced the world to a new hobby. At the same time, a lot of great designers took RPGs and ran with them in other directions. So that's an extremely important thing to do, but it's not everything.I think the central point of all of it is this: do you believe that game design has progressed and developed since Gygax's day? Some people would say "absolutely not!" and believe that it is a silly idea to begin with. Personally as someone who's a little older (and started gaming very young) I believe that RPG design has progressed a lot since it began, and good design today has learned a lot from the early days.I play a lot of board games, and the advance of rules design is much easier to see there: games by the same designer introduce mechanisms to address issues that come up in the earlier games, and game design simply gets better. That's not so say that, say, Settlers of Catan isn't a great game, but  Klaus Teuber's later games are simply better due to the things he learned.</blockquote>

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