Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ariosto" data-source="post: 5552344" data-attributes="member: 80487">Lumin, you seem completely clueless as to what Gary wanted to "tighten up" -- which was no secret, nor had been for years, and most who were into the game back in the day should be able to guess it in one try -- and quite oblivious to the degree to which AD&D was a collation of D&D material rather than a radical departure in any way, shape or form. I see no evidence that you have any acquaintance whatsoever with the great corpus of pre-AD&D material. Certainly, and by your own admission, you were not part of the scene in the 1970s.One problem is that the AD&D books were not addressed to you. They were written in a particular cultural context -- and that context was not post-3e RPG-dom.The context was the miniature wargames hobby and its relations, especially of course the role-playing offshoot. There was a very narrowly regulated RPG, to wit GDW's En Garde, but that was exceptional and the approach has always made its credentials as a "full fledged RPG" subject to challenge. (There was a John Carter game that seemed similarly focused and formalized, as I recall, and likewise of dubious RPG-ness in most quarters.)Gary was not trying to be difficult or obscure or misleading, any more than were Ken St Andre and Prof. Barker and Jim Ward and Marc Miller and Simbalist & Backhaus and Dave Hargrave and so on. Some of those people are alive today, and you can ask them about their intent. They wrote of their intent in the common language of the hobby of which they and we were fellow participants.The reason we old hands agree so much in our understanding is that Gary, like the rest, was writing from and for that very same understanding. It's in a lineage of custom with Joe Morschauser and Jack Scruby, Charles Grant and Don Featherstone, Brigadier Young and Lt. Colonel Lawford.I do recall very well an attitude, as tiresome as it was ignorant, among some players who came in with AD&D. However, your 'fundamentalism' is so extreme that it resembles more than anything a parody of the would-be rules lawyer ill equipped to plead before the Judge.Your position reminds me of a fellow who wrote a theological attack on Orthodox Christian use of icons without knowing much about the actual tradition of theory and practice. His ignorance was easily and clearly demonstrated, and he ended up doing the intellectually honest and honorable and genuinely educational thing: writing an admission and apology, and actually learning a bit about the subject.</blockquote>

Verification