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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DammitVictor" data-source="post: 8323186" data-attributes="member: 6750908">I have a million and a half posts in my "insert quotes" queue, so I'm just... not going to do that.[HR][/HR]I don't like talking about Saint Gary. He's no longer here to defend himself and he's no longer capable of taking any actions whatsoever concerning the things he said and did in life. May he rest comfortably in the arms of his ancestors.I first met Gary Gygax here. His user name was Col_Pladoh. I believe it was Col_Pladoh on Dragonsfoot as well. Everything I am about to say was learned either here, or on Dragonsfoot, or from his own words in written publications.Without diminishing the cruelty of Ernie Gygax's comments this week, Gary Gygax spent his entire public life writing and defending statements that were much, much worse from 1973 until his death in 2008. In defense of his position on orcish noncombatants and "always chaotic evil", he quoted by name an American war criminal whose atrocities against Native Americans were so unspeakable during the American Civil War that he was dishonorably discharged and discommendated by the Union Army. I'm not going to look up where he originally made that statement, but the last time he made a public statement in defense of it was in 2005. His sexist beliefs and attitudes have already been documented in this thread. I do not know if he had a similar record of homophobic and/or transphobic statements, and I do not care enough to attempt to find out.Likewise, his business practices were frequently grossly unethical. It's relatively common knowledge that a couple of years after TSR published Dungeons & Dragons, with Gary Gygax's and Dave Arneson's names on the cover, Gary Gygax added some rules from various sources and republished Advanced Dungeons & Dragons as a new game, with his name on the cover alone and supposedly no financial obligation to Dave Arneson. The concurrent publication of Dungeons & Dragons and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons from 1981 until, IIRC, 1995 was the result of the courts disagreeing.What is not relatively common knowledge-- though hardly a secret-- is that several parts of AD&D were not written by Gary Gyax or by TSR employees, but were uncompensated fan works, at the same time that TSR was sending cease & desist letters to fanzines and third-party publishers selling perfectly legal modules and supplements for AD&D. It was commonly joked at the time that "T$R" stood for "They $ue Regularly".When TSR needed a quick influx of cash money-- a necessary step for most small businesses becoming big businesses; a good thing-- Gary Gygax and his business partner Don Kaye sold the majority ownership of TSR, Inc. to Brian and William Blume. Gygax had a contentious relationship with his new business partners almost immediately-- for reasons I don't know, and won't assume were Gygax's fault-- and after a series of conflicts about creative control and the distribution of royalties, he attempted to modify the copyrights declaration on the unpublished Oriental Adventures, a book he neither wrote nor paid for himself, to claim the book as his exclusive property.When you hear stories about how the Blumes forced the hapless genius Gary Gygax out of the company he built, this is why. A number of TSR's employees quit in protest; one must assume they knew the story about OA, so one must also assume they believed Gygax had some justification.I am not writing this to belittle the man. He was a genius, and his work touched a lot of lives-- including my own and everyone reading this-- for the better. He also hurt a lot of people, including myself and several other people here. I think... when we're remembering his legacy, we should focus on the former.But when we excuse or justify Ernie G. Gygax Jr's recent behavior-- political or business-- on the grounds that Dungeons & Dragons is his family's birthright, we need to remember that E. Gary Gygax Sr's similar behavior forty years ago is the reason that it isn't. Evil Wizards of the Coast didn't snatch Ernie's inheritance out of his pram; Wizards of the Coast bought TSR as a kindness from the woman who bought it from the brothers that his father sold it to.[HR][/HR]Screaming pedantry says I have more ground to cover here, but character limits say I don't. Next post.</blockquote>

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