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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 9350718" data-attributes="member: 2205">I think that that's an insightful observation. Gygax also made no distinction between honest-to-goodness sword & sorcery like Leiber and Howard and Revisionist deconstructionist anti-sword & sorcery by the likes of L. Sprague de Camp and Michael Moorcock. Even though they completely flipped the tropes upside down and deconstructed the genre, superficially they looked somewhat the same, so he didn't seem to have perceived any disconnect between them. If anything, he seems to have preferred the latter to the former, and especially raves about L. Sprague de Camp and his ilk. de Camp was notoriously a pedantic and arrogant "you didn't do this right" kind of guy who use all kinds of pop Hollywood or semi-academic approaches to his fantasy fiction in an attempt to virtue-signal his supposed intellectual superiority. (In case its not obvious, I'm not a fan of this approach at all.)I suppose that's not necessarily unexpected. Lots of people still think Clint Eastwood's 70s revisionist anti-Westerns like High Plains Drifter or The Outlaw Josey Wales were regular westerns at the same time Gygax thought 60s-70s revisionist anti-sword & sorcery tales were regular sword & sorcery tales, but in both cases they were all about deconstructing and flipping the genre on its head. John Wayne got it and angrily rejected any collaboration with Eastwood because of it, but Gygax seems to have gone more into the 'let me adjust my bowtie and push up my glasses before starting my 'well, ackshually..." lecture about how wrong you are' side of the genre.But if D&D were actually based on sword & sorcery, the way a lot of people believe that it is, it would have looked very different. For one thing, I doubt that there would be anything like the D&D vision of a dungeon at all.</blockquote>

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