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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Shadow" data-source="post: 6009769" data-attributes="member: 16760">I have to say, your post brought me up short and made me think.  I'd xp you for that if I could.  I still don't 100% agree, but I'm listening.The idea of encountering D&D before encountering fantasy fiction is downright alien to me.  When I first came in contact with D&D at the age of 11 or so, I had already read reams of fantasy, science fiction, mythology, and literary classics.I've seen those testimonials too, and have been forced to chalk it up to extreme differences in taste.  But if there really are lots of people who encountered D&D before reading fantasy... Well, I don't know.  Maybe it would have an entirely different effect on them.Not having read Vance, I'll take your word for it there.  But I've read plenty of Lieber, and I'm just not seeing the resemblance.And though I love many of the Appendix N books, I really have to question if Gary loved them for the same reasons I do.  (Which is fine, of course - it just means we're on very, very different wavelengths.)  His fumbling disdain for Tolkien in an infamous Dragon article revealed him to have a TOTALLY different imaginative life than mine.(Though how the guy who wrote the GREAT artifact chapter in the DMG could possibly dismiss the One Ring as 'merely an ordinary Ring of Invisibility, albeit one with a nasty curse' is utterly beyond me.  It's like saying because your low-level character has figured out only one setting of the Machine of Lum the Mad, therefore it doesn't do much.)It's been a long time since I've read the AD&D DMG.  It may be that if I were to reread it now, I'd see the same self-deprecating humor you do.  I sincerely hope that I would, and I'm encouraged that someone does see it.I do hasten to add that my dislike of the man's style does not equate to a dislike of the man's ideas.  Gary could be wildly creative, and his *descriptive* writing at times becomes very fine indeed.  There are passages from the Vault of the Drow, in particular, that I will never forget - more for the evocative imagery than for his wording.  And I've already mentioned my admiration for the artifacts chapter.His narrative prose, however, is abysmally awful.  The Gord the Rogue books are nearly unreadable for me, on several levels.  I find it hard to believe they ever would have been accepted for publication without his name on the cover.And I find it hard to believe that throwing around Anglo-Saxon words like dweomercraeft without ever defining them helped anyone enjoy the hobby.  Still, I have no wish to deny that we owe him a tremendous debt for many hours of fun.Let's see, where do I start?'When you read some of those novels' of the pulp era?  I've read lots of them, thanks.  Never gotten around to Vance (and intend to remedy that someday), but I've read plenty of the others.'A man of times gone by'?  He wasn't *that* old, you know.  Perhaps he mentally did occupy earlier times, though;  in much the same way that a man of historical sensibility once told me quite seriously that I have a medieval mind. (I took it as a compliment.)But by no stretch are the 1920's 'olden times'.  Nor can I think of any era of Western civilization in which a style like Gygax's has been the norm.  Still... you like what you like.  I like what I like, and it seems the twain do not meet.  If you enjoy Gary's novels, more power to you.  De gustibus non est disputandum.</blockquote>

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