Hackmaster won an ORIGINS award in 2001

[Chainsaw]

You're boycotting someone, but you don't remember his name? How do you know you're boycotting him if you don't know his name?

Hmm.. as I said above.. failing to recall someone's name one afternoon and not recognizing it on the cover or inside page of a module are pretty different things. This doesn't seem like an overly complicated distinction.

 

[jonesy]

To be honest, I suspect it was more aimed at Hackmaster being a parody game that sort of made fun of AD&D. Why should a game that more or less is seen as a parody win the awards and all that.

I'm reading the thread where his quote is from and he calls Hackmaster cool and says that the people who made it "write some of the best damn games out there and should be much better selling than they are".

His problem wasn't that the game was bad, it was that his game should have been number one instead of number two, because his game was innovative and Hackmaster 'the same old thing'.

I see the whole thing as a total overreaction.

 

[J Arcane]

And here I thought slagging people personally was against this board's policy. Huh.

I worked for Bruce (yes, on that "abortion") and you have never met a nicer guy or better developer (except maybe Exalted's GGG). Is he opinionated? Well, is he a gamer?

I like -- no, *luv* -- Hackmaster, and am glad it won the Origins Award in 2001. My having that opinion in no way invalidates Bruce's opinion, even if it is somewhat unkind and controversial. I think the idea that you'd never support him via buying his work is perfectly valid, if a little extreme. And I think his -- or anyone's -- opinion on the validity of an award win for a game like Hackmaster (or any "remake" or "retroclone" or whatever) is a perfectly valid discussion to have.

But to actually insult him is going too far and I hope the Mods are watching this thread and some folks will get warnings. Very poor form, the lot of you.

I've said nothing in the vein of a personal insult, only described his work as accurately as language allows, and criticized the ideas he has presented in his public discourse. The only insults I see in this thread are the ones quoted from Baugh's original post.

Thank you for reminding me of the attitude that keeps me away from the site so often though.

To be honest, I suspect it was more aimed at Hackmaster being a parody game that sort of made fun of AD&D. Why should a game that more or less is seen as a parody win the awards and all that. So on that level I understand where he is coming from.

Actually, he expressly addressed that in the original RPGnet thread the quote is from. Someone asked him whether it would still bother him if the game had been nominated in some sort of "parody/humor" category, and his response was an emphatic no, and went on to express the whole "this is an affront to all progress" nonsense.

The key thing is--people need to stop taking this stuff so seriously, and think dismissing a game is equivalent to condemnation of themselves a human being. I have a feeling if we took every author's every opinions as a serious offense we would not buy anything from anybody.

Again, he didn't just dismiss a game, he personally insulted everyone who enjoyed it and voted for it. There's a difference. Indeed, his diatribe could very readily be taken as "condemnation of [the reader] as a human being", given the traits he uses to describe those who would vote for Hackmaster.

 

[El_Gringo]

Do you know how many things Gary Gygax has said about gaming that I disagree with? That really doesn't matter when I play D&D.

 

[Chainsaw]

Do you know how many things Gary Gygax has said about gaming that I disagree with? That really doesn't matter when I play D&D.

Did he ever ask you to boycott his products?

 

[JohnRTroy]

Out of curiosity, did anybody do any research to see if he was having a bad day or something?

Does he still share that opinion today?

After all, this was almost 10 years ago. I'd hate to condemn somebody for something they said 10 or 20 years ago.

 

[mattcolville]

Well, to be fair, Hackmaster is basically 1e AD&D with a few modifications, none of which are particularly new or exciting. The main reason it won, SFAICT, was that KenzerCo put it out and had a pent-up fanbase from the KoDT comics.

He does also have a point, though it's a fairly commonly-made one, in that awards like this are a popularity contest. In this case, I can't imagine that Little Fears or Terra Incognita would have won, simply because they were such niche products.

I don't think the KODT fanbase was the key, I think it was purely backlash against D&D3. A lot of D&D players didn't want D&D3, they wanted AD&DAgain, and in many ways Hackmaster was that.

It wasn't just AD&DAgain, it was a love-letter to AD&D and AD&D players.

A friend of mine, owns a game company people have heard of, hated D&D3 and more, hated how popular it was. But he looooved Hackmaster.

Of course, once D&D3 wasn't new anymore, once D&D4 was new, that's what he hated, and so started loving Pathfinder.

 

[jdrakeh]

I find it perfectly ironic that this thread was started by a guy with a long and storied history on these forums of expressing his absolute ire for pretty much every innovation in D&D over the last decade.

 

[Doug McCrae]

I agree with Bruce.

 

[Chainsaw]

I agree with Bruce.

Shocker..