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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Snarf Zagyg" data-source="post: 9013801" data-attributes="member: 7023840">I apologize for not responding to this earlier- partly because I have been unavailable recently, and partly because of, well, my repeated statements about the efficacy of these conversations. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />As I'm sure you remember, I had a number of threads based on The Elusive Shift, which I think is pretty much required reading in terms of having a good understanding of the history of the development of RPGs. More importantly, it reinforces my belief that the majority of these conversations suffer from a lack of understanding of what came before as well as a desire to avoid the present; everyone is always reinventing the wheel, making assumptions that the people in the past had no idea about the "avant-garde" topics that they conjured up years ago, while refusing to engage in timely topics. But all of this is par for the course; as for Arneson, he was famous (or infamous, depending on the context) for both his strength in conjuring up imaginative games, and his disdain for rule codification; if you were to look at Game Wizards as well, the constant theme running through that book, well, one of them, is that Arneson was singularly unable to translate his ideas into rules ... because that's not how he was operating. Going to the second idea- I think that the book does a great job at showing the sheer diversity of playing styles that exploded in the 1970s. Not only the mainline debates ("golden hole" vs. "full-fledged campaign," or even whether there should be more narrative), but concepts that are beyond the pale- having D&D contain, within it, what we would now think of as "LARP freeform" sessions (for extended diplomacy) or, as you astutely note, questions as to whether the referee would exercise any authority at all (or even if there was a need for a referee).It's interesting- I sometimes wonder about the double-edged sword that was the Egbert Explosion. On the one hand, the massive pop culture success of the game in the early 80s helped cement the success of TTRPGs as a hobby, and provided a generation of players and an explosion of commercial products. On the other hand, the massive influx of young players dramatically changed the nature of the hobby at the time, and calcified it during the 80s in a way that I think prevented the game from continuing to be as experimental as it was. That said, it's just an idea that I was frittering around with, and it's probably wrong.</blockquote>

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