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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9598612" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I mean, if one is trying to use Gary as some sort of "I win" button--other than to point out pure historical facts, I guess?--then they've made a self-defeating argument. It is trivially true that D&D is not exclusively what Gygax personally created, because so many versions of it have been written by other people. Gygax is no more the sole arbiter of what is or could be D&D than, say, H.P. Lovecraft is the sole arbiter of what is or could be Cthulhu stories and cosmic horror generally. Yes, the genre owes an enormous debt to him, but even during his lifetime other people were already writing stories about Cthulhu and Nyarlathotep, and he himself "borrowed" Hastur/The King in Yellow too.Hence why, as I said above, I use him only as a point of comparison or contrast, not as a point of unimpeachable victory. For example, the passage about how to "teach" players that playing anything other than a human (and especially anything particularly unusual), is a pretty clear demonstration that things I consider to be hostile DM behavior have in fact been with us since literally the beginning--because Gygax advocated there, even if that was not always his position, that the DM should be a passive-aggressive bellend, manipulating players, refusing to speak honestly with them but instead punishing them and assuming they'll be "smart enough" to figure it out on their own.That's not a slam-dunk about what D&D inherently is. It's simply a demonstration of a historical fact: D&D has had bad, harmful DM behaviors going all the way back to its very roots--and sometimes those behaviors were actually enshrined in the rules themselves. Different rules, different advice, can produce better outcomes.</blockquote>

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