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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Willie the Duck" data-source="post: 9658988" data-attributes="member: 6799660">Glad you included the specifier. He certainly didn't do the Dungeon&Wilderness Guides or Dragonlance/Greyhawk setting hardcovers, nor Manual of the Planes, Fiend Folio, or Deities & Demigods/Legends & Lore. It's become clear that Zeb Cook did much if not most if not all of Oriental Adventures, and Unearthed Arcana is mostly a collection of articles (some of which EGG wrote, to be fair). I'll agree that what we'd now call the core 3 are very clearly Gary's writing (so much so that they are notable in their use of 'Gygaxian prose'). Honestly moreso than oD&D, which feels more like a (n incomplete) summation of playtest findings collected by Gygax. I do think there's more nuance in the statement that we shouldn't treat the person and the edition as the same, though. Gygax contained multitudes, and only himself as a point in time truly aligned with 1e AD&D -- and particularly the AD&D that existed flowing from his pen (/typewriter) as he was writing these books. Even during the 1e era he vacillated wildly in thoughts on the importance of DM impartiality and other important game qualities. Y'know, given the back and forth right before your post, I'm inclined to say, 'yes, he should be acknowledged. He was in fact there.' He was there, and things would look different without him. I say that because, well, remember Gronan? One and only person who was in both Gary and Dave's playtest groups -- at least  only one who then had any presence in the D&D community into the online era? He would occasionally drift into one-true-wayism or kids-these-days-isms, but in general he just wanted it acknowledged that he had this little claim to fame as being present when something big (within our trivial little pursuit) happened. He drifted away from the community during the pandemic for reasons unknown. I have mixed feelings (he did have some real self-inflicted dustups over the years), but generally miss him and think that -- of all the things he might have wanted -- acknowledgement of that small part of the story was not an unreasonable desire. I think we owed him that, and that much we owe Gary as well. Yes, Gary is a complicated individual with a lot of (increasingly visible) flaws. However, he was there, and he did do the things he did (yes, tautologically impossible not to be true. You get my point). Yes, many of them could have been done by others (and maybe would have, perhaps even at a similar time). But he did them. He deserves acknowledgement, nothing more or less.Where I shift back to OP's point, is the use of Gary in support (or just framing) of anything else (usually an argument in favor of/against something, or in how something ought to be). There, one should recognize just how little that acknowledgement means towards anything else. That anything past that mere acknowledgement requires a logical argument as to its relevance or support to the point at hand. The most obvious (in my mind) case would be arguing for something to be the way to play D&D 'as Gary intended it.' This ought immediately call up the two responses of 1) 'how do you figure?,' and more importantly 2) 'so what/yes, and?'</blockquote>

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