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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mannahnin" data-source="post: 9184442" data-attributes="member: 7026594">Yes, "Gygaxian" is a modifier describing at least a couple of different things.Gygaxian Prose tends to be purple, highly ornamented, and shows off the writer's vocabulary and knowledge of obscure and archaic terminology. It often uses circumlocutory phrasing.[ISPOILER] ("Assassins are evil in alignment (perforce, as the killing of humans and other intelligent life forms for the purpose of profit is basically held to be the antithesis of weal)."[/ISPOILER] Some folks have theorized that it reflects Gygax being sensitive about his own lack of higher education, and wanting to assert his intelligence, especially since he was often keeping company with people who had done formal advanced study of the same historical subjects he was interested in. It's also definitely reflective of the prose styles of at least one of his favorite authors- Jack Vance. Possibly also Clark Ashton Smith, though CAS was left out of Appendix N, which has been debated whether its an oversight by OSR nerds for many years. <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=":)" />Gygaxian Naturalism usually refers to the effort to make a fantasy world seem more realistic and have nods to things like ecology.  Examples include the trolls in Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth (IIRC) which he tells us subsist on giant cave crickets in a neighboring cavern.  Or the chapel Frank Mentzer added to The Keep on the Borderlands after noticing that there was a priest but no chapel, a correction Gygax agreed with as fixing an oversight.  Or the monster lairs in The Caves of Chaos having guard posts, sleeping chambers, mates and young.  Or the pages in the 1E DMG where Gary writes a detailed description of an ogre treasure horde, full of trade goods and mundane items as well as valuables, to make the horde look plausibly like something the ogres would have gotten from raiding merchant caravans and such.  Or the detailed descriptions he gives in the DMG about how different monster lairs will respond proactively, augment defenses, and react with increased organization (or not) to repeated assaults by a group of adventurers who return to town to rest and heal after a first attack.  Gary wanted his worlds to feel logical and verisimilitudinous, and his players to be able to make logical deductions and decisions within the context of that world.That latter leads us to Gygaxian Skilled Play, a concept of the kind of play Gary found really stimulating and exciting and clever.  In which players use their acquired knowledge of the game world and rules to solve puzzles and tackle problems, and adapt to new surprises (like "gotcha" monsters).  And their knowledge of things like, e.g. military tactics to anticipate and counter things like those aforementioned monster lair defensive strategies I mentioned above, from the DMG.Yeah, "looping" is one of the closest.  There are other kinds of nonlinear dungeons.I don't think a starfish or dendritic layout reflects Jaquays' design principles which the original article exalts.  Part of the point of a Jaquays dungeon is that it contains loops and the ability to encounter stuff in different order.  Depending on which ways the PCs go, they may have SEVERAL different orders in which they can encounter various rooms and locations.  Combine that with multiple entrances, so even the first room/area encountered can vary. And multiple and tastefully-deployed vertical connections between levels, so areas can be circumnavigated vertically as well as horizontally, and approached from different directions that way too.If you haven't read the <a href="https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/13085/roleplaying-games/xandering-the-dungeon" target="_blank">original articles</a>, I recommend them.  All the cool ideas that <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/jaquaying-the-dungeon-a-term-to-avoid.700821/post-9183122" target="_blank">Charlequin listed a few posts ago</a>, including looping options and paths, verticality, and multiple entrances, which Jaquays starting using in dungeons like Caverns of Thracia back in the 70s were IME a bit more advanced and thoughtful than most attempts even at non-linear dungeons.  She had a TON of neat ideas and she had them really early.  IMO she deserves the credit.</blockquote>

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