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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mannahnin" data-source="post: 9450679" data-attributes="member: 7026594">Based on my reading and study, and a little bit of speculation, I'd guess that a combination of things went into it.  Gary failing to evolve in his gaming tastes and game ideas is, perhaps, in part being a prisoner of his own success.  Whether we credit the invention of the roleplaying game to Wesely or Arneson, Gary was the guy who made it a published product and blazed the trail in that.  He saw in that achievement the fulfillment of his life's dreams of being a Great Man and a financial success.  Able to live in one of those fancy mansions facing the lake he grew up admiring, able to hobnob with Hollywood producers, never needing to worry again about feeding or clothing his kids, having a drink with lunch, entertaining beautiful women, buying jewels or furs for his wife, or affording a driver to take him places.  After the initial few years of tireless promotion, encouraging people to innovate, and talking about how he and Dave's games ran very differently and so should other people's, he grew jealous of and threatened by rivalries.  From Arneson's lawsuits for royalties and credit, from bigger publishers or other conventions like Origins not giving him or "his" game respect.  From other people publishing new RPGs and profiting off "his" invention.  From the Blumes inside "his" own company owning more shares and thus having the ability to potentially take it all away from him.  I think he got really defensive psychologically, saw D&D as his Golden Ticket, and became more focused on keeping control of it and getting his royalties than on gaming in general.  I think these pressures stifled his creativity to a great degree.  When you've invented (or tell everyone, or truly think yourself) the First and Greatest of a whole new kind of game, the 800lb gorilla of an industry, what incentive do you really have to get into rival games or try to invent something better or different?  He spent the first half of the 80s mostly just trying to make money and keep control of TSR and D&D, while his family disintegrated around him to a significant extent (mother died in 1980, alcohol and other troubles leading to divorce in 1983), and wrote fewer and fewer game supplements. Once he was forced out in 1985, of course he tried to make some new games, but a lot of those did still seem stuck in the past.  When he discussed ideas for 2E AD&D they were pretty much just "compile all the existing stuff, edit it a little better, and add some new classes".  Cyborg Commando was spectacularly awful.  Dangerous Dimensions AKA Dangerous Journeys  notoriously doubled-down on every aspect of elaborate Gygaxian prose, arcane jargon, and unnecessarily complex mechanics that AD&D 1E had, and then was dogged by TSR lawsuits.  Some folks liked Lejendary Adventures and it was simpler and cleaner by comparison with DJ, but still I think a bit stuck in the past. Arneson, by comparison, had incentive to try to innovate.  He was arguing by '77 at latest (First Fantasy Campaign), that Gary had messed up his original ideas from Blackmoor and his original game was better than D&D.  OTOH, he never managed to publish anything substantive and compelling to an audience. 2E was, I think, handicapped a bit. The design was shaped by a couple of major factors.1. A mandate from above to maintain reverse compatibility with 1E AD&D products, which prevented them from making bigger changes.2. Some extensive customer surveying of existing players, which I think mostly captured the expressed desires of people who were already fanatically into the game.  I think the mistake of making 3d6 down the line (as in OD&D and the Basic/Expert and BECMI lines) once again the default ability score generation system, but retaining the more demanding ability score charts from AD&D which expected a more generous system, was likely a product of these surveys.  Hardcore players asking for a hardcore default version of the game.  To the detriment of, say, new players.Could you clarify how 2E made multiclassing and spellcasters better, in your opinion?  The biggest change I always think of there is that multiclassing Magic-Users got weaker because of the new armor restrictions.  2E has the strongest Thief prior to 3E.  Being able to get bonuses to your skills and to adjust/allocate points so you can specialize a bit and make yourself competent fairly quickly in a couple of them is an improvement over OD&D and 1E and the B/X and BECMI Thieves, IMO.  But yes, despite the poor Thieves, B/X is probably the pinnacle of TSR-era D&D.Yuuup.  Or things like "balancing" magic users by making them weak at low levels and overpowered at high levels.  That's just unbalanced in different ways at different times.  Or making demi-humans flatly better at low levels, that virtually everyone plays, and then bad at high levels which a small fraction of players actually play at.  That's the same "unbalanced in different ways at different times" issue, except that 80%+ of the players only experience one of them.There are a few really good games like this in the OSR space.  Willing to embrace newer and older ideas and integrate them without being too beholden to other mandates or priorities.</blockquote>

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