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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="WizarDru" data-source="post: 1591753" data-attributes="member: 151">Idle thoughts:   1. Gary defined what role-playing was to the first great influx of players of the game. His name was attached to the most famous milestones of the game's early genesis, and was widely held as the 'father' of the game. It was a perspective fostered by EGG's appearances all over the place. First quoted was usually only quoted. When D&D was huge and Nickelodeon was relatively new, Nick had a talk show called Livewire that addressed a lot of topics it probably wouldn't touch today...and one of them was D&D. Three guesses who the main guest advocate on the show was (first two don't count). For a great many years, EGG WAS D&D.  Not the only person by any means, but the big burritto, the 'go to' guy, Mr. Big.  I learned from Moldvay, but I knew Gygax.   2. Richard Garfield makes games. It's what he does, and he doesn't much care for the spotlight. Magic: The Gathering was the second product he pitched to WotC, after they decided to take a wait-and-see attitude for RoboRally. After Magic, he was right on to developing The Great Dalmuti and lots of quickie card games. He's not the showman that EGG is, nor does he care to be.   3. D&D might have happened with someone else at the helm, but I don't think so, and certainly not as it is today. One might argue that EGG's talents as the guiding hand for the product line even more important to the brand than his mechanical contributions. Few others had the dedication or desire to pull D&D through to it's point. That EGG made some, in hindsight, poor business decisions and partnerships is irrelevant to contribution he and many others made to the game. I'm sure others would have developed the basic idea of the RPG over time...but I think a lot of factors converged to create the massive success that D&D would spawn...and EGG was a significant one of those.   4. D&D has evolved for many years without EGG, and not to it's detriment. I appreciate his contribution, but his desires and goals from the game are not mine, and his style is not mine. I can respect the man and give him his propers without agreeing with him. And, to be clear, in many cases I truly don't.   5. Avalon Hill DID have an RPG, called Powers & Perils. It was a confusing mess, as I recall, but it had some great ideas that would be better implemented later on.   6. People often forgot that the actual inventor of a thing is often in dispute, moreso the further back in time you go. Good ideas aren't always unique to one person and can develop in parallel, as the existence of several other RPGs atests. Few people agree over the actual inventor of certain technologies, Bell and the phone being a legendary example of contentiousness. Ever read about the Smithsonian's vendetta against the Wright Brothers and their subsequent decades-long battle to restore the truth?   7. The one thing I really like about ENWorld? It's that it's one of the best moderated, most discussion-friendly places on the web. Pettiness does not become us, and consideration and tolerance of new members should be the rule of the day. Everyone is a newbie at some point, and not all of us joined the hobby in 1979. (mods, feel free to take a bow...you deserve it.)  8.  Much more alternative game systems exist and have existed, and generally found only cult status or little acceptance.  I'm not really sure what direction RPGs could take that would be recognizable as one, though I'd be glad to see.  Games like Everway, Castle Falkenstein and Amber certainly were mechanically different, but even they were fundamentally very similar to D&D at the root level.  The same could be said for many LARPs.</blockquote>

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