NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7012889" data-attributes="member: 82106">I think that's not really a very supportable thesis. Gary Gygax was the author of MANY products, a lot of which sold quite well. He was clearly capable of taking an idea and boiling it down from concept to something that people could read and play, even if it wasn't always the MOST coherent in all its details. I also think you are treading on dangerous ground when you attribute any specific element of D&D particularly to one of either Gygax or Arneson. Arneson had the germ of the idea, and translated it into something he could play himself. What exactly that was is open to a lot of debate. Arneson also basically never produced a finished publishable game product. It seems fair to say, IMHO that Gary was capable of taking a project to completion and Dave wasn't really. He came up with at least the one key idea of the game, and certainly some of the specific elements that made up OD&D (but which ones we can't say for sure). There were clearly other ideas that Dave had that Gary axed, and we don't really know if those were good or bad ideas. Honestly, a perusal of Blackmoor doesn't really impress me that much. The two classes it provides, Monk and Assassin, are both problematic in various ways. They diverge from the existing pattern of other classes for no discernible reason in ways that are rather limiting for example. The Monk is also underpowered and lacks a coherent role, making it really rather unplayable as written. The Assassin is more playable, but the whole % assassination feature isn't appropriate to a PC, particularly in the context of OD&D. Clearly it at least shows that Dave had a very different style of game than Gary did! Then we have the whole hit location system, which is just about unplayable and not coherent with the rest of the highly abstracted combat system of D&D. Its telling that this system is basically THE one and only part of OD&D that makes no appearance in any later edition. I'd note that 1e pretty much completely rewrote the Specialists and Disease sections as well, though I don't see where Gary's versions are clearly better.It seems like a mediocre supplement. There are some good monsters, and it does contain the first real published TSR adventure, though as adventures go its pretty rough going! It seems to me, this being Dave's one and only unequivocal contribution to the corpus of the game beyond some unknown but significant percentage of the core rules, that all indications are D&D in total is more Gygax than Arneson.</blockquote>

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