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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mannahnin" data-source="post: 9659832" data-attributes="member: 7026594">The comic books were a story in Slaying the Dragon.  TSR West (under Flint Dille, as I recall) was working on multiple different media properties, none of which worked out.  DC was uninterested in doing Buck Rogers, so TSR tried doing it themselves.  They came up with the concept of a "comic book module" as a combined story plus game content in comic book form, to be distributed in comic shops and anywhere a comic could be.  They tried to justify this as not being the same thing as a comic book and thus not in conflict with their licensing agreement with DC, but DC was unhappy and that experiment wound up crashing their relationship.[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.dicebreaker.com/series/dungeons-and-dragons/feature/dnd-comic-books-failed-attempt-tsr-dc-comics[/URL]In 1974 and 1975 he was famously a cheerleader for the community's creativity.He said in the original 1974 rules there was no reason a player couldn't play as a dragon, as long as the referee made them start small/young and worked up advancement charts. In letters to Alarums & Excursions in '75 he opined that it would be boring if everyone's campaigns were similar, and gushed about how playing in Dave Arneson's campaign was fun because he didn't know how everything worked and it kept him on his toes. He also talked about how spell points would be a more flexible and logical system, but would be too complex and detailed, so they went with the simpler "Vancian" system for ease of use and playability.In columns in Dragon years later, after he started getting territorial and concerned that other publishers were ripping him off, he got negative about variants like Warlock, or Dungeons & Beavers, as the Cal-Tech house rules were sometimes called.  In the AD&D DMG he expressed pessimistic views about monster PCs and advised DMs to strictly enforce limits and downsides for them.  He also expressed a pretty firm opinion that critical hits were a bad idea for D&D, but I wouldn't call him vicious about it.  See the text on page 61:</blockquote>

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