Jon Peterson discusses the origins of Rule Zero on his blog. It featured as early as 1978 in Alarums & Excursions #38.
A crap game compared to what? Was there anything like it in 1974? I tend to put more stock in opinions from the same era of the work that was produced. If OD&D was a terrible system, or thought of as a terrible system, it wouldn't have spread like wildfire.
Truth.
By today's design standards OD&D's system was a bit pants. But as a game it was lightning in a bottle.
By the time The Modvay B/X hit - no can defend...
While general play/design preferences have changed, B/X are quite playable games RAW..
And even though RQ landed in 78, it went in a direction that would not compete with D&D.
A crap game compared to what? Was there anything like it in 1974? I tend to put more stock in opinions from the same era of the work that was produced. If OD&D was a terrible system, or thought of as a terrible system, it wouldn't have spread like wildfire.
The original game did everything we (see below for who "we" were) needed it to do in 1974. That's not "a crap game".
OD&D is a bad game by the standard of modern game design. It's not a fair comparison as TTRPG design was in its infancy. It's not fair to rate OD&D based on games that game decades after it when game design developed.
As you point out, D&D had no competition back in 1974 because it was the first of its kind. And as it was the first, there was no standard by which it could be judged. So if you want to say the rules were crap it begs the question, compared to what? I do not believe the general consensus of contemporaries believed the game to be crap, and, if it was the general consensus, I do not believe D&D would have become popular.Yeah it would, because as the prior poster put it it had no competition. It was conceptual wildfire, and its substandard mechanical structure couldn't hurt that.
As you point out, D&D had no competition back in 1974 because it was the first of its kind. And as it was the first, there was no standard by which it could be judged. So if you want to say the rules were crap it begs the question, compared to what? I do not believe the general consensus of contemporaries believed the game to be crap, and, if it was the general consensus, I do not believe D&D would have become popular.
I didn't say you compared it to modern games. I'm just saying by modern standards, OD&D would unfairly be rated as bad as it leaned hard on Rule Zero to get its cobbled together sets of rules to work.I'm not. I'm comparing it to other games that were contemporaries of related but similar types (referee administered wargames) or RPGs of very near vintage where, while you could argue they had D&D to learn from, but they certainly weren't decades along. TSR itself produced games with better and more coherent design at the time; heck, Chainmail was a better game.
What D&D had going for it was originality and hitting the zeitgeist.
Do you have evidence that there was a general consensus among contemporaries that the rules for D&D were crap compared to the more traditional war games? If you think they're crap, okay. Personally, I'd rather pop boils on my body with a crab fork than run AD&D games again so it's not like I'm a big fan of those old systems. But for the era they were produced, they weren't crap.Compared to even referee overseen wargames by the same company?
Do you have evidence that there was a general consensus among contemporaries that the rules for D&D were crap compared to the more traditional war games? If you think they're crap, okay. Personally, I'd rather pop boils on my body with a crab fork than run AD&D games again so it's not like I'm a big fan of those old systems. But for the era they were produced, they weren't crap.