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What is Gygaxian?


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Quasqueton

First Post
Which is also a Gygaxian quality.
That's the truth. He helped me build my vocabulary when I was younger, but now that I'm older (and a professional wordsmith, myself), reading his prose makes me laugh.

Quasqueton
 

Quasqueton

First Post
I think you'd have to ask Col. Pladoh what Gygaxian really means.
You'd get 1 fanboy telling you what he thinks it means in glowing terms, 2 fanboys jumping on you for asking the possibly insulting question, 3 fanboys using the post as a seque for asking EGG about liquor/food, and finally 1 post from Gygax quoting the first fanboy, saying he "pretty much has the right of it", and then 5 posts from Gygax responding to the liquor/food posts.

Quasqueton
 


Fedaric_the_Axe

First Post
Quasqueton said:
You'd get 1 fanboy telling you what he thinks it means in glowing terms, 2 fanboys jumping on you for asking the possibly insulting question, 3 fanboys using the post as a seque for asking EGG about liquor/food, and finally 1 post from Gygax quoting the first fanboy, saying he "pretty much has the right of it", and then 5 posts from Gygax responding to the liquor/food posts.

Quasqueton

And then there is the anti-fan boy fan boy that posts about the fan boys. Geesh.
 


Sundragon2012

First Post
I have to preface this by again saying that I appreciate Gary creating D&D in the first place and that I have nothing against him as a person.

Having said that....

What is it that is so compelling about Gygax except the romance of old familiar names like Xagyg and Mordenkainen or the broken bindings of your lovingly fondled 1ed DM's guide with the efreet on the cover? In fact I think that the 1e DM's Guide was more interesting by far than the later incarnations of the same book. There was cool, obscure stuff in that book.

When people talk about gygaxian I see a set of assumptions that seem IMO reminiscent of the RPing experiences of adolescents at best and my brother and I at 11 at worst. I am not trying to be insulting, but the things I read about Gary's campaigns ie. the nazi soldiers in a dungeon and other wacky crap seems to me about as similar to mature RPing as Hercules, The Legendary Journeys is to real greek mythology. I'm not even talking about some pretentious "mature" role playing, I am talking about:

Dungeons that have a reason to exist.
Monsters with ecologies that seem believable.
Paladins who do more than kill critters in holes in the ground because their detect evil ability rang off.
Actual 3-D characters who have motivations outside of their next gold piece.
Naming conventions that are believable within their millieu.
Moral complexity to plotlines.
Internally consistant environments.

And so on...

I'm not claiming that none of Gary's stuff was deeper, but that which is considered gygaxian seems well......very unsophisticated and a throwback to a time when gaming was just starting out and its potentials were far from realized. There is an old phrase that goes like this, "You can never go home." In gaming, I would take this to mean that even though we have wonderful memories of old gaming experiences, those experiences have been romanticized somewhat and that going back to those times really isn't possible because we mature and our tastes mature and change.

Some things, like Drawmij and Gygaxite deserve a fond spot in our memories but that IMO is where they belong.


Chris
 
Last edited:

ThirdWizard

First Post
Fedaric_the_Axe said:
Can anyone show me an RPG where this is NOT possible? If you think that this is Gygaxian then you are sorely mistaken my friend. I can have just the same amount of Charcter development in Gygaxian than I can with d20. I don't need to have a rule for this kind of activity, maybe you do but not me.

Part right, part wrong.

You're thinking of this as an OD&D vs 3.X debate when its not, as you are comparing Gygaxian to d20. You're right in that you can have a character driven rolepalying game in any system. You're wrong in thinking that a character driven roleplaying game will be anything close to Gygaxian. You can run a Gygaxian game in Vampire. You can't run a Gygaxian game centered around political intrigue. As soon as the game starts go toward character development as any kind of important aspect of the game, you are no longer Gygaxian. Unfortunately, I don't know a term that would be the antithesis of Gygaxian off the top of my head.
 

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