Was he a hack?

Was he a hack?

No.

Sort of.

He was BASED.

Yes

I don't know

He was a product of his time. He was a very charismatic, well meaning guy who none the less had some flawed and I dare say wrong ideas about how table top games should be played.

He's also kind of the Freud of TTRPGs. He laid a lot of the ground work and paved the way for those who would come after and build bigger and better things, but compared to those later works a lot of his ideas just seem bad and antiquated.

Like as not, without him we likely wouldn't have traditional gaming and all that goes with it, including Veeky Forums so, (if nothing else) for that I salute him.

He is one of the people who laid the foundations of our hobby. He has had tremendous influence and continues to be imitated by others.

tl,dr: No.

The founding father. We can do better, but we can't do without.

His ideas, although groundbreaking at the time, have become outdated as the field of game design has advanced. He's the Plato of gaming, his ideas are incredibly influential, and transformed the face of gaming, but if anyone actually puts them into practice nowadays then they're really behind.

>He laid a lot of the ground work and paved the way for those who would come after and build bigger and better things, but compared to those later works a lot of his ideas just seem bad and antiquated.
This.

Though Dave Arneson probably did more to shape tabletop RPGs as we know them today than Gygax did and doesn't get nearly enough credit for it.

...

Ehhhh, probably more like every week.

You're judging a pioneer by the standards of a culture that has grown over 30+ years. You're like those faggots that complain about videogames from 95 having shit graphics.

user, he was active within tabletop RPG till final years of his life.
And he was utter shit.

Do you think gaming is 40 years old?

...

Conan for the NES has worse graphics than Super Mario Brothers, also for the NES.

I wouldn't say he was "utter shit" so much as a relic of the past struggling to still be relevant in a hobby that's grown beyond him.

Yes, moving on

... which "utter shit" summarises in two words

To elaborate
If he just went on retirement, he could leave pretty based legacy. But because he was insisting on remaining in the hobby till his final months, he only keep embarassing himself for last decade or so, showing everyone how out of touch he is and how he doesn't even understand the shit he's supposedly responsible for. He burned out his entire legacy and credit of trust, then still kept pushing.
And then died, leaving nothing behind, aside those repetitive threads.

No, of course not. I should have said "gaming as we know it" wouldn't exist without him.

No, rather the opposite of one. He took a bunch of disparate ideas and created a uniform framework that has been used by every roleplaying game since then.
He more or less created this hobby.
And as for D&D itself it has never been as huge as when he was in charge. It was being stocked at fucking wallmart and featured in E.T. the highest grossing film of all time between 1982 and 1993.

>have become outdated as the field of game design has advanced.
It's regressed if anything. Which is why so many people decided to say fuck it and just went back to playing the old games, the old way. Not only D&D but Runequest, Traveller and so on.

The fuck do you mean?

Why should someone who built an entire hobby ever leave it?

Why would said pioneer ever care for the new shit others make?

How can anyone burn their legacy? IIt's not like every book of AD&D went into flames.

Explain yourself.

>But because he was insisting on remaining in the hobby till his final months, he only keep embarassing himself for last decade or so
What?
He made a dime, hung out with old friends, ran games and went to the same conventions he always did, the one he founded.
Honestly I can't comprehend the kind of retardation required to think like this. Did you come here from a mental ward? RPG.net?

>Being this tier deluded

He was a hackmaster.

>Guy just wants people to have fun
Nope.

>outdated
>old

Can someone break down the teleology of gaming? What's the goal here? What is gaming "progress" and the metric thereof?

>OSR is a huge enough chunk of the D&D players that 5E explicitly went back to a ton of old stuff
>Runequest basically threw away the excellent 6th edition rules, which have now become their own thing, to go back and make what they call "2.5E"
>Mongoose Traveller 1E and the upcoming 2E are pretty much poorly edited slightly expanded version of Classic Traveller
>The holders of the Vampire license are talking about going back to the White Wolf era stuff
>The original creator of Call of Cthulhu was brought back to make sure the new edition was even made

Did he invent card games too? What about tactical board games?