Transformers Producer Enters Into Deal With Gygax Estate To "Oversee The Gygax Catalog"

His forum posts badly explaining alignment and showing what a bitter old man he became in the 90s and 00s?

,,, I'd rather spend time with my grandfather and father for my dose of old man.

Scores me family points.

Not at all, I'm just saying that I doubt his 'body of work' is composed of anything substantial. D&D is an amazing creation, no one here is doubting that, but the rules themselves are often erratically designed and the writing is simply not that great (though the latter, again, tends to be much better in an actual adventure instead of a rulebook).

It's also not part of the Gygax Catalog, due to Gygax giving the ownership to TSR, TSR kicking him out, and TSR exploding and WotC picking up the rights.

I know. His actually prolific work is not publishable by this new deal, so what remains is (unless he got better, which I doubt) erratically designed, poorly written rules, and (hopefully!) some decent adventures.

And yet somehow everything Gygax has ever written seems to magically solve at least half the shitposts on Veeky Forums if anyone had bothered to read him in the first place.

Samefag here. Yes. I said everything and I'm sticking to it. Including grocery lists. Don't pretend you're all shocked about it either.

Not once have I ever seen an example of this. In any case, it's foolish to put his work on some pedestal at this point just because he co-wrote D&D. I'd be more interested in his work at a historical level.

.... What system would the adventures use?

His work "at a historical level" makes him worthy of the pedestal.

What, you didn't contribute to the memorial? Typical entitlement mentality.

Example: Why can't I play as a monster?

Gygax addressed that.

Example: Fudging dice.

Gygax addressed that.

No clue what Gygax worked on after he was ejected from TSR.

No post-D&D work, hell any post 1e work period, of Gygax's is worthy of a pedestal of any sort.

Lots of people have addressed those things. Some of the best rulebooks I have read have said 'fuck it, play as a monster if you want'. That Gygax was the first to address it doesn't make his addressment the best or an absolute.

It is a fact that Gygax was very much so a 'control freak' regarding his rules and wanted objectivity for adventure consistency and tournament play.

Legendary Adventures, Cyborg Commando, a bunch of unofficial AD&D shit, and Dangerous Journeys.

Hell, 4e released some playable NPC's that half use the PC rules and half use the monster rules to make a playable monsters, including succubi, friendly owlbears and so on.

They explicitly don't have advancement, but that's just them inheriting 4e's monster rules.

>Lots of people have addressed those things.
Yes, and creatively so out of their ass. Gygax did it first; authoritatively.

All I remember about those is people saying Cyborg Commando wasn't very good.

>It is a fact that Gygax was very much so a 'control freak'

It's called leadership. Something you kids wouldn't recognize.

If you do it first, but do it badly, it doesn't fucking matter that people copied you and made it better.

All art is creative copying.

>They explicitly don't have advancement

If no advancement, then why play? Oh yeah, I forgot, because snowflakes need to be more special than all the other players.

>If you do it first, but do it badly,

Purely subjective assessment noted.

Shut up, cuck.

>badly explaining alignment

To be fair, you being unable to understand doesn't mean his explanations were bad.

The 9 Gygaxian alignments were much more general, and had to be since an alignment was something you're not going to change often. He erred on the side of letting players interpret alignments more freely. How bitterly misanthropic do you have to be to not like that?

They're for companion characters.

Because someone wants to play for a session and then go?

Or you want to introduce a player to the combat without hacking up a new PC?

As a person who doesn't really like the creation process of games, but the actual game itself, knowing that the basic combat for the game is fun is important.

>tournament play.
> D&D

How was this supposed to work ?

>"On occasion one player or another will evidence a strong desire to operate as a monster, >conceiving a playable character as a strong demon, a devil, a dragon, or one of the most powerful >sort of undead creatures. This is done principally because the player sees the desired monster >character as superior to his or her peers and likely to provide a dominant role for him or her in the >campaign. A moment of reflection will bring them to the unalterable conclusion that the game is >heavily weighted towards mankind."

IOW, you're a goddamn munchkin if you allow monsterfags, furfags, etc.

>"Those works which do not feature mankind in a central role are uncommon. Those which do not >deal with men at all are scarce indeed. To attempt to utilize any such bases as the central, let >alone sole, theme for a campaign milieu is destined to be shallow, incomplete, and totally >unsatisfying for all parties concerned unless the creator is a Renaissance Man and all-around >universal genius with a decade or two to prepare the game and milieu."

IOW, this type of player is in the middle of such an existential crisis as to not even identify as a human being anymore. Sounds like many of the people I run into at cons nowadays.

>"The less intelligent players who demand to play monster characters regardless of obvious >consequences will soon remove themselves from play in any event, for their own ineptness will >serve to have players or monsters or traps finish them off."

>Gary Gygax, 1979

Since that's all anyone plays them for, is pure edge value. Too busy trying to impress everyone at the table to actually create a character.

You have a bunch of groups doing a module at the same time. You score points for certain things. Highest points wins. Look up the C-series modules for more details, they're all tourney ones.

Stuff like Tomb of Horrors, which can be seen as either difficult or cheap on death, were originally made for tournaments where teams of players would sit down with a DM and run through a module. Those who would get the farthest and reach parameters like 'least dead characters' would be the winners.

Compare that with OD&D, five years earlier.
>sure you can play a monster, but it has to start off weak and grow stronger

AD&D was the first attempt -- EVER -- to make an RPG system that was standardized so that you could join someone else's group and actually know how to play it. Similary, the Dungeon Master's Guide was the first of its kind -- EVER -- as far as a ... guide for an RPG referee.

Additionally, you seem to be deeply confused. Those posts you responded to were referring to 4e companion characters which are very minor and simplified NPCs.

Oh shit, the god changed his mind.

Personally, if I was a DM, I'd like to talk to any players that want to play a monster and have some limits.

(No, you can't be the 4 by 4 Ooze monster, the stats aren't really adaptable into playable character, and if you really want to be sapient slime, just play a friggin' shardmind and I'll let you tweak it a bit)

As a player, I won't play a non-standard character without being provided it, but for a session, there was a good reason I had to be the red dragon, I'd fucking do it.

Is "we're playing Council of Wyrms" a good enough reason to play a red dragon?

Eh, possibly.

I have no idea what "Council of Wyrms" is

Council of Wyrms is a 2e supplement where you play dragons. You also have a minion character to go do normal adventurer stuff like looking for gold for the dragon character to sleep on, but the emphasis is on the dragon.

>Council of Wyrms is a 2e supplement where you play dragons

Nope, not good enough. Playing a dragon is still munchkinry of the highest level.

>Oh shit, the god changed his mind.

No. user #1 was quoting Eric Holmes and didn't know it. He was acting out of desperation and you happened to get fished in.

A Centaur, for mechanics purposes, is a human with an extended cab. A werebear is like a single-option druid. Problem?

How can that be user #1?

You are user #1.

Fuck it.

You don't mix the dragons and the regular adventurers. Dragon PC is for dragon things, minion PC is for normal things.

Well, yes. This, as well as the fact that the supplement was broken as fuck. But there were signs 2nd ed was going downhill long before this.

>Honestly, as much as I love Gary, he was a fairly subpar designer
Stopped reading. Opinion discarded.

Sounds interesting.

If I didn't do it, it would have nothing to do with the concept (and playing a red dragon), just execution and the group I was doing it with.

Is #1 OD&D man? Because I thought OD&D was an Arneson and Gygax job.

I am user #1 as concerns quality control.

I was referring to user #1 in succession of order.

>D&D is an amazing creation, no one here is doubting that,
The fuck? Did I step into a bizarro Veeky Forums?

Can I stay here forever?

No, I'm user #1

>he co-wrote D&D
>Implying Arneson ever did anything besides drink company soda

That dude wasn't even a good Ideas Guy, all he ever came up with was blackmoor and the assbackwards mistake that was AC.

>"At the Dungeon Master's discretion a character can be anything his or her player wants him to be. Characters must always start out inexperienced and relatively weak and build on their experience. Thus, an expedition might include, in addition to the four basic classes and races (human, elven, dwarven, halflingish), a centaur, a lawful werebear, and a Japanese Samurai fighting man."

>Eric Holmes 1977

NOT Gygax, who overruled this in '79. And for good reason, because players were drifting away from humanocentric characters and trying to exploit Holmes' good nature.

In so much as having negative AC be better than positive AC?

Sorry, yeah, I should have clarified that I meant specifically the unintuitive feature of making AC count backwards instead of forwards.

Yes-you-are, because they told you so in your special snowflake class. Don't forget to take your ritalin.

On-Topic: This is a must read.

If you have not read it, you might as well leave the thread.

Every day D&D becomes more and more normalized.

It's going to be interesting to see where roleplaying goes in the future.

That's basically the same thing as what's in the '74 box set, so that doesn't come from Holmes.

>Five years earlier
So in other words, he tried it out, learned his lesson, and then tried to pass on his life-experience to us through his words of wisdom?

Got it, user.

...

I don't understand why a monster listing a to-hit bonus or to-hit penalty on its record sheet and the player listing the target number on his record sheet is so fundamentally mind blowing compared to a monster listing a target number on its record sheet and the player listing a to-hit bonus or penalty on his record sheet.

>"I also thing torturing people and slaveholding is natural and good for LG in my setting."

-Gary "Natural 20 to Justify Means" Gygax

So he's either admitting it's a development error, or someone else's fault. Point being that Gygax has the experience and the seniority to say so.

That is, if you can be bothered to cough up the actual quote.

What the hell does two direction mean in this context?

Do you mean rolling two dice?

Eh, not really.

Roll enough dice and you will get the average roll for the die size * the number of dice + or - nothing really interesting.

Oh man, that's rich. Source?

because people can't handle negative numbers.

It's that simple.

Dice used to be less reliable than they are now (well, the more expensive ones, anyway).

In order to avoid blaming the dice (because back then dice were utter shit as well as HTF), one had to roll over their saving throws and under their ability scores.

^ And since no one knew when a player had to roll what (not even the DM), this ad hoc solution worked just fine until Lou Zocchi came along.

And there are dice collectors that don't even believe him!

Gary originally only had Law and Chaos in D&D. Good and Evil were only added in later. based on Gary's understanding of the Law/Chaos axis I could see how he might end up there.

Also Gary treated alignment a bit like Asimov treated the Three Laws of Robotics. He came up with a cool idea then spent years finding the cracks in it.

True. I didn't want to pile on the fact that players tend to be less math-literate nowadays.

Higher numbers are better numbers for everything except AC, where lower numbers are better. It's jarring.

>unintuitive feature of making AC count backwards instead of forwards

It's not unintuitive if you think of AC 1 as being 1st Class Armor.

Oh fuck, don't bring up goddamn gamescience dice. It's the gamer equivalent of the anti-vaxxer movement.

As it becomes more normalized, more and more women are going to be involved with it. That will bring in dudebros who are chasing the women, and the actual hobbyists will leave since they don't want to be around the dudebros. Since the women don't really want to be there if they aren't going to be worshipped by the hobbyists and don't want to be pursued all the time by the dudebros, they'll leave as well. Then the dudebros will leave, since the women are no longer present.

And then the hobby itself will have died, like so many others before it, all because normal people had to get interested in it.

If you can't handle adding or subtracting negative numbers, you aren't smart enough for this hobby.

Dude, It's not math literacy, it's the ability to compute in your head.

We don't need to subtract numbers that often in modern society, so we don't.

Honestly, there are other areas I would rather stretch my math brain in, so I do.

Men and Magic, bottom of page 8, under Other Character Types.

well meme'd

Have you considered actually going outside and talking to people for once?

That's like saying that Newton was a shitty physicist because he didn't understand the universe as well as later scientists would. Gary was a trailblazer, and without the benefit of thirty plus years of hindsight the rules he came up with were damn good.

Not talking about the old modules, but my old LGS used to do regular "tournaments" where a bunch of players would do a one-off and vote for the MVP at the end. It worked well with that group since nobody was enough of a shit to vote for themselves.

Eh, Newton has some massive holes in his work.

Insisting that light was in particles, and not waves.

Sure, laws of motion were good, but we shouldn't pretend that all of his work is worth well.

At least laws of motion are fairly concise and so can be easily translated for new eras.

If the die floats. . .

Pretty much this.

Math in RPGs needs to be kept as simple as possible. Not because it's "too hard" for people, but because it's faster. The more calculations, and the more complex they are, the longer calculation heavy segments take (typically combat). This takes away from time better spent on RPing or doing cool shit.

Addition is the easiest for people to do. It doesn't matter whether you belong in Mensa or on a short bus, addition is faster. Not by a lot usually, but it adds up over a session.

Why didn't you just post the actual meme instead of having to type all that shit? Was it cathartic for you or something?

He could have copy pasted some bits.

Awesome. So he's either admitting it's a development error, or someone else's fault (probably Arneson). Point being that Gygax has the experience and the seniority to say so.

it'd help if you read the 1e DMG explanation of the alignments, genius. Not to mention he was the inventor of the concept of "Lawful Good" and so can define it however he likes

Dude hasn't been in the trenches as a player.

>Eh, Newton has some massive holes in his work.

And we landed on the moon with it regardless. You can GTFO now.

bullshit.

You pronounce .gif like gift.

What if you really don't want to play with people who just got off a short bus?

Think of it as a literacy test for voting.

>Eh, Newton has some massive holes in his work.

>Casually dismissing one of the most influential scientists in history as if you could have done better

Gr8 b8 m8 I r8 8/8.

Because I couldn't find the image.

And just because it's a meme doesn't mean it's not true. Only because this gives context, I'm a girl who's watched a good half-dozen college groups get killed by the exact process laid out in the meme. Pretty girls (of which I am not) come in because they hear the game is fun, they get chased in, and the people who just like to roll dice and tell stories get pushed out or leave from frustration.

Plenty of girls play D&D and other RPGs.

The "g" in ".gif" stands for "general," therefore "gif" is pronounced like "jiff."