Okay.
So, as someone relatively new to D&D, I've noticed this underlaying hatred of Gygax from older players; almost on the level of old anime fans and the guy who created Robotech.
Why is that? I know he left TSR or something at the end of the 80s thanks to the Satanic Scare and created Tomb of Horrors to fuck with his own personal That Guy, but what's the real reason everyone hates the guy?
You're mistaking a vocal minority and people making it into a meme for an underlying trend.
Gygax designed some real bullshit, but I don't think people really seriously hate him, they were just salty that they fell for yet another cursed treasure style trap.
So people are mad because they're basically bad at dungeon-crawlers?
He should be respected for what he did (form the foundation of gaming that influenced both tabletops and gaming from start to present), but his individual works should be recognized for the flaws they have (bizarre and unintuitive design, ad-hoc rulings being printed as official rules, the entirety of the alignment system, etc.) and his others failings should be recognized, as well (childish clashing with Dave Arneson, poor money management and business decisions, bizarre splitting of Basic and Advanced, those grumpy-old-man posts he made on ENworld).
>alignment system
>bad
Oh boy, here comes another MUH MORAL GRAY poster.
Keep in mind that people played competitive D&D at conventions, with tournament rules and everything. It was a very different game, and a lot of D&D's core audience today would not enjoy it very much due to the departure in tone and playstyle.
That said, it's not as common as you probably think.
Those were tournament modules, the actual games Gygax ran, he was a softy.
Gygax's main problems are growing pains. Most people forget that RPGs were an offshoot of wargaming.
Hatred is a strong fucking term.
Most bitching I've seen here is from people still pissed his is treated as word of God.
It's like they don't understand.
>grumpy-old-man posts he made on ENworld
Those were some damn good posts, necessary for stopping autism. People have forgotten about them, and with the death of the author autism came reeeing back.
I have heard that newer players thinking that a character living a full and healthy life full of crazy adventure is a misinterpretation of old players being fond of their characters from back in the day actually surviving long enough to have a bunch of cool stories and them retiring them once they became too strong.
I'm guessing tournament/competitive play was a "race to the finish" style?
Yeah as stated already OP:
The real reason everyone hates the gary? They don't.
People bitch about some aspects, that's it. You are quite simply mistaken.
I don't hate Gygax but BD&D is better than AD&D (and BD&D settings run using OD&D plus some splats is best of all).
He's a cool guy, seeing as he created roleplaying games as we know it. We could have gotten someone way, way worse. The AD&D DMG might even be a prime reason why roleplaying games still exist and didn't end up just as a fad.
It's just that his writing is pretty messy and he could sometimes make some pretty weird design decisions of which some, because of AD&D's immense popularity and influence, still stick around in many aspects of the RPG community as a whole.
Abolishing cruel and unusual punishment was a mistake.
That's not how it works though. Historians suspect that rape rates in medieval times were at least 400% of what it is today.
Pretty hard to prove someone is a rapist when you literally have to catch people red-handed.
Doesn't mean abolishing cruel and unusual punishment wasn't a mistake.
All those kinds of punishments do is turn criminals in death seekers and put cops unnecessarily in harms way.
>oh shit, i accidentally shot that mall cop
>and now the cops are after me
>might as well grab all my mags and my ar and just keep killing cops until they shoot me
But that's what happens now.
You can't tell me it's more of a disincentive to get scalped than it is to be dressed in orange clothing and given a home to live in.
>But that's what happens now.
Not as often as you think.
fuck off
>Oh boy, here comes another MUH MORAL GRAY poster.
Not that guy, but I loathe alignment for the simple fact that you cannot fit complex characters into one of nine boxes without going "Oh it's just tendencies" so hard it's effectively pointless. That and DMs attempting to use alignment shifts as a stick to beat disruptive players with when they're not using classes with alignment restrictions. Oh, and the fact that literally no one agrees on what the fuck the chaotic-lawful axis actually means, and neutrality jsn't much better. Alignment is either dumb and intrusive or it's vestigial and literally just meaningless words on your sheet.