Was Gygax misunderstood?

Yesterday was the 10th anniversary of Gygax's death. Thinking about his career and legacy led me to the conclusion that a lot of his work is either misunderstood or done in opposite by the most people.
>Intended to create a sword and sorcery game
>People forcibly made it into the kitchen sink high-fantasy
>Run a lot of games in rules-light mode, rarely referenced rulebook, sometimes didn't even bring the book at all
>People thought that grognardy by-the-book attitude is the norm and the way it intended to be
>Didn't thought of maps and miniatures as a necessity, sometimes didn't use them at all, bookkeeping was easy-going
>People run their games as if it was a wargame, bookkeeping most of the times is very strict
>Did the design of old D&D editions in a relatively simple manner, and while some things were clunky and unbalanced, it was still easy to get into
>People in post-Gygax TSR created a mess that is AD&D2 on the top of his rules, and further on successors simply tried to rehash this mess with further editions only to get another mess
>Old D&D editions had the rules to negotiate with monsters, hit-points were the amalgamation of things like character's skill, experience, luck, divine intervention instead of "meat", alignments had somewhat different interpretations, martials were actually very powerful
>People inverted all of this for some reason

Gygax is by no mean the paragon of GMing and design, but why did aforementioned examples and the like turned out this way?

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>People played the game they fucking wanted to
Color me shocked

For the same reason OSR has been split into three threads at this point. People are stupid, you can't trust them as far as you can throw them, and Murphy's Law is a bitch.
In short, what the hell, what the fuck, somebody grab me a drink, and the world would all be better off if everyone on this board minded their own business instead of getting angry at everyone else's.

>People in post-Gygax TSR created a mess that is AD&D2 on the top of his rules
Implying that 1st edition isn't a mess of rules. And just looking at Unearthed Arcana, it's pretty easy to see how things were just getting more kludgy over time.

>run a tournament style dungeon
>make it difficult to the point of frustration, the fun is in the silly deaths as you grind on through
>people think his games are Tomb of Horrors: The campaign
>he was a real softy DM who played up freedom and fun

>sometimes didn't use them at all
From what I understand he only rarely used miniatures.
It shows in the way AoEs and projectiles are adjudicated in OD&D, it *really* only makes sense if you want to run combat as savage chaos where the GM can massage details around in place of tracking specific positioning.

Also, another interesting thing I've found out thanks to a few letters he wrote to a hobby magazines regarding OD&D in the first couple of years after it released: you were originally intended to be able to play as monsters with very little fuss. He even laid out how you would do that as a gold dragon.

This said, I totally agree with that 1e is at least as much of a mess as 2e. Not that it necessarily matters: AD&D was initially conceived of as being a immutable ruleset for tournament play, as well as being a happy medium for combat-rule-execution-is-gameplay types. Essentially as if it was the tabletop RPG equivalent of the Queensberry Rules.

Tomb of Horrors is a dismally easy dungeon. Every trap is plainly visible on a handout just incase whichever referee assigned to your table gave bad verbal cues, the whole dungeon is linear, and (unless you go ethereal) there are no Wandering Monsters.
I get that time pressure is a real issue in a tournament setting, but it's impossible to die in S1 if you don't rush.

Lorraine Williams remains an accursed creature of the utmost evilness in all my campaigns whose name must never be invoked and worshippers of Zagyg are sworn to counter and destroy her at every turn.

>People thought that grognardy by-the-book attitude is the norm and the way it intended to be
THIS was largely a creation of the 3.PF/OGL erra, and I almost never encountered it before then. IT was understood during AD&D2E and before that the DM WOULD twist the rules into a pretzel with house-rules, and on-the-fly rulings that put fun and storytelling first so that we could play a game that actually felt like the stories we were emulating. It was only after the OGL that people started treating the GM like an intermediary between the rules and the players, rather than.... the master of the game.

>oar is 3 threads
Wait what

There's /osrg/ the same bitchy shitfest you know and love. Then there's /tsrdnd/ for people who wanted comfy, only comfy turns out to be a poster count of 12 and shitposting about 2e. Then there's /diydnd/ a new creation trying to supplant /osrg/ but probably just a false-flagging troll. This is the world we live in now, have fun.

Lorraine Williams didn't scuttle TSR's hull and bailed out water for longer than her predecessors would have managed.

>There's /osrg/ the same bitchy shitfest you know and love.
Except that it's really only been like this for the last couple of weeks. By Veeky Forums standards, /osrg/ has tended to be pretty staid and non-shit-flingy.

>hen there's /tsrdnd/ for people who wanted comfy, only comfy turns out to be a poster count of 12
Not too surprising, as it seems to be based on a rejection of the discussion of modified rules, which takes away the main creative outlet and topic for debate, leaving you without much to talk about.

>Then there's /diydnd/ a new creation trying to supplant /osrg/ but probably just a false-flagging troll.
I'd be fine with one thread for purists and one thread for non-purists, but it's not like that would stop the troll(s), and it's not like you could get everybody to agree to that anyway. /osrg/ has the brand recognition, and any splinter thread is going to be like the Roger Waters to /osrg/'s Pink Floyd. And we certainly don't need three threads.

OSRG, DIYD&D, and TSRD&D.
Shitposting in OSR went nuts. TSR is a refuge, and DIY is because TSR won't discuss Retroclones.

Yes he was, your post is a prime example.
Gary was a stickler for rules, valued the "game" element extremely highly, was a proponent of balance, and enjoyed playing with miniatures.

>People inverted all of this for some reason
Not just any people, people that call themselves "old shool".

No, this is exactly what we need. The board is spiraling. Soon we might hit a critical mass and reach a point where the shitposting exceeds what we actually get from the board, and we'll see a new exodus from the board.
One of these days, you'll wake up and realize that Veeky Forums just isn't worth being on anymore.

>THIS was largely a creation of the 3.PF/OGL err

I don't know about any earlier than that, but this attitude was prevalent during 2e. 3e and onwards only inherited what was already there. Most problems in 3e particularly can be traced back to the widespread attitudes and biases in AD&D and 2e, and WOTC failing to account for those during playtests.

>Didn't thought of miniatures as a necessity
Everything I've read is his opinion of miniatures drastically altered on a whim, in the last 5 years of his life he was mostly back to running OD&D+Chainmail with miniatures.

God, I hope my kickstarter is ready before that happens.

>realize that Veeky Forums just isn't worth being on anymore.
But user, I have nowhere else to go.

>The board is spiraling
The hobby is spiraling, Veeky Forums is a reflection of that, It's well established at this point most of the industry persons post here for the primary perpose of attacking each other.

>in the last 5 years of his life he was mostly back to running OD&D+Chainmail with miniatures.
I heard the opposite. A lot of people who played in his one-shots at cons stated that he didn't use neither maps or miniatures. He did use them mildly in the campaigns though.

Huh, I'm gonna have to admit I've got zero first-hand knowledage and just repeating stuff I've read on enworld.

>as it seems to be based on a rejection of the discussion of modified rules
It was a rejection of discussion of absurdly incompatible rules and systems that kept parading themselves as OSR despite obviously not being OSR.

Which ones, specifically?

Honestly the whole issue turned into a "No True Scotsman" argument about whether a system is OSR because it was played during the era, whether it's compatible with one or more systems within the era, or if it had the "spirit" of the games of that era and could theoretically run all the same stuff with minimal conversion.

Dungeon Crawl Classics was a big one, if i remember correctly, and there was a bit of a troll who wanted BRP as part of it(personally, I think he just wanted to find BRP a home. It's a good system, it deserves it), and then there's Dungeon World, which is another mess completely.

>Didn't thought of maps and miniatures as a necessity, sometimes didn't use them at all, bookkeeping was easy-going

He literally based the game on a miniature based war game user.

It became a slippy slide, first it was Burning Wheel, then DCC, then Dungeon World and now they've got people wanting RuneQuest to be OSR.

GLOG probably. DCC also comes to mind, but it's less of a stretch.

Basically every niche game that couldn't sustain their own thread decided they wanted to be apart of /osrg/.

If you go strictly by the Era, the BRP system is technically Old School, and does inherit much of the ideals of the time. However, since it had a fairly linear development, and was developed to oppose D&D, it's exempt from that category. It's also far more complex than anything claiming to be OSR, and is wholly incompatible with OSR modules without a major conversion.
It's a good system, and it deserves better than what it gets on here, but treating it as OSR is quite frankly an insult to the original and current goals of the system.

I suspect that it's mostly a divide of old OSR fans coming into conflict of new OSR fans, when OSR wasn't trendy and was mostly confined to blog theorists peoples definition of OSR was much more strict and limited, then came the newfriends who were introduced to OSR through lotfp, black hack, etc and didn't read the same blogs as the old fans.

OSR theory was a explict rejection of the GNS model, when The Forge self-immolated out of embarassment a lot of people from that community similarly decided to join the winning side but they brought their luggage with them.

Definitely. Doesn't help that there's only two kinds of rpgs people play these days.
I ran a poll on here a while ago, asking what everyone's favorite system was. The thread died before it got much traction, but the initial votes were quite clear:
5e, Pathfinder, 4e, Gurps, and OSR all held the top spots. That basically means there's two kinds of rpgs people run these days:
The ones that are so easy to get into because they're simple and malleable(5e and OSR), and the ones that people have been playing for so long that they have enough practice running them that they've become extremely efficient at it, and comfortable with it.(4e, PF, and GURPS)
RPGs these days are focused on limited timeframes for prep-work and learning curve based on the average age of gamers today. Most of us have jobs, college, relationships, maybe even kids. We don't have time for lengthy hours spent learning a new system.
So, your choices are either easy, or what you already know.

Yes, he did. But again

I've met people who honestly think rule 0 is the sign of an unfinished game.

This was the main argument of the last 4e thread where the 4e defense force insisted that rules for improvisation were required and trolls baited them to 500 posts. So it's definitely a thing.

Don't you have a containment thread with 12 posters to shitpost in?

It depends. Rule 0 is essential to any game that wants to run smoothly, but I chafe at the Dungeon Crawl Classics design philosphy in which chunks of the game are left blank for a faux-retro feel.

>4e defense force insisted that rules for improvisation were required
You just can't make up this level of autism.

What chunks are you talking about, user?

Magic item rules amount to "make shit up to preserve the aura of mystery" outside a few shaky tables which can roll some generic types of magic item. References in the book to spells which purposefully do not exist (Magic Rod). Patrons that can be generated on the standard random tables which don't have spellburn or patron spells, requiring making things up.

I have run D&D (mostly AD&D 2ed) for ten years in the 90s and early 2000s and no group of mine has ever used miniatures.

>What is death of the author
And I don't mean literally.
Srsly RPGs need more lit crit.

I agree, but that's because it fits the design philosophy of DCC. It's written all over the book. Magic items are supposed to be arcane and unique and never generic +1 whatevers. Magic in general is supposed to be bullshit in the game.

>OSR theory was a explict rejection of the GNS model
If there's actually any truth to this then it's hilarious, since the Old School Primer is a fantastic example of creating a style of play for old school D&D with a coherent creative agenda; it's textbook Forge.

>but why did aforementioned examples and the like turned out this way?
You seem young. I say that because maybe this is the first time you have heard this story. It is not the first time I have heard it. I was just reading about Gygax's editions of D&D, how they didn't read like government regulations and were downright conversational and explanatory. Basically Gygax was an inventor, a person who is by definition more intelligent and more creative than the average man. It is the fate of inventors to see their inventions pass into the hands of average men, and be corrupted into the opposite of their intent. It's amazing how fast this happens; the most rules-heavy anal-retentive DM I ever played with was so experienced he claimed the only DMs with more experience than himself had personally played with Gygax.

This is the way of the world. It's an old story. It's happened before, and will happen again. I'm sorry.

If you, yourself, are intelligent and creative and love to throw together a bunch of different rulesets to have a fun night with your friends, I can see how the domination of this hobby by the rules-lawyers would make you angry, and reading about 0E and Gygax would make you feel simultaneously vindicated and depressed. Again, I am sorry. I feel the same.

I think you are misunderstanding Gygax a little.

He didn't run without the rulebook, he introspected and deeply understood the purpose of all his rules and rulings. What they were for and why he had them. He kept very tight book-keeping instead of wasting time in the rulebooks.

Game designers nowadays do not think 1/10th as hard about why a rule exists.

Go read some of the OSR blog posts from the 2010-2013 period, they collectively told the GNS Forgefags to fuck off, never come back and stop trying to claim some kind of lineage between them.

Generals are more bad than good for the board desu. At people were actually playing games with quests, instead of insipid "I know you are but what am I" bullshit.

That's part of the problem. Most blogs aren't as vibrant or interesting as they were during that period.

That's because a lot of them didn't like the overcommercialization that followed, people moved from blogs to social media like G+ which became less about discussion and more about advertising their homebrew for the low low price of $5/mo.

Isn't that mostly because a handful of OSR people are wildly racist and sexist and don't like having to share a hobby with people who won't put up with their regressive bullshit, so they just scapegoated it as a gaming ideology issue rather than own up to the fact that they're human shitstains?

I don't think that concept applies to manuals

Please don't feed the moron.

You need to consume less RPGnet senpai

@58312761

Has reading RPGnet given you brain damage?

>@

THE EXPLANATION IS HERE


>d&d is created and get famous
>its the first rpg so (since its famous) you have all those extreme amount of rpg players with different point of view of how a rpg should be, playing the exact same rpg
>after some amount of time playing some players discover some stuff they think are flaws, while discover some rules they think are really awesome
>because they have very different views on what a rpg should be (despise playing the exact same rpg), what some guy think is a good idea wont be considered a good idea by the other player, what some consider a shitty idea will be considered a good idea by other rpg player
>new system is made based at this enviroment, and create a mess of a rpg system.
>many of those players quickly jump into the new system, expecting fixed to what they think are flaws
>because the players have very different opinions on what rpg should be (despise playing the same exact system), what is a flaw to some is a fix to another, and what is a fix to another is a flaw to someone. So the system CAN'T be fixed.
>all those extreme amount of players quickly jumping to this new system, bring new (to rpg) players to the new d&d system
>this make the game have an extreme amount of rpg players with different point of view of how a rpg should be, playing the exact same rpg
>because they have very different views on what a rpg should be (despise playing the exact same rpg), what some guy think is a good idea wont be considered a good idea by the other player, what some consider a shitty idea will be considered a good idea by other rpg
>new system is made based at this enviroment, and create a mess of a rpg system. No one knows what the system/d&d is suposed to be, because it was created based on a mess.
>the story continue ad infinitum

It's been split by one assmad shitter trying to kill the general

>bookkeeping was easy-going
YOU CANNOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN UNLESS STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE KEPT, so you're totally wrong on this point. He only started playing fast and loose with that one in his dotage.

You're right about the other stuff, though. Take up OSR games.

Who the fuck is Don Kaye?

Welcome to game design and dealing with a target audience.

>the BRP system is technically Old School
No, it isn't. It's the originator and standard bearer of the New School. The fact that it came out during the "right" era is obviously irrelevant since the first "new" games necessarily HAVE to come out during the period when there are only "old" games. That's just simple causality.

I dont understand your image

Are you fucking serious?

He was Gary's initial business partner and was supposed to be the responsible guy in charge of the money. He died of a heart attack in '75, which is why Gary and the Blumes were able to screw TSR so badly.

Everyone and the uncle thinks Finch's primer is trash. Webb's primer has visible seams, but is much better overall.

Most of the messy parts of 2e were already in 1e and Gygax and Arneson's games already were a kitchen sink.

>Everyone and the uncle thinks Finch's primer is trash.
Nah, it's just a few of the usual /osrg/ spegs who are buttmad that the Primer doesn't apologize for having a strong opinion.

2e was a mess to play not a mess to read and Gygax's and (aside from his very first) Arneson's games were not high fantasy.

They were still kitchen sinks even if they were not high fantasy. Blackmoor had a crashed spaceship, shit like the City of Gods and dinosaurs on random encounter tables. Hell, you can even see it in the classes. The thief is Cudgel the clever, the Cleric is half biblical miracles and half Van Helsing as seen in Hammer horror films, the halfling and dwarf are stolen from Tolkien, and the elf is half Tolkien and half Poul Anderson. The magic system and several spells are inspired by the Dying Earth stories, and basically everything else is a hodge-podge of all the shit in appendix N

>Look at this newfag guys haha so pathetic would someone else explain It to him? I am having a hard time doing that because Im so angry at him

>They were still kitchen sinks even if they were not high fantasy.
I'm not arguing with that. High fantasy is the damnable portion.

And we both came from /osrg/, I know that trivia too. No need to fellate.

Gygax was working in an environment where it wasn't about you being "Elite Plus Ultra" or "The greatest Character of all." The point was to him you as both a player and character aren't special, you're just someone who goes adventuring and it's down to you how to solve / work around the problems you encounter yourself. Nothing is off the table and you can expect to encounter adversaries and situations that are near impossible to beat against depending on what choices you actually make.

Modern Games are made in an environment where a need to feel the feel special is dominant because it's not politically correct to ostracise someone for their shortcomings. The emphasis is therefore on the character "being a better you". To do this modern rulesets work on a "Character A can do X but can't do Y" as its core mechanic... and then finds was of ensuring that "But Character A can do Y if..." just so people don't feel left out. It then enforces an idea that even if you are the most uncreative, unispiring, timid, aspergic, trans-gendered, racially confused person, if you roll a high number on some plastic you are contributing. When in reality you are an insufferable burden we are forced to tolerate "because".

New user here, that means your original post is kinda nonsensical.

Gygax invented an entirely new genre of game that nobody had ever experienced before in the breadth of humanity's history.

Consider for a moment how truly difficult and revolutionary millenia into human history inventing a totally new game that has never been done before is. They struggled to even describe what it was in the 70's it was so bizarre and alien a concept to people.

I doubt he was even aware quite what he created.

It's natural that upon hearing about this game people will immediately form their own views, opinions and expectations of it. D&D was merely the start of an entire genre of games spawning hence why we see so many variations on the concept that are still be innovated to this day.

roguesandreavers.blogspot.com/2014/03/campaign-frames.html

>Modern Games are made in an environment where a need to feel the feel special is dominant because it's not politically correct to ostracise someone for their shortcomings

I'd say the bigger inspiration to actual heroic-hero DnD is probably the parade of novels, videogames, cartoons and movies where the PCs are taken to be the protagonists and frequently are called on to save the world and the like.

The heroic fantasy of being the main characters, coupled with an increased attachment to characters and rerolling/resurrecting being a momentum killer makes designing the game around not dying twice a session more attractive to players and designers.