tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2600947515654238699.post7975387687898584912..comments2024-03-09T19:23:22.482-03:00Comments on The RPGPundit: 10th Anniversary Classic Rant: A Beautiful Obituary, and a Forge ObituaryRPGPundithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17267330191433119298noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2600947515654238699.post-28050623404951436602015-11-27T22:11:30.675-03:002015-11-27T22:11:30.675-03:00Agreed. Had he a sense of humor, he would have mad...Agreed. Had he a sense of humor, he would have made an awesome wizard. His likeness was featured in a Tank Girl comic book in the early 1990's.Brooser Bearhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08487438364129415650noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2600947515654238699.post-83089088733052473112015-11-27T04:46:21.588-03:002015-11-27T04:46:21.588-03:00He had been calling the OSR purists the OSR Taliba...He had been calling the OSR purists the OSR Taliban for years. You can't even accuse him of favoritism at this regard. Snowman0147https://www.blogger.com/profile/04811245101715889991noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2600947515654238699.post-65256161044534591962015-11-26T15:25:25.518-03:002015-11-26T15:25:25.518-03:00Gygax was a talented game designer. He had a visio...Gygax was a talented game designer. He had a vision behind his design philosophy. This was the reason I chose AD&D 1st Edition as a ruleset to run my fantasy campaign over all the other rulesets I considered. It was the sheer comprehensiveness of it over other D&D clones and retro-clones. <br />Gygax business ethics, on the other hand, were abysmal. He took an evolving trend in a gaming scene and made it his own by ruthlessly denying participation to other gamers who took part in the process as he started commercializing it for himself. (How many gamers from the Lake Geneva group ended up with jobs at TSR?) He first excluded the folks from Arneson’s group, and then he pushed out the other gamers in his own group. He pushed out Dave Arneson, when the game became a huge success, and he in turn was pushed out by the TSR board of directors.<br />What karmic justice, eh Pundit? Gygax simply outmaneuvered himself by handpicking that Williams gal for the TSR board, didn’t he? And it gets better still. <br />It appears that as a consequence of his own peculiar conservative beliefs, which led him to mistrust banks, he did not try to secure a business loan to underwrite his first print run of the ODD rules, instead he started giving away control over his creation by offering a stake in the venture to business partners. The sum in question was two thousand dollars, about eleven grand in today’s money. I asked old timers, they said that back then two thousand dollars was a lot of money, but it was not impossible, and even doable to get a two thousand dollar business loan, especially with the assistance of the Small Business Administration of that day. <br />Had Gygax made a better decision early on, he would have never lost control over the TSR. <br />I suspect that his ruthlessness and nearsightedness were part of the same package of personal qualities, that made him alienate Danny Kaye’s widow, who sold her 1/3 share of the TSR to the Blumes, who already had 1/3 share, giving them the majority. <br />Nothing is black and white, of course. Playing at the World, which has enough source annotation to make it a scholarly work on the hobby, mentions that Gygax gave Arneson a job, office and time at TSR to do game design, but that Arneson did not produce anything much, and left the TSR shortly thereafter. <br />Another point worth noting – after his departure from TSR, Gygax wrote Castles and Crusades and Lejendary Adventures, two fantasy role playing games, but they did not break any new ground or take the gameplay in any new direction from D&D, as far as I can tell. Gygax’s Oriental Adventures book is an absolute gem, his efforts at writing fiction notwithstanding, but he was never able to develop any other game system beyond D&D. That is interesting, and points to a possibility, that Gygax appropriated for himself something that evolved in a group that he was a port of. That is nothing new. Others have done it on grander scale. <br />To me, a talented and prolific game designer worth his salt would have struck out and created his own Forge to take the hobby (and the business from TSR) in a new and different direction, but Gygax never did.<br />BTW, Pundit, the Forge may have imitated an elitist European post war nouveau art movement, and their GNS theory is contrived and off base, as far as I am concerned, but your OSR movement is just as bad. Your scene consists of a bunch of small wannabe Gygaxes, who want to make money off their hobby. That kind of entrepreneurship tends to make people ugly. (I’ve seen this in other instances, besides OSR) They see people in their group as potential competition. They tend to associate with people, who can help them, while blowing off people, who can’t. In addition, a person, who wants to make a buck off you, can never be a real friend to you, s/he is a retainer, if anything. That is why there is a noticeable difference in social interaction between the mini-gygax DMs and the DMs who simply play and not seek to monetize their hobby. <br />Brooser Bearhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08487438364129415650noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2600947515654238699.post-5345630971465127372015-11-26T11:24:39.285-03:002015-11-26T11:24:39.285-03:00Note that the not all workout routines intended fo...Note that the not all workout routines intended for constructing muscle tissues is wonderful for an individual. Whilst it does work they could possibly have did wonders intended for some others, you <a href="http://www.healthybeats.net/pro-muscle-fit-review.html" rel="nofollow">Pro Muscle Fit</a> need to know that success continues to be over a circumstance in order to circumstance time frame. 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