Quote from: Benoist;434679Oh my God. What the fuck is this? :banghead:

Quote from: Melan;434672Yeah, I have seen WW-fan/forgies/whoever use their fantasy of Arneson as a proxy to attack "traditional gaming", but then I have also seen a Story Games thread use Lorraine Williams as a hopeful example of progress in gaming. Not too relevant.

Quote from: Tommy Brownell;434813Every time I click on a link to Story Games, a piece of my soul dies.

QuoteLorraine Williams is the crooked cement Soviet war monument in front of a landfill of thousands of tons of Dragon Dice. Innovative or Not, because of her terrible people and business management skills, attributing her to anything in the RPG world is the equivalent of wiping a booger on it.

She might have been the Small Press DIY Gaming God-figure in terms of shared goals, but we'll never know; her ineptitude when working with other people, and numbers, have cast her into her role as the Boogyman of RPG History.

Quote from: danbuter;434681Also, how the hell can anyone hold up Lorraine Williams as a good thing?

Quote from: Melan;434803He sure didn't write Temple of the Frog, which really makes Supplement II. It is actually a very good and very open-ended scenario (okay, the first dungeon level strains disbelief with ~1000 soldiers housed in a few small barrack rooms... scale that down and it is gold, solid gold).

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;434734I don't have much time for fanciful attempts to write Gygax out of D&D such as Dragons at Dawn, which I hereby dub the Piltdown Man of the OSR.

Quote from: Melan;434672Of the two, EGG wrote a lot while Dave barely anything. So, the former is maligned on the basis of his available work (and very often on his most ingenious design decisions - classes, levels, hit points and the memorisation system), while in the case of the latter, we see a lot more projection - wishful thinking and also condemnation. Both can be and have been used as proxies in various game-related flame wars. Yeah, I have seen WW-fan/forgies/whoever use their fantasy of Arneson as a proxy to attack "traditional gaming", but then I have also seen a Story Games thread use Lorraine Williams as a hopeful example of progress in gaming. Not too relevant.

Quote from: danbuter;434681I don't understand how either Gygax or Arneson are put on pedestals. Yes, they gave us roleplaying, and that is awesome. However, they are not gods and made just as many mistakes as they did achievements.

Also, how the hell can anyone hold up Lorraine Williams as a good thing?

Quote from: thedungeondelver;434720Okay.  I ask because Tim Kask will straight up tell you he wrote Supplement I, not Arneson.

Quote from: Imperator;434818Please, do not be such drama queens A bit later on the thread AndyK says:



So it's  not a universal opinion of story-gamers or something.

QuoteShe was an early heroine and exemplar for the whole Storygames movement,  representative of the utter contempt in which they hold regular RPGs.

Quote from: RPGPundit;434869Yes, he also might be lying.

RPGPundit

QuoteThe Basket, or,
You Want me to make what out of that?

In Sept of 1975, I became the first full time employee of TSR (which was Tactical Studies Rules at the time). I joined Gary and Brian Blume (owners) on the payroll at the princely sum of $100 per week; this was what each of us drew. They, however, had some royalties to look forward to. Rob and Terry Kuntz were part-timers; even if I remembered what they got paid, which I don't, it would not be kosher for me to tell. Rob also had royalties coming in for GH. That year, I would guesstimate that we did a little over $100K, most of which was selling other people's product. We sold a lot of MiniFigs back then.

Our work area was a "table" made from a sheet of plywood in Gary's basement; we worked around the furnace and oil tank in near Stygian darkness. (Well, not quite that dark, but it was always a bit of shock on the pupils when we came up.)

After a couple of weeks filling orders, assembling D&D boxed sets, talking about Strategic Review plans, etc., I got a rude surprise one morning.

(Now I realize how young some of you reading this are. Many of you have never seen clothes baskets made of anything but plastic or seen apples sold in anything but cardboard containers. However, in the murky distant past, there were baskets called "bushel baskets". They actually held a bushel of dry stuff like apples or wheat or oats or stuff like that. There were also half-bushel baskets, baskets that would hold a peck and some that held 1.5 or even two bushels. I admit that I was always a bit hazy on these exact sizes and volumes; at my house growing up they were referred to as baskets, small baskets, big baskets, etc. It is what Moms used for laundry and everyone used to throw stuff in, if you had the luxury of having extras. They were made of thin slats of wood loosely woven together.)

Upon going into work that fateful morning I was greeted by the grinning visages of Brian and Gary, looking like siblings from the same litter of Cheshire cats. Sensing that something was up, and that it undoubtedly involved me, and that furthermore, I might not be thrilled about it, I got ready to fill that day's orders. At that point, I was handed one of the aforementioned baskets, filled with what I mistook to be orders. Seldom have I been so wrong. Over the sound of Brian nearly chortling to death, Gary informed me that they were now going to find out just how well I could edit. The basket contained what was destined to become Supplement II of D&D: Blackmoor

Sifting through about 50 odd sheets of mostly handwritten material and charts, I asked for clarification. Again I was informed that what I held in my hands was the next supplement to D&D.

Supplements: A word about supplements is in order here, as they were explained to me and came to be.

The first three books laid the groundwork for playing the game. They are all I used from GenCon '74 until GC 75' when I picked up GH.

Supplements did what the name implied: i.e., add more stuff; they also clarified and corrected inconsistencies and contradictions. (They also made a few contradictions and clouded a few things, too, but that's another story.) You have to remember that D&D was a growing, evolving entity and it was through the supplements that this occurred. With the metamorphosis into Basic and Advanced, the first stage of growth was completed.

I was told that they wanted a manuscript ready to go to the printer in about 6 weeks or so, IIRC. Naive fool that I was, I said sure. I did have to empty the basket that day because Gary's wife needed it for laundry, so I stacked all the papers and stuffed them into one of those expanding folders with the ties at the top. I took it home that night and let it sit for about a week. Hey, we had other stuff going on, like a SR issue at the printer.

So here I am, next week, and I sit down to go through the file. Uh oh, something seems to be amiss. I tried sorting the stuff; I re-sorted the stuff. I cataloged, alphabetized, prioritized and sanitized—all to no avail. This was a file folder full of repetitions, contradictions, duplications and complications. But not a supplement. I found three different versions of one idea, and two different approaches to another that are at odds with each other, as well as previously published guidelines. After two evenings of trying to make heads or tales of anything at all, I went to Gary and told him something to the effect that I couldn't make heads or tails of the whole mess. And he replied something to the effect that it just needed some editing. About this time, I realized I was in deep dung.

In journalism school and classes they teach that editing is the collecting, preparing, and arranging of materials for publication, or, the revising or correcting, of a manuscript. Well, there was damned little to revise or correct as the preparing and arranging had yet to happen. What I had was some ideas, more like notes, on how to do various things. Problem was, several of them contradicted themselves and each other; a good many were not developed. I am sure that they must have meant something to Dave, but only he knew what. When I made an effort to get clarifications and explanations, I got none, or worse, what I got in response to my questions were responses that intimated that I must be mentally deficient if I couldn't understand them. Finally I said to hell with that and threw most of the crap away, determined to start over and do it my way.

Another thing that supplements did was try to counter some of the foolishness that was going on in the fanzines. They would make some preposterous proposal, and we would give the public the "company line" on how to do something.

In Blackmoor, we supplied something entirely new; a concrete example of how to construct a major edifice in a campaign. I refer, of course, to the Temple of the Frog. TotF was Dave's creation. All I did was legitimate editing; I made it read better and looked out for inconsistencies such as any DM might make in something like that.

TotF was the only part of BM that was Dave's alone. In fact, if the whole of the book were analyzed, Dave wrote the TotF segment, and I wrote about 65 or 70% of the rest. Gary, Brian and Rob, and Terry, too, contributed the rest. Some of the ideas might have been Dave's, but the execution, expansion and explanation were ours. (I am confident that Gary will back me up on this. Rob was a great help to me on this because he was very handy to bounce ideas off of, and a good sport about it. I was afraid of going to Gary too much for fear he would think he had hired a boob or incompetent.)

So BM got published with Dave's name on it and I wrote an intro. I had no problem with this. I was an employee and got a salary for editing. Royalties went to authors. In retrospect, I should have held out for a portion of the royalties. I'm perfectly cool with it, don't misunderstand. That hindsight thing is a bitch.

BM was a great learning experience for me. What I learned on it would serve me in good stead in future supplements. (Except for psionic combat. I LOVED psionic combat and had great fun devising it with all of its tables and charts. Apparently I was in the tiny minority. I guess mental combat was too esoteric for most D&Ders; not enough of them shared my fondness for the Dr. Strange Marvel comics and Mindflayers. God, I loved Mindflayers; they were all ovr my dungens. I just loved the idea of turning an annoying PC into a gibbering idiot.. Oh well, live and learn...)

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;434734On the other hand I don't have much time for fanciful attempts to write Gygax out of D&D such as Dragons at Dawn, which I hereby dub the Piltdown Man of the OSR.

Quote from: two_fishes;434898Holy shit, people still care about this? The OP should have gone a little more like:

"Apparently there are still people out there who have strong opinions about the Gygax/Arneson dispute. It was more than 30 years ago. Grow up. Get over it. That's what principal figures in the dispute did, before they died. There are real problems in the world far more worthy of your ire. Jesus, what is wrong with you people?"