I worked with James on several articles for SJGames' "Journal of the Traveller's Aid Society" back when it was a going proposition, and corresponded with him on several other games from that time period (specifically Star Wars d20 and Fading Suns). I found him thoughtful, intelligent, with many good ideas, and a pointed ability to make me defend my assertions about certain aspects of all three games. He changed my mind more than once, which is saying something.

I cant speak to his work after, say, 2001 or so, but in my experience he was a good fellow, knew his shit, and wasn't afraid to call out others who made statements they couldn't back up.

Shorter review - Appreciated his viewpoints and creativity, would work with again.

Not sure if that helps, but there ya go.

Quote from: DKChannelBoredom;789025Remember when Pundit laughed at the people who went through his (10+ year) old blogposts to find something to (mis)quote him over, trying to win arguments during consultantgate? Kettle black, much?

That was different. Those people pulled unfounded assertions out of their asses in public and then had to find proof to back them up or else lose face/apologize.

...

Oh.

I'm going with "the Geez" on this one...there's no there, there.

Let it go, Pundit, there are fatter dragons to fry by far.

Dwimmermount alone is enough for me to come to a decision about his character.  Especially the part where he spent or pocketed the money, and left fulfillment and refunds to his publisher out of their pocket.  I don't really need to comb through his entire gaming history to find out his old school purity.

Although, to the charge of "beating a dead horse," I'll point out he is back posting about gaming on another platform, apparently without any apology or acknowledgement.  I do think that warrants more scrutiny than if he had maintained a dignified silence.

Edit to add:

Quote from: stuffis;789092i continue to assume that the guy meant well, freaked out, fucked up, and left others holding the bag. i haven't heard who knows what's up accuse james of trying to steal the money -- only of handling a bad scene very (very) badly.

i'm not sure what i'd gain by assuming otherwise.

The bold part is the problem though, not any kind of excuse.  I don't much care whether he had a ten year plan to steal the money (which actually does seem unlikely), or fell into it.  Kickstarter money is supposed to go for production and fulfillment expenses.  Which... it manifestly didn't.  The most charitable explanation is, Malizewski was calling living expenses "production" while he was writing, then he stopped writing and kept spending the money, then he went silent and left his publisher to fill production and refunds out of their pocket and at a loss, without returning even a fraction out of his pocket.  That charitable explanation isn't any worse to me than if he was running a long con.

Edit:  I was wrong about all the money.  My guess, at this remove, is I formed that impression during the lag time where he hadn't yet returned any money, and had it reinforced when I heard Dwimmermount was a money loser for Autarch.

Quote from: RPGPundit;788999So being a guy who remembers stuff but doesn't keep records, I could use some help in this: point me to evidence in links to articles, forum posts, references to publications, etc./whatever that show James Maliszewski being a complete Swine about D&D before he had clued into how potentially profitable it would be to pretend to just lovey love love old-school in order to become a blogging celebrity to a group of people he considered retarded (so as to eventually embezzle them).

This post is a great insight into the diseased mind of RPGPundit: "Some guy changed his mind to agree with me, he must be a piece of shit. In fact, he's probably part of an international cabal that's trying to destroy roleplaying!"

For those actually interested in tracking Maliszewski's rediscovery of old school gaming, what you want to check out is the Schizonomicron, his pre-Grognardia LJ. (I found it by literally reading the very first blog post on Grognardia, which tells you to go check out his old blog if you want to see how he got to this point).

It's pretty straight-forward: He was developing Thousand Suns and frequently revisited his love for Traveller while doing so. For example, here's a post from February 2007. Around this same time period he starts looking at modern games and expressing his dissatisfaction with the way that they "transitioned [from] being rules that allowed you to tell your own stories in an imaginary world ... to being rules that allowed you to tell other people's stories (with a reference to Dragonlance as the dawn of the "new paradigm").

The lens of Traveller is also where he first starts analyzing what went "wrong" with the industry.

It also appears that his research for Thousand Suns was taking him back to the science fiction he read as a kid.

This appears to be a key post: "It's like someone's engaged in a psy-op to make me think that, you know, the grognards and canonistas aren't really that bad, after all -- at least they actually read and understood Traveller and can talk about why it's fun without having to resort to pseudo-academic buzzowords and coffee house banter." This Traveller-specific bit of "get the fuck off my lawn" comes after a series of such posts over the previous couple of months (including attacks at kid's not understanding the pop music of his youth). Shortly thereafter, he tells D&D 4th edition to get the fuck off his lawn (albeit it with a more compromising tone).

(Oddly we then get a literal Maliszewski vs. the neighborhood boys post.)

By December 2007, he's apparently reading his 1E manuals shortly after he was going to clean the old books out of his basement. A fortnight later the basic Grognardian philosophy of "back to the source" has taken literal form.

From that point forward, the Schizonomicon rapidly metamorphoses into a proto-Grognardia. In March 2008, Grognardia is formed.

Quote from: Saladman;789113The bold part is the problem though, not any kind of excuse.  I don't much care whether he had a ten year plan to steal the money (which actually does seem unlikely), or fell into it.  Kickstarter money is supposed to go for production and fulfillment expenses.  Which... it manifestly didn't.  The most charitable explanation is, Malizewski was calling living expenses "production" while he was writing, then he stopped writing and kept spending the money, then he went silent and left his publisher to fill production and refunds out of their pocket and at a loss, without returning even a fraction out of his pocket.  That charitable explanation isn't any worse to me than if he was running a long con.

That is a completely inaccurate description of what happened: Maliszewski turned virtually all of the funds over to Autarch.

Maliszewski's handling of the Dwimmermount project was absolutely horrible. It's not necessary to just make shit up about it.

Quote from: Old Geezer;789037Somebody who shot off his mouth and then fucked up royally seems a lot more believable.

Agreed.  My general experience with life is that a fuckup doesn't require conspiracy thinking, just bad luck and/or reach exceeding one's grab.

I backed Dwimmermount, I'm receiving what I backed for.  Anything beyond that is between James and Autarch, and not my business.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;789116That is a completely inaccurate description of what happened: Maliszewski turned virtually all of the funds over to Autarch.

Maliszewski's handling of the Dwimmermount project was absolutely horrible. It's not necessary to just make shit up about it.

Source?  Cause I'm not trying to make shit up, that was my understanding.  I am certain Dwimmermount came in at a loss for Autarch; conceivably I'm mixing the two up.

Well what Pundy tends to do is constantly fall into the same logical fallacy:
1. X is doing something that has results that I don't like.
2. Therefore X WANTED those results to happen.
3. Also X probably planned out those results from way back, probably working together with other people.

Often "1." is true and then Pundy goes off the deep end a bit. For example, James Maliszewski's handling of the Kickstarter was screwed up which caused a lot of headaches for the good people at Autarch. But then if you assume that he WANTED that clusterfuck to happen ahead of time and had it all planned out for years and years ahead of time then things start getting silly.

The same thing goes for politics, story games and right on down the line.

After reading Alexander's links Pundit, you're screwed on this one.  Even if you did find a mountain of evidence to show that JMal was once a card-carrying member of the Swine, his Old School Epiphany seems real and is historically supported over time.

Could he have slowly and carefully constructed this new Pro-Old School identity merely to boost sales of Thousand Suns and institute himself as the main historian for an D&D Revival?  I suppose, yeah, he could have, but that theoretical mastermind would have been capable of delivering on Dwimmermount.

More than likely, like a whole lot of people, the internet culture arising from 3e and the advent of MMOs left him looking at this new gaming paradigm and wondering what the hell happened, and going back to find out.

QuoteOnce more, I predict that the new century will see a rise in goofy optimism and other such feel-good nonsense. When you're living on the high of a big round number with a lot of zeroes, you don't think much about the End of Things. Just watch.

That quote is from JMal's Gamma World screed.

Wow. 1999 was a long time ago and an entire culture away.

Quote from: stuffis;789092i continue to assume that the guy meant well, freaked out, fucked up, and left others holding the bag.

I don't even like Grogtardia and I agree with this.

Quote from: Old Geezer;789081You shall know them by their fruits.

Making a half assed dungeon for a game you don't like just to rip people off would be more effort than making a good thing for a game you do like.  Thus it is HIGHLY unlikely that JM pulled some sort of multiyear conspiracy to become a "fake OSR guru" just so he could fuck up Dwimmermount to get people's money.

Unfortunately... I know two cases personally. One being a circuit artist whos done exactly this within a horror art group he despises. He has insinuated himself into the group and gotten very popular. Periodically he rips patrons off for hundreds, at least once thousands, of dollars and gets away with it because he is good at laying blame elsewhere and has enough screeners up who get art that no one believes the past victems that speak up. That and he keeps changing his handle online.

For over a decade and a half!

So Id love to say its far fetched... But there are people out there THAT psychotic.

Is JM? Doubt it. Sounds more like he got in over his head and bailed with what damnably sounds like the standard cop out that too many KS failures use.

If it happens more than once though. THEN start getting suspicious.

No, this is sick.

Quote from: JM on LivejournalThere are a lot of things and elucidating them all probably deserves a full post of its own, but there are a couple of big things:

1. Simplicity: That's a big factor. After the mess that is 3E and the even bigger mess that will be 4E, this is a powerful draw.
1a. The ability to easily house rule things because the underlying systems are so simple.
1b. The pleasure of being able to develop the game's rules organically over time. Because the rules as written are largely skeletal, through play you pretty much have to add stuff to make it work and I love the idea of seeing how my OD&D might develop differently through play than did, say, Gary Gygax's.

2. "Primal-ness": It's a terrible word but what I mean is that OD&D feels like I'm at the Axis Mundi of gaming. This is the Navel of the World, the Ground Zero whose beautiful radiation created hundreds of mutant offspring and it feels ... healthy to bask in its glow for at least a little while. Gaming right now feels very unmoored from its roots and that bothers me. Returning to OD&D is like going home after a long trip or re-reading a good book after many years. I feel as if I better know what I like in gaming and what I want to get out of it than I did before because of my returning to OD&D.

I am sure this is all utterly unconvincing to you. It's one of those things you either get or you don't. Nothing wrong with not getting it and there's nothing uniquely laudable about getting it, but I'm not sure I can really convey the whys solely through words. I think you'll need to play a session or two and see how it's affected my thinking to understand.

Quote from: More JM on Livejournal4E is explicitly about -- I wish I could remember the exact quote -- not forcing the DM to do any more work than he has to. To me, that's madness. I wholeheartedly agree that 3E had become too complex and tedious to prepare and had 4E simply been a streamlining of 3E, I might have happily stuck with WotC. But all indications are that it's much, much more than that, right down to making the game more explicitly "an awful lot of prefab work."

If that's what someone wants out of an "RPG," cool, more power to them, but it's most emphatically not what I want. So I'm returning to the roots of the game, where the rules are simple -- easy to remember, easy to change, and very easy to prepare -- and the meta-setting is very thin on the ground, so I can make stuff up and be creative. That's why I roleplay.

Face it Pundit, he genuinely returned from the Dark Side circa 2007.  The scars of 3.5 and nascent rise of the soul-numbing horror to come returned him to first principles and the scales fell from his eyes.

Fake conversion?  I don't buy it.

Quote from: DKChannelBoredom;789025Remember when Pundit laughed at the people who went through his (10+ year) old blogposts to find something to (mis)quote him over, trying to win arguments during consultantgate? Kettle black, much?

There's a bit of a difference here.  If, for example, I had been a raging homophobe 10 years ago, and people tried to claim I wasn't a raging homophobe 10 years ago, it would be a legitimate practice to look back at old things I wrote to judge if I had or had not been one.

That's what we're establishing here: was JMal an anti-D&D "unwashed masses", "role playing not role-playing" WW-style 90s-swine or not. Had he, back in the 90s and early 2000s been a huge fan of old-school gaming, or was he in fact someone who spent the better part of his gaming life opposed to old-school gaming?