I'm arguing with someone on G+ (someone who's a big participant of the Ultra-Orthodox Wing of the OSR, so claims of ignorance about the subject seems a bit contrived, but whatever), who is questioning claims about how before starting Grognardia, James Maliszewski was actually not an Old-School gamer (not in the sense that some of the Clonemaniacs use of "you don't play purely the way play so you're not a REAL old-schooler", but in the much more LITERAL sense of "did not play old-school games") and had in fact written many things where he mocked, made fun of, criticized and insulted old-school D&D.
So 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).
RPGPundit
You should hang out here more Pundit, it's quite a nice forum. :pundit:
This is like asking us to shit on your bucket so you have more shit to fling at someone.
Thanks, but no, thanks.
Do your own [strike]shitting[/strike] research.
Thank you Pundit for starting the thread.
Pundit is (probably) referring to me as the object of his first sentence ("someone who's a big participant ..."), though he mis-characterizes me. That I sometimes post & reply on K&KA is a matter of obvious truth (and I have met a fair number of other folks who post in K&KA in person, they're good guys, and I would drink and play games with them again in a heartbeat; I will post there again too, certainly). Full disclosure: I also posted on Dragonsfoot, odd74 (a bit), The Acaeum, ENWorld (mostly long, long ago), various blogs, G+, rpg.net (once or twice, I think), the Swords & Wizardry forums, and probably one or two other places. I also sell modules explicitly for use with AD&D (Chaotic Henchmen Productions).
What I want: I want to read what Pundit describes: "James Maliszewski being a complete Swine about D&D before ..."
There is no agenda. I want to read it. That is all. I keep links to various (admittedly obsessively stupid) stuff. I want links to these.
To show that this is in good faith, I will start with the "best" thing I have found, which may not be much:
In 1999 Maliszewski was critical of (dissed?) Gamma World and 80's games in a general sense:
https://web.archive.org/web/20000124101747/http://rpg.net/news+reviews/columns/sffeb99.html
In 2009 Maliszewski showed a positive view toward Gamma World:
http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2009/04/retrospective-gamma-world.html
Quote from: One Horse Town;789000You should hang out here more Pundit, it's quite a nice forum. :pundit:
Gotta second OHT. :cheerleader:
Quote from: Guy Fullerton;789003https://web.archive.org/web/20000124101747/http://rpg.net/news+reviews/columns/sffeb99.html
In 2009 Maliszewski showed a positive view toward Gamma World:
http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2009/04/retrospective-gamma-world.html
I dunno, he seems not to be dissing GW so much as referring to its extreme levels of gonzo (and sillyness/humour) wich according to the second text is something he actually appreciates.
So what's the narrative?
1. JMal plays D&D like everyone else as a kid.
2. At some point starts writing for gaming companies.
3. Gets involved with WW in the 90s and works on a lot of WW stuff. Along the way he becomes a snooty elitist (or always was one).
4. During his stint at WW does 3e stuff via S&S imprint.
5. Doesn't like 3.5 and 4.
6. Starts Blog to figure out why D&D isn't D&D anymore
7. Becomes Pope of the OSR
8. Implodes spectacularly in a Perfect Storm of hype, internet hysteria, and Kickstarter malfeasance.
You have to be a political blogger's level of asshole to blog daily for 4 years and not mean a word of it, so in all likelihood, he meant a decent portion of what he wrote. He might have been pompous and overblown, with an insufferable sense of his own geek-fanboi bolstered celebrity, but his blog could be interesting and useful at times.
Even if the worst possible interpretation of all that were true, that he was a total "swine" who "came to Gygax" only as a marketing opportunity, so what?
His bubble has burst, let the poor bastard be.
(Grunt...strain). It's no use. When it comes to this subject, I just can't seem to give a shit.😜
This isn't beating a dead horse, it's digging up the broken bones of a buried dead horse so they can be finely ground.
Too funny. This reminds me of a bit out of Vi Hart's Guide to Comments:
QuoteBy the way, just as the chauvenist assumes that everyone's secretly sexist, the narcissist assumes everyone else is also trying to fake who they are for status and attention and that's where you get the type of comment where they accuse you of not being a real.. whatever - because if they were you, they would be pretending, would desperately want people to see them that way, and being called out on it would be the most shameful thing possible.
While I learned a lot from James' blog, I find several lines in this '98 review he wrote of Alternity sadly revealing of his abrupt about face on the subject of D&D and its mechanics:
http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/classic/rev_943.phtml
I got into D&D in 1981 or '82 at age eleven. I became obsessed with it and it became a major part of my life throughout adolescence and young adulthood.
Shortly after college in the 90's I kinda went through a "Snob" phase of wanting "More" out of gaming (Hip, trendy, KEWL relevance that would get me respected as an artist or laid or something) and turned my back on D&D, which at the time seemed played out and about as cool and with-it as the Andy Griffith Show. I had nothing to do with D&D for a little less than a decade. It probably didn't help that none of the gamers around here wanted anything to do with it either. If I had suggested playing old-school D&D to them in 1996 I would have been laughed out of the room (Although their Earthdawn games were really no different... or for that matter their Vampire games, which as far as I could tell were about as gothic and psychological as Michael Bay movies, with vampires slugging it out on motorcycles with katanas and HK-MP3s. )
I got back in to D&D via third edition, which reminded me of just what I found so magical back in '81: Killing owlbears, looting old moathouses, half-orc assassins and temples of Tiamat and otyughs and githyanki ... but I soon decided the system was waaaaaaay too complex and number-crunchy (The "Paperwork" of designing characters and encounters was a crushing drag). So I got back down my old Moldvay Basic set and never looked back.
I imagine that my experience of falling away and then coming back was not that uncommon among old-schoolers (Maybe it was even the norm, I have no idea). I don't think weird pissing contests about who is or is not a "Pure" OSR member are constructive.
Remember 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?
James Maliskewski was an ass for abandoning Dwimmermount. And he faltered on Petty Gods as well. Both of which had to be bailed out by other people.
The way it all went down he thoroughly burned his bridges with the larger OSR community. And he burned it by what he did.
Which is how the OSR operated from the beginning. People who have influence because they do things not by what they say or who they know. People who crash and burn do so because of their actions, like taking a lot of money and not delivering a product.
I can see this of being of interest. Possibly make the story of James Mal all the more interesting. But whatever is uncovered it would be a side show to conduct he displayed with Dwimmermount. In my mind that what did him in.
Quote from: Just Another Snake Cult;789016This isn't beating a dead horse, it's digging up the broken bones of a buried dead horse so they can be finely ground.
Nah, it's more like whining at your neighbours to dig up the bones and beat them for you, while gloating that you once dealt with (http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/09/08) an entire stable, on your own.
---
I'm also not fond of this internet concept that, once someone has expressed an opinion on a subject, they can never ever change their minds, or rethink something, without being accused of being a hypocrite, sellout, or whatever the commenter's current insult of choice is. This isn't a game show; we don't have to only accept one answer.
Grognardia's purist snobbery was always a big part of its appeal, no one should pretend otherwise; plenty of James's commenters obviously dug it. Hard to believe anyone's surprised that a guy used to like a lot of stuff he now despises, and vice versa -- it happens to everyone, though he was always pedantically humourless about it. But for better or worse, that last isn't a crime.
I hope he's doing alright now, and getting work done. The death of a parent is a hard thing, self-inflicted public humiliation doesn't make it any easier, and the outpouring of entitled cuntistry from the peanut gallery that followed his disappearance won't soften the blow much.
Do your own trolling, like a man's man.
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?
I think you missed the much funnier point how a many who's defining games he does not like as Swine fights with a man who's defining games he does not like as Non - OSR. It's literally a post that should someone else write it, it'd go straight into "This is why we hate you." Not that that 1 minute hate idea took off.
Quote from: stuffis;789033I hope he's doing alright now, and getting work done. The death of a parent is a hard thing, self-inflicted public humiliation doesn't make it any easier, and the outpouring of entitled cuntistry from the peanut gallery that followed his disappearance won't soften the blow much.
What does a death in the family have to do with outright theft?
Hell, I'll bite: who the hell is James Maliszewski, and why should I care one way or another about what he's said?
Quote from: Ladybird;789031I'm also not fond of this internet concept that, once someone has expressed an opinion on a subject, they can never ever change their minds, or rethink something, without being accused of being a hypocrite, sellout, or whatever the commenter's current insult of choice is. This isn't a game show; we don't have to only accept one answer.
Sure it does. In our worldscape of tribalist fiefdoms, someone who disagrees with your POV is an Enemy, to be treated as such. Someone who
changed his mind to agree with you was already a traitor to his side, and may prove to be a traitor to yours: you certainly can't trust the two-faced bastard, right?
The [SARCASM] flag being turned off, +1. What the hell, right? So this guy may have changed his mind over the years.
Isn't that the frigging point of Internet debates in the first place, to convince the other guys that your way of looking at things is the right way? Are people
that astonished when it actually works?
[SARCASM] Oh, wait. No, that's stupid of me. The point isn't to convince anyone of anything, because
that's never going to happen. The point is to do a tribal wardance in front of the Enemy, so that onlookers can watch you count coup if you're more eloquent than the other guys, or if you merely have better snark. [/SARCASM]
Crom's hairy nutsack, Pundy, you're making yourself look ridiculous.
"James M didn't like older games, thought about it, and changed his mind. Then he got full of his own shit and thought he could write some stuff for money. It ended badly. The end."
No ten-year conspiracy needed. I mean, really. Painting him as some mastermind who planned to rip people off years in advance sounds like something from a James Bond villain. Somebody who shot off his mouth and then fucked up royally seems a lot more believable.
DISCLAIMER: I have never met James M nor do I play him on TV. I just don't believe in multi-year conspiracies.
Yup can't beat Old Geezer's summary. Pretty much sums it up accurately.
Quote from: Guy Fullerton;789003To show that this is in good faith, I will start with the "best" thing I have found, which may not be much:
In 1999 Maliszewski was critical of (dissed?) Gamma World and 80's games in a general sense:
https://web.archive.org/web/20000124101747/http://rpg.net/news+reviews/columns/sffeb99.html
In 2009 Maliszewski showed a positive view toward Gamma World:
http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2009/04/retrospective-gamma-world.html
Those just show a man changing his mind after a decade. A decade that included the 9/11 and its fallout taking a big dump on the optimism James M. predicts at the end of the first link. Providing shiny new villains to keep viewers at home scared and paranoid.
Jeez... I'd find much more disconcerting if the guy had held the same opinions all those years... never wavering.
I never had much interest in Dwimmermount but I enjoyed his blog and was sad to see it end. I doubt he's had a pleasant time during any of this crapfest and see no need to continue his punishment.
I'm sympathetic with people changing their mind. In terms of Maliszewski's viewpoint, that seems like the most likely explanation (given what I've read), as opposed to a conspiracy. Hell—my mind has changed significantly on many things over far less time than 9 years.
But I'm willing to give Pundit the benefit of the doubt, for purposes of discussion, if he or anybody else wants to continue that angle.
Pundit, on G+ you said: "James as in Grognardia? As in the guy who wrote articles all through the 90s about how fucking lame D&D and especially old-school is, and then when he saw a chance faked a road-to-damascus conversion?"
https://plus.google.com/u/0/116753362008267799901/posts/TfrBqeAsVs1
Most of this is already covered by the question I already asked, but I'm curious about the underlined part.
Pundit, what's the story on Maliszewski faking his new viewpoint on stuff?
Even if he was faking his enthusiasm (which I've seen no evidence of), I don't get why that matters.
His blog was of use to me, that's enough. I'm not looking for saints and prophets... and I'm not fucking the guy.
Quote from: RPGPundit;788999pretend 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).
I'm pretty sure that is an overly harsh (if not libellous) analysis. :D
He was a typical 1990s railroad/metaplot type guy who then got interested in the newly fashionable old-school D&D, went way into that, started a campaign dungeon, thought he could write up his campaign dungeon for Kickstarter money, took the money and mostly failed to write up the dungeon. The whole 'money first-product later' Kickstarter phenomena inevitably creates situations like this.
I'm pretty sure he didn't read Swords & Wizardry and think "Aha! A great opportunity to embezzle foolish fans of old D&D!"
JM's bitching about post-holocaust games seems to imply that he should absolutely loathe D&D-type games. If it's damning that global thermonuclear war has not really happened, or that science-fantasy mutants are silly, then what of sword-n-sorcery magic and monsters?
Quote from: Phillip;789050JM's bitching about post-holocaust games seems to imply that he should absolutely loathe D&D-type games. If it's damning that global thermonuclear war has not really happened, or that science-fantasy mutants are silly, then what of sword-n-sorcery magic and monsters?
If this is the same guy as posted on the Gamma World group way way back then yeah he was a dick. As one of the admin I considered booting him. But did not as we reserve that for trolling the group which Ive only had to block one guy because he kept dragging historical revisionism into conversations when not trying to drag things down religious gutters.
Now-a-days I'd be a bit more harsh with someone joining just to bash Post Apoc settings.
Now I'll have to dig through archives and see who that person was for sure.
But yeah. Opinions change. Sometimes for the worse. Sometimes for the better. Foes can become friends. And vis-a-vis. Unfortunately. Sometimes they really are lying through their teeth about their change of heart.
How the hell do you tell them apart?
So Grogtard changed his mind? Big whoopee do.
One-wayism of any flavor is lame.
Quote from: One Horse Town;789000You should hang out here more Pundit, it's quite a nice forum. :pundit:
He's right Pundy. It's your bar, you pay the rent, so drink here more often.
Quote from: Omega;789058How the hell do you tell them apart?
You 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.
Quote from: CRKrueger;789007So what's the narrative?
1. JMal plays D&D like everyone else as a kid.
2. At some point starts writing for gaming companies.
3. Gets involved with WW in the 90s and works on a lot of WW stuff. Along the way he becomes a snooty elitist (or always was one).
4. During his stint at WW does 3e stuff via S&S imprint.
5. Doesn't like 3.5 and 4.
6. Starts Blog to figure out why D&D isn't D&D anymore
7. Becomes Pope of the OSR
8. Implodes spectacularly in a Perfect Storm of hype, internet hysteria, and Kickstarter malfeasance.
You have to be a political blogger's level of asshole to blog daily for 4 years and not mean a word of it, so in all likelihood, he meant a decent portion of what he wrote. He might have been pompous and overblown, with an insufferable sense of his own geek-fanboi bolstered celebrity, but his blog could be interesting and useful at times.
Even if the worst possible interpretation of all that were true, that he was a total "swine" who "came to Gygax" only as a marketing opportunity, so what?
His bubble has burst, let the poor bastard be.
Heh heh heh, next 4 years here will be very funny.
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.
I bet Maliszewski is just another Serbian war criminal who was trying to hide it out as a guru.
Quote from: Brad;789035What does a death in the family have to do with outright theft?
i 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.
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.
(http://www.pinterest.com/pin/create/extension/)
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 (http://maliszew.livejournal.com/), 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 (http://maliszew.livejournal.com/374546.html). 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 (http://maliszew.livejournal.com/436513.html) (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 (http://maliszew.livejournal.com/406476.html).
It also appears that his research for
Thousand Suns was taking him back to the science fiction he read as a kid (http://maliszew.livejournal.com/394042.html).
This appears to be a key post (http://maliszew.livejournal.com/411531.html): "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 (http://maliszew.livejournal.com/415939.html) (albeit it with a more compromising tone).
(Oddly we then get a literal Maliszewski vs. the neighborhood boys (http://maliszew.livejournal.com/427616.html) post.)
By December 2007, he's apparently reading his 1E manuals (http://maliszew.livejournal.com/432620.html) shortly after he was going to clean the old books out of his basement (http://maliszew.livejournal.com/422968.html). A fortnight later (http://maliszew.livejournal.com/435003.html) 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?
Quote from: estar;789027I can see this of being of interest. Possibly make the story of James Mal all the more interesting. But whatever is uncovered it would be a side show to conduct he displayed with Dwimmermount. In my mind that what did him in.
Well yes, certainly. But it speaks as to:
a) just how sincere his status as a "real" Old-school gamer was, much less the guy who wanted to be King of Old School and get to tell other people how they weren't real old-schoolers because they weren't sufficiantly "gygaxian".
b) the legitimacy of an asshole who WASN'T THERE getting to be the one to tell people who WERE there how it was like, much less whether the way they're doing it is really the way they did it back then.
and
c) just how wise it was to make him the hero of the OSR. (or, for that matter, to trust him with tens of thousands of dollars of old-schoolers own money for a product that turned out not to actually exist and that he had no intention of completing)
That's the huge irony: I was actually an Old-School Gamer. I was playing 1e and B/X when those were the current editions in print. But the OSR-clonemaniacs have the gall to say I'm not a Real Old-schooler or that the style I write about is not how people really did it back then, while licking the balls of a guy who up to 2007 had never given any sign of anything but contempt for Old-school.
i think that james had his road to damascus event just after gygax died. and that is really ok. we all waxed nostalgic after that and it was powerful catalyst for people to start exploring legacy d&d and clones.
Quote from: Justin Alexander;789115This 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 (http://maliszew.livejournal.com/), 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 (http://maliszew.livejournal.com/374546.html). 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 (http://maliszew.livejournal.com/436513.html) (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 (http://maliszew.livejournal.com/406476.html).
It also appears that his research for Thousand Suns was taking him back to the science fiction he read as a kid (http://maliszew.livejournal.com/394042.html).
This appears to be a key post (http://maliszew.livejournal.com/411531.html): "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 (http://maliszew.livejournal.com/415939.html) (albeit it with a more compromising tone).
(Oddly we then get a literal Maliszewski vs. the neighborhood boys (http://maliszew.livejournal.com/427616.html) post.)
By December 2007, he's apparently reading his 1E manuals (http://maliszew.livejournal.com/432620.html) shortly after he was going to clean the old books out of his basement (http://maliszew.livejournal.com/422968.html). A fortnight later (http://maliszew.livejournal.com/435003.html) 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.
So he very literally had an apparent conversion process that he mapped out on the internet, and that anyone who read Grognardia should be familiar with.
That's what I don't get, I hardly read grognardia (it was insufferable and the guy was obviously trying to create some kind of OSR-Swinedom to match his White-wolf days from the very start), but even I know that the guy readily admitted his 'narrative' about being a convert, and having gone from mocking old-school to being its Chosen Champion. That was part of the whole deal, of how he sold himself to the grognard crowd: "I used to persecute you but then I SAW THE LIGHT and now I am not only one of you but the most obviously qualified person to judge how old school really was and who is or is not old-school now!!"
So why are the people who know this trying to now deny it or claim like I'm making outrageous assertions?
Quote from: Justin Alexander;789116That is a completely inaccurate description of what happened: Maliszewski turned virtually all of the funds over to Autarch.
WHAT? That's not what I heard. Like, ever.
Quote from: CRKrueger;789123After 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.
The material from his pre-grognardia blog does make it seem pretty clear that he believed himself to be having a sincere conversion, yes.
But that still leaves two very significant points:
1) Why are people who CLEARLY KNOW about this conversion trying to pretend he wasn't Saul of Tarsus before the conversion?
and
2) It still makes him just about the worst shittiest choice for Pope of the OSR. Like most converts, he was a fanatic, and thought that now he was obviously the one who best understood the mind of god (or for god, read "old school"), much moreso than those who had actually walked and talked with jesus (or for jesus, read "people who had actually been old-school gamers since the actual pre-2e period").
Because he was a half-way decent writer with some skills, and because of his enthusiasm, and his
willingness to tell the extreme wing of the OSR-grognards exactly what they already wanted to hear (this cannot be emphasized enough), they put him up as their Prophet. And that was a really stupid thing to do.
Quote from: RPGPundit;7891491) Why are people who CLEARLY KNOW about this conversion trying to pretend he wasn't Saul of Tarsus before the conversion?
No idea on that one, he definitely was late to the table. I don't know how far he walked on the dark side though, only that he saw the light.
Quote from: RPGPundit;7891492) It still makes him just about the worst shittiest choice for Pope of the OSR. Like most converts, he was a fanatic, and thought that now he was obviously the one who best understood the mind of god (or for god, read "old school"), much moreso than those who had actually walked and talked with jesus (or for jesus, read "people who had actually been old-school gamers since the actual pre-2e period"). Because he was a half-way decent writer with some skills, and because of his enthusiasm, and his willingness to tell the extreme wing of the OSR-grognards exactly what they already wanted to hear (this cannot be emphasized enough), they put him up as their Prophet. And that was a really stupid thing to do.
There's a lot about the OSR that was stupid, and the fanboi celebrity of JMal was one of the stupidest, although the non-Clonemania part of the OSR is by far the more successful these days (which was inevitable, because you can only really RetroClone once, NeoClones, however are all over the place and god bless 'em.) If you're keeping score, the OSR is holding it's own as a design philosophy or at least as a demographic to pay lip service to.
Go make an Arrows of Indra Megadungeon. :D
Quote from: CRKrueger;789155Go make an Arrows of Indra Megadungeon. :D
Yeah seriously. Bonus points if it is compatible enough to be used with other OSR games.
Quote from: CRKrueger;789155Go make an Arrows of Indra Megadungeon. :D
I did one better. In the section in AoI on the Patala Underworld, I provided you with all the mechanics, and building-system, and (later) things like monsters, treasure, etc., for you to MAKE YOUR OWN AoI megadungeon.
Quote from: Spinachcat;789080So Grogtard changed his mind? Big whoopee do.
One-wayism of any flavor is lame.
Agreed.When a fanatic Big Ender becomes a fanatic Little Ender, that means everything to other partizan hard-liners. To the rest of us, it's more significant that the mind is still the narrow one of an intolerant ideologue.
Quote from: RPGPundit;789143Well yes, certainly. But it speaks as to:
a) just how sincere his status as a "real" Old-school gamer was, much less the guy who wanted to be King of Old School and get to tell other people how they weren't real old-schoolers because they weren't sufficiantly "gygaxian".
I found the links to his older blog interesting but overall the issue is not that relevant to me. I am pointing this out so you know where I am coming from.
What I will say that even if all that you say is true it has little relevance to the development of OSR.
I have seen hobbyist organizations founded, grow, and flamed out spectacularly because they were reliant on a few individuals at their core. Without those individual working together the whole thing fell apart.
I seen hobbyist organization found, grow, and continued to grow or maintain a stable members despite important members flaming out spectacularly.
The difference in my experience is in the nature of what they were trying to do. Hobbyists that do things that require coordination of multiple people, like holding an event, are prone to collapsing utterly if the core leadership flames out. Or in what you are debating, prone to capture by an other set of individual and redirected from its original purpose.
The OSR is was never that type of group. Because of internet, open game license, and technology, it was and continues a kalidoscope of individuals and communties coming together and then breaking apart for a variety of projects.
Nobody I know saw a decrease in sales or viewers when James Mal flamed out spectacularly. The same when the ChicagoWiz hanged his hat, or Jeff Rients had to focus on Grad School, etc, etc.
To but it blunt is not one example of any hugely popular OSR individual have any measurable impact after they stopped participating in the OSR. The only way the OSR can go under if general interest in classic D&D ceases. Even then it has to be a pretty drastic reduction in interest before the influx of newcomers gets low enough to actually halt things.
Reduce the flow of discussion and new material, yeah that very possible. But the low barrier of entry and the OGL means that classic D&D is around for the duration.
Quote from: RPGPundit;789143b) the legitimacy of an asshole who WASN'T THERE getting to be the one to tell people who WERE there how it was like, much less whether the way they're doing it is really the way they did it back then.
Everybody has their opinion. Even you have a very strong opinion that old school ought to be about aesthetics and not focus so much on concrete rules. I have a strong opinion that the core of the OSR is a bunch of independents all doing their own things with the classic D&D mechanics.
Doesn't mean people have to agree with me, you, or James Mal.
Quote from: RPGPundit;789143c) just how wise it was to make him the hero of the OSR. (or, for that matter, to trust him with tens of thousands of dollars of old-schoolers own money for a product that turned out not to actually exist and that he had no intention of completing)
Because until then he seemed like any other OSR publisher. From my viewpoint I got paid promptly for the maps I did on the Old Chateau module he did. I was flabbergasted that he flamed out the way he did. I figure the worse case would be like Brave Halfling and Delving Deeper. But with his connections i figure he would have the help needed to overcome that or any other issue.
But disappearing down a rabbit hole in Canada for several months and shutting down his blog was well... well the guy burned his bridges thoroughly on that one. He did not exhibit rational behavior so there was no predicting it. Luckily he didn't spend all of the money and remitted a substantial portion of the kickstarter funds to Autarch. I don't have the link but Tavis posted the terms publically.
I am only mention this not to make James Mal seems like a better guy. Only that the situation wasn't the worst possibility that could have occurred.
Quote from: RPGPundit;789143That's the huge irony: I was actually an Old-School Gamer. I was playing 1e and B/X when those were the current editions in print. But the OSR-clonemaniacs have the gall to say I'm not a Real Old-schooler or that the style I write about is not how people really did it back then, while licking the balls of a guy who up to 2007 had never given any sign of anything but contempt for Old-school.
So what. We all to endure our taunts by one clique or another. You think Majestic Wilderlands beloved across of all the OSR? I gotten shit about that. Gotten shit about my blog. The difference is that I don't bitch about it. Because it had no practical effect on me. There is absolutely nothing they can do that can stop any project that I am working on or want to work on.
What I focus on is growing my audience. Making things that I know somebody finds useful. Along with helping others make useful and interesting things for the OSR. Like you.
That why I called out you out on your post. Erik is doing a lot a useful things for the OSR. You were way off base accusing him of historical revisionism. For all his popularity Erik Tenkar does not have the kind of power you attribute to him. Nor did James Mal "the Pope of the OSR".
If anything a closer analogy to James Mal role would be the " autocephalous Patriarch of Grognardia" than the "Pope of the OSR." Pope implies some type of authority he did not have.
Quote from: Justin Alexander;789115It'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 (http://maliszew.livejournal.com/374546.html). 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 (http://maliszew.livejournal.com/436513.html) (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 (http://maliszew.livejournal.com/406476.html).
It also appears that his research for Thousand Suns was taking him back to the science fiction he read as a kid (http://maliszew.livejournal.com/394042.html).
This appears to be a key post (http://maliszew.livejournal.com/411531.html): "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 (http://maliszew.livejournal.com/415939.html) (albeit it with a more compromising tone).
I remember Thousand Suns, and was on the Traveller/Citizens of the Imperium forums when he was there developing it. I bought both editions of it as I am a sci-fi guy, though I lost track of him after that.
Thousand Suns is pretty good but it seems like J.M. himself is kinda all over the map.
Well whatever else you can say about Pundy it's immensely admirable that when he's being a dumbass people feel free to call him on it without even the slightest hint of fear of being banned. I don't think I've ever seen that except in unmoderated spam pits.
Quote from: Just Another Snake Cult;789022I got into D&D in 1981 or '82 at age eleven. I became obsessed with it and it became a major part of my life throughout adolescence and young adulthood.
Shortly after college in the 90's I kinda went through a "Snob" phase of wanting "More" out of gaming (Hip, trendy, KEWL relevance that would get me respected as an artist or laid or something) and turned my back on D&D, which at the time seemed played out and about as cool and with-it as the Andy Griffith Show. I had nothing to do with D&D for a little less than a decade. It probably didn't help that none of the gamers around here wanted anything to do with it either. If I had suggested playing old-school D&D to them in 1996 I would have been laughed out of the room (Although their Earthdawn games were really no different... or for that matter their Vampire games, which as far as I could tell were about as gothic and psychological as Michael Bay movies, with vampires slugging it out on motorcycles with katanas and HK-MP3s. )
I got back in to D&D via third edition, which reminded me of just what I found so magical back in '81: Killing owlbears, looting old moathouses, half-orc assassins and temples of Tiamat and otyughs and githyanki ... but I soon decided the system was waaaaaaay too complex and number-crunchy (The "Paperwork" of designing characters and encounters was a crushing drag). So I got back down my old Moldvay Basic set and never looked back.
I imagine that my experience of falling away and then coming back was not that uncommon among old-schoolers (Maybe it was even the norm, I have no idea). I don't think weird pissing contests about who is or is not a "Pure" OSR member are constructive.
It mirrors my experience to a degree.
I was heavily into D&D at first, though we always had time to try other games as well (Top Secret, Star Frontiers, and TMNT were all favorites in the early years; with Earthdawn, CoC, and Rifts later on).
Then there was a period in college where I really, really got into the WW stuff for about a year. It seemed so cool and hip at the time. But it got old real fast and I didn't like the people who liked those games very much.
After that I played some Earthdawn and AD&D, but it was sparse and eventually I just quit gaming all together by my Senior year in college.
Years later, I got with a gaming group that played D&D 3e. Like you, I liked the experience at first but then the sheer volume of rules seemed to weigh things down quickly (and this was just as a player).
I successfully killed that campaign off and got the group to try Rifts, which went great. We then played a rather short and dull AD&D 2e game that someone else ran before I hijacked the group again to play a 4e campaign (which was fun for a while, but it really was the difference between a good 80's action movie and something like the "Expendables" movies). Once that was over, I got the group to play a Basic D&D game, which is my personal favorite edition.
Since leaving that group, my new group has done a Gangbusters/CoC crossover game (which worked very well) and a Mongoose Traveller game (which did not). And now I'm back looking at doing AD&D 2e again (though we have tried 5e, it wouldn't be my preferred edition).
Quote from: RPGPundit;789148WHAT? That's not what I heard. Like, ever.
Well, it's right there on the kickstarter, in update #48 (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/autarch/dwimmermount/posts/434984):
QuoteI'm very happy to announce that this afternoon, James Maliszewski transferred to Autarch the Kickstarter funds necessary for us to complete the Dwimmermount project and pay the artists who haven't been compensated for their work.
Edit: Now, that doesn't mean that Autarch hasn't lost some money finishing the kickstarter, but this would hardly be the first kickstarter where the funds weren't enough to cover the expenses. :) But the person making the update seems to think they've gotten a good chunk of the Kickstarter funds.
Quote from: RPGPundit;789149Like most converts, he was a fanatic, and thought that now he was obviously the one who best understood the mind of god (or for god, read "old school"), much moreso than those who had actually walked and talked with jesus (or for jesus, read "people who had actually been old-school gamers since the actual pre-2e period").
This is what pissed me off. Grognardia marked the shift of OSR from people talking on places like Dragonsfoot about how they played TSR D&D, to pious doctrine about how people
should have played D&D. And a bunch of grognards ate it up because they had become fanatical edition-warriors against WotC D&D players, and wanted a strict shared orthodoxy that the troops could rally under.
I started with Holmes Basic in 1979 and I sure as fuck didn't need some pompous blogger to tell me how
real old-school D&D was supposed to work. Especially some fucker who never actually played that way.
My old school is older than your old school.
Just the act of starting a blog is pompous on some degree... like running for political office it suggests you think you have something valuable to offer, things worth saying. That you're a little bit better than the other guy.
A successful blog doesn't run on self-doubt.
Meanwhile there are always sheep out there looking for a shepherd.
QuoteEspecially some fucker who never actually played that way.
From what I'd read I had the impression that he HAD played D&D/Gamma World/Traveller in the old days and then moved on (similar to myself and plenty of others). Not that I think someone espousing the treasures of OSR games needs street-cred to have good ideas.
Quote from: Daztur;789173I don't think I've ever seen that except in unmoderated spam pits.
Yes, truly free speech is tragically rare, both online and in the real world. Freaks people out. Makes me feel all
Easy Rider:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gc11mJGre10
Quote from: estar;789167Nobody I know saw a decrease in sales or viewers when James Mal flamed out spectacularly.
Well, Autarch.
Quote from: Simlasa;789192From what I'd read I had the impression that he HAD played D&D/Gamma World/Traveller in the old days and then moved on.
IIRC, he played, but confessed that after parsing the scrolls of Gygax, he felt he had played wrong. Which is the whole problem. Did you have fun? If yes, then you didn't play wrong.
Quote from: Simlasa;789192Not that I think someone espousing the treasures of OSR games needs street-cred to have good ideas.
Sure, anyone can learn and enjoy any given playstyle, old or new. But it takes a particular kind of douchebaggery to pontificate about the righteousness of a particular orthodoxy when you're a recent convert yourself. It would be like me (a 40-something Canadian) preaching to a 70-something guy who grew up in Liverpool about Merseybeat and the dancehall scene in the early 60s just because I read a couple biographies about the Beatles.
Quote from: RPGPundit;789194Well, Autarch.
Of course there would be an impact on Autarch. I was talking about the OSR as a whole. I realize it is a guess I don't know anybody whose sales was effected adversely by the crash of Dwimmermount and the Grognardia ceasing to be an active blog. I feel know enough people feel that was true of the rest of the OSR.
I don't thing Autarch sales was affected due to the way they handled the situation. Certainly their development schedule was thrown seriously out of whack.
When screw ups happen in the OSR the fallout is limited to the principles. The closest the OSR ever came to any type of movement wide shit storm was the TARGA mess several years back. Even that was mostly an issue among bloggers. OSR Publisher were busy with their own projects.
As long as the internet remains what it is, PoD remains accessible and affordable, combined with the Open Game License means as long there interest in classic D&D there will always be an OSR. And because of trends in the larger hobby, old school style minimalist games will continue to be developed and find an audience.
Everybody win from where I stand. There just no downside other than the fact to make something good you have to put some work into it. That part of the equation hasn't changed.
Quote from: Haffrung;789188This is what pissed me off. Grognardia marked the shift of OSR from people talking on places like Dragonsfoot about how they played TSR D&D, to pious doctrine about how people should have played D&D. And a bunch of grognards ate it up because they had become fanatical edition-warriors against WotC D&D players, and wanted a strict shared orthodoxy that the troops could rally under.
I started with Holmes Basic in 1979 and I sure as fuck didn't need some pompous blogger to tell me how real old-school D&D was supposed to work. Especially some fucker who never actually played that way.
Yes but how did it effect your ability to publish, promote, or play classic D&D or another old school game?
People whoes opinion I don't agree with are a dime a dozen. The ones that matter are those who power is a such they can impact what you can or want to do.
This is where Pundit oratory fails the test. He spending a lot of verbal energy against the gatekeepers of the OSR when in fact the people he target have no ability to effect what being published, played, or promoted. The only thing that the anybody can do is add their own voice to the mix.
Quote from: jcfiala;789182Well, it's right there on the kickstarter, in update #48 (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/autarch/dwimmermount/posts/434984):
That means I was wrong about Mal keeping all the money; I apologize.
I really had the opposite impression; at this remove, my guess is I formed that 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: fuseboy;789017Too funny. This reminds me of a bit out of Vi Hart's Guide to Comments:
Vi Hart is awesome. :)
Quote from: Haffrung;789188This is what pissed me off. Grognardia marked the shift of OSR from people talking on places like Dragonsfoot about how they played TSR D&D, to pious doctrine about how people should have played D&D. And a bunch of grognards ate it up because they had become fanatical edition-warriors against WotC D&D players, and wanted a strict shared orthodoxy that the troops could rally under.
I started with Holmes Basic in 1979 and I sure as fuck didn't need some pompous blogger to tell me how real old-school D&D was supposed to work. Especially some fucker who never actually played that way.
Seconded, Haffrung. I am from the same era. I read some of JM's blogs and I took rather strong exception to what he was writing. After a few weeks of writing posts refuting what he was saying, I regained my sanity and ignored him.
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).
Quote from: RPGPundit;789142That'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?
If nothing else, this thread is basically providing a master class in Pundit's broken rhetoric and hypocrisy: Post absurd, libelous bullshit. Get called on bullshit. Attempt to rewrite history to claim that you never said the absurd, libelous bullshit.
Quote from: RPGPundit;789149But that still leaves two very significant points:
1) Why are people who CLEARLY KNOW about this conversion trying to pretend he wasn't Saul of Tarsus before the conversion?
Jesus Christ. You literally just smeared mud all over your face by asserting that someone had a secret, hidden agenda and were forced to pretend that you never said it. And you respond by immediately turning around and claiming that somebody
else has a secret, hidden agenda?
Bonus hypocrisy points for claiming that they
must be following a hidden agenda because they failed to do the most basic research... ya know, the same basic research you failed to do before starting this thread.
Hopefully your tinfoil-hat paranoia is just a badly broken rhetorical crutch of rampant hyperbole and hypocrisy that you are unable to resist. If it's actually how you view the world around you, then you have my pity.
"The pizza delivery boy was 5 minutes late... The only possible explanation is that he's laced my pizza with psychotropic drugs!"
Quote from: Saladman;789204That means I was wrong about Mal keeping all the money; I apologize.
I really had the opposite impression; at this remove, my guess is I formed that 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.
Mistakes happen. And when they do, this is the best way to handle them. Thanks for that.
Pundit: Take notes.
Quote from: Haffrung;789196IIRC, he played, but confessed that after parsing the scrolls of Gygax, he felt he had played wrong. Which is the whole problem. Did you have fun? If yes, then you didn't play wrong.
OK, but I don't get why it bugs you so.
QuoteSure, anyone can learn and enjoy any given playstyle, old or new. But it takes a particular kind of douchebaggery to pontificate about the righteousness of a particular orthodoxy when you're a recent convert yourself. It would be like me (a 40-something Canadian) preaching to a 70-something guy who grew up in Liverpool about Merseybeat and the dancehall scene in the early 60s just because I read a couple biographies about the Beatles.
Maybe, but on the other hand... the douchebag MIGHT have some interesting observations, things to say... and the 70-something MIGHT have spent the whole time drunk on his ass and not really thought too deeply about what was going on.
Being a blowhard doesn't negate the possibility of good ideas.
It's similar to how Pundit is often up some bizarre tree with his rants... but I can read through them and still find golden bits to steal away. Not EVERYTHING he says is crazy conspiracy rants... not EVERYTHING James M. wrote was egomaniacal pontification.
Quote from: CRKrueger;789123After 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.
Yeah, I agree with CRKrueger and Alexander on this one (and thanks Alexander for looking that stuff up).
JMal just changed his mind. That's the point of what you're doing Pundit, right, trying to change minds? Don't get all pissy when it happens to work.
Quote from: Saladman;789204That means I was wrong about Mal keeping all the money; I apologize.
I really had the opposite impression; at this remove, my guess is I formed that 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.
We received a portion of the money back (about 60%). The other 40% was either retained by James as a license fee to give us the rights or had already been spent by him.
Had we simply laid out and delivered his manuscript as-is, we probably would have turned a profit, even so; but because of the re-write Tavis and I did, the cost of layout, printing, and shipping ended up notably higher. Some of the special components also cost more than we projected. So we lost money, and if you add the opportunity cost of the delays it posed on our other projects, we lost a lot of money.
But I'm hopeful that our decision to deliver the best product we could will prove the right decision in the long term, in terms of Autarch as a brand and company.
Quote from: Daztur;789173Well whatever else you can say about Pundy it's immensely admirable that when he's being a dumbass people feel free to call him on it without even the slightest hint of fear of being banned. I don't think I've ever seen that except in unmoderated spam pits.
This is unabashedly true. There are people here that might fairly be described as Pundit's enemies. He welcomes it all, responds to most of it, and I've never seen him take any moderator/administrator action in retaliation for a persons opinion.
Yeah, the best thing about this site is that there is a core of people who pay attention to the threads, but no is acting like a Nazi.
Quote from: estar;789199Yes but how did it effect your ability to publish, promote, or play classic D&D or another old school game?
People whoes opinion I don't agree with are a dime a dozen. The ones that matter are those who power is a such they can impact what you can or want to do.
Revisionism and the New Orthodoxy have most certainly affected what is published and played.
A few years ago, a local DM set up a B/X campaign and posted session reports on a forum. He was a player of about the same providence as I was (he started with Moldvay Basic, not Holmes). One of his players was another guy who started playing in 1980. Another had started with 2E.
So they play in a mini-sandbox. They go to a few locations. PCs die. New ones are created. They miss a lot of content. After about four sessions, the campaign dies.
Afterwards, the DM basically scolded the players for not following key old-school procedures. The didn't solicit rumors actively. The didn't hire enough hirelings. They didn't have enough rope and poles. They didn't use this mapping technique, or that protocol for checking for traps. etc. etc. From the sounds of it, the players shrugged and moved to a different DM. The upshot is the DM believed they were playing wrong, even though the right way (which he had clearly read on some OSR blog) isn't the way either he or the other long-time player had every played. They were trying to mimic something the DM had read about on the internet and they didn't have fun doing it.
Then there's megadungeons. Now, megadungeons are a very cool premise. But let's not pretend they were any kind of widespread thing outside Gygax's own campaign or the first few years of OD&D. I expect the number of people who played Steading of the Hill Giant - even just the monochrome edition - dwarfs the number who had played in a megadungeon up to that point.
So why are megadungeons regarded as some hallmark of old-school D&D? Because a bunch of fans dug around forums and old D&D arcana and uncovered the premise like archaeologists dusting off the rosetta stone. Again, which is perfectly fine. But then every wannabee old-school DM and his brother (including Maliszewski) had to publish one just to establish their OSR cred. In the space of a couple years, the OSR was synonymous with megadungeons - something which was outside the experience of 95 per cent of D&D players in 1982.
Smaller, setting-based dungeons like Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan, or In Search of the Unknown, were overlooked as models of old-school play. And you saw nary a whisper about linked adventure series, like the U series or A series, as adventure models. Why not? Far more old-school players have experience with those sorts of adventures than with megadungeons. And they were a common topic of conservation on forums like Dragonsfoot and the Necromancer Games forums long before the old-school movement metastasized into an ultra-conservative jihad that looked to how Gygax played for guidance, rather than how most gamers themselves played back in the day.
So the embrace of ultra-conservative orthodoxy by the OSR did affect what people talked about, played, and published. It also alienated a lot of long-time gamers who frankly didn't give a shit how Gygax played, and saw no particular reason to imitate his play-style at their own table.
There are reasons I say that the term Old School makes more sense to me if read as a synonym or euphemism for "Early Gygaxian" ...
But really, Pundit, do you need evidence? Just take up your mantle as High Anticleric of the World (1) of the Old-School/5th Edition Syncretist State (The motto: "Convert, Leave or Die") and declare Maliszewski excommunicate for not having always been a pure adherent of the True Way of Gaming. About half the OSR seems to have done it to the other half or each other in some form.
;) ;)
1. In the sense of the World, the Flesh and the Devil. Zak S holds the position of High Anticleric of the Flesh; the position of High Anticleric of the Devil is still open, but Venger Satanis appears to be making a strong bid for it.
In this thread:
1. Spittle-flecked narcissist demonstrates just how threatening rival authority figures are, again
2. People calmly pointing out that he's missing, well, all of the important facts
3. People calmly pointing out that even if the facts were as he suspected, his conclusion would still be just shy of paranoid conspiracy
4. People congratulating one another on what a nice thing freedom of speech is
I met James once, and managed to get in a whole gaming session and a long follow-up conversation before I clued in to who he actually was. He didn't come across as a toxic lunatic, which in hindsight is slightly too rare a quality.
Quote from: fuseboy;789251In this thread:
1. Spittle-flecked narcissist demonstrates just how threatening rival authority figures are, again
2. People calmly pointing out that he's missing, well, all of the important facts
3. People calmly pointing out that even if the facts were as he suspected, his conclusion would still be just shy of paranoid conspiracy
4. People congratulating one another on what a nice thing freedom of speech is
I met James once, and managed to get in a whole gaming session and a long follow-up conversation before I clued in to who he actually was. He didn't come across as a toxic lunatic, which in hindsight is slightly too rare a quality.
Pundit's Razor: If two or more explanations are equally likely, the one that involves a storygamer swine conspiracy is probably correct.
-Emperor Norton
Maybe it's a good idea to stop seeing the world as a sports match where people who don't belong to team A belong to team B. It's very monolithic. Maybe you should look at it what is practical and what isn't.
For example a lot of WW stuff is written like essays and goes into depth about the themes and the mood of the games. I don't find it very practical. It doesn't help me as a GM, but I guess a lot of people read it to get into the mood of the game. I like more technical advice like for example advice telling me how many XP I should give my PC's and the NPC's based on the epicness of the game. Like Unisystem does.
But then again I like Fate campaign advice better even if it's probably more swinish than WoD. I like the writing down of questions and the ones who aren't answered after a few sessions are probably the campaign arc. That works for me.
Anyway, rambling here. Back to my point. Why fighting all these wars to people from the wrong camp? Get out of a game what works and ignore what doesn't work for you.
Quote from: RPGPundit;789165I did one better. In the section in AoI on the Patala Underworld, I provided you with all the mechanics, and building-system, and (later) things like monsters, treasure, etc., for you to MAKE YOUR OWN AoI megadungeon.
It's called "The Jakallan Underworld." :D
Quote from: amacris;789231We received a portion of the money back (about 60%). The other 40% was either retained by James as a license fee to give us the rights or had already been spent by him.
Had we simply laid out and delivered his manuscript as-is, we probably would have turned a profit, even so; but because of the re-write Tavis and I did, the cost of layout, printing, and shipping ended up notably higher. Some of the special components also cost more than we projected. So we lost money, and if you add the opportunity cost of the delays it posed on our other projects, we lost a lot of money.
But I'm hopeful that our decision to deliver the best product we could will prove the right decision in the long term, in terms of Autarch as a brand and company.
Well, at least to me, and some other people, it showed that Autarch has integrity. "You do not leave your mates in the cacky."
Quote from: Justin Alexander;789115(Oddly we then get a literal Maliszewski vs. the neighborhood boys (http://maliszew.livejournal.com/427616.html) post.)
.
That whole story about him stealing the little kid's shoe is fucking hysterical in it's peevish, fussy banality. It's like something out of a Harvey Pekar comic.
It's brilliant. It's a great story.
Quote from: Old Geezer;789274Well, at least to me, and some other people, it showed that Autarch has integrity. "You do not leave your mates in the cacky."
Pretty much the reason I bought the PDF. After the whole Dwimmermount fiasco, I was happy to see that someone actually produced a quality product out of that mess.
Quote from: RPGPundit;789165I did one better. In the section in AoI on the Patala Underworld, I provided you with all the mechanics, and building-system, and (later) things like monsters, treasure, etc., for you to MAKE YOUR OWN AoI megadungeon.
Unfortunately, it's just a few page of random tables. Not even long random tables. It's almost worthless in practice because it's just the same stuff over and over.
If you want to see a random dungeon done right, look at Mad Monks of Kwantoom from Kabuki Kaiser.
Quote from: Haffrung;789244So the embrace of ultra-conservative orthodoxy by the OSR did affect what people talked about, played, and published. It also alienated a lot of long-time gamers who frankly didn't give a shit how Gygax played, and saw no particular reason to imitate his play-style at their own table.
The thing is, the OSR didn't really do that. Look at how many OSR modules there are. Literally hundreds. Even now, probably 2-3 come out on average a week.
How many of them are megadungeons? Damned few.
Quote from: estar;789027James Maliskewski was an ass for abandoning Dwimmermount. And he faltered on Petty Gods as well. Both of which had to be bailed out by other people. The way it all went down he thoroughly burned his bridges with the larger OSR community. And he burned it by what he did.
Hrrmmm?? I don't read
Black Gate anymore either. I really liked that e-zine right up until the time they published a bunch of Jmal articles after his great dissing of Old School Gamers by abandoning Dwimmermount.
Didn't think he deserved to have any article published after that. He shouldn't be a spokesperson for the OSR, or for old school gaming in general.
Quote from: Haffrung;789244Revisionism and the New Orthodoxy have most certainly affected what is published and played.
That wasn't my question, how it effected YOUR ability to publish, play, or promote D&D. What opportunities you personally did have because of the OSR "gatekeepers".
Quote from: Haffrung;789244Afterwards, the DM basically scolded the players for not following key old-school procedures.
Sounds like the DM was as an ass. Were you playing in this campaign?
Quote from: Haffrung;789244Then there's megadungeons. Now, megadungeons are a very cool premise. But let's not pretend they were any kind of widespread thing outside Gygax's own campaign or the first few years of OD&D. I expect the number of people who played Steading of the Hill Giant - even just the monochrome edition - dwarfs the number who had played in a megadungeon up to that point.
My experience back in the day was that there was more than few gamers with their prized dungeon. But it wasn't that common especially as the variety of published products grew and the individual referees gained experienced.
Quote from: Haffrung;789244So why are megadungeons regarded as some hallmark of old-school D&D?
Well Blackmoor started as a miniature wargame and after several months evolved to focus on the Blackmoor Dungeons. Greyhawk had its dungeon as the central tentpole from the get go. So my personal guess is that people it attracted to the mystique of being the focus of the campaign where game of Dungeon & Dragons was born.
Quote from: Haffrung;789244In the space of a couple years, the OSR was synonymous with megadungeons - something which was outside the experience of 95 per cent of D&D players in 1982.
That not supported by the Hoard and Horde timeline.
Quote from: Haffrung;789244Smaller, setting-based dungeons like Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan, or In Search of the Unknown, were overlooked as models of old-school play.
Seriously? Have you looked at the Horde and Hoard list (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ar9Wm_5gI_1TdGlyZHpwRHFoU2pEMng0NkhqTlJEYmc#gid=0)? Sorted it by adventure and publication date?
By 2008 there were 64 free and commercial module released for classic D&D or near clones.
In 2008 there was 31 modules released
2009 62 modules
2010 72 modules
2011 92 modules
Up to may of 2012 21 modules
with names like I2 Beyond the Black Wall, The Horrendous Heap of Sixteen Cities, Isle of the Unknown, G8 Manor of the Mountain Giant King, etc.
Yeah there was Stonehell, Barrowdown, and yes Dwimmermount. But I think the megadungeons are dwarfed by the sheer multitude of releases.
And while I sound critical, I am not. The OSR is so diverse and widespread that all that anyone sees is a slice, including myself. You happened to see the slice that included a lot of people making megadungeons. But the OSR is not dominated by megadungeons. Hell today it not even dominated by close clones of classic D&D. Instead classic D&D just the center of a diffuse and diverse crowd prompting, playing, and playing RPGs.
Quote from: Haffrung;789244And you saw nary a whisper about linked adventure series, like the U series or A series, as adventure models.
Again back to Horde and Hoard, there are the Howling Hills series by the Dungeon Delver, there are several series of modules with related codes. I will say that the OSR is not partial to Adventure Paths or anything like them.
Quote from: Haffrung;789244So the embrace of ultra-conservative orthodoxy by the OSR did affect what people talked about, played, and published. It also alienated a lot of long-time gamers who frankly didn't give a shit how Gygax played, and saw no particular reason to imitate his play-style at their own table.
I am not seeing the embrace of ultra-conservativism you are talking about. Certainly James Raggi of Lamentation marches to the beat of his own drummer. Kevin Crawford, Tim Shorts, and myself all do things that have little to with slavishly re-creating old materials. Looking over the Hoard and Horde list i can see names that I know are into gonzo, sandboxes, intrigue, etc. Nearly every subgenre is representated somewhere in the OSR. The ultra conservative are there as well. Just one of many possibilities that exists.
What I have to do? Go through each every Hoard and Hoard entry and compile them into hard statistics? Before you believe that there is no gatekeepers, that there is nothing to stop anybody who is willing to do the work to make a go of it?
The evidence is just not there.
Quote from: Haffrung;789196Sure, anyone can learn and enjoy any given playstyle, old or new. But it takes a particular kind of douchebaggery to pontificate about the righteousness of a particular orthodoxy when you're a recent convert yourself. It would be like me (a 40-something Canadian) preaching to a 70-something guy who grew up in Liverpool about Merseybeat and the dancehall scene in the early 60s just because I read a couple biographies about the Beatles.
JMal liked to shit all over the D&D I grew up with (BECMI), so there's no love lost here. That said, dude had a blog, on which he wrote out a bunch of his own particular thoughts about the game. He was enthusiastic and fervent, as the newly converted often are. Whatever other many, well-documented failures and failings he may have had, I can't fault him for having a blog about his new conversion. Hell, that's better than going on forums and spewing one's opinions on any tangentially related thread.
I think this also goes to one reason for JMal's popularity. He may have, as Pundit suggests, appealed to an ultra-orthodox wing of old-school D&D gaming. But that isn't what made him popular. For a lot of folks who never stopped playing whatever flavor of TSR-D&D they liked, he was harmless at worst. They may not agree with all of his takes, but within his prolific output there'd be some stuff that really hit the nail on the head. But that'd just make him another blogger.
What made JMal such a major voice in the wilderness is that there
a lot of folks like him. Some of them had played back in the 80s, but not quite in the dungeon/wilderness exploration mode. Some of them had played 2nd Ed. in the 90s, when that mode had been largely abandoned. Some of them had seen 3e as the realization of all their fervent wishes, but then realized that you must be careful what you wish for; you just may get it. Even some people who'd started with 3e or 4e, but were intrigued by what JMal described, entirely different from the D&D they had learned.
For these somewhat disparate groups, JMal's "outsider going in" stance and the archaeological aspect of his "discoveries" were a major part of the draw. This was an audience who'd never played OD&D, AD&D, or B/X by the book, and they were suddenly saying, "Hey, if you just assume that the designers knew what they were doing, you find there's a really interesting game here!"
Further, it was that position that meant when someone said, "Hey, I'm new to the OSR and want to find out more about. What are some resources?" they were invariably pointed to Grognardia.
Quote from: Brad;789312Pretty much the reason I bought the PDF. After the whole Dwimmermount fiasco, I was happy to see that someone actually produced a quality product out of that mess.
Cryptozoic got the same favourable reaction from the backers of Doom that Came to Atlantic city when they stepped in to save the game after Erik Chevalier tool the 122k raised and then told backers that the game couldnt be produced and he couldnt refund them because he was broke and hed have to get a job to repay them, some day... So please stop calling him bad names because its ruining his burgeoning movie making career... honest!
Leaving Keith Baker and co holding the bag of very irate backers.
Cryptozoic stepped in and offered to not only fulfill the orders, but to send them to all the backers for free.
Quote from: fuseboy;789251I met James once, and managed to get in a whole gaming session and a long follow-up conversation before I clued in to who he actually was. He didn't come across as a toxic lunatic, which in hindsight is slightly too rare a quality.
In practice, most people are probably relatively mundane and down to earth in person. It takes a lot of effort and energy to maintain a "larger than life" persona, whether online or offline (in public or in front of a mirror).
Even an individual that is a high functioning autistic, is usually more than a one-dimensional caricature. (ie. They're not always like one-dimensional "Sheldon Cooper" types).
Quote from: Haffrung;789188This is what pissed me off. Grognardia marked the shift of OSR from people talking on places like Dragonsfoot about how they played TSR D&D, to pious doctrine about how people should have played D&D. And a bunch of grognards ate it up because they had become fanatical edition-warriors against WotC D&D players, and wanted a strict shared orthodoxy that the troops could rally under.
I started with Holmes Basic in 1979 and I sure as fuck didn't need some pompous blogger to tell me how real old-school D&D was supposed to work. Especially some fucker who never actually played that way.
YES! Exactly.
Pundit, we need to go back to the beginning of this thread...
Quote from: RPGPundit;788999someone on G+ ... is questioning claims about how before starting Grognardia, James Maliszewski was actually not an Old-School gamer (not in the sense that some of the Clonemaniacs use of "you don't play purely the way play so you're not a REAL old-schooler", but in the much more LITERAL sense of "did not play old-school games") and had in fact written many things where he mocked, made fun of, criticized and insulted old-school D&D.
You incorrectly depict the question on G+. (The last phrase, "and had in fact...," is close to a correct depiction though.)
Quotepoint 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
Here you also incorrectly depict the question on G+. (This one slipped past me the first time, but not on a second look. "Swine" is too broad, nebulous, and (potentially) polymorphic of a criteria, since you "own" the criteria's definition.)
This was the actual G+ conversation (source (https://plus.google.com/u/0/116753362008267799901/posts/TfrBqeAsVs1)):QuoteKasimir Urbanski Sep 27, 2014: Seriously?! James as in Grognardia? As in the guy who wrote articles all through the 90s about how fucking lame D&D and especially old-school is, and then when he saw a chance faked a road-to-damascus conversion? ...
Guy Fullerton Sep 27, 2014: "articles all through the 90s about how fucking lame D&D and especially old-school is." Where are these articles? I would like to read some. I see he has credits in some Challenge Magazines and AAB Proceedings. Are they in those? Somewhere else?
To restate the (singular) question:
Where are Maliszewski's "articles all through the 90s about how fucking lame D&D and especially old-school is?"Here is what I (and others) looked through, covering many dozen articles & reviews
all through the 90's:
Five issues of AAB Proceedings (from 1990 to 1992)
Eleven issues of Challenge Magazine (from 1991 to 1994)
His columns (http://www.rpg.net/columns/list-column.phtml?colname=sf) and reviews (https://web.archive.org/web/20000208080222/http://rpg.net/cgibin/flatfile.cgi?filename=Reviews&site=news&search=and&keyone=Reviewer&valueone=Maliszewski) from pre-2000 rpg.net (from 1998 and later)
His Roleplay News (https://web.archive.org/web/20000815071548/http://www.roleplaynews.com/) reviews (from 1998-2000)
The Fourth Millennium Games (https://web.archive.org/web/19990202173823/http://www.interlog.com/%7Emaliszew/4thm_home.html) web site
His circa-2000 (https://web.archive.org/web/20000816151057/http://www3.sympatico.ca/maliszew/) web site
The Gamma World yahoo group (https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/gammaworld) (started in 1998, which he didn't post on, but I followed Omega's lead, so I included it)
His usenet posts (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/James$20Maliszewski%7Csort:date), though this was an ridiculously quick skim through hundreds of posts.
I did not look at any of his Pyramid or InQuest articles. Nor any significant amount of post-1999 content (because Pundit's assertion was "all through the 90s").
What was found:
Reviews of Alternity Player's Guide (https://web.archive.org/web/20000208123538/http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/reviews/rev_0943.html) (4-out-of-5 rating) and Gamemaster Guide (https://web.archive.org/web/20000208025952/http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/reviews/rev_1041.html) (3-out-of-5 rating) that both contain uncharitable* reactions to class and/or level systems.
Review of Apocalypse Never (https://web.archive.org/web/20000124101747/http://rpg.net/news+reviews/columns/sffeb99.html) containing an uncharitable* characterization of gamma world and (maybe) 80's games in a somewhat-general sense.
Review of Imagine Players' Guide (https://web.archive.org/web/20000818170715/http://www.roleplaynews.com/reviews/imagine.asp) (3-out-of-10 rating) containing an uncharitable* characterization of 70's era AD&D. (This is perhaps the most extreme viewpoint of those found.)
*I use "uncharitable" in order to be intentionally ambiguous about how critical his words are, so you are forced to read the articles in their entirety. There is context beyond the short quotes, and he sometimes delivers caveats with his criticisms.
SUMMARYAmong roughly
sixty articles plus various other content, from 1991-1999, I found
four articles with potentially-applicable criticisms. There are
dozens of articles & reviews & posts with no such criticisms.
Pundit: Is this it? Are these four sources the "articles
all through the 90s about how
fucking lame D&D and especially old-school is?" Are these the "
many things where he
mocked, made fun of, criticized and
insulted old-school D&D?"
Quote from: Haffrung;789244So why are megadungeons regarded as some hallmark of old-school D&D? Because a bunch of fans dug around forums and old D&D arcana and uncovered the premise like archaeologists dusting off the rosetta stone. Again, which is perfectly fine. But then every wannabee old-school DM and his brother (including Maliszewski) had to publish one just to establish their OSR cred. In the space of a couple years, the OSR was synonymous with megadungeons - something which was outside the experience of 95 per cent of D&D players in 1982.
I'm unclear how you're tracing this to Maliszewski, though. The big megadungeon threads on Dragonsfoot predate Grognardia by nearly two years. And Philotomy's "Dungeon as Mythic Underworld" is basically contemporaneous with Grognardia's appearance.
I also agree with Rob that the OSR has produced a lot of stuff and megadungeons have only been a small fraction of that output.
I was bored at a game session, and came home hoping to at least be entertained by some game-related discussion online.
Fuck you, Pundit, for being boring today.
Something I noticed about JM's infamous megadungeon is that it has plenty of cool elements but has a lot more extra blibber blubber than I associate with hte OSR dungeons that are actually 'O'. I think the page count this thing spends on explaining to me how special clerics and dwarves are, all the various political connections among the factions, the history of the dungeon, etc. is not dissimilar from the page count on the entirety of D1-3 (arguably the first seriously massive underground geographic space published for D&D). I didn't have much of an interpretation of it when I first saw it (other than swiping left until I could get to the actual dungeon...). But perhaps it is some sort of residual taint from before his conversion to one true way ism. I feel like a really proper old goat who ran shit like this in the 70's wouldn't throw a small telephone book of exposition at you as introduction to his megadungeon. Though perhaps that is unfair.
Quote from: estar;789339Seriously? Have you looked at the Horde and Hoard list (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ar9Wm_5gI_1TdGlyZHpwRHFoU2pEMng0NkhqTlJEYmc#gid=0)? Sorted it by adventure and publication date?
By 2008 there were 64 free and commercial module released for classic D&D or near clones.
In 2008 there was 31 modules released
2009 62 modules
2010 72 modules
2011 92 modules
Up to may of 2012 21 modules
with names like I2 Beyond the Black Wall, The Horrendous Heap of Sixteen Cities, Isle of the Unknown, G8 Manor of the Mountain Giant King, etc.
Yeah there was Stonehell, Barrowdown, and yes Dwimmermount. But I think the megadungeons are dwarfed by the sheer multitude of releases.
Point taken. I don't go delving around the hoard and horde site, so I am indeed ignorant of those figures. Good to see. However, I do think it's the megadungeons that are prominent and talked about in the general RPG scene.
Quote from: Iosue;789344I think this also goes to one reason for JMal's popularity. He may have, as Pundit suggests, appealed to an ultra-orthodox wing of old-school D&D gaming. But that isn't what made him popular. For a lot of folks who never stopped playing whatever flavor of TSR-D&D they liked, he was harmless at worst. They may not agree with all of his takes, but within his prolific output there'd be some stuff that really hit the nail on the head. But that'd just make him another blogger.
What made JMal such a major voice in the wilderness is that there a lot of folks like him. Some of them had played back in the 80s, but not quite in the dungeon/wilderness exploration mode. Some of them had played 2nd Ed. in the 90s, when that mode had been largely abandoned. Some of them had seen 3e as the realization of all their fervent wishes, but then realized that you must be careful what you wish for; you just may get it. Even some people who'd started with 3e or 4e, but were intrigued by what JMal described, entirely different from the D&D they had learned.
For these somewhat disparate groups, JMal's "outsider going in" stance and the archaeological aspect of his "discoveries" were a major part of the draw. This was an audience who'd never played OD&D, AD&D, or B/X by the book, and they were suddenly saying, "Hey, if you just assume that the designers knew what they were doing, you find there's a really interesting game here!"
Further, it was that position that meant when someone said, "Hey, I'm new to the OSR and want to find out more about. What are some resources?" they were invariably pointed to Grognardia.
Another fair point. In that sense JMal was an OSR hipster, immersing himself in retro gaming in the search for authenticity, and sharing his discoveries and opinions with others too young to have experienced it themselves. Like the 30-something who is an expert on turntables and other stereo equipment from the 70s.
Quote from: Larsdangly;789417Something I noticed about JM's infamous megadungeon is that it has plenty of cool elements but has a lot more extra blibber blubber than I associate with hte OSR dungeons that are actually 'O'. I think the page count this thing spends on explaining to me how special clerics and dwarves are, all the various political connections among the factions, the history of the dungeon, etc. is not dissimilar from the page count on the entirety of D1-3 (arguably the first seriously massive underground geographic space published for D&D). I didn't have much of an interpretation of it when I first saw it (other than swiping left until I could get to the actual dungeon...). But perhaps it is some sort of residual taint from before his conversion to one true way ism. I feel like a really proper old goat who ran shit like this in the 70's wouldn't throw a small telephone book of exposition at you as introduction to his megadungeon. Though perhaps that is unfair.
Let me kick the pinata before I punch the beehive: Grognardia always gave me massive heartburn, not because he and his people are converts but because when they converted, they assumed there wasn't a community already in place when they showed up. Some converts are humble and mostly lurk. They want to learn. That's the kind I was, sitting in the back on the Acaeum and Dragonsfoot all those years before the Great OSR Awakening.
Then there's the kind of who see nothing but blank decades to "excavate" as they "reconstruct" what happened between when they quit D&D to do other things and when they came back. That's the kind of convert who cheerfully drives a bulldozer through somebody's house in order to build a shrine, trading post or other commercial venture on the rubble. Ahem.
But time to punch the beehive and take my stings: I didn't buy Dwimmermount because I knew it would be overwritten for my taste, but that's neither Maliszewski's fault or Autarch's, and it's not even a sign of them getting the 1970s "wrong." The proper old goats would have sold their souls to have the resources to overwrite on such a scale. It would have been the ultimate luxury in a world where EPT is the market-breaking price point at $30. It would have meant they'd finally "arrived."
Would they have puffed out the page count in the same way? Hard to tell. But it's hard to expand from a 32-page Vault of the Drow to a 400-page behemoth without diluting the density of ideas at least a little. The added scale requires more connective tissue and less muscle. You're not a lean power trio any more. You're a symphony orchestra paying a guy to ding the triangle four times a night.
From what I can tell, Dwimmermount is a state-of-the-art 400-page behemoth. That's what a lot of the post-3E kids demand as a price point nowadays. The old goats might have been forced to cut those ideas into 12 or more 32-page modules because that's the market they had to work with. Maybe one or two would be awesome and there'd be those cutie-pie adventurer maps floating around today. Maybe the rest would be mercifully forgettable and nobody takes the surviving copies out of shrink wrap for a reason.
Since you bought the thing and are now swiping left over vast swathes of page count, it might be an interesting experiment to try cutting up Dwimmermount into whatever we consider "old school chunks." Maybe it's a little brown supplement and a series of three 16- to 32-page modules. Who knows?
Quote from: econobus;789422Since you bought the thing and are now swiping left over vast swathes of page count, it might be an interesting experiment to try cutting up Dwimmermount into whatever we consider "old school chunks." Maybe it's a little brown supplement and a series of three 16- to 32-page modules. Who knows?
It all open content, so folks can have at it and show how its done.
Quote from: Haffrung;789421I do think it's the megadungeons that are prominent and talked about in the general RPG scene.
I imagine they get a bigger-than-usual share of the press because they have such a romantic product differentiator - "you could play a whole campaign in this place!" This or that little indie-written module might be twice the quality, but to tell
that, you've gotta buy it and read it. (Other differentiators that pop to mind are really slick cover art, "shocking" subject matter, or a celebrity author.)
Quote from: estar;789426It all open content, so folks can have at it and show how its done.
So let's do it! But the "all open content" bit confuses me if part of that $19,000 that Maliszewski retained was considered a licensing fee, which to me implies intellectual property is not exactly up for grabs.
Hey, amacris, would you guys feel chagrined if a thousand Dwimmermounts mount? I guess the good thing there is that people would need to buy the PDF in order to play along.
Quote from: econobus;789428So let's do it! But the "all open content" bit confuses me if part of that $19,000 that Maliszewski retained was considered a licensing fee, which to me implies intellectual property is not exactly up for grabs.
The details are here
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/autarch/dwimmermount/posts/439546?ref=activity
and in Dwimmermount itself on page 410 of the PDF
QuoteDESIGNATION OF OPEN GAME CONTENT
All maps, text, tables, and game statistics are open game content, with the exception of text and terms defined above as product identity.
Now there is one caveat and that the name Dwimmermount is declared product identity. So you can't call it Dwimmermount
unless you agree to use a separate license.
And there is one one Page 412 called the Dwimmermount Product Identity License.
And what it requires that the derivative work using the Dwimmermount name not be obscene i..e rated NC-17 and that the various trademarks are acknowledged. Either one is likely not an issue for the project you are talking about.
I was one of the ones to initially pushes. Some of it due to the fact I view open content as a good things, a good part due to me figured that given all the drama and ensuing shitstorm the community ought to have something beyond the product itself, and last like my Blackmarsh an easily obtainable example for hexcrawl setting, Dwimmermount can stand likewise as an example for megadungeons.
Personally I think a minimalist Dwimmermount would be excellent in that it will be more accessible thus increasing the audience for the full product and its accessories. If nothing else the 5e situation is demonstrates that a stripped down but fully functional free product leader can do wonder for sales of the core product. One reason that GURPS by SJ Games has hung on is that GURP Lite is pretty darn good as well as standing on it own.
I don't own that many of these new megadungeons, but the one I really really love is Stonehell. I'm probably preaching to the choir, but that shit is just excellent, and it is completely efficient and on point. You could rip any couple pages you want from that thing and play for 2 weeks. My group is still on the first level, but begging to play another session literally every day.
Quote from: Justin Alexander;789360I'm unclear how you're tracing this to Maliszewski, though. The big megadungeon threads on Dragonsfoot predate Grognardia by nearly two years. And Philotomy's "Dungeon as Mythic Underworld" is basically contemporaneous with Grognardia's appearance.
I also agree with Rob that the OSR has produced a lot of stuff and megadungeons have only been a small fraction of that output.
Yeah. I see people blaming James M. for all the "ultra-conservative" folks in the OSR, but as far as I could tell he was a lot more moderate. He even had a few posts I believe critiquing some of those elements I think. From what I see in his blog archives, it was more friendly discussion of things. Occasionally he got opinionated but the only thing I saw that was irksome was his anti-commercial sentiments.
James M. isn't responsible for the people Pundit says took things too conservative. From what I can tell, those ranks existed before Grognardia, and many of them didn't like James.
What happened with Dwimmermount was awful, and in retrospect James deserves the criticism (I could see personal problems affecting him but lurking and not even addressing the issue years later is not very respectable). But a lot of the criticism about Grognardia seems to be mostly based on people's personal tastes and dislike of him, rather than any sort of proof of him "hijacking the OSR". He just wrote a blog that entertained some and irritated others, and people seem more concerned about how popular he became than anything else.
Quote from: amacris;789231We received a portion of the money back (about 60%). The other 40% was either retained by James as a license fee to give us the rights or had already been spent by him.
Had we simply laid out and delivered his manuscript as-is, we probably would have turned a profit, even so; but because of the re-write Tavis and I did, the cost of layout, printing, and shipping ended up notably higher. Some of the special components also cost more than we projected. So we lost money, and if you add the opportunity cost of the delays it posed on our other projects, we lost a lot of money.
But I'm hopeful that our decision to deliver the best product we could will prove the right decision in the long term, in terms of Autarch as a brand and company.
Thank you for clearing this up. And the implications about his "manuscript as-is" are noted.
I'm sure your decision was the right one, because pretty well everyone I've seen at this point agrees that Autarch, unlike Maliszewski, comported themselves really as well as they possibly could in an absolutely terrible situation.
Quote from: Haffrung;789244Revisionism and the New Orthodoxy have most certainly affected what is published and played.
A few years ago, a local DM set up a B/X campaign and posted session reports on a forum. He was a player of about the same providence as I was (he started with Moldvay Basic, not Holmes). One of his players was another guy who started playing in 1980. Another had started with 2E.
So they play in a mini-sandbox. They go to a few locations. PCs die. New ones are created. They miss a lot of content. After about four sessions, the campaign dies.
Afterwards, the DM basically scolded the players for not following key old-school procedures. The didn't solicit rumors actively. The didn't hire enough hirelings. They didn't have enough rope and poles. They didn't use this mapping technique, or that protocol for checking for traps. etc. etc. From the sounds of it, the players shrugged and moved to a different DM. The upshot is the DM believed they were playing wrong, even though the right way (which he had clearly read on some OSR blog) isn't the way either he or the other long-time player had every played. They were trying to mimic something the DM had read about on the internet and they didn't have fun doing it.
Then there's megadungeons. Now, megadungeons are a very cool premise. But let's not pretend they were any kind of widespread thing outside Gygax's own campaign or the first few years of OD&D. I expect the number of people who played Steading of the Hill Giant - even just the monochrome edition - dwarfs the number who had played in a megadungeon up to that point.
So why are megadungeons regarded as some hallmark of old-school D&D? Because a bunch of fans dug around forums and old D&D arcana and uncovered the premise like archaeologists dusting off the rosetta stone. Again, which is perfectly fine. But then every wannabee old-school DM and his brother (including Maliszewski) had to publish one just to establish their OSR cred. In the space of a couple years, the OSR was synonymous with megadungeons - something which was outside the experience of 95 per cent of D&D players in 1982.
Smaller, setting-based dungeons like Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan, or In Search of the Unknown, were overlooked as models of old-school play. And you saw nary a whisper about linked adventure series, like the U series or A series, as adventure models. Why not? Far more old-school players have experience with those sorts of adventures than with megadungeons. And they were a common topic of conservation on forums like Dragonsfoot and the Necromancer Games forums long before the old-school movement metastasized into an ultra-conservative jihad that looked to how Gygax played for guidance, rather than how most gamers themselves played back in the day.
So the embrace of ultra-conservative orthodoxy by the OSR did affect what people talked about, played, and published. It also alienated a lot of long-time gamers who frankly didn't give a shit how Gygax played, and saw no particular reason to imitate his play-style at their own table.
Precisely. To pretend that what bandwagons end up on the racetrack has no effect on anything is an absurdity. It obviously had effects.
Quote from: Old Geezer;789272It's called "The Jakallan Underworld." :D
Where do you think Barker got it from?
I used the original material. I considered doing some kind of veiled pastiche like Barker did, but in the end concluded that anything I could imagine on my own (or indeed, anything almost anyone could imagine on their own) would be less impressive and less effective than the product of four thousand years of myth.
That, and the lack of a linguistics and anthropology prerequisite, are what make Arrows of Indra better than Tekumel.
RPGPundit
Quote from: JeremyR;789321Unfortunately, it's just a few page of random tables. Not even long random tables. It's almost worthless in practice because it's just the same stuff over and over.
No, now you're lying.
The AoI section on the Patala Underworld is by itself, about 10 pages long.
It has:
-random tables for generating cavern formations, with variations according the levels of the underworld, as well as tables for the interconnecting areas between levels.
-random tables for the contents of cavern areas; which, I'll note, are a fuckload more interesting than "4 giant rats and precisely 2000cp".
-random tables for creatures in each region of Patala, with notes on types of encounters and special conditions.
It is inherently NOT just the same stuff over and over. Any two levels of the Patala underworld will not look alike, and any two regions/complexes generated will not look alike. There are tunnels that look like ant warrens, there are complexes that look like a standard D&D cave complex, and there are country-sized caverns with their own kingdoms, cities, rivers, forests, etc.
There's also several pages of descriptive text that detail what each of the levels is about and the major features/races/demons/etc found in each level.
There's additional descriptive text in the section on monsters for those monsters relevant to the underworld.
Finally, there is room left in the mechanic for cavern-complex-creation to permit a GM to modify to their taste or add their own stuff, and the interpretation of random results obviously requires and contributes to GM creativity.
But yeah, I guess Gygaxian Naturalism is 4 giant rats and 2000cp. That's waaaay better than an OSR that's actually creative.
Quote from: RPGPundit;789499That, and the lack of a linguistics and anthropology prerequisite, are what make Arrows of Indra better than Tekumel.
No matter how many times you repeat this, it's still bullshit, and merely testifies to your laziness and/or bad faith. Straight out of the so-called "swine" playbook.
Quote from: estar;789339I am not seeing the embrace of ultra-conservativism you are talking about. Certainly James Raggi of Lamentation marches to the beat of his own drummer. Kevin Crawford, Tim Shorts, and myself all do things that have little to with slavishly re-creating old materials.
The people you're naming there (including yourself) were precisely the ones who BROKE the ultra-conservative dominance of the "Pure Clones".
Quote from: Guy Fullerton;789358Pundit, we need to go back to the beginning of this thread...
You incorrectly depict the question on G+. (The last phrase, "and had in fact...," is close to a correct depiction though.)
Here you also incorrectly depict the question on G+. (This one slipped past me the first time, but not on a second look. "Swine" is too broad, nebulous, and (potentially) polymorphic of a criteria, since you "own" the criteria's definition.)
This was the actual G+ conversation (source (https://plus.google.com/u/0/116753362008267799901/posts/TfrBqeAsVs1)):
To restate the (singular) question: Where are Maliszewski's "articles all through the 90s about how fucking lame D&D and especially old-school is?"
Here is what I (and others) looked through, covering many dozen articles & reviews all through the 90's:
Five issues of AAB Proceedings (from 1990 to 1992)
Eleven issues of Challenge Magazine (from 1991 to 1994)
His columns (http://www.rpg.net/columns/list-column.phtml?colname=sf) and reviews (https://web.archive.org/web/20000208080222/http://rpg.net/cgibin/flatfile.cgi?filename=Reviews&site=news&search=and&keyone=Reviewer&valueone=Maliszewski) from pre-2000 rpg.net (from 1998 and later)
His Roleplay News (https://web.archive.org/web/20000815071548/http://www.roleplaynews.com/) reviews (from 1998-2000)
The Fourth Millennium Games (https://web.archive.org/web/19990202173823/http://www.interlog.com/%7Emaliszew/4thm_home.html) web site
His circa-2000 (https://web.archive.org/web/20000816151057/http://www3.sympatico.ca/maliszew/) web site
The Gamma World yahoo group (https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/gammaworld) (started in 1998, which he didn't post on, but I followed Omega's lead, so I included it)
His usenet posts (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/James$20Maliszewski%7Csort:date), though this was an ridiculously quick skim through hundreds of posts.
I did not look at any of his Pyramid or InQuest articles. Nor any significant amount of post-1999 content (because Pundit's assertion was "all through the 90s").
What was found:
Reviews of Alternity Player's Guide (https://web.archive.org/web/20000208123538/http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/reviews/rev_0943.html) (4-out-of-5 rating) and Gamemaster Guide (https://web.archive.org/web/20000208025952/http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/reviews/rev_1041.html) (3-out-of-5 rating) that both contain uncharitable* reactions to class and/or level systems.
Review of Apocalypse Never (https://web.archive.org/web/20000124101747/http://rpg.net/news+reviews/columns/sffeb99.html) containing an uncharitable* characterization of gamma world and (maybe) 80's games in a somewhat-general sense.
Review of Imagine Players' Guide (https://web.archive.org/web/20000818170715/http://www.roleplaynews.com/reviews/imagine.asp) (3-out-of-10 rating) containing an uncharitable* characterization of 70's era AD&D. (This is perhaps the most extreme viewpoint of those found.)
*I use "uncharitable" in order to be intentionally ambiguous about how critical his words are, so you are forced to read the articles in their entirety. There is context beyond the short quotes, and he sometimes delivers caveats with his criticisms.
SUMMARY
Among roughly sixty articles plus various other content, from 1991-1999, I found four articles with potentially-applicable criticisms. There are dozens of articles & reviews & posts with no such criticisms.
Pundit: Is this it? Are these four sources the "articles all through the 90s about how fucking lame D&D and especially old-school is?" Are these the "many things where he mocked, made fun of, criticized and insulted old-school D&D?"
Aren't they enough? Shit, isn't the fact that in other writings he was a confirmable White Wolf-style Swine enough? It was a prereq of being in that in-crowd that you look down on D&D (and its Class-based systems) as "inferior roll-play of the unwashed masses".
Look at the "uncharitable" things he said in the articles you cite, and you can clearly extrapolate from that exactly what he thought about D&D at that time.
And to further clarify, the reason that whole thing came up in the G+ discussion was only because people were trying to pretend like JMal had ALWAYS been a stalwart fan of old-school and of D&D. Its now not only evident that he was not, but that ANYONE who was a fan/reader of his blog (which one would assume just about all his G+ apologists are, and hardcore; otherwise why would they keep trying to defend a guy who so obviously didn't give a fuck about taking people's money and running away from his responisiblity while betraying and abandoning the publisher that vouched for him?) would have certainly known that he was not!
Shit, how the fuck do you think I knew?! I was very far from a daily-reader of Maliszewski's blog, and yet my relatively few forays into it were enough for me to know his Apostolic Conversion Heroic Origin Narrative that he felt entitled him to be the new Prophet of the Pure Way of Gygax.
So let's look at the most important issue here:
Summary:a) my statement about "having wrote articles all through the 90s" is only slightly incorrect.
b) Its now been shown that he was clearly an anti-D&D swine throughout the 90s, which was my point in the first place.
c) More importantly, its been shown that anyone who is enough of a drooling fanboy of JMal to keep defending him even after he showed himself the be the King of Shit would undoubtedly have known this.In other words, in everything that matters except semantic quibbling, I WAS RIGHT.
Pundit, thank you for answering.
Quote from: RPGPundit;789503And to further clarify, the reason that whole thing came up in the G+ discussion was only because people were trying to pretend like JMal had ALWAYS been a stalwart fan of old-school and of D&D.
You are probably misrepresenting again. (TBH, I'm not sure who you mean by "people:" People's posts in that thread vs. something different.)
The date of this thread is clear; the date of my question in the G+ thread is clear. None of that G+ thread (up to the dates in question) contains a person making such a proclamation about Maliszewski. Ditto for the related threads/posts that spawned from it.
https://plus.google.com/u/0/116753362008267799901/posts/TfrBqeAsVs1 (https://plus.google.com/u/0/116753362008267799901/posts/TfrBqeAsVs1)
https://plus.google.com/+ErikTenkar/posts/E6a5bhtDJnJ (https://plus.google.com/+ErikTenkar/posts/E6a5bhtDJnJ)
http://therpgpundit.blogspot.com/2014/09/historical-blinders-in-origin-story-of.html (http://therpgpundit.blogspot.com/2014/09/historical-blinders-in-origin-story-of.html)
Quote from: RPGPundit;789502The people you're naming there (including yourself) were precisely the ones who BROKE the ultra-conservative dominance of the "Pure Clones".
Speaking as someone who is more interested in "pure clones" than most of what I think of as "pseudo-clones" or "kinda clones" (i.e., systems that are mostly compatible with D&D, but usually throw in some subsystems or approaches or elements that are more common in recent/modern RPGs), I'm not sure why that is a big deal. I mean, I don't have any problem with people making "inspired by" kind of games that are mostly D&D (or sorta D&D). I don't see it as a Pure vs. Non Pure (or "Creative") kind of thing. The "breaking" of the pure clones seems like a non-event, to me. Maybe even a predictable one. I'm left going, "...and?"
My interest in clones is the fact that
they're clones, so the closer they are, the better. For example, I like OSRIC, but I don't consider OSRIC a game to be played. Instead, I'd play AD&D, and use OSRIC as a compatible resource in my game. In other words, I'm not looking for OSRIC to be a creative, innovative game. I'm looking for OSRIC to be as compatible as possible with the game I'm playing (i.e. AD&D). To me, *THAT* is the place (and the point) of a "pure clone."
That's not to say that some of the pseudo-clones don't interest me. The ones that are most likely to interest me as games to be played are the ones that put a different spin on D&D, or offer something quite different from standard vanilla D&D. If it's basically regular D&D, but just a little different/more modern/etc., then I'm left yawning -- I just don't care. That's why 5e doesn't enthuse me: I just don't need another vanilla D&D. These days, I'd be much more likely to play something like
Crypts & Things or
Arrows of Indra than I would 5e or C&C.
But I'd also be much more likely to play AD&D or original D&D than a pseudo-clone -- and use material from the "pure clones" with those games. What can I say? I like those games.
Quote from: RPGPundit;789503In other words, in everything that matters except semantic quibbling, I WAS RIGHT.
I see a difference between "Not being Old School" and "Being Anti-Old School" and that difference is more then just semantics.
You want to say JMal was "Not Old School", pretty sure the text supports that, but most of the text I can find is based on Sci-Fi games anyway. It's possible he lambastes D&D in his usenet stuff about Sorcerer's Crusade, but all I see is a kind of indifference in a "those are old, dated rules" kind of way without being actually against them as a valid playstyle or system.
You want to say JMal was actively Anti-Old School and thus his switch is an extreme "road to Damascus" conversion that shows true hypocrisy - that's what I don't see.
Quote from: The Butcher;789501No matter how many times you repeat this, it's still bullshit, and merely testifies to your laziness and/or bad faith. Straight out of the so-called "swine" playbook.
Have pity, he can't help it his wiener is little.
Quote from: RPGPundit;789502The people you're naming there (including yourself) were precisely the ones who BROKE the ultra-conservative dominance of the "Pure Clones".
Jeff Rients, Gonzo D&D, and Fight On! all preceded James Raggi right at the beginning of the OSR. And this wasn't at the fringe but one of the major communities involved and one of the first to embrace the OSR label itself.
Sorry you are going to have to try harder with the OSR was captured by the "clonemanics" meme.
I never got your inability to acknowledge that even at the beginning the OSR was more than just people devoted to making clones of the original rules.
I found your 2009 post complaining about the OSR. Now you say I have to find an earlier one? I will take a crack at it but but any further back you start going back before the term Old School Renaissance was in widespread use.
And Frankly I am getting fucking annoyed at your inability to come up with a detailed timeline of who what and when. As a historian you should know better. Guy Fullerton, myself, and others have been posting links, names, and timelines to refute your opinions with specifics. What do you counter with? your opinion or I wrote a post back in the day but can't find it.
Fuck that. Do the research, name names, and post the links. Construct the narrative of what YOU think happened. And quit posting opinions to specific points.
And don't give the excuse that you don't have access your xanga blog. I was able to demonstrate several times that with the original link I can pull it up from the Internet Archive. You stated several times you have the dump from Xanga. Go through it find your links and use it to pull up the Internet Archive. Failing that then just repost in your forum here like you already have been.
This time you need to quit acting like the RPG Pundit and start acting like the RPG Historian.
And while I am critical and harsh of what you been saying lately. Like Arrows of Indra, I strongly encourage you to do this. I think what you would come with, if you put the work into it, would be informative and interesting.
Estar,
Is any of this going to change how or what you play? Didn't think so. As for the OSR, you know what happened, I know what happened, and so does Guy. The only person in this discussion who doesn't but continues to insist that they do is Pundit, and apparently he's interested more in winning teh internets than actually gaining any substantive insight. As for any of our respective pieces of work, that should speak for itself. I know I find it a lot more satisfying responding to emails from people actually using something I've written and then finding some common ground for future collaboration than ranting to strangers about how much better my thing is. If that makes me a swine, well so be it - bacon tastes pretty fucking good.
Estar, may I ask what draw you to the OSR initialy ?
Quote from: Kellri;789564Estar,
Is any of this going to change how or what you play? Didn't think so. As for the OSR, you know what happened, I know what happened, and so does Guy. The only person in this discussion who doesn't but continues to insist that they do is Pundit, and apparently he's interested more in winning teh internets than actually gaining any substantive insight. As for any of our respective pieces of work, that should speak for itself. I know I find it a lot more satisfying responding to emails from people actually using something I've written and then finding some common ground for future collaboration than ranting to strangers about how much better my thing is. If that makes me a swine, well so be it - bacon tastes pretty fucking good.
vietnamise pig :D
Quote from: Larsdangly;789417I feel like a really proper old goat who ran shit like this in the 70's wouldn't throw a small telephone book of exposition at you as introduction to his megadungeon. Though perhaps that is unfair.
It's a bit unfair.
I knew lots of proper old goats. I joined the hobby as a kid in the late 70s, but gamed heavily with adults thru the early 80s as a teen. Some of them had binders full of info about their campaigns and megadungeons. There was one dude who had over 1000 index cards of NPCs and interacting with one would result in notes on others because that tavern owner talks to the barmaid, she talks to her thief boyfriend who talks to his guild master. That dude had hours of homework after every game to update his setting.
But the concept in publishing games was pamphlets. Today's boardgames or card games normally have several pages of rules. Back then? The rules were written on the inside of the box cover or were on one sheet of paper.
Even most "hardcore" wargames were a dozen pages, not dozens or hundreds.
It's hard for us today to recognize how shocking it was to see people playing a game with several thick books on the table. Forget the weird dice, D&D was THAT game where you needed to read thick books to play (even though you really didn't, just the DM).
But you say, hey, the AD&D PHB isn't thick! Look back at the fantasy and sci-fi novels of the 60s/70s and you will find what today would be called novellas. The publishing norm wasn't 600 page novels in trilogies read by 12 year olds.
Quote from: Larsdangly;789433I don't own that many of these new megadungeons, but the one I really really love is Stonehell.
Please start a thread about Stonehell!!!
Quote from: estar;789556This time you need to quit acting like the RPG Pundit and start acting like the RPG Historian.
And while I am critical and harsh of what you been saying lately. Like Arrows of Indra, I strongly encourage you to do this. I think what you would come with, if you put the work into it, would be informative and interesting.
I disagree. I'd rather see RPGPundit develop Arrows of Indra and Forward to Adventure! and produce new stuff for fans of his work than waste more of his time on petty online forum bullshit chasing the "truth" about whatever "swine" has gotten him rabid like a mad dog after imaginary squirrels.
Anybody notice Consultantgate never exploded with the offline community once the 5e PHB hit the stores?
There has been total lack of stories, even anecdotes, about irate people rage returning their PHBs to game stores across the country. I haven't seen a single news report about parent's panicking about their teens demanding sex changes after they read the PHB in a wave of national transgender madness.
Spinachcat is wise.
Quote from: yabaziou;789571Estar, may I ask what draw you to the OSR initially ?
The short version? Open gaming, circumstances, a large audience, and rules that I am happy and comfortable to use to run games with.
The long version.
Open GamingI am a programmer by trade and supported open source software since I learned about it in the 90s.
CircumstanceI was that sandbox guy who helped with Judges Guild and was part of the Wilderlands Boxed Set then came out with the two Points of Light book.
a large audienceI was on the net early one through BBSs, Compuserve, Genie, Illuminati Online, and the Usenet. I experienced a lot of niche communities. I also was very involved in boffer LARPS, NERO, running events and later a entire chapter. Despite the headache of dealing with with the national office, I like the increased diversity that came with being part of a larger group. Purely personal preference.
happy and comfortableI never disliked classic D&D liked other games better particularly GURPS. However after reading Matt Finch's Old School Primer I had a "Road to Damascus" moment. Finally after 30 years I "got" how to referee AD&D.
I want to stress that the Road to Damascus moment was purely on how to pick up the rulebook and referee a campaign. Classic D&D is just a game, a good game but just a game. A person should use the rules that resonates with them the best.
Having this revelation would have NOT changed my first go around with AD&D. Because between me standing in 2008 versus me standing in 1978 is nearly 30 years of life expeerience including a lot of medieval reenactment (SCA) and LARPing (NERO).
What it did do is made me completely comfortable with any classic edition of D&D. To allow me to make combat and characters as interesting and detailed as they were in my GURPS campaigns.
Quote from: Spinachcat;789590I disagree. I'd rather see RPGPundit develop Arrows of Indra and Forward to Adventure! and produce new stuff for fans of his work than waste more of his time on petty online forum bullshit chasing the "truth" about whatever "swine" has gotten him rabid like a mad dog after imaginary squirrels.
That would my ideal, but he the one writing about leading the charge against the clonemanics and fundamentalists. The one that continually ignores counter examples.
The last time this went around I took the same stance and challenged him to come up with an OSR to show how the rest of us how it done. I figure the experience would demonstrate the lack of gatekeepers.
But nope. He back again with the same shit he wrote in 2009, and 2011.
So the challenge is different. Tell the story the way he see it and back it up. Or shut and finish Dark Albion. All and all I rather have the second than the first.
Thank for your answer, Estar ! It was nice to read you about that !
Quote from: Old Geezer;789546Have pity, he can't help it his wiener is little.
(http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/fiction_rule_of_thumb.png)
Quote from: RPGPundit;789603(http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/fiction_rule_of_thumb.png)
Surely you can name
one single instance of that happening in Tékumel? A made-up word replacing an English noun?
In every book I've read (EPT, S&G, GoO Tékumel) swords are swords, clans are clans, legions are legions, the Emperor is the Emperor. Hell, even the nobility titles employ Western equivalents, e.g. Baron Áld.
Between the desperate attempts to frame JMal as an insincere convert and the Tékumel-bashing, I wonder how you keep track of all the strawmen you're putting up.
Quote from: estar;789598Or shut and finish Dark Albion. All and all I rather have the second than the first.
I forgot about Dark Albion.
I'm utterly unimpressed with 5e, but Dark Albion has interested me since it was first discussed years ago. If RPGPundit published a 5e Dark Albion, I would seriously consider running it.
I would never run 5e Warhammer as IMO, Warhammer has specific feel that could not be duplicated in 5e (or any other D&D, or many other systems, even my other favs), BUT the concept of faux-historical fantasy might work in 5e.
Of course, that's dependent if Zweihander leaps to the occasion and delivers a better experience. We will see.
But yeah, I totally understand your frustration with RPGPundit's obstinate stance on this issue...but don't forget that it's mostly drama for the lulz!
Quote from: RPGPundit;789603(http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/fiction_rule_of_thumb.png)
Interesting, you had a different opinion a while ago about Tolkien. Did you have your road to Damascus moment about him?
Quote from: Rincewind1;789612Interesting, you had a different opinion a while ago about Tolkien. Did you have your road to Damascus moment about him?
Tolkien handled it better. In fact, while LotR had and has its snobs, LotR has become more and more accessible to regular people as time goes by, while EPT has become less and less so (by becoming more byzantine and requiring more buy-in in terms of time and study).
And to clarify The Butcher's point: Barker himself was not terrible about this, but the problem is that every successive edition of EPT/Tekumel, the tekumel-fanboys became less and less about adventuring in gonzo style with an exotic flair, and more and more about walls and walls of pseudo-linguistic and pseudo-anthropological text. I mean, it beats even Harn for utterly-non-gaming-related useless flavor material obsession. It stopped being about adventuring in a cool place and it became about how much "lore" you can know about weird cultural details.
RPGPundit
Quote from: RPGPundit;789613And to clarify The Butcher's point: Barker himself was not terrible about this, but the problem is that every successive edition of EPT/Tekumel, the tekumel-fanboys became less and less about adventuring in gonzo style with an exotic flair, and more and more about walls and walls of pseudo-linguistic and pseudo-anthropological text. I mean, it beats even Harn for utterly-non-gaming-related useless flavor material obsession. It stopped being about adventuring in a cool place and it became about how much "lore" you can know about weird cultural details.
As I suspected: no objective examples, and a quick rearrangement of the goalposts to boot.
I wonder at which moment the "Flaming Keystrokes of Truth" became the Flaming Keystrokes of Because I Said So, Nuh Uh.
Quote from: The Butcher;789616As I suspected: no objective examples, and a quick rearrangement of the goalposts to boot.
I wonder at which moment the "Flaming Keystrokes of Truth" became the Flaming Keystrokes of Because I Said So, Nuh Uh.
Dude, just compare the original EPT book (which certainly had some anthropological stuff going on but was squarely focused on adventuring/dungeoneering) with the edition that came next after it (Swords & glory?) which was just a fucking Anthro/linguistics textbook masquerading as an RPG.
I read both of them. That's all the proof I need. Go fucking read them and tell me that there wasn't a shift away from gonzo gaming and toward anthropological wankery.
RPGPundit
Quote from: RPGPundit;789619Dude, just compare the original EPT book (which certainly had some anthropological stuff going on but was squarely focused on adventuring/dungeoneering) with the edition that came next after it (Swords & glory?) which was just a fucking Anthro/linguistics textbook masquerading as an RPG.
I read both of them. That's all the proof I need. Go fucking read them and tell me that there wasn't a shift away from gonzo gaming and toward anthropological wankery.
If you'd please be so kind as to bring those goalposts back to the charge of "making up words unnecessarily" that you implied by linking the xkcd comic,
then we can argue where exactly we shall draw the line between "very detailed and decidedly non-traditional setting fluff" and "anthropological wankery".
Also the number of games that end up on the shitlist is getting bigger and bigger. Dude, even if you are 3000% right, you are stuck in the same gear.
Some games try to give more depth to their setting material and some games even overdo it. There is nothing pseudo-something about it. It's just overdone non-functional setting material.
Quote from: RPGPundit;789619I read both of them. That's all the proof I need. Go fucking read them and tell me that there wasn't a shift away from gonzo gaming and toward anthropological wankery.
RPGPundit
If you had said THAT, I would have agreed with you.
Yes, Phil fell into bad company of "RPGs are ART" swine decades before it became fashionable. It's one of the reasons he wound up with multiple gaming groups. Some of us just wanted to play a damn game.
I guess this technically falls under the umbrella of "industry events and gossip" (emphasis on "gossip"), but Jesus, this is an ugly, stupid, fucking thread. What a bizarre way to denounce and create distance from the drama and witch hunts we all hate on other forums.
"Hounds, find me things someone wrote 20 years ago, to show that he maybe felt a little differently about the hobby roughly a generation ago! I WILL CRUSH HIM FOR THIS!"
Quote from: Critias;789674I guess this technically falls under the umbrella of "industry events and gossip" (emphasis on "gossip"), but Jesus, this is an ugly, stupid, fucking thread. What a bizarre way to denounce and create distance from the drama and witch hunts we all hate on other forums.
"Hounds, find me things someone wrote 20 years ago, to show that he maybe felt a little differently about the hobby roughly a generation ago! I WILL CRUSH HIM FOR THIS!"
Well, for a while we were talking about me, which is always good.
Quote from: Critias;789674I guess this technically falls under the umbrella of "industry events and gossip" (emphasis on "gossip"), but Jesus, this is an ugly, stupid, fucking thread. What a bizarre way to denounce and create distance from the drama and witch hunts we all hate on other forums.
"Hounds, find me things someone wrote 20 years ago, to show that he maybe felt a little differently about the hobby roughly a generation ago! I WILL CRUSH HIM FOR THIS!"
Welcome to TheRPGSite!
Quote from: Old Geezer;789676Well, for a while we were talking about me, which is always good.
And how are you, OG? Life going well?
:)
Quote from: jcfiala;789698And how are you, OG? Life going well?
:)
Heh.
Actually, I'm in a bit of existential crisis, since my wife was called as an Episcopal priest to a small rural town with a very limited number of jobs that aren't minimum wage part time in either the food service or housekeeping industry.
A commerical truck driver's license or a welder's certificate would serve me better than two masters' degrees here.
Also, a crisis is causing severe harm at my alma mater.
The one pernicous "orthodoxy" I see in the Grognardia blog and elsewhere is the pretentious business of classifying non-D&D games as "old school or not."
There WAS no school of rpg design back in the day, and the current "old school" is a specifically D&D-culture thing that is newer than the trends in contrast with which it defines itself.
It's irritating when JM, or someone else who never liked T&T or C&S or RQ or whatever, who does not play it and knows squat about the issues actually relevant to its fandom, goes off pontificating as if the latest arguments among D&Ders on the internet define the whole universe of role-play gaming.
Quote from: RPGPundit;789613And to clarify The Butcher's point: Barker himself was not terrible about this, but the problem is that every successive edition of EPT/Tekumel, the tekumel-fanboys became less and less about adventuring in gonzo style with an exotic flair, and more and more about walls and walls of pseudo-linguistic and pseudo-anthropological text. I mean, it beats even Harn for utterly-non-gaming-related useless flavor material obsession. It stopped being about adventuring in a cool place and it became about how much "lore" you can know about weird cultural details.
That is on the fans and not on Tekumel then. Its like the Alien franchise and the fanboy fixation on calling the creatures "Xenomorps" ad nausium. Only ramped up to Star Trek Klingon levels.
Quote from: Omega;789751That is on the fans and not on Tekumel then. Its like the Alien franchise and the fanboy fixation on calling the creatures "Xenomorps" ad nausium. Only ramped up to Star Trek Klingon levels.
I also think it's ass-backward when you compare the latest (from Guardians of Order) with the previous Gardasiyal, or even Gardasiyal with Swords & Glory (of which the Sourcebook remains the real encyclopedic compendium of Tekumelania, the Players Handbook being more an example of elaborate game systems).
Well, 'Sore and Gory' (which is what we called "Swords & Glory") non only was influenced by early RPG as Art swine, but it ALSO was begun pretty much at the height of the "MOAR RUULS IZ BEDDER RUULS" craze of the early 80s.
Quote from: Omega;789751That is on the fans and not on Tekumel then. Its like the Alien franchise and the fanboy fixation on calling the creatures "Xenomorps" ad nausium. Only ramped up to Star Trek Klingon levels.
Yes, except that pretty well after the first EPT rules, everything else was fan-driven. So it's like if the Klingon-fanboys had taken over Star Trek by its second year and made it all about Klingon Grammar and Rituals.
Quote from: Omega;789751That is on the fans and not on Tekumel then. Its like the Alien franchise and the fanboy fixation on calling the creatures "Xenomorps" ad nausium. Only ramped up to Star Trek Klingon levels.
That's just 'cause most of them are too stupid to realize xenomorph is just a generic descriptor, like reptile, annelid or whatever.
Quote from: RPGPundit;789796Yes, except that pretty well after the first EPT rules, everything else was fan-driven. So it's like if the Klingon-fanboys had taken over Star Trek by its second year and made it all about Klingon Grammar and Rituals.
Pretty close, especially for somebody who wasn't involved.
It was a little more elaborate: Back in the early 80s we were still in the "D&D is making fuckloads of money. MY game should make fuckloads of money" era.
"So, what makes YOUR GAME different from D&D?" is the question a LOT of people asked about games.
Phil was convinced by his fans that it was the anthropological and linguistic stuff.
And it was... for the 300 or 400 people who bought that stuff. I never DID get a copy of the "Tsolyani Language" tapes, because I really didn't give a shit about learning to speak Tsolyani.
Quote from: RPGPundit;789613Tolkien handled it better. In fact, while LotR had and has its snobs, LotR has become more and more accessible to regular people as time goes by, while EPT has become less and less so (by becoming more byzantine and requiring more buy-in in terms of time and study
Yes.
The History of Middle Earth Vol. 12: Peoples of Middle Earth is a far better gateway than
The Hobbit.
Quote from: Old Geezer;789828Pretty close, especially for somebody who wasn't involved.
It was a little more elaborate: Back in the early 80s we were still in the "D&D is making fuckloads of money. MY game should make fuckloads of money" era.
"So, what makes YOUR GAME different from D&D?" is the question a LOT of people asked about games.
Phil was convinced by his fans that it was the anthropological and linguistic stuff.
And it was... for the 300 or 400 people who bought that stuff. I never DID get a copy of the "Tsolyani Language" tapes, because I really didn't give a shit about learning to speak Tsolyani.
Not just the language. Cartoon from long forgotten source.... Entitled " epitaph of the petal throne":
A tombstone in a lonely graveyard inscribed " I thought it was it's dick until it shot me with it"
Quote from: ConradBumpus;790216Not just the language. Cartoon from long forgotten source.... Entitled " epitaph of the petal throne":
A tombstone in a lonely graveyard inscribed " I thought it was it's dick until it shot me with it"
You know one doesn't necessarily exclude the other. See traumatic insemination (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traumatic_insemination).
Quote from: Ephemerer;790083Yes. The History of Middle Earth Vol. 12: Peoples of Middle Earth is a far better gateway than The Hobbit.
I'm not sure what the fuck you're talking about; I'm talking about the Hobbit movies. So yeah, way to ruin your own point there.
Quote from: RPGPundit;790397I'm not sure what the fuck you're talking about; I'm talking about the Hobbit movies. So yeah, way to ruin your own point there.
I was under the impression that the Hobbit movies were an attempt to take a short, simple novel and cram it full of irrelevant crap until it exploded.
Quote from: Ephemerer;790569I was under the impression that the Hobbit movies were an attempt to take a short, simple novel and cram it full of irrelevant crap until it exploded.
And yet, being eight or nine hours of movie, they are still more accessible than any EPT product short perhaps of the original, in the same way that, say, The Matrix is more accessible than many of the philosophical texts that inform it.
Quote from: LibraryLass;790585And yet, being eight or nine hours of movie, they are still more accessible than any EPT product short perhaps of the original, in the same way that, say, The Matrix is more accessible than many of the philosophical texts that inform it.
But is the movie more accessible than the book? Because that's what Pundejo is claiming.
Quote from: Ephemerer;790569I was under the impression that the Hobbit movies were an attempt to take a short, simple novel and cram it full of irrelevant crap until it exploded.
Your impression is correct.
Quote from: The Butcher;790588But is the movie more accessible than the book? Because that's what Pundejo is claiming.
The movies are only more accessible than the book if by accessible you mean popular. Because yeah, action movies are more popular than novels. Any dolt can emerge from the kinetic barrage of a CGI funride with a pleasurable afterglow that he perceives as pleasure.
Quote from: Haffrung;790599The movies are only more accessible than the book if by accessible you mean popular. Because yeah, action movies are more popular than novels. Any dolt can emerge from the kinetic barrage of a CGI funride with a pleasurable afterglow that he perceives as pleasure.
Well, let's have an EPT movie then. Preferrably directed by Michael Bay.
Quote from: RPGPundit;789603(http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/fiction_rule_of_thumb.png)
I present Jack Vance as exhibit 1 refuting your theory.
Quote from: The Butcher;790588But is the movie more accessible than the book? Because that's what Pundejo is claiming.
Probably not, but still fairly accessible. As the Haffrung pointed out, action movies are fairly undemanding, and most find them enjoyable.
I'd argue that the old Rankin-Bass version of The Hobbit is a lot more accessible than the new movies.
If only I could remember why I am arguing about this in a thread about Maliszewski, I would try and declare victory.
Damn you, Pundit. In the last week, you have made threads attacking James Maliszewski and John Wick, two people who's opinions on gaming I really don't care for, and you have me arguing against you in both. What the hell is going on?
Quote from: Mistwell;790610I present Jack Vance as exhibit 1 refuting your theory.
But does Jack Vance make up words, or just use words that nobody else remembers? "Deodand," anyone?
Quote from: The Butcher;790603Well, let's have an EPT movie then. Preferrably directed by Michael Bay.
Anyone here care to do up the storyboards for an EPT movie? That alone would be interesting to check out.
Quote from: Old Geezer;790657But does Jack Vance make up words, or just use words that nobody else remembers? "Deodand," anyone?
I'm pretty sure it's mainly the latter - using really obscure words - but I could be wrong.
That said Vance was clearly inspired by CAS who was also heavily into weird but real, really obscure words.
On the original topic:
The greatest folly of James M. is letting the 'Pope of the OSR' thing go to his head. There clearly is not nor can there truly be a leader in the OSR for it isn't a type of movement that requires leadership, and this has been proven time and time again over the years. Nobody runs it nor will anyone run it, simple as that. It is a DIY toolbox that everyone can participate in. Nobody can run something like an rpg for my group or I. We give and take from the community and it keeps on chugging along. All those who think they can run it only fool themselves by chasing their own tails.
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.
Most of us having nothing to gain by it.
Pundit needs supervillains to support his being Pundit. Think about what would happen to Rush Limburger if there were suddenly no more liberals? Or if he had to invent them in the first place.
So who won?
Quote from: Matt;898318So who won?
No one, because arguing on the internet is for children and not grown adults.
This thread is old, so I am closing it down. If there is some new thing going on that suddenly makes it relevant, just start a new thread.