Quote from: S'mon;967915In my case his Talmudic studies were useful though, they helped me identify what I always thought was wrong with all those "Ecology of the Manticore/Gelatinous Cube/etc" Silver Age articles in Dragon Magazine and reject 'Naturalism' wherever I felt it didn't fit with what I wanted.

I listened to a podcast where Gygaxian Naturalism came up as a topic. They kept going back to those "The Ecology of..." as the purist example. It bugged me as I couldn't recall Gygax ever having written any or anything particularly like them. The concept of naturalism vs. a mythic feel is useful to consider when starting a campaign. It just bugs me that Gygax's name gets attached to the naturalism side when his approach is more varied.

There's this foolish tendency in geekdom to treat our favorite fiction as though it came into being the way reality does, as the outworking of self-consistent fundamental laws. The laws of physics don't get revised for game balance, we can't retcon the 15th century to leave Anatolia unconquered by the Turks, and we can't add an interesting backstory for some random gewgaw that we later decided should be central to the plot.

It's pretty obvious as you read D&D stuff in historical order that people were throwing shit together and making it up as they went along. Somewhere in there, Gary Gygax or Dave Arneson or someone decided to have the players fight a chimera and statted it up for game night, and then probably Gary decided to throw it on a random table to have the chance of wandering into one, and then he probably figured it would be neat if when you rolled one up, you put it in a lair or whatever, and somehow all that got smushed together in the AD&D books.

If you play D&D like that, throwing shit together that seems fun and writing stuff up as it emerges, you're probably getting closer to the gaming world of the 1970s than you are by spending a few weeks doing scholastic exegesis of a book of pretend monsters with an amateurish painting on the front.

By George, I think he's got it!

And a lot of the ideas that became rules were hatched in the course of a bunch of friends bullshitting about stuff for the game, some of which Dave or Gary liked enough to write down later.

Quote from: Voros;967895I think most of us have been avoiding names to prevent too much internet drama but since you insist: T. Foster, the dude who stepped out of a time machine to proclaim B/X a 'watered down version for kids' lol

Here's Tom Moldvay, editor of the 1981 D&D Basic Set, talking about it in Dragon #52 (August 1981):

Quotethe market has changed since the earlier rules edition. The first D&D market was made up of game buffs and college students. Today, the majority of D&D players are high-school and junior-high students. The new rules edition takes into account the younger readership in its style of writing.

Well, one thing I think people need to get a grip on is that identifying elements of Appendix N fiction as the source of certain D&D assumptions is NOT...
1. Declaring these texts to be the only influence.
2. Declaring that playing a certain way is Right or Wrong.
3. Worshipping those texts or Gary Gygax in any way, shape or form.
4. Saying that if you've never read them, you can't possibly understand D&D.

I'm not saying Jmal, Jeffro or whoever else didn't say these things.  I'm saying that looking up an author's influences to see to what extent they influenced their works is hardly rare, in fact it's pretty standard...except if it's Gygax and Appendix N, in which case you're automatically this obsessed One True Wayist.

Gimme a fucking break.

Quote from: CRKrueger;968010Gimme a fucking break.

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Quote from: Dumarest;968012[ATTACH=CONFIG]1055[/ATTACH]

Shh! Pundit will hear you and post links to weird articles.

Quote from: Krimson;968014Shh! Pundit will hear you and post links to weird articles.

Heaven forfend! I don't think I can take another article about "real magick."

Quote from: CRKrueger;9680102. Declaring that playing a certain way is Right or Wrong.

I'm a believer in understanding how Gygax ran his tables.  But a big part of that is understanding how the rules evolved around that style of gameplay so that you can - get this - be better informed about which rules should be changed or removed if you're *not* playing that way.

Quote from: robiswrong;968030I'm a believer in understanding how Gygax ran his tables.  But a big part of that is understanding how the rules evolved around that style of gameplay so that you can - get this - be better informed about which rules should be changed or removed if you're *not* playing that way.

In my considered opinion after reading everything I could get my hands on, is that what it all boils down to play like folks did back in the late 60s and early 70s is to simply define the setting and what you want to focus on. Then come up with the rules to make that happen. For example "I want to refight the Battle of Waterloo", "Let run a bunch of Gladiatorial Ludus and compete against each other." "OK lets have a German town in the middle of the Napoleonic War with a bunch of factions with their own agenda." "OK lets pretended to be fighter or wizards in a fantasy setting with a bunch of things going on including an invasion of some bad guys".

I get why people love to know the specifics of the rules they used back in the day but I think that focus is missing the point if you really desire to recreate the experience. Gronan pegged it with "We made up some shit that we thought was fun."

Quote from: estar;968038...if you really desire to recreate the experience.

It's fruitless to try. It's interesting to read about what it was like in those days, but you really can't recreate an experience like that. You know too much and can't approach it with the same naïveté and freshness as someone making it up as he goes. It's like the mid-90s "Cool Britannia" and "Britpop" fad trying to recreate to Swinging London and Beatlemania.

Quote from: T. Foster;968008Here's Tom Moldvay, editor of the 1981 D&D Basic Set, talking about it in Dragon #52 (August 1981):

The article in question lists four goals on the new edition, and simpler language was just the third one. Simpler language doesn't automatically suggest a dumbed-down game. The other goals were to create a more organized book for people new to gaming as well as to take into account years of playtesting and answering questions. The other goal was to provide a set that would smoothly lead into the expert rules.

Simpler language in a rule books seems an admirable goal to me and not a sign of dumbing something down.

Quote from: Dumarest;968041It's fruitless to try. It's interesting to read about what it was like in those days, but you really can't recreate an experience like that. You know too much and can't approach it with the same naïveté and freshness as someone making it up as he goes. It's like the mid-90s "Cool Britannia" and "Britpop" fad trying to recreate to Swinging London and Beatlemania.

I think Estar's point was that rather than trying to bend your game to do what Gary wanted to do with it, you should bend rules to do what you want out of a game. It's hard to get freshness is you are trying to rebuild Castle Greyhawk in exacting detail, but you can get a fresh result if you just work with whatever literary and cinematic obsessions you have bubbling in your head at the moment.

Quote from: S'mon;967962That's certainly closer to what Gygax was doing, and the style he advocated for (more or less). JMal 'Gygaxian Naturalism' is a result of Talmudic (well, really more Catholic Scholastic) study of the 1e Monster Manual as if it were a serious treatise.

   Hmm...got any good examples? I don't know much about Gygaxian Naturalism, but I do know Scholasticism. The OSR is actually like the Renaissance or the Reformation in its emphasis on 'back to the sources'.

   Personally, I think if you want to get the equivalent to Scholasticism in an RPG, you go to the HERO System, but I may be biased.

Quote from: Baulderstone;968047I think Estar's point was that rather than trying to bend your game to do what Gary wanted to do with it, you should bend rules to do what you want out of a game. It's hard to get freshness is you are trying to rebuild Castle Greyhawk in exacting detail, but you can get a fresh result if you just work with whatever literary and cinematic obsessions you have bubbling in your head at the moment.

Yup pretty much this but applied more generally. Define what it is you want to focus on for your campaign first, then figure out the rules second.

I will add that if one has a favorite set of rules by all means use it as the base to make a campaign happen. But it still campaign first, rules second.