Quote from: Voros;968089Let's see if I can address this without derailing the thread. There's neo-Nazis POS like Varg and then extremist reactionaries like Johnson. One is beyond the pale whereas the other is a bit of a bore who projects his politics onto talented pulp writers like Brackett. I mentioned Johnson's politics because like a 50s Marxist he insists on dragging it into his analysis and oftentimes profoundly distorts the writers he discusses. That's judging from his blog posts but to his credit he does seem to occasionally put aside his own politics and discuss a subversive and overtly leftie writer like Margaret St Clair fairly. I just don't know if I want to slog through all the pop culture rambling and politicing for the occasional gem.

As to whether the Pundit is far right...

OK thanks. I'm fine with patronising what I think count as 'extremist reactionary' types in your words, but I'm not fine with Neo-Nazism, which is what 'far right' is usually used to imply I think. Maybe it's commonly used to include right-libertarians now, judging by the Antifa attacks on people wearing MAGA hats, but I prefer to keep these concepts distinct.

Edit: Agree that excessive bringing of politics into unrelated matters can get annoying.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;968092Nobody writes rules that don't work

Most RPG authors write rules that don't work, IME. Or they provide only a partial game (as Justin Alexander insightfully pointed out) - often just chargen & task resolution and handwave the rest, notably the big issue of What Do We Actually Do?. Understanding that Gygax created a complete game that is loads of fun, and why the various systems are in there that are often discarded in newer games (eg wandering monsters, random treasure generation, reaction & morale checks, monsters by dungeon level, evasion rules, the XP & Level system), what their purpose is, and why they make the game fun, is worthwhile I think.

I can put up with an extremist reactionary if they're talented. Not seeing many Celines or Malapartes out there these days.

Quote from: Voros;968158I can put up with an extremist reactionary if they're talented. Not seeing many Celines or Malapartes out there these days.

LOL

Quote from: Voros;968118In fact you'd be hard pressed to turn Three Hearts and Three Lions or The Broken Sword into a D&D campaign.

Three Hearts and Three Lions reads like the sort of D&D campaign we used to have. Very much so.  It also is clearly the inspiration behind Trolls, Alignment, and Paladins at the very least.

Quote from: Voros;968128Sorry but in Lieber the world-building is not a sand-box. The vast majority of his Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories are rooted in character, not setting. Vance is a masterful world builder but his extreme use of distancing language and his love of satire and irony produce something completely unlike D&D. Vance is as far from Naturalism as it is possible for a writer to be, his baroque style is reminscent of the French decadents who inspired Clark Ashton Smith or even the French New Novelists of the 60s.

To read these authors via D&D is to reduce them significantly.

Vance's Turjan stories are very D&D, as are the Cugel ones. Not to mention something like the Dragon Masters.

D&D can also be character based like Fafhrd and the Mouser. Certainly I have played in adventures that were like Ill Met In Lankmahr and Lean Times In Lankmahr.   Maybe there isn't a published adventure like that.
I have never really considered D&D to be about the published settings and modules, for me it has always been roll your own.  When I started there was no Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk set to pick up. No Dragonlance, and we couldn't get many modules in our neck of the woods. So we just assumed that of course you would make everything up for your game. That included much pilfering from Apendix N, much of which we had read. If you were a fantasy fan that was fantasy. I feel sad for todays gamers who instead get D&D influence fantasy.

Quote from: Voros;968116I have no idea how Jack Williamson, who wrote time-travelling space operas, kid-friendly sf and one excellent adult werewolf novel, has anything to do with D&D. His inclusion on the list backs up the idea that this was a 'off the top of my head' list from Gygax.

I don't find it all unlikely that Gygax used elements of Williamson at the game table. The guy wrote two whole modules based on Lewis Carroll's works.

D&D eventually stagnated into being a set IP and turned "vanilla", but it wasn't like that in the '70s or the early '80s. I felt a lot more free to put whatever I wanted into my D&D game. One of my favorite things about the OSR is that it has allowed the game to expand in any strange direction it wants to.

Quote from: Voros;968116I have no idea how Jack Williamson, who wrote time-travelling space operas, kid-friendly sf and one excellent adult werewolf novel, has anything to do with D&D. His inclusion on the list backs up the idea that this was a 'off the top of my head' list from Gygax.

He also wrote a book called The Reign of Wizardry, which a swords & sorcery-flavored retelling of the Theseus myth. It's pretty much a Howard pastiche and has some bits when Theseus is in the Labyrinth that feel vaguely D&Dish. I get it sort of mixed up in my mind with the Prester John novels by Norvell Page, which were written around the same time (published in magazines in the late 30s-early 40s; reissued in paperback in the 60s) and which I read around the same time (early 00s). That's probably the book Gary (or Tim Kask, who collaborated with Gary on the list, which originally appeared in an issue of The Dragon c. 1977) had in mind, but he/they couldn't recall the title so they just left the author's name hanging loose.

Same deal with Stanley G. Weinbaum. He's remembered nowadays for hard SF stories that don't seem much of anything like D&D, but when asked about it at ENWorld Gary said he was specifically thinking of a novel (The Black Flame) that was sort of an A. Merritt-pastiche. Probably the same deal with Fredric Brown, too. The stuff he's remembered for - ironic and satirical SF like Martians Go Home and pulp-noir novels like The Fabulous Clipjoint - isn't at all D&Dish, but there's probably at least one novel or story out there that had some element that Gary or Tim recalled as feeling D&Dish. Maybe the story "Arena" (that got adapted into a Star Trek episode) - that's the kind of situation that could arise in a D&D game, I suppose.

Quote from: Voros;968091Everyone knows that B/X and BECMI were developed for kids and newbies. You use that as a slur and claim it was 'watered down.' We all heard that disparagement back in the 80s but many now believe from experience at the table that there were significant advantages to the stripped down approach of those versions.  

And its not just in retrospect, Imagine magazine carried a review of the Red Box that praised its simplier rules and superior presentation for newbies.

Just because it was made simplier (or perhaps more accurately not made pointlessly complicated) and 'for kids' is no more a measure of quality than the fact that Through the Looking Glass and Treasure Island were written for children makes them inferior to The Da Vinci Code or 50 Shades of Gray.

You have a right to prefer AD&D but you don't have a right to shoot your mouth off on the net and not have people disagree with you. Seems like many on the net you can dish it out but not take it.

By "watered-down" I mean deliberately simplified. Things like melding race and class together, or changing the order of operations in combat from overlapping phases to "side A goes then side B goes," or deleting a lot of the stuff about in-town activities, or various other things (not to mention simplifying the language). All of those changes make the game simpler and more streamlined and more easily accessible and understandable by newbies and kids but, at least to me, they also dilute the flavor that I find appealing about the original game and AD&D, thus "watered down." I don't think the B/X sets are bad. I think they're probably the best version for newbies and kids, and I had a lot of fun with them for about 6 months (when I was both a newbie and a kid) before I started yearning for more options and more depth, both of which I got from AD&D.

How that position makes me a sinister "gatekeeper" who's trying to define what is and isn't old-school and how people should be allowed to play the game (which is the context in which you brought me up - people were asking who actually advocated that straw-man position, you volunteered my name) is still beyond me. I don't know you. I literally don't care at all how you choose to play D&D. I like to talk about the way I like to play, which sometimes includes why I prefer my version to other options. That's apparently really offensive to some people. Whatever.

The "Appendix N" list came into being because Gary and Tim Kask realized that a lot of their fanbase (presumably people going to GenCon and writing letters to TSR and/or The Dragon) hadn't read a lot of the books that were Gary and Tim's favorites and that influenced the content and shape of D&D, and they wanted to encourage people to read them. So they sat down and pulled together a list of authors and titles and published it in The Dragon. A couple years later, an expanded version of that list was included in the DMG.

If you read the books, for most of them (some exceptions noted 2 posts above) it's pretty obvious why Gary (and/or Tim) liked them and what they drew from them for D&D. Sometimes it's some specific monster or spell or character-type (and, it's worth noting, there are also plenty of D&D monsters, spells, and character types that come from sources not cited in Appendix N). Other times it's just the general "vibe" of the work - they're usually short, fast-moving, action-packed, not too serious; they're often set in a fictional world, there's usually some supernatural element, there's often at least one bit where the hero is in some sort of underworld maze, there's usually at least one part where the hero has to use his (or her, but it's pretty much always his) wits to overcome some trap or obstacle, and there's almost always a healthy dose of hand-to-hand combat. By reading these books (especially reading a lot of them - reading just one or two will probably lead you to try to overthink it and draw too-close parallels, but when you've read a dozen or so of them you can more easily grasp the general trend) you get a feeling for the headspace Gary (et al.) were in when designing D&D, and the sort of feel and tone they expected D&D adventures to have - pulpy, fast-moving, action-packed, straight-faced but not really serious. H.P. Lovecraft is an exception to pretty much all of those trends, but is nonetheless considered one of the "main" influences. Presumably it's for his language - eldritch, squamous, etc. - and the weird vibe of the Cthulhu Mythos (though a lot of what people claim as Lovecraftian elements in D&D seem to me to come more from A. Merritt), and the fact that Rob Kuntz included a bunch of Lovecraft monsters in his adventures in the Greyhawk Campaign.

There's no need to read any more into it than that. Appendix N isn't the Rosetta Stone or the Da Vinci Code. It's not "the key to really understanding D&D." But if all you've ever read is Terry Brooks and David Eddings and you're frustrated that D&D doesn't really feel much like that, reading some of these books will help you to understand why that is - and, perhaps, help you decide what changes to make to D&D if you do want it to feel more like those other books.

Quote from: Voros;968119PS. Please explain how Williamson's pulp sf is reflected in D&D.

Jesus H. tapdaincing Christ on a surfboard, HOW FUCKING STUPID ARE YOU?

Appendix N is a list of books Gary liked that were more or less fantastic.  Reading anything more than that into them is utter bullshit.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;968252Appendix N is a list of books Gary liked that were more or less fantastic.  Reading anything more than that into them is utter bullshit.

Imagine if Gary had had the page count and recall to list all the 'countless hundreds of comic books,' and horror movies, and Grimm fairy tales as well. One certainly hopes we wouldn't then have to analyze each one and ferret out what they each have to do with D&D.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;968252Jesus H. tapdaincing Christ on a surfboard, HOW FUCKING STUPID ARE YOU?

Appendix N is a list of books Gary liked that were more or less fantastic.  Reading anything more than that into them is utter bullshit.

You aren't fooling anyone, Gronan. You just want the secret grognard treasure that Gary hid in Appendix N all to yourself. I'm going to keep digging.

Quote from: T. Foster;968242There's no need to read any more into it than that. Appendix N isn't the Rosetta Stone or the Da Vinci Code. It's not "the key to really understanding D&D." But if all you've ever read is Terry Brooks and David Eddings and you're frustrated that D&D doesn't really feel much like that, reading some of these books will help you to understand why that is - and, perhaps, help you decide what changes to make to D&D if you do want it to feel more like those other books.

Exactly. And always remember D&D did not set out to directly recreate Appendix N in game form. For one thing it couldn't, the material is too diverse. For another the idea that an RPG had to stick to one source exclusively had not been invented yet.

Influences and inspirations. Not copied perfectly.

Quote from: Baulderstone;968268You aren't fooling anyone, Gronan. You just want the secret grognard treasure that Gary hid in Appendix N all to yourself. I'm going to keep digging.

Now we just need to figure out which of these appendix N author's graves is where Gary secretly buried the One True D&D, with which one could win all gaming debates if one ever read.