I've blogged a bit about my general busy-ness. Work the last year has been pretty killer for me. However... I just finished the job that was so killer; my technical last day was earlier this week, and bright and early on Monday, I'll start a new job. I will also be forced, however, to relocate within the next month or so, so my blogging will still be delayed. However, I imagine that once I'm actually moved, my new job will be more chill than the one I'm leaving. Plus, since I won't really know anyone and I'm kind of antisocial anyway, when I'm not out hiking or exploring our new area with my wife, I'll be homebodying at home, which is good for blogging. In fact, I can look forward to a greatly improved set-up from which to do my computer stuff, reading, music, etc. as we'll use one room as an office-slash-library "for my own particular use" to quote Charlotte from Pride & Prejudice. Heck, with a purchase of a slightly better rig and a new microphone, it could even be a credible studio for me to record much better youtube videos in, if I'm inclined to do so.
Anyway, I'm taking a moment now to blog, because I haven't in a while, and I remembered a tag I created that I intended to use off and on all year to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the RPG hobby, which was kicked off by the publication of the original D&D booklets in June or so of 1974. In my last post, I "debunked" or at least said that I don't really buy the premise that D&D was really all that based on sword & sorcery. What it was really based on was Gary Gygax's love of Medieval historical wargaming, which is why people looking back at older D&D works written by EGG scratch their heads wondering what glaive-guisarmes and fauchard-forks are or what they have to do with Conan or the Gray Mouser or even Aragorn. Not to say that Gary didn't enjoy sword & sorcery, because I think that's one of the things that we can take him at his word on, but he didn't actually incorporate nearly as much of that into the game as people tend to think. It's much more based on actual history, actual mythology, and the self-contained and unique game loop of D&D of "go into a dungeon for loot, return to town, sell it, level up, and then go to tougher dungeons to repeat"; a loop that has, again, nothing to do with sword & sorcery, or any kind of fiction at all up to that point, for that matter.
But that actually brings me to the point of today's post: Gary Gygax is not actually a reliable witness and what he says can't be taken at face value very often. As the legal doctrine represented by the Latin phrase that the post's title ascribes, once Gary Gygax is shown to be blatantly contradicting himself and using a disingenuous "certain point of view" to justify it, you learn to be pretty wary of taking any of his other claims too seriously. One of which was what I talked about in the last post on the 50th tag, but it's not unique. Sure, Gary Gygax probably wasn't as sold on Tolkien as some of his audience was, but the idea that he wasn't pilfering bleeding chunks, as the saying goes, straight out of Tolkien more frequently, or at least as frequently, as he was pulpish sword & sorcery tropes is laughably absurd, and his claims to how it doesn't resemble Tolkien at all are so clearly untrue that you almost are stuck with a double take when he makes them; does he really have a straight face while he's typing that column? Well, yeah, because the threat of legal action by the Tolkien estate was still relatively fresh on his mind. But that also gives a blatantly obvious ulterior motive for him to dissemble about how closely D&D resembled Tolkien too. A kind of 70s van art Brothers Hildebrandt interpretation of Tolkien, but Tolkien nonetheless.
There are a number of other claims that seem to cover up pretty shady practices too, that can be pinned to Gygax, and while I'm not attempting to cast aspersions or judgements on the guy, I'm saying that again, just because he said something doesn't mean that he is really a reliable witness. Dave Arneson did have to sue TSR when Gygax was running it because they weren't paying him the royalties due. TSR made the shady decision to replace some of the elements of the old BD&D set with a module B1 In Search of the Unknown, which was supposed to discourage Arneson because the author of B1 was a friend of Arneson's and now instead of taking royalties away from Gygax, he'd be taking them away from Mike Carr. Of course, as soon as the Basic set took off due to the notoriety of D&D after the "steam tunnels" incident from about 5,000 sales monthly to roughly 30,000 sales monthly, Gygax decided that he didn't want to keep paying royalties to Carr, so he replaced the module with one that he wrote, B2 Keep on the Borderlands so that he could pocket the royalties instead.
Gygax used to famously say that there was no right or wrong way to play D&D; the whole point was that the referee had the authority and explicit mandate to make the game work for his players, and neither Gygax nor anyone else knew what was best for any other given group other than their own. But then, he later recanted and said that AD&D was the only correct way to play and explicitly said that unless you followed every rule as written, you were playing the game so wrong that you couldn't even be considered to be playing AD&D. Also in spite of the clear similarities and cross compatibility, he made the dubious yet "protesting too much" claim that D&D and AD&D were completely separate games that had no real relationship to each other. Again, when anyone in the know knew that he had clear legal reasons to do so to drive sales towards the game that he was trying to box Arneson's royalties out of.
Gamers in general are sympathetic to Gygax when the Blumes (or more specifically Lorraine Williams, acting in behalf of the Blumes' share in the company) essentially forced him out of his own company in 85 or 86 or so and took over everything that he built (with mostly their money, it should be noted) but I tend to look at it as the classic case of "live by the sword, die by the sword." It wasn't much worse than what Gary himself had done most notably to Arneson to also to the Tolkien estate, the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate, Michael Carr, arguably Grenadier Miniatures, and plenty of other people if he thought he could take advantage of them for his own benefit and hide behind legalese and belabored justifications such as the above that are clearly not true, especially when the clear ulterior motive is plain for all to see.
And there shall also be many which shall say: Eat, drink, and be merry; nevertheless, fear God—he will justify in committing a little sin; yea, lie a little, take the advantage of one because of his words, dig a pit for thy neighbor; there is no harm in this; and do all these things, for tomorrow we die; and if it so be that we are guilty, God will beat us with a few stripes, and at last we shall be saved in the kingdom of God. (Of course, this is followed by the following...)
Yea, and there shall be many which shall teach after this manner, false and vain and foolish doctrines, and shall be puffed up in their hearts, and shall seek deep to hide their counsels from the Lord; and their works shall be in the dark.
Anyway, lest this be merely a personal complaint about a specific person, and one who's passed on and can hardly defend himself even if he wanted to, I'll quit here; most of these items are public record (many of them even available on various Wikipedia articles) with little independent interpretation by me, other than my general lack of empathy for someone who played a bit heavy-handed with his business colleagues and supposed friends getting the same treatment himself a few years later. Let it be said that Gygax's departure by coincidence (or maybe not) was timed more or less with a number of other things that were happening in the game and at the company, which reinforces my earlier benchmark of 1984-5 or so being the change into something different. Much of the original staff and crew at TSR was gone or would soon themselves leave, and most of the employees were newer hires who had not grown up in the Wisconsin wargaming crowd, and therefore had in many cases very different ideas for what the game should be like. It seemed to be, for a time at least, that they were sorta right, as the types of products (modules at first) that were written under different design parameters to be less games-like and more story-like were quite popular, and found a ready market who seemed to be inclined towards the same things. Reviewers started talking about the dungeon-crawl as if it were a passé thing; an immature phase that the hobby had to go through to get to where it really "wanted" to be. The original Ravenloft module is often hailed as a landmark in this new direction, but the reality is that the game, the designers and the audience to a large degree, had been heading that way already for a long time, and if Ravenloft hadn't come along, shortly something else would have accomplished the same goal. Tracy Hickman gets either the credit or the blame, depending on how you think his influence has changed the hobby because he was in the right place at the right time, but if he hadn't been, there are plenty of other candidates who could have played the same role in more or less the same time frame, because they were already working towards similar design parameters and expectations out of the game.
While in retrospect the hubris of this second wave who wanted to transform the hobby to something that it hadn't previously ever been is kind of obvious, However, I'm sympathetic to their opinions because honestly; I was never in love with the paradigm of the D&D loop of play or its obvious wargaming roots, and Gygax's own insistence that the game be firmly rooted in gamist design philosophy and that role-playing was merely an adjective, not the whole point... but in their efforts to remake the hobby they probably created more problems than they really solved. Even today, the majority of most product out there, and Paizo's long adventure paths and WotC's "campaign novels" are prime examples of this; aren't really very well suited to be just freakin' played. My own struggles to wrangle some of the Paizo adventure paths into something that I could run are a perfect example of this, but its a common refrain among players of many different playstyles. I've had to take just the kernels of ideas from Paizo or WotC and completely rework them so that they are hardly recognizable at all anymore in even a generous interpretation. The "best" style of play, for me at least, was just as poorly served in most respects by "modern" 1985+ game design philosophies as it was by 1974-1984 "classic" design philosophies.
But those were all things that had little to do with the actual rules of the game, which remained largely unchanged even as this completely different philosophy of module design and how the game would actually be played percolated through the designers and from them obviously eventually to the players. Of course, there were many changes coming to the rules too; 1985 or so is also the advent of Unearthed Arcana, and more ominously, least for old school players, the publication of Oriental Adventures which produced the first "skill system" of sorts for D&D. It was followed shortly by a much more detailed and codified version of the same in the Dungeoneer's Survival Guide and the Wilderness Survival Guide. But let's cross that bridge in the next post in the 50th tag, shall we?
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