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NGDBSS posted:Gary Gygax seems to be tabletop's equivalent to Ronald Reagan. Both are revered by certain factions in their respective arenas, and yet there exist a bunch of misconceptions about their actual views and practices. I think the Stan Lee comparison fits as well - he had some originating creative role that is hotly contested, screwed over his collaborators in some manner, became less of a talent and more of a smiling ambassador as the years went by, never achieved anything as good as that lightning in a bottle moment ever again and is most likely to get credit for the creation of everything by people who don't know the history of their hobby/interest that well. Terrible Opinions posted:Eh I think it's pretty blatant hyperbole but Gygax was irritating enough to not bother arguing to defend him. Either that or I just think of Gor as way more horrible than you do. Sure, I was being flippant and hyperbolic, despite his lovely views on gender I don't actually think Gygax wanted to sexually enslave women while claiming it was for their own good on a shirtless desert dying earth type world. But I think that was implied? I think fascist is a better term for Reagan btw Lightning Lord fucked around with this message at 07:50 on Aug 25, 2016 |
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Jul 15, 2016 07:46
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Everything I've read about them makes Arneson seem like the cooler dude and better DM of the pair.
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Jul 15, 2016 18:48
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Yeah but the more you read the more it sounds like if you are being completely fair, Dave Arneson probably would have released a 8-page 'zine edition of his Blackmoor rules complete with spelling errors and probably soda stains, had it not been for Gary Gygax being like "this is so goddamn amazing" and taking the reigns. The saddest part of the whole thing is really just that they did not get along better, as it probably would have been better overall if their acrimonious split (and then Dungeons & Dragons' split) had never occurred. Also EGG is really not somebody you can easily pigeon-hole into good or bad if you ask me. He was certainly a purveyor of the puke-inducing "women are weaker but more charming than men, how is this up for debate??? Hey, would you mind passing me the literally infinite power of magic so I can unironically enjoy its realism thanks" thing, but it is also easy to find quotes of his where he talks about how dumb it is to think of his word as law (even if, yes, sometimes he would also say "why are you playing Dungeons & Dragons if you do not think the rules are worth following?"). He was a really interesting person though, and I would still take his "standoffish online and somewhat regressive but genuinely kind and forthcoming to all his fans" self over any alt-right misogyny gaming shitbird. The only real 1970s gaming hero is Ken St. Andre. "LOL this game is stupid, I am going to make my own version based on half-remembered rules photocopies and still sell it in 40 years."
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Jul 15, 2016 23:24
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Yeah, I think it's weird to criticize people for not being more ahead of their time.
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Jul 16, 2016 00:44
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I'm pre-emptively judging all you drinkers for drinking in anticipation of the future timeline in which intoxication becomes seen as a moral evil once we have direct cortical stimulation to reproduce the positive effects of any drugs with no downside.
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Jul 16, 2016 02:14
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Jimbozig posted:I'm pre-emptively judging all you drinkers for drinking in anticipation of the future timeline in which intoxication becomes seen as a moral evil once we have direct cortical stimulation to reproduce the positive effects of any drugs with no downside.
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Jul 16, 2016 02:24
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dwarf74 posted:Yeah, I think it's weird to criticize people for not being more ahead of their time. Being a biological determinist in TYOOL 2004 is a totally reasonable thing to criticize a person for.
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Jul 16, 2016 04:55
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I always get a little irritated at talk of people being creatures of their time. It's not like there weren't people who had different opinions then, and it's not as if regressive attitudes are a thing of the past now, making the average MRA a direct fixture of this time and place. Just as slave owners and genetic racists had opposition from abolitionists and others, so too did sexists in the time of Gygax and earlier have their opponents, from suffragettes to feminists and onward. The assholes have never been totally unopposed, and as such they never get a free ticket to be an rear end in a top hat.
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Jul 16, 2016 08:44
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remusclaw posted:I always get a little irritated at talk of people being creatures of their time. It's not like there weren't people who had different opinions then, and it's not as if regressive attitudes are a thing of the past now, making the average MRA a direct fixture of this time and place. Just as slave owners and genetic racists had opposition from abolitionists and others, so too did sexists in the time of Gygax and earlier have their opponents, from suffragettes to feminists and onward. The assholes have never been totally unopposed, and as such they never get a free ticket to be an rear end in a top hat. But it does matter. It takes much more dedication and courage to be *insert cause*, if society will beat you / lock you up / kill you for it than just going with the flow. On reverse, it doesn't take much courage for me to announce that I'm supportive of Unions, Gay and minority rights. Hundred years ago I would be in big trouble for those beliefs. Or more likely I would have just kept my mouth shut/adopted more mainstream attitude to survive.
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Jul 16, 2016 13:31
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you know this discussion is never fun when someone namedrops HP Lovecraft and it's not fun now. Gygax was a weird  -er and that clearly impacted D&D in ways that we know today were loving stupid. why don't we move on to the stage in Gygax chat where we talk about how he didn't like 3e and would've probably disowned any iterations after that so anyone using his words as gospel who isn't devoted to following all of the convoluted crap in the core 2e books is being silly?wait no, exciting new twist: what would Gygax think of the OSR people who clean up his rules and prose and resell it without all the pretensions? Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 15:08 on Jul 16, 2016 |
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Jul 16, 2016 14:59
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He would be so drat angry.
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Jul 16, 2016 15:02
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What even is The List of the biggest and oldest names in this scene at the formative level that have left a legacy of sorts as far as the already deceased and the still hanging on? There's Gygax obviously, and the wildly-different-than-Gygax M.A.R. Barker---must be another good few that make up the earliest enduring foundations to paint something of a picture?
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Jul 16, 2016 15:31
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ExiledTinkerer posted:What even is The List of the biggest and oldest names in this scene at the formative level that have left a legacy of sorts as far as the already deceased and the still hanging on? There's Gygax obviously, and the wildly-different-than-Gygax M.A.R. Barker---must be another good few that make up the earliest enduring foundations to paint something of a picture? Ed Greenwood and Sandy Petersen, for two. There's still a good number of 0e/1e hands and their contemporaries around, including players in Gygax's home campaign if that's your thing, like Rob Kuntz and Skip Williams. Frank Mentzer and Jennell Jaquays, too. Bob Bledsaw is dead, though. But Ken St. Andre and Sandy Petersen at least present an okay idea of what it was like outside of TSR back when. Greg Stafford, too.
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Jul 16, 2016 15:45
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ExiledTinkerer posted:What even is The List of the biggest and oldest names in this scene at the formative level that have left a legacy of sorts as far as the already deceased and the still hanging on? There's Gygax obviously, and the wildly-different-than-Gygax M.A.R. Barker---must be another good few that make up the earliest enduring foundations to paint something of a picture? There's the two Steve Jacksons, Arneson, M A R Barker, Gygax, Ken St Andre, Rick Loomis, Mark W Miller, Kevin Siembada and I can't think of anyone else who was active in the 70's-early 80's and produced anything long term right now. Honestly I'm sure there's a comprehensive list in Designers and Dragons.
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Jul 16, 2016 15:46
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Kind of surprised Greg Stafford hasn't been brought up. But only kind of.
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Jul 16, 2016 15:47
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Kind of surprised Greg Stafford hasn't been brought up. I beat you to it!
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Jul 16, 2016 15:48
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I have always thought it was weird that there were two Steve Jacksons, and for a period of time they both worked on the same gameline (Fighting Fantasy).
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Jul 16, 2016 15:52
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A fun bit of trivia is that Greg Stafford bought the very fist copy of D&D, literally out of the print shop. quote:A friend of mine, Jeff Platt, was at a printer’s shop to pick up a catalogue where he met a guy getting his new fantasy game. Jeff bought one from Gary Gygax right at the shop. Gary told me later it was the first copy of Dungeons & Dragons ever sold. He was not impressed quote:I found D&D to be almost illiterate, poorly organized and not worth my trouble to sort out.
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Jul 16, 2016 16:13
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adhuin posted:But it does matter. It takes much more dedication and courage to be *insert cause*, if society will beat you / lock you up / kill you for it than just going with the flow. Historically, this is correct. But part of the problem of hero worship is the tendency to gloss over these flaws, and even attempt to revive these positions by using the whole "X was a Good Person (TM) and believed in [regressive trash], so it can't be that bad" line. Gaming's not any worse with this than general culture, but it also isn't any better. The cult of Gygax is a great example of this-- Gygax helped make a popular game, but in retrospect he had a lot of very bad ideas about gaming, and people in general. And because of our pretty crappy personality cult culture (plus the loser gamers getting angry that decent people are starting to enter the hobby) his ideas get drug out in TYOOL 2016, instead of just looking it at as a relic of his backwards time and not worthy of a second look.
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Jul 16, 2016 16:33
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quote:I found D&D to be almost illiterate, poorly organized and not worth my trouble to sort out. A very true thing. I remember as a kid trying to learn AD&D 1E from the DMG (this was in the late 80s) and thinking how poorly written it was as an instruction book. My copy of Metzner Basic D&D was a simpler game, but also way better laid out. I can't believe that TSR was putting out such a bad book at the same time as more modern books in the AD&D line. The DMG was a set of essays with Gary ranting about anyone playing the game at all differently to his primary model, and had piles of rules that just poo poo on players in unneeded ways that have still stuck around in people's psyche for some reason. Acting like Earn Your Fun is the only (let alone primary) way to game is intensely bad for burning through new players.
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Jul 16, 2016 16:42
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remusclaw posted:I always get a little irritated at talk of people being creatures of their time. And yet we are. How much thought/discussion do people give to the personhood and rights of gorillas now? Of your rights with regard to the airspace immediately over your backyard, and things falling into it? These are fringe discussions now. Bring up the gorilla thing and you're likely to get somebody scoffing about being able to marry their dog (as many already do when gay rights come up). Bring up the airspace thing and people will cock their head like a dog, not thinking ahead to drones buzzing all over the place for every reason, delivering pizzas and Amazon packages and even junk mail. Stuff's gonna change in all aspects of life, and you can pretty much guarantee that you're not going to change with 100% of it. The older you get, the more set in your ways you get.
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Jul 16, 2016 16:44
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Kwyndig posted:There's the two Steve Jacksons, Arneson, M A R Barker, Gygax, Ken St Andre, Rick Loomis, Mark W Miller, Kevin Siembada and I can't think of anyone else who was active in the 70's-early 80's and produced anything long term right now. Jeff Dee, Jack Herman, Jordan Weisman, and Bob Charette are some more and Paul Hume may still be in the business.
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Jul 16, 2016 17:46
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Steve Perrin is still alive and kicking.
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Jul 16, 2016 17:50
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homullus posted:And yet we are. How much thought/discussion do people give to the personhood and rights of gorillas now? There's a difference between recognizing contemporary normalized values and outright apologism. Using your example: sure, we don't speak up a bunch about the rights of gorillas. It has been in the news and some people are outspokenly for it but the average person responds with an "eh." If, in the future, this is a huge issue then we might be judged for that passive attitude. However, one would be completely correct in judging those who held the position that gorilla rights don't matter at all or that holding them in captivity is completely justified. Here's a more contemporary (and contentious) issue: child abuse. Hitting your kids as discipline was a normalized activity in the recent past. I think it's complete bullshit to defend a parent punching their child because "that's how it was done at the time." Spanking as discipline is a muddy water - but it's far and away from what passed for parenting in many circles. There are obviously levels of contentiousness here: spanking is (probably) not tantamount to actual abuse but history may judge us differently. Even today there are still a large number of people who say things like "todays kids just need a good pop in the mouth." To bring it back to the current discussion: there is a large difference between Gygax shrugging at the idea of biological determinism or saying things like "well, you might have a point" and offering a houserule and actively writing that poo poo into the text of his game. I won't go so far as to call him a misogynistic shithead but drat dude, science left that poo poo behind fifty years before your were born.
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Jul 16, 2016 17:51
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Zurui posted:There's a difference between recognizing contemporary normalized values and outright apologism. All of the things you said are true. I likewise would bet $20 you will be an apologist later in life, for something that was less thought-about when you were younger, and will be judged for it, and it will be because you are a product of your time.
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Jul 16, 2016 17:59
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It's very possible. I'm more speaking to the apologism of younger people for generations past.
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Jul 16, 2016 18:03
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Nuns with Guns posted:you know this discussion is never fun when someone namedrops HP Lovecraft and it's not fun now. Gygax was a weird Lovecraft died in 1937. Gary Gygax professed that he was a biological determinist in 2004. Also, if you're intelligent enough to know the meaning behind the words "biological determinist" and believe that is a correct way of thinking, then you're informed enough that you ought to know you're wrong. To continue believing otherwise isn't ignorance or being set in your ways. It is active malice.
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Jul 16, 2016 18:05
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homullus posted:And yet we are. How much thought/discussion do people give to the personhood and rights of gorillas now? Of your rights with regard to the airspace immediately over your backyard, and things falling into it? These are fringe discussions now. Bring up the gorilla thing and you're likely to get somebody scoffing about being able to marry their dog (as many already do when gay rights come up). Bring up the airspace thing and people will cock their head like a dog, not thinking ahead to drones buzzing all over the place for every reason, delivering pizzas and Amazon packages and even junk mail. The matter of women being equal and having equal rights though has not simply been the domain of crackpots and the fringe, if it were suffrage would not have been won in the 20's and the ERA would not have come so close to ratification in the 70's. On the matter of abolition, the framers of the constitution were split, even sometimes within the person of the same framer. These have not been fringe issues in a long long time, and though there was obviously lot of push back from regressive elements it is not like their opposition lived eternally in fear of them, necessitating a cloaking of their attitudes. Further it is not as if people do not suffer today at the hands of assholes for the crime of doing anything in public while black or expressing themselves while female. Now as then there are consequences for whatever opinion you publicly hold, but that doesnt stop people now and it didn't stop people then. They had and still have no excuse for being an rear end in a top hat. The only people we play this game with are people who have produced works we like. The average shithead on the street in 1920 doesn't get given a pass for shouting obscenities at women or blacks no matter the times. remusclaw fucked around with this message at 18:14 on Jul 16, 2016 |
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Jul 16, 2016 18:10
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homullus posted:All of the things you said are true. I likewise would bet $20 you will be an apologist later in life, for something that was less thought-about when you were younger, and will be judged for it, and it will be because you are a product of your time. Otherkin! Multiple systems! Please kill me!
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Jul 16, 2016 18:16
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remusclaw posted:They had and still have no excuse for being an rear end in a top hat. The only people we play this game with are people who have produced works we like. Well, I'm not playing any game here. This isn't "that's just grandpa being grandpa!" and shrugging it off as though grandpa's horrific racism doesn't matter because he's old or w/e; it matters, and it matters even more if grandpa is on the city council. I think you are wrong to completely ignore the culture (time being a subset thereof) in which a person grows up, though! It is a powerful force in your own personal development, and it is a lifetime's work to continually challenge your assumptions and perspectives. You probably are not gonna catch 'em all, and you'll be judged. Gygax was born in 1938 in the midwest, so he would have grown up with men going off to fight in wars and women in the home, in a socially conservative environment (Wisconsin is definitely conservative outside its cities, and Lake Geneva is Absolutely Not A City: population maybe 4,000 when he moved there). He was also way into anthropology. He worked in insurance. This biological determinism stuff was very likely already in his head long before D&D came out. He had enormous success with sexually-regressive D&D, so of course it stayed in the game. He then went on to Hollywood, hardly a bastion of sexual equality. Then the wheels fell off the TSR car and he was back in Lake Geneva. He had ample opportunity (decades!) to use his brain to have a less-regressive view of women all along, and . . . didn't! There's no excuse, and I don't agree with his position. But I definitely understand how he could get to biological determinism from where and "when" he was, and keep that perspective as he aged. I think the point you raised about the ERA is a good one: this stuff was already getting its next big nudge toward the door when AD&D came out, especially in actual intellectual circles. Gygax wasn't in actual intellectual circles, though; he was in community college/undergraduate/gaming circles. He was in Dan Brown/Da Vinci Code circles. Even so, the ERA was a big deal. As a kid in the same part of Wisconsin, I knew what the ERA was, so I don't see how he could have not been aware. It didn't move him. As we note that he is a product of his time, we can also note that he held a view that was a little behind the times even in his time. He wasn't alone, though, and Exhibit A is the fate of the ERA. Arivia posted:Otherkin!
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Jul 16, 2016 19:00
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homullus posted:
We are moving fast these days, though perhaps not so fast as that. There is little to no agitation as yet for the sake of people such as this, excepting of course those people who belong to such groups. Regardless, if it were to pass that such folk are accepted in the future and their lifestyles were no longer the subject of jeers and abuse, I would hope to be seen as relatively faultless in the matter, having adopted the general attitude some time ago that the way other people live is none of my business so long as they do it in a manner that doesn't do harm to me or others. There are of course degrees in these matters. Gygax likely gets off the hook more easily than others, if only for not being very influential in the field of assholery. Regressive thought is a personal fault, regressive statements are to be called out as such, and regressive actions are to be thoroughly condemned. Gygax had some rear end in a top hat ideas that he felt worth declaring out loud, well I say he had the wrong ideas. Considering that to my knowledge, he didn't agitate, march, or write professionally for the cause of misogyny, he falls rather short of being on the level of other more egregious examples, though it does not leave him totally off the hook. remusclaw fucked around with this message at 19:45 on Jul 16, 2016 |
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Jul 16, 2016 19:31
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remusclaw posted:We are moving fast these days, though perhaps not so fast as that. There is little to no agitation as yet for the sake of people such as this, excepting of course those people who belong to such groups. Regardless, if it were to pass that such folk are accepted in the future and their lifestyles were no longer the subject of jeers and abuse, I would hope to be seen as relatively faultless in the matter, having adopted the general attitude some time ago that the way other people live is none of my business so long as they do it in a manner that doesn't do harm to me or others. Hey, I hope so too! I can only hope that the ways I'm behind the times later are not-people's-rights stuff like not wanting my phone as a chip in my head or something. But that's what I meant about "product of your time" -- if you go on to become a Famous Game Designer who somehow clung tenaciously to the later-hilariously-outmoded view that gender expression was a broad cultural spectrum that only covered the human species, I think it would be important to note how widespread that view was when and where you grew up. Not an excuse, and hopefully not hurtful in the future, but I'd want people to understand that about you.
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Jul 16, 2016 19:42
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I can agree with that. Hell I would hope that were I well known in the future I would be looked at clearly, faults and all. We only get better by accepting that we have faults, because it is only when we do so that we can truly endeavor to correct them.
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Jul 16, 2016 19:51
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I'd like if it were more widely understood that the times are a product of its people and not the other way around. Cleaning up media has a weird side effect of creating the impression that the past was somehow just this misled, ignorant place and we've all grown up since then. We can applaud Disney hiding Song of the South in a vault, but it doesn't change that audiences of the era ate that crap up. I'm trying to say that this stuff wouldn't have flourished without an audience. Gaming is unique because a) it's a comparably small audience, b) some gamers are loving horrible examples of humanity, and c) we refuse to take out our trash. With the exceptions of GROGS.TXT and some neglected corners of Tumblr and G+, self-examination and calling out the community's worst just doesn't happen. People are genuinely surprised that hateful shitstains were consulted on D&D Next. But that continues because inertia trumps calls for improvement.
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Jul 16, 2016 20:33
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http://www.thepaincomics.com/weekly010905a.htm Relevant comic
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Jul 16, 2016 20:46
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That person is an idiot.
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Jul 16, 2016 20:55
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canyoneer posted:http://www.thepaincomics.com/weekly010905a.htm These kinds of things don't come out of nowhere though. While minds do change they do not do so without sizable amounts of support among the populace. PETA right now is the only organization I can think of that is anti pet as a whole, and they would need to pick up a massive amount of public support to expect societal change in the direction of embracing their attitudes regarding pet ownership. The person in the cartoon is someone who has to have lived through that kind change and actively remained stalwart in his attitude regardless of the societal change around him, a dedicated defender of the old status quo. Sometimes I miss Grog.text. Where else was that poo poo being called out in a relatively public manner. moths posted:Cleaning up media has a weird side effect of creating the impression that the past was somehow just this misled, ignorant place and we've all grown up since then. We can applaud Disney hiding Song of the South in a vault, but it doesn't change that audiences of the era ate that crap up. I'm trying to say that this stuff wouldn't have flourished without an audience. I honestly wish they hadn't hidden "Song of the South." I think it is important for for groups to own their past, good and bad. Hiding it fails to teach the lessons that can be learned from engaging with past failures and attitudes.
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Jul 16, 2016 21:02
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Haystack posted:A fun bit of trivia is that Greg Stafford bought the very fist copy of D&D, literally out of the print shop.
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Jul 16, 2016 21:44
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Ewen Cluney posted:I'm increasingly of the opinion that while Gygax was a better game designer than people sometimes give him credit for, he was a much worse writer than his fans would have us believe. A lot of things in D&D had a lot of thought and testing go into them, yet he couldn't be bothered to put into words how and why they worked (despite being a prolific writer across zines and such), so that the people who took over D&D wound up making new editions based on their own cargo cult understanding of the game rather than the game he intended but failed to actually communicate in writing. And then the entire hobby inherited some of his bad habit of not being able to explain stuff in words. This is very much true. A good example of how bad he was putting at stuff into writing is how the wizards ended up being in 3rd edition, because it's pretty obvious that the 3rd ed designers missed the purpose behind all the fiddly limitations put on wizards. Kemper Boyd fucked around with this message at 22:58 on Jul 16, 2016 |
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Jul 16, 2016 22:55
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Ewen Cluney posted:[quote] I largely agree with this. We know what D&D was supposed to do with the benefit of a few decades of hindsight, but we really could have used "dev diaries" to help us get there sooner and with more clarity.
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Jul 17, 2016 00:03
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