{"id":669,"date":"2008-03-11T07:32:38","date_gmt":"2008-03-11T13:32:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamingwithchildren.com\/2008-03-11\/slate-slams-dd\/"},"modified":"2008-03-11T07:32:38","modified_gmt":"2008-03-11T13:32:38","slug":"slate-slams-dd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/2008\/03\/11\/slate-slams-dd\/","title":{"rendered":"Slate Slams D&D"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"mmanual.jpg\"This is off-topic for this site- true, but most of us have some sort of D&D background. So I thought I’d upset everyone’s morning by linking to this<\/a>. An overly sensationalistic article that uses the death of Gary Gygax to complain about this “morally reprehensible” game called D&D. The author isn’t a “think of the children\/culture war” leftie or rightie – the writer is in fact a bigger geek and RPG fan than most of the geeks who are going to complain about this article. Well, the article is factually true from what I can see. But it does go VERY wrong in a few places. . . .<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It’s true that D&D’s experience and character growth system are flawed and based on acts of violence and greed. The best ways to get experience points are to kill monsters and rob their bodies. But Gygax and Arneson didn’t make the game that way to push an agenda. They deserve praise because they were first. The story goes like this (as told to me by Dave Arneson). Gygax and Arneson were friends who were into playing wargames using miniatures and dice. WWII, Napoleonic, the Civil War, that sort of thing. Gygax had the idea one day that his miniature, instead of representing a regiment or group of warriors could represent a single warrior. With every player playing one character, they didn’t need to fight each other. They could fight monsters. They could make the game more personal, more co-operative, and with these decisions, other decisions followed. How do you show growth in your heroes (well, the game is about combat so why not make it about killing monsters?) and why do the adventurers fight? To get gold – why, as the article asks, do orcs have gold when they can’t spend it? Because ancient myths ALWAYS have the monster have a treasure trove and it NEVER makes sense. Even Smaug in the Hobbit slept on untold riches – for no good reason. I can see lowering this charge on D&D if it was the 3rd or 5th role-playing game to come out… but it was the first. The goals weren’t realism then. They were making it up as they went along and it’s not fair to fault what’s first for being weaker than what came after.<\/p>\n

If you want to take D&D to task for being first, being the pioneer, then you need to slam “Rock Around the Clock” for the same reason. That song was arguably the first rock n’ roll tune, but compared to the rock that came later, it doesn’t stand up the same way. While you’re at it, Beowulf – the first English epic – doesn’t compare well to Lord of the Rings because Beowulf is rather shallow in the character development and the only theme involves killing a freak with your bare hands. How about the very first films? Action Comics #1 is the first Superhero comic book but, guess what? The Pulitzer Prize winning Maus is much, much better.<\/p>\n

Show me something that was first, and I’ll show you something similar only better. It’s a fact of life and of art, and of innovation that things are built upon other things. You can’t, as this article does, fault the first guy to truly innovate in terms of gaming for being “morally reprehensible.” Before D&D there was nothing like this. Gary got there first and that, alone, deserves a degree of celebration.<\/p>\n

Having spoken to them in the past, I’m pretty sure the author’s hero Steve Jackson would agree with me. It was Gary Gygax that first taught us to rock around the clock all night – and inspired us to make his game better than he did.
\nThe last mistake the author makes is in forgetting that D&D is an open system. We’ve always been encouraged to add or drop rules. For my own game I created a different experience point system because I didn’t like the one Gygax made. I created a lot of new rules and used D&D as a template.<\/p>\n

I haven’t met this author but I think I know him. I’ve pushed past him to do an interview at Gen Con, I’ve rolled my eyes listening to him pontificate in lines, I’ve done my best to ignore him all my life. He’s the Comic Book Guy – always ready to levy unfair critique, piousness, a warped sense of purity, a false sense of logic, and a flair for hyperbole and venom, at anything he smugly feels superior toward. He also likely has a real need for attention.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And I just gave him way too much of that.<\/p>\n

My bad.<\/p>\n

PS: I’ve got a pet peeve. Look, nobody gets to say “without Gary Gygax there’d be no role-playing games!” If you pay attention, you’ll hear garbage like that now and then. Very few things are true leaps and for every visionary there are scores of people with the same vision who have no power to realize it. Gygax gets credit for the same thing Neil Armstrong gets. He was first. And that’s nothing to sneeze at all by itself!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is off-topic for this site- true, but most of us have some sort of D&D background. So I thought I’d upset everyone’s morning by linking to this. An overly sensationalistic article that uses the death of Gary Gygax to complain about this “morally reprehensible” game called D&D. The author isn’t a “think of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-669","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=669"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}