Unless you're one of those crazy Christians who believe that Gygax engineered D&D as a brainwashing tool to get people to worship Satan. Then you're probably glad he's dead.
Gary Gygax died, basically. That's all that you need to know for this thread.
And if you don't know who Gary Gygax is, he's the guy that created Dungeons and Dragons, he pretty much invented tabletop RPGs, or at least had a big part in it.
My brother had him as a professor in one of his classes when he was going to Full Sail, said the guy had a stroke (not because of the class, just, like, at some point before Joe had the class) and he was a bit messed up because of it.
I think I remember my brother saying he met him at one point. I'll have to ask him about that. And continue trying to assemble a group to play D&D at my school.
His main argument was that people did not actually role play a character, they just became a stronger and more talented character the more they killed and earned exp. I'll grant, that did happen, but he seems to be completely ignoring character alignment. If you played lawful good (and played it right), then you wouldn't slit the throats of the hypothetical sleeping orcs. That's what made the game dynamic, especially if you played with people of different alignments, who also played their characters right.
I dunno, my DnD experience is only a few years long, and intersperced at best, maybe someone else can comment better on this.
Wow, how can he be the worst thing to happen to his own creation? And their whole part about how you kill stuff just for the sake of killing and getting xp? Correct me if I'm wrong, but that really is up to the DM. Yes, with more simplistic campaigns, the focus is on killing treasure hoarding goblins or whatever, but the DM can award xp based off of creative problem solving or good role playing if he wants. I always thought that what made D&D work was that it provided a good system for role playing and adventuring, but can easily be tailored to the players' liking.
I too am dubious about the "moral" questions that author raises, but I think the points raised about the experience building system being clunky and not meshing well with storytelling are somewhat valid. But perhaps I've just had shitty DMs over the years. I'm also partial to GURPS, so maybe I'm biased as well.
Comments
Unless you're one of those crazy Christians who believe that Gygax engineered D&D as a brainwashing tool to get people to worship Satan. Then you're probably glad he's dead.
By the way.. excellent thread title.
RIP
And if you don't know who Gary Gygax is, he's the guy that created Dungeons and Dragons, he pretty much invented tabletop RPGs, or at least had a big part in it.
The class was hilarious though, apparently.
=(
ah, but by that same token, he also implicitly had a big part in the creation of MUDs.
:hulk:
Man, I've seen dudes playing on campus with entire DUFFLEBAGS, packed as full as they could possibly be, with nothing but D&D rulebooks.
http://www.economist.com/obituary/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10838120
http://www.slate.com/id/2186203
His main argument was that people did not actually role play a character, they just became a stronger and more talented character the more they killed and earned exp. I'll grant, that did happen, but he seems to be completely ignoring character alignment. If you played lawful good (and played it right), then you wouldn't slit the throats of the hypothetical sleeping orcs. That's what made the game dynamic, especially if you played with people of different alignments, who also played their characters right.
I dunno, my DnD experience is only a few years long, and intersperced at best, maybe someone else can comment better on this.