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Post by GRWelsh on Nov 7, 2016 13:47:08 GMT -5
Removal of Gygax from the company was like telling the Coca Cola recipe to take a hike in the 80's it was just bad business. They should have brought him back immediately once they realized Ward, Greenwood, Grubb, Cook, Weiss, Sargent, Moore, etc. were equivalent to office furniture. Once they realized...? I don't think they every realized it. I remember the late 80's/early 90's being a time when there was vague talk that D&D had "evolved" and EGG was passe. Those who recognized and appreciated EGG's creativity and foundational importance had to keep their mouths shut or play along and not contest the Gygax-bashing if they wanted to keep their jobs. But like you pointed out, the product was as corporate slick looking as ever, so it fooled a lot of people. I'll admit I was still buying late 80's/early 90's product and I was on the 2nd edition train when it came out. For a while. "Hey, this looks great so it must be great." But once I learned more, it soured me, and I sold most of my post-1985 TSR stuff and never really kept up with newer incarnations since then.
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Post by geneweigel on Nov 7, 2016 14:14:29 GMT -5
Removal of Gygax from the company was like telling the Coca Cola recipe to take a hike in the 80's it was just bad business. They should have brought him back immediately once they realized Ward, Greenwood, Grubb, Cook, Weiss, Sargent, Moore, etc. were equivalent to office furniture. Once they realized...? I don't think they every realized it. Well, thats probably true. According to Kuntz when Gary was still there it was already some kind of cheese office with cubicles.
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Post by geneweigel on Nov 7, 2016 18:25:00 GMT -5
I don't think Arneson and Brian Blume were wrong for D&D's feel but I don't think that Williams was the true culprit either but rather her stupidity served as some kind of magnifier of something that was already present in TSR.
As a tangent, all one has to do is look at the other products. I think that GAMMA WORLD second edition (1983) was good but looking back at STAR FRONTIERS (1982) I don't know what was going on there. The 83 GW adventures were terrible except the original edition ones. Something weird was going on at TSR in 1982 and D&D was protected somewhat. You're not going to get honest stories about this time period especially not from former employees/associates but as a consumer who was auto-buying all this shit I can say with my head held high that Star Frontiers was like a beautiful model who is dead on the table. Sure its great to look at but it smells like an open sewer.
I saw Luke Gygax remembering STAR FRONTIERS fondly on a forum somewhere a few years back and the first thing that popped into my head was whether or not he was being sincere. Then I realized he was probably dealing with piles of hypothetical product that we never saw.
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Post by davegibsongreyhawkdm on Nov 7, 2016 19:34:09 GMT -5
I'm glad I never bought any 2e products! I remember skimming thru and realizing it was crap and refused to buy! PCs in my campaign wanted to do critical hits rules, but I told them if we go there in campaign its critical hits for monsters, NPCs etc. and they didn't want to go there!
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Post by davegibsongreyhawkdm on Nov 7, 2016 19:36:10 GMT -5
I also did enjoy original GW and BH adventures!
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Post by geneweigel on Nov 7, 2016 20:06:06 GMT -5
There was some 1997 video TSR: MASTERS OF FANTASY that I had seen the Star Frontiers lead designer Steve Winter on a while back (it also features Lorraine Williams and Gary!):
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Post by davegibsongreyhawkdm on Nov 7, 2016 23:29:46 GMT -5
The UA says that a Paladin can increase their charisma score in the same way a cavalier increases strength, dexterity, and constitution - the way this reads, it sounds like Paladin only gets the charisma score increases, not the strength, dexterity, and constitution increases that a cavalier gets? Am I understanding this correctly, or is the paladin also supposed to get the strength, dexterity, and constitution score increases just like the cavalier?
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Post by Scott on Nov 7, 2016 23:47:50 GMT -5
All as a cavalier, plus charisma.
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Post by geneweigel on Nov 8, 2016 9:34:57 GMT -5
Paladins and cavaliers played traditionally are fine but if the game routine has problems (turns into an alignment debate every session) then I'd recommend institutingfighters with some kind of holy/honor brownie points.
Cavaliers in my experience work well with campaigns that have a lot of rotating characters. Cavaliers don't fit in a town to dungeon air tight cheap campaign as well as the paladin (who in turn bends up the entire cheap campaign micro-universe to their morality!) because the cavalier mentality is offputting without the paladin's grace. I have found cavaliers work well with campaigns with functional troops because they're a visible necessity.
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Post by geneweigel on Nov 8, 2016 10:40:12 GMT -5
Here is the opening bit from the cavalier article (DRAG 72 APR 1983): Pre-bureaucracy in 1983? Here is Jon Pickens (POLYHEDRON #10 FEB 1983) explaining the difference between AD&D and Basic D&D and in turn D&D. All this is just before the start of Basic/Expert/Companion/Master/Immortals sequence. I think this mentality had never spread to my group. We stuck with AD&D and added everything from Dragon Magazine. In regards to adding stuff from Basic. There were attempts but there really was nothing new in there. I recall buying the BOOK OF MARVELOUS MAGIC (1985) and it being integrated with AD&D. My younger brother was into the whole BASIC-EXPERT-COMPANION-MASTER-IMMORTALS scene because the kids in school were adamant with it. I recall the resurrection of Arneson as a big deal that didn't pan out for them but I wasn't an animal I looked all that shit over as it came out (Gazetteers and the like) and I deemed that it wasn't great. He had the bad habit of getting into a rivalry with me over anything. That said, my brother. my friends called him the "King of Cavaliers" when he played with my group. He had to be on his toes to make air tight characters to sit at the table with us because: 1) all the people that were playing with me were high school and adults (upwards of 10 to 15 people playing on average) and he was in middle school. 2) he came to the table with his obvious BASIC-EXPERT boxed sets in a stack. 3) no one was comfortable drinking with him around. So when he played a cavalier it was impeccable. His knights had coats of arms that were related to other knights in different lands under different banners. If the party didn't have a leader/caller (in action) he would immediately take command and he played it straight: "CHARGE!!!". I think it was good that he never backed down off it and it was enjoyable. He certainly wasn't taking a cue from "Eric the Cavalier" although many there would break his balls about it. Sadly my brother's D&D never escaped the 80's because he's now like a nazgul or something.
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Post by geneweigel on Nov 8, 2016 15:04:33 GMT -5
I think I haven't explained who my "group" was. My brother might have did analogies of the D&D games seen in E.T./STRANGER THINGS somewhere. For me it was different. There was a brief bubble of people playing D&D in the vicinity of Northeastern Brooklyn and where it spilled over into Queens in different directions. I was 13-14 at that time. I had no parental guidance at this time at all. Too much shit was going on. My usual game was in real "dungeons" that is desolate ruins of a greater time period of the city. I recall a huge game in a public park where it got too cold so we started a campfire then the cops showed up. Abandoned houses. Dead garages. Derelict train stations. The 1800's pipe factory. We once had a D&D game in the Madison Square Garden bowling alley. When I moved that Summer due to weird circumstances I lost contact with my fellow delinquents for at least 3 or 4 months. During that time, Spring Summer Fall 1983 I had forged huge D&D games out of boating people, gamblers and concert-goers up in Saratoga. I think the warning was something like sure there is plenty of space to crash at the lake house but Gene's going to force you to play D&D at least once. In the 1983-1984 Winter being in the giant creepy Connecticut house snowed in for months the need for new blood was a perogative. I even had my mom and godmother making characters. The next Spring I was like full recruit mode. I was importing people from the city and had a draft at the local high school. That Summer of 84 was huge with multiple coDMs with giant round tables (made for an outdoor circus tent sized party). If I was "THE DM" before I had almost lost that identity completely as there were any number of DMs judging at any given time. We're playing everything Marvel Superheroes, Villains & Vigilantes, Star Frontiers, D&D trivia (a made up question-answer game), Gamma World, Gangbusters, Boot Hill, Top Secret, etc. During this time so many people were DMing at the place where I was living that newer friends that I made after this time weren't asked by me to play at all. I got to the point in the late 80's that playing with the glib was no longer worth playing. After that it was total dryout on D&D someone had stolen my DM guide and Players Handbook and I was like how am supposed to replace this shit? I had actually forged ahead with just a replacement PLAYERS HANDBOOK but the games were wan because frankly the adventures had soured out. I had returned to D&D full force in the late in a quest to get the energy back. It was total fail with second edition. Not only was it hands down worse than anything foreshadowed in DRAGONLANCE it was time to focus on the old stuff. Thats when I made my AD&D/Gord notes and discovered THIS AIN'T D&D GOLDURN IT! So ever since that time its been my holding up a tentpole to remember the old times with the old rules because every foray into current product was disastrous. The worst believe it or not was DARK SUN (1991) because my cousin Bill bought it for me to DM him through and that empty pages of that stuff kept getting worse as more product came out. Most of the people who were DMing in the 80's were gone either off to school, in the service, moved away or dead. The only one who has never really left is Taylor. He's a DM but he'd rather just be a player these days. He tried to make a comeback in 3rd edition but that was a disaster which also featured Bill's debut as a DM. KABOOOM!!! Boy that imploded fast. Especially when his bad habits came back to bite him in the ass. His players brought him a 3E Warcraft book so they could use. It didn't work out so well I heard! Anyway, the games have dried up because in the 2000s the people that I got off the street were Pathfinder type people. One was that Pokemon guy that wrote the Gord story with Gary... <<<<shudder>>> I think this is probably the longest period that I've gone without playing D&D. My cousin Bill used to provoke games out of nothing but he is so settled down I don't even know what he is anymore. I saw a photo of him recently and he looked like some old golfer. The only person who keeps badgering me for a D&D game is my friend Henry but every time that I have him over a typical all night D&D game his wife goes ape shit because to him if he doesn't come home drunk from a D&D game then something is wrong. Taylor is like D&D Batman you just give him the signal and he comes blazing out but his cardinal rule is no one-on-one D&D games. This adventure once I put the finishing touches is going to have a long ass playtest so this time it'll be no excuses.
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Post by geneweigel on Jan 27, 2017 9:35:05 GMT -5
I just saw a prime example of the irrelevance of post-Gygax D&D. ENWorld has an article on the history of the Nightmare: www.enworld.org/forum/content.php?3807-Monster-ENCyclopedia-Nightmare#.WItMU1yTzCdCore that down to 1st edition, cartoon, toys, brief start of Greyhawk section and the coloring book they mention in the comments and thats about as interesting as it gets with all that talk. I think DRAGONLANCE is probably to blame for the nightmare going South (Lord Soth) but its probably the cause of most fantasy in D&D taking a bad turn.
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Post by GRWelsh on Jan 27, 2017 12:16:56 GMT -5
It is a well-researched article, but my first thought was: what a waste of time. Can you imagine tracking down every reference to the nightmare in every edition of D&D? What is the point? Just pick a version and go with it.
This just reminded me, though... around 1981, my neighbor had the AD&D coloring album and knew I had started playing D&D so he gave it to me. He had no interest. To me it was like a bar of gold. The illustration of the adventuring party at the Green Dragon Inn is burned into my mind as "how Greyhawk looks." And that also defined my view of the nightmare as the favored mount of the "low planes drifter."
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Post by geneweigel on Jan 27, 2017 13:16:21 GMT -5
I threw out large toys in 1989 and my nightmare, brass dragon, hook horror and dragonne were in there and I didn't realize it until years later. I never bought ghe good destrier because they both had Stranghart good paladin's legs on it. That Tiamat was so rare i never saw it
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