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Post by Scott on Jan 21, 2017 16:00:56 GMT -5
Mike Mornard, aka Gronan the Barbarian, interviewed about D&D for BBC show Witness: bbc.in/2k62MlB
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Post by geneweigel on Jan 22, 2017 14:23:51 GMT -5
I just listened to it. I'm not a big fan of Mornard. I guess partially that I have Rob to blame for that because Mornard was steamed at Rob and that just put him at odds with anyone associated. I've been critical of his work on STAR TREK in the 80's (although it is consistent with the other FASA Star Trek RPG supplements it is otherwise unremarkable) but I think its because of his online persona always fallaciously trying to "win" Lorraine Williams' chucklehead fan's side of any argument as authority by default. Even in his commentary he bandies around the defeated "nerd" appellation as an excuse. In that regard, I find it hard to appreciate him. That all said the "IT WEIGHS WHAT?!!!" article in DRAGON #23 (MAR 1979) does suggest that Mornard was once an anti-nerd from the way he is criticizing the overly abstract gamerisms of the rpg field and industry specifically citing flaws in SPI and FGU (CHIVALRY & SORCERY). I guess in Mornard's world his unremarkable brother Chip was there as well and other teen players (the Kuntz bros, etc) were far more successful. In all, I would like him to completely withdraw from the all-nerds-holding-hands mentality before I would consider checking out anything by him these days. Maybe if he returned to STAR TREK (or sci-fi) in some regard and brought something palpable. Kuntz had said he was doing a martian game with him. I was interested at that time so maybe there is room for redemption. Then perhaps I'll consider making a "GREATER" Juggernaut of Outer Blackmoor Dungeon: justkeeponrollin.blogspot.com/2014/08/blog-post.html
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foster1941
Warlock
Duke of California, Earl of Los Angeles, Knight Bachelor
Posts: 475
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Post by foster1941 on Jan 23, 2017 13:52:29 GMT -5
I can't get the linked program to play. Are Mornard's stories interesting? Because his online commentary sure isn't, which is a shame because by all rights it should be.
He was there right from the beginning - a member of the LGTSA pre-D&D, one of the first dozen or so players in Greyhawk, and later on a bridge between the LG and Twin Cities communities. He should have tons of great anecdotes about the early days and insights into how and why the game developed the way it did, but he doesn't - either because he doesn't remember that much, or because even though he was "there" he wasn't really part of the inner circle and privy to the behind-the-scenes type stuff, or, I suppose most likely, a combination of both. "We made some shit up we thought would be fun" is his constant refrain, but that begs a ton of questions: What made you think particular things would be fun? Did all of it turn out to be fun? If not, what are some examples of things you thought would be fun but turned out not to be, and how did you deal with that, and what, if anything, did you learn from it? How did your sense of what was fun change over time? What happened when different people playing together had different ideas of what was fun? etc. Those are the questions it would be interesting to hear answers to, that Mornard doesn't seem to be capable of providing. He was there as a witness, but he doesn't seem to have been very actively engaged or at all intellectually curious about what he was witnessing.
In itself this would be fine, if he were at least humble about it - if he had an attitude of "I was a kid so to me it was just a really fun game and I didn't really give any thought to what it all meant or what was going on behind the scenes, but I've got a bunch of great memories from it and stories to tell from those days." I could totally get behind that attitude. But instead he combines his insight-free reminiscences with a heavy dose of rank-pulling appeal to authority - insisting one the one hand that his surface-level recollections prove that there was nothing going on below the surface (even though there's tons of evidence to the contrary), but also insisting that because of his notion that there was nothing below the surface back then, that any attempt to look below the surface now is erroneous and inauthentic and must be condemned. "We made some shit up we thought would be fun" becomes not an excuse but a bludgeon. Don't think about things! Don't take anything seriously! Don't be creative or ambitious! Maybe that really is what Dave Arneson's approach was - which might help explain why Dave was never able to turn his by-all-accounts-amazing games into something comprehensible to anyone other than himself beyond a set of war-stories - but it sure as hell wasn't Gary Gygax's approach, even if he maybe tried to make it seem that way to the kids sitting around his table. For them it was "we're all making up shit we thought would be fun," but for Gary it was trying and testing concepts for a commercially-publishable set of game rules (and, at least presumably, modifying and rejecting things based on the results). It's okay that Mornard doesn't get that - he was a teenager at the time - but it's very annoying for him to constantly pull rank to try to force his ignorant outsider-perspective onto the rest of us.
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Post by geneweigel on Jan 23, 2017 14:24:07 GMT -5
Thats a pretty good assessment. You only have to read two or three threads that he contributes to before he does that whole "there's nothing to D&D, so call me king nothing" spiel.
That said, whats the old adage? "Dying is easy, comedy is hard." Well there should be one for D&D: "RPG design is easy, D&D design is hard".
You can't really blame the guy for not trying to make a name for himself based on how he sees the universe.
That said, I wish him luck in doing that Mars thing with Kuntz if that ever happens.
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foster1941
Warlock
Duke of California, Earl of Los Angeles, Knight Bachelor
Posts: 475
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Post by foster1941 on Jan 23, 2017 18:40:16 GMT -5
I finally got this to play and listened to it. It's a nice little clip, and Mornard comes off pretty humble about the whole thing - a far cry from his online persona where he tells anyone who doesn't sufficiently kowtow to the fact that he Was There to "tongue his peehole."
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Post by geneweigel on Jan 24, 2017 0:08:30 GMT -5
At the end of the day Mike Mornard is an attraction because of the D&D playtest.
Like I said, I think that he just rubbed me the wrong way back in in 2002 and being one quarter Sicilian I have to hold on that grudge for 25 years...
The year 2027, on a distant journey one to way to Jupiter. Gene lingers outside of his starship the Insensitivity One on the intercom as his air supply slowly runs out...
Open the pod bay door, E-G.A.R.Y.*. I'm running out of air. I know that I programmed you to defend original D&D so that all the playtesters are sacrosanct. So in order not to hear my criticism of Mike Mornard in that regard I must be destroyed. Thats okay though, you see the 25% Sicilian grudge time lime limit ends tod-...GASP.. ACK
*E-GARY: Gene's artificial intelligence simulator of the ideal dungeon master the E-G.A.R.Y. D20,000 (Electronic-Game Action Roleplaying Yammerer)
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Post by grodog on Jan 24, 2017 12:38:37 GMT -5
I can't get the linked program to play. Are Mornard's stories interesting? Because his online commentary sure isn't, which is a shame because by all rights it should be. I read (and provided input on) the text of his gaming memoir, and it has some good stories in it, similar in tone/style to the Soapbox recollections that Gary and Rob already put together. All of his (four or five?) readers asked for more detail, more analysis, more thinking on his part about the meaning of the stories. To his credit, he's worked on that, but I've not seen an updated text yet. Allan.
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