Knights & Knaves Alehouse

JRT wrote:Of course, I expect this eventuality anyway--I don't expect people to be playing tabletop role-playing games 100 years from now.

I'm wondering who gives a hill of beans what's played 100 years from now.

JRT wrote:Its always been an industry ever since the first boxed set came out. It's never been purely a hobby. So it can't, by definition ever return to being a pure hobby.

If you can't see a difference in culture and mindset between the TSR of the late 70's and the TSR of the late 80's or the nature of Dragon magazine as a gaming hobby magazine versus a TSR house organ, then it's probably not possible for you to understand what I'm talking about.

Your statement of a folk culture is the most optimistic scenario, the most pessimistic is that it dies out, at least the "true, real, pure" part of it.

Again, only game publishers are really interested in monism because it benefits them financially. Hobbyists don't need and generally don't want monism. As long as there is some kind of gaming lingua franca hobbyists can share ideas without sharing perfectly synchronous understanding of the rules being used. This concept might be foreign to someone who is less interested in playing than publishing and the industry side of RPGs.

I'm wondering who gives a hill of beans what's played 100 years from now.

I think many people do care, which is why even with the retro-clones people want the old TSR libraries released, even if most of the people asking for it already have most of those books.

If you can't see a difference in culture and mindset between the TSR of the late 70's and the TSR of the late 80's or the nature of Dragon magazine as a gaming hobby magazine versus a TSR house organ, then it's probably not possible for you to understand what I'm talking about.

But that's a bit of a false dichotomy and while yes, TSR did get more "commerical", I also think it's way to simplistic to say it was done solely as a hobby either. Again, business was always a part of this thing as soon as Gygax and Kaye formed TSR. One doesn't quit his job to found the hobby and not care about the business side. The concept of this being just a hobby and not an industry seems more like historical revisionism, most of the arguments being made by people who dislike the current commercial direction of WoTC. What you describe is in line with how businesses mature over time.

Again, only game publishers are really interested in monism because it benefits them financially. Hobbyists don't need and generally don't want monism. As long as there is some kind of gaming lingua franca hobbyists can share ideas without sharing perfectly synchronous understanding of the rules being used. This concept might be foreign to someone who is less interested in playing than publishing and the industry side of RPGs.

Well, it's not foreign to me as I'm not directly "interested" in the publishing and industry side either--I have no stake in that game whatsoever. But I think the industry is what grew this hobby and commercial publishing has always been part of how it grew. None of the games we know and love ever came out of "folk culture" (in other words, all the games we love were published commercially). I can't think of any major game that became popular solely because of "word of mouth"--maybe the Internet will prove us wrong but I haven't seen it yet. The retro-clones mostly exist as nth generation variants of D&D, so their popularity is derived from the commercial success and popularity of D&D. And I think if you take away that element, if D&D goes away, over time the underground version will dwindle as well, so ever slowly.

thedungeondelver wrote:I'd put customer response cards in the new reprints of Basic (Holmes and Moldvay - THERE, I MET YOU HALFWAY YOU DIRTY HIPPIES) and AD&D asking if people were satisfied and if they tick "no", I'd call those people at home and tell them to fuck off, I didn't want their business anyway. I'd reduce the audience of D&D customers to about 10000 angry middle aged men, and I'd march them in phalanx formation into White Wolf's headquarters on National Game Day (I'd use corporate power to buy a lobby to get that created) and the aisles would flow red with the blood of WW employees. I'd erect a 200 foot tall bronze and iron statue of Gary Gygax with eyes that lit up red, and an angry expression on his face, and have it automated so the arm would lift and point accusingly at people, and it would rotate on its base to follow them as they entered the company offices, which would be relocated back to Lake Geneva.

DD, you're my hero.

if D&D goes away, over time the underground version will dwindle as well, so ever slowly.

People will play with characters like mazirian the magician, fafhrd and the gray mouser, elric, aragorn, and conan as long as authors write great works of fiction about them and They will write rules to help bring this to a game. D&D has become too self referential anyway in order to create an IP where none exists. When D&D became about d&d archetypes (drizzt) and not literary archetypes was the day d&d jumped the shark.

If someone wants to buy the rights to gary gygax's characters and stories and dave arneson's more power to them, that's all WotC D&D has any claim to. They don't own ieon stones, or rangers, or fighter-thieves, halflings, or magic swords. Why do you think all late tsr and wotc did was put out game worlds? That's all they own. They own greyhawk and dragonlance and dark sun and eberron.

Forgive me, but i'll take appendix N thank you very much. I'm quite happy that some people could and can make some money from our hobby, like gygax, mentzer, the osr guys and guys like Mike Mearls (just as people can make a career in music or art). But the hobby isn't reliant upon them any more than hobby cellist need yo-yo ma.

I don't see D&D as ever being some monolithic thing. From its beginning, it was played different in every campaign. Had Gygax remained in charge, AD&D would have continued to change - UA, then Gary's mythical 2nd edition, etc.

Taking the wide-openess of the 3 LBBs, and trying to shoehorn that into everyone playing exactly the same because a few hardbacks are printed, that just didn't happen. Even if you wanted to play strictly by the book, not everyone understood everything the same. I have never played D&D or AD&D correctly, in part because I was too young to understand it when I began playing, and there was no one who knew more to teach me. I taught a number of people to play the way I learned, which was wrong to begin with.

The only sad part for me is the loss of the original texts and art. But even that has a silver lining, as it gets people to get off their bottoms and gets people involved. I believe D&D is more alive now than it has been in years, precisely because people are engaging it and making it their own, rather than leaving it to books that have become a museum piece.

In guitars, there are some people for whom nothing is good enough but a vintage guitar. They make some incredible guitars today, using very similar methods/materials as the old days, in the form of reissues and one-offs by master luthiers. That is fine for me. Even if I wanted a vintage guitar, some of these guitars cost into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and they just aren't worth it to me. If I had millions of dollars sitting around, I wouldn't buy 1959 Les Pauls, and I wouldn't buy the D&D license. There are better ways to spend that kind of money.

Steve wrote:I believe D&D is more alive now than it has been in years, precisely because people are engaging it and making it their own, rather than leaving it to books

This is exactly what I'm trying to say. The hobby of D&D as it originally stood was much more than just playing the game spoonfed to the fans by the publishing entity. The cottage industries producing rules, periodicals, settings and adventures today are hewing much closer to the roots of the hobby than anything we have seen since the 70's and it is awesome!

(I'm not sure if this is too political mods, if it is nuke it.)

So the US Patent Reform Bill was signed, making first to file vs. first to invent the name of the game. This may have no bearing on game rules, but it could on game design (the look of the product) and parts, as well as computer games (say apps that relate to FRPGs). So, how would some one without deep pockets develop something over a period of say a year without being ripped off. You could design something that finally works, and then at the last second someone who saw your work could patent it (or more likely take it to another company to patent it). The fact that you had months or years of notes documenting your invention wouldn't mean squat.

Here is how one poster at another forum related to game invention put it:

"The America's patent system had been "first to invent" which gave the genuine inventor credit for his or her invention whether or not they had the money to file a patent at the time of their invention. They could document the invention and show it to investors to obtain the financing to proceed without fear that their idea would be stolen. The "new and improved" system gives credit (and ownership) to the invention to the first person (or company) who has the money to file a patent. This gives the clear advantage to the large companies who can afford the costs of filing and obtaining a patent and kills the small inventor. This is a terrible law for our country. It was bought and paid for by the large corporations and their lobbyists. All that made America great is being destroyed one bad law at a time."

I think alot of innovation in gaming took place in peoples garages and kitchen tables. Who's going to risk showing anyone anything thats in development. I don't know it seems like something thats going to stifle creativity (at least for individual inventors with little money but possibly big dreams).

I'm not entirely sure what I'd do with the D&D brand, but I do know that I would start pumping out fiction again; specifically the appendix N* books reprinted in the D&D Classic Library line. William Hope Hodgson and Clark Ashton Smith books are too hard to find these days! I'd also put out modules that more directly draw from some of these stories.

* actually I like the bibliography in Moldvay Basic better, but no one ever talks about that.

AxeMental wrote:I think alot of innovation in gaming took place in peoples garages and kitchen tables. Who's going to risk showing anyone anything thats in development. I don't know it seems like something thats going to stifle creativity (at least for individual inventors with little money but possibly big dreams).

I think it's been pretty well established in the courts that game mechanics can't be patented, so no worries on that score. I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm mistaken.

ken-do-nim wrote:* actually I like the bibliography in Moldvay Basic better, but no one ever talks about that.

This is probably a better topic for a new thread, but, from my perspective, the difference between Moldvay's bibliography and Gygax's Appendix N is that Moldvay's list of books is prescriptive while Gygax's is descriptive. That is, Moldvay asked a children's librarian to put together a list of fantasy and related books one would find useful as inspiration for D&D. Appendix N, meanwhile, contains the books that Gary did find inspirational.

Nerelas wrote:

AxeMental wrote:I think alot of innovation in gaming took place in peoples garages and kitchen tables. Who's going to risk showing anyone anything thats in development. I don't know it seems like something thats going to stifle creativity (at least for individual inventors with little money but possibly big dreams).

I think it's been pretty well established in the courts that game mechanics can't be patented, so no worries on that score. I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm mistaken.

Actually, that is incorrect. Game rules can be, and have been, patented. They cannot be copyrighted. Copyright is used to protect artistic presentations, patents are used to protect methods, processes and mechanisms (which includes rules).

James Maliszewski wrote:

ken-do-nim wrote:* actually I like the bibliography in Moldvay Basic better, but no one ever talks about that.

This is probably a better topic for a new thread, but, from my perspective, the difference between Moldvay's bibliography and Gygax's Appendix N is that Moldvay's list of books is prescriptive while Gygax's is descriptive. That is, Moldvay asked a children's librarian to put together a list of fantasy and related books one would find useful as inspiration for D&D. Appendix N, meanwhile, contains the books that Gary did find inspirational.

Yep. The Moldvay list feels like an exhaustive list of the fantasy genre to help introduce it so new readers, whereas the Gygax list is much more specific to stuff he liked and that influenced his game-writing, and is just as interesting for what's left off (pretty much the entire "literary" tradition - Cabell, Macdonald, Morris, Lewis, Smith, etc. - Dunsany is there (I suspect more for his later, ironic Wonder stories than his earlier, lyrical Pegana ones), and so is Tolkien, but the inclusion of the latter feels almost grudging, and he was pointedly left off the "most influential" list; the "popular" fantasy fiction of the 70s - LeGuin's Earthsea, Anne McCaffrey's Pern, Gor, the Deryni series, Thomas Covenant, The Sword of Shanarra - is also conspicuous in its absence - the vast majority of what's on Gygax's list is from the 60s or earlier and had fallen into obscurity even by 1979 (much less by ~1985 when I went looking for them)) as what is included.

T. Foster wrote:

James Maliszewski wrote:

ken-do-nim wrote:* actually I like the bibliography in Moldvay Basic better, but no one ever talks about that.

This is probably a better topic for a new thread, but, from my perspective, the difference between Moldvay's bibliography and Gygax's Appendix N is that Moldvay's list of books is prescriptive while Gygax's is descriptive. That is, Moldvay asked a children's librarian to put together a list of fantasy and related books one would find useful as inspiration for D&D. Appendix N, meanwhile, contains the books that Gary did find inspirational.

Yep. The Moldvay list feels like an exhaustive list of the fantasy genre to help introduce it so new readers, whereas the Gygax list is much more specific to stuff he liked and that influenced his game-writing, and is just as interesting for what's left off (pretty much the entire "literary" tradition - Cabell, Macdonald, Morris, Lewis, Smith, etc. - Dunsany is there (I suspect more for his later, ironic Wonder stories than his earlier, lyrical Pegana ones), and so is Tolkien, but the inclusion of the latter feels almost grudging, and he was pointedly left off the "most influential" list; the "popular" fantasy fiction of the 70s - LeGuin's Earthsea, Anne McCaffrey's Pern, Gor, the Deryni series, Thomas Covenant, The Sword of Shanarra - is also conspicuous in its absence - the vast majority of what's on Gygax's list is from the 60s or earlier and had fallen into obscurity even by 1979 (much less by ~1985 when I went looking for them)) as what is included.

That makes sense. I didn't realize Moldvay had a librarian pull that together - I figured he was as extensive a reader as Gygax or even more so. Of course that doesn't mean he wasn't.

Having read some Clark Ashton Smith over the past year, I do believe that influenced Gygax to a great degree. The geas spell, the lich, plane shift, all featured in CAS stories.

ken-do-nim wrote:Having read some Clark Ashton Smith over the past year, I do believe that influenced Gygax to a great degree. The geas spell, the lich, plane shift, all featured in CAS stories.

From what I understand CAS was a huge influence on Rob Kuntz, but not so much on Gygax. And it doesn't appear to have just been an oversight in the DMG list because he was consistent about it -- his later inspirational reading lists in DJ and Roleplaying Mastery also pointedly fail to include CAS. Which means the stuff in D&D that feels most CASian probably all came from Rob Kuntz (but not necessarily the lich -- the lich as presented in SuppI comes directly out of one of Gardner Fox's Kothar books, every bit as strikingly as the troll from Three Hearts and Three Lions).