What's up with the Zeb Cook hatred?

[BlackBat242]

I don't like roll-playing, as the emphasis on dice results gets boring.

I prefer role-playing.

Sorry, its the pedant in me.

[JCBoney]

Semaj, do you still live in Arkansas, and and if so, where? Not that you'd want to hang out with a punk like me.

I'm an Otus fan as well, but neither am I outright insulted by later (and somewhat blander) artwork. At least it's not like modern stuff that looks faddish with its buff characters and wild fashion.

I live in LA (Lower Arkansas).

[Random]

Well shucks. I just moved to Fayetteville recently, although I'll still get down to Pine Bluff occasionally to visit my brothers. I used to live in Arkadelphia for a while as well, but I doubt I'll be going that way very often.

[JCBoney]

Well shucks. I just moved to Fayetteville recently, although I'll still get down to Pine Bluff occasionally to visit my brothers. I used to live in Arkadelphia for a while as well, but I doubt I'll be going that way very often.

I remember that. I also remember us talking about shopping at Hobbytown USA in LR up on University Drive. Good memories of that place, even if the owner was an old crab.

[Random]

Perhaps there's another Arkansan lurking around. I don't remember any talks of Hobbytown USA. Either that or I'm more forgetful than I thought!

[Melan]

That's what artists working in commercial venues almost always say -- all of the great Golden Age Hollywood movie directors (John Ford, Howard Hawks, Hitchcock, etc.) always insisted that it was all about craftsmanship and scoffed at the idealistic French kids claiming that what they were doing was art, I know Stephen King and Heinlein and other "popular" authors have said similar things, the same with a lot of the early rock 'n roll pioneers, etc. -- Shakespeare was probably saying the same thing back in his day as well. It creates a conundrum for those in the "second generation" looking back at their work and seeing the obvious signs of inspiration/art/genius -- are these guys lying? are they just being overly modest? was their art really created unconsciously and accidentally?

Coming back to this way later, the distinction is not between art and non-art, but a product or brand during an initial innovation process and a product or brand being leveraged for profit in a period where the innovation has already run its course. (There are still pseudo-innovations, but these are not groundbreaking, just like a mobile phone is innovative while a mobile phone with a built-in camera is not.) It is still a creative field in the sense that it develops intellectual property, but no longer in the sense that its output is a standardised product. (As another example, take Dilbert the comic strip on corporate culture vs. Dilbert the enterprise that is corporate culture.) He who has never compromised in his professional life to sustain oneself and loved ones may now proceed to throw stones at Zotster.

Also, the company side of TSR is such a typical story of every other creative endeavour in innovative/growth branches that it might as well be a textbook case study in business&management.

[Antonio Eleuteri]

They actually kept "half-orc" in the text? Geez, you'd figure that would have offended someone, been done away with and replaced with something like Huu'or'Moselee'huum'An.

1e and 2e are quite mixable. Try the taste, you won't be disappointed

[Grognard]

What I've proved is that you were simply lashing out at another person who worked on a game ... a GAME ... you didn't like.

And you are lashing out at another person who made a post on an internet forum... a POST... you didn't like.

Whoosh.

And, amusingly, now so have you.

Woosh.

Actually, I wasn't lashing out, I was pointing out. Bit of a difference.

Seeing you get your panties in a twist because someone expressed the opinion that Elmore is a corporate whore was pretty funny. I've been enjoying the show.

[rogatny]

1e and 2e are quite mixable. Try the taste, you won't be disappointed

I ran a campaign like that in the early 90's. I was disappointed. Liked the guys in the group. Didn't like the game. Switched to regular D&D exclusively for the nearly a decade and had lots of fun. Re-investigated AD&D in 2002 or so. Discovered I really liked most early 1e stuff. Didn't like 2e stuff.

Still probably like regular D&D the most. But like 1e, too, but not 2e.

[Falconer]

I've followed this whole thread, and I've got to say, while I have plenty of respect for the whole "Har! No holds barred!" attitude of many of our posters, I'm just overall not happy with the way things are going here. No-one ever said that posters on this site had to be monolithic in their views, just that they had to respect the parameters of the allowed topics. Constant "Edition Wars" has led to the downfall of many of this forum's predecessors. Conversely, the narrow focus of this forum has led to a lot of harmony and very fruitful discussion.

"This board unashamedly and proudly supports Old School GYGAXIAN games." So states the official rules. "We make no excuses and no apologies for other game systems not being supported here. Our game focus is our choice.... You are guests in our home.... This board does not support the "other" editions of D&D (Moldvay, Cook, Mentzer) nor AD&D 2E...." Outside of "the comfy confines of the Theory & Design area", you may not "begin comparing and contrasting D20 or C&C vs. AD&D, OD&D, OSRIC or any other supported game here at K&K Alehouse."

Antonio posted earlier that he "had no idea this was supposed to be a 'pro-Gary' site". Well, now you know, dude!

I don't want to see "2e is not so bad!" "Oh yes it is!" back-and-forths anymore. That issue is already decided, as far as this forum is concerned. Respect that or get out. 2e is off-topic. D. Cook is off-topic, 99% of the time. M. Breault is off-topic.

People may disagree on how to handle this issue, but the rules and the history of the site are on my side. Now we've lost a long-time, iconic poster and contributor, and we've gained his polar opposite. If things continue the way they are, I'm going to follow him. Jeer if you want.

[JCBoney]

People may disagree on how to handle this issue, but the rules and the history of the site are on my side. Now we've lost a long-time, iconic poster and contributor, and we've gained his polar opposite. If things continue the way they are, I'm going to follow him. Jeer if you want.

Did I miss something? Who bailed?

[Falconer]

Gene.

To be fair, he comes and goes a lot, but it wasn't cool that people jeered him on his way out.

[JCBoney]

Ok. Yeah, you're right.

[JLowder]

Hey:

Thought I'd add a couple comments on the topics being covered here and in the Lorraine thread. Like Mike, I was a TSR employee--our tenures overlapped for a year or two in the late 80s--and an almost-New Infinities employee just before that. I can spell out the details if anyone cares.

In the late 90s, when the company was close to bankruptcy, TSR might have considered selling off the game lines and keeping the fiction, but I doubt it. The D&D brand was too valuable. However, around 1990 the company realized that the fiction was generating far more income than they'd ever suspected. (Every once in a while someone would crunch actual numbers, and the results often went against the assumptions favored by the front office.) Novels are a lot less expensive to produce than games--no interior art, minimal typesetting, and so on--and the four-person book division staff was generating products by 1990 that made up a wildly disproportionate part of the company's profits. I'd heard rumors that some of the bigger book publishers in New York were interested in making an offer for TSR as a way to get access to those book lines, and they would have been far less interested in the game stuff, but I don't think any of those talks went anywhere.

Random House was TSR's distributor, not publisher. They handled all TSR traffic in the book trade, which had become very important for the company for both game and fiction sales by the late 1980s. TSR would come up with a schedule and then the company would "pitch" the products to Random House (mgmt. and all the sales reps) at sales conferences. We'd get feedback from RH, and they had influence over the schedule, but did not have final say. Their influence was more subtle. If the sales reps didn't understand a product or didn't want to push it, the sales numbers would often (unsurprisingly) reflect that disinterest, which in turn would influence future schedules. But if TSR mgmt. wanted something on the schedule, no matter how badly it sold (like, say, Buck Rogers fiction) it would stay on there.

I can't find the exact post, but I recall someone suggesting the 2E ranger was based on or influenced by Drizzt. Not so. Salvatore's first trilogy was just being published when the core 2E books were being designed and released, and there was very little interaction between books and games on that front. In fact, Drizzt was actually a supporting character in the first two Salvatore Realms novels. It wasn't until the third novel, published in 1990 (after the initial 2E core books), that TSR realized Drizzt was catching on with fans--and even then, those initial novels were not selling wildly better than other Realms novels. So the design and publication timing made that connection impossible, even if the character had been an obvious break-out from the start, which it wasn't. Over the last 20 years, as Drizzt became an iconic figure, TSR and WotC have bent the class to resemble the icon, but that was not the case with the initial design in 2E.

For what it's worth, Salvatore is a big fan of 1E. In fact, if Richard Garfield hadn't beaten him to the assignment, Salvatore wanted to write the essay about 1E for Hobby Games: The 100 Best.

Mike's remembering very correctly about Lorraine being adamant about how her grandfather was remembered in connection with Buck Rogers. She insisted he be called the "creator" of Buck Rogers, though he had not technically created the character. He had, as a newspaper syndicate owner, paired the original writer with a comics artist. It can certainly be claimed he "popularized" the character, since the Buck of the strip was the one that caught on with the public, but "created" was a stretch. I once was handed some text to proof--part of info on Buck for a Smithsonian exhibit, I believe--and tried correcting that claim. I was told Lorraine was very unhappy (cue rumble of thunder) I had suggested the official wording was incorrect.

Finally, no designer or editor at TSR was ever paid enough to stick around in their jobs if they didn't genuinely love the game or the hobby. To suggest anyone was paid enough to "sell out" is actually kind of amusing. And in the years I spent in-house there, I never heard the designers and editors run Gary down. Zeb, in particular, was always very clear about where Gary deserved credit--and I've never known Zeb to be anything other than brutally honest. Yes, there was a continuing feud between Gary and Lorraine, but below the VP level, I saw staffers fighting to give more credit to the people who had come before them, just as they were fighting with upper mgmt. to give more credit to the people who were then designing the new products.

It's no accident that two of the people who spoke at Gary's funeral--Jim Ward and Harold Johnson--were TSR employees long after Lorraine took over the company. It was never a matter of being a TSR employee or working on later editions of D&D somehow equating to treachery against Gary, even to Gary and his family.

Cheers,
James Lowder

[Wheggi]

Thanks for the enlightening post, James. It brings a bit of a smile to my face thinking of the TSR employees 'fightin' the man' to give more credit and respect to those that preceded them. And this:

For what it's worth, Salvatore is a big fan of 1E. In fact, if Richard Garfield hadn't beaten him to the assignment, Salvatore wanted to write the essay about 1E for Hobby Games: The 100 Best.

This messed with my equilibrium a bit. Finding out that Salvatore - the man behind what may be the #1 poster child of the differences between 1 and 2E, Drizzit - is actually very pro AD&D 1E. Its like when the creepy guy in Scooby Doo turns out not to be the bad guy, but the undercover agent.

- Wheggi