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Post by Deleted on Nov 4, 2011 11:01:55 GMT -6
Howdy folks! I would be very interested in hearing what you think of Mongoose Publishing's new history of the RPG industry, Designers & Dragons. www.mongoosepublishing.com/us/rpgs/othergames/designers-dragons.htmlAnyone have a chance to look it over? My copy has not arrived yet. I will post comments when I have read the book. It is available from Mongoose direct in faux leather, and in PDF format from DriveThruRPG. I mention this for information only-- I have no interest in promoting the book. Cheers!
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Post by DungeonDevil on Nov 4, 2011 12:43:26 GMT -6
Anything from MGP receives from me a most vigorous, preemptive raspberry.
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Post by Finarvyn on Nov 4, 2011 13:33:55 GMT -6
I have not seen it, but I saw an advertisement for it and it looked pretty interesting to me. I assume that they bothered to do some research on the matter and not just throw something together.
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Post by aldarron on Nov 4, 2011 13:41:43 GMT -6
Here's my full review of the "preview" I've always thought pretty well of Mongoose; at least they seem to be an aggressive success story in the industry and while I only have two of thier Conan books (Betrayer of Asgard and the Stygia sourcebook) I think they are pretty cool. Unfortunetly it's dead obvious they are out of their depth with this attemp at history. The book, Designers and Dragons, has available a 7 page preview. I am actually only discussing the prieview here, it was enough for me to see the character of the book. A history book, in the modern sense, will contain the fruits of carefull scholarship. It will have many references and footnotes in an appendix discussing sources and details. In other words the author will "show the work", behind it. It will also be fact checked. This is when a publisher sends the book to credible readers who will double check, to the extent that they can, the assertions of the book. Mr. Appelcline and Mongoose Publishing have very obviously done none of these things. The preview contains several pages discussing the Origin of the Dungeons & Dragons game. As it happens, I'm an archaeologist with an avid interest in that subject and have researched it extensively, including talking with a number of the people involved. So I'm pretty well versed. There's no question that RPG history owes a great deal to a man named David Wesely, and Appelcline does indeed mention him, or I think it must be him, but Wesely's name is repeatedly misspelled (something a fact checker would have noticead right off) Imagine a History of the United States starting with Georg Washingtown. Wesely ran - and still runs from time to time - a game set in a fictional town of Braunstein. Appelcline labels Braunstein as Napoleonic, but then says Dave Arneson - Co Creator of D&D - started running Braunstein and changed it to many types of settings. While Dave did run a Braunstien - he called it Blackmoor - it was Wesely himself who started changing the setting to different locals and set most of his games in a fictional, modern day Banana Republic, not the Napoleonic period. This may seem like a minor fauxpaux but since nothing is referenced, the reader is left to assume that Appelcline is relaying accurate information. It gets worse, much worse. "Various sources describe Arneson visiting Gygax, Gygax visiting Arneson, or the two meeting at GenCon IV (1971)." This is pure non-sense. All the people directly involved who have said anything about it have told exactly the same story - including, Gygax, Arneson, Kuntz, and Megarry. Megarry and Arneson went to Lake Geneva in late fall of 1972. (November, according to Mr. Kuntz). Megarry went to showcase his Dungeon boardgame and Mr. Arneson went to help him and run "a Blackmoor" for Mr. Gygax. "Other sources", meaning fan speculation and half forgotten comments from third parties, have no credibility in the matter. This is really basic reasearch 101 stuff. The correct information can be gotten directly by asking the surviving participants or can be found without much trouble using a search engine. Next we have this lovely sttement: "Whatever the case, in that 1971 meeting Gygax and Arneson decided to jointly design a game that incorporated their ideas of fantasy realms and individual player characters. They called it ... `The Fantasy Game'." There is exactly nothing true in any of the above. Gygax asked Arneson for his rules so they could "jointly design" Dungeons and Dragons in the tail end of 1972 after experiencing a delve into Blackmoor Dungeon as a player. They did not put their head together and decide to jointly design a fantasy game in 1971. Far from it, Arneson had been running his RPG for nearly two years before Gygax got involved with the game. Further - in an interview on the very website that Mr. Appelcline founded and manages www.rpg.net/news+reviews/columns/lynch01may01.html - Gygax emphatically denied that "The Fantasy Game" was ever an actual name for the game. Here's the quote "As an aside, I must laugh at some comment I saw about the name for the game being "The Fantasy Game" until someone "wised me up". Having been employed as an Editor-in-Chief, selecting what game rules and games would be published by Guidon Games since the beginning of 1971, I was well aware of the need to use a working title, the need for some caution in regards using the actual name for a a projected game release. So that's the reason for that bland one on the draft works." Appelcline seems to cavalierly ignore the information on his own website! "They" never called it "The Fantasy Game" Gygax merely put that on an early draft as a placeholder. Arneson, as it happens, had an entirely different title in mind, but that is another story. Here's yet another unchecked and unsited "fact": We all know - at least those who have seen the circa 90 page reformatted versions of the 3 LBB's - that Gygax's figure of 150 typewritten pages (or 300 !! as claimed in his Dragon #7 article) for the final playtest manuscript of D&D is an um... overestimate - yet Appelcline states it as simple fact without citing any source or giving any hint it might be otherwise. That nearly ends the preview and its enough for me to shake my head in wonder at what can be published as history with a straight face and a less than inexpensive pricetag. This book doesn't even meet the most basic standards of journalism, let alone historical inquiry. I imagine there might be a lot of good information in the book, particularly as it gets closer to the present, but with such sloppy scholarship and lack of decent references, who's to know what parts can be trusted?
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Post by DungeonDevil on Nov 6, 2011 11:36:03 GMT -6
Well, that pretty much cinches it. Yet another collection of myths and rumours made flesh. My original suspicions stand firm. MGP has been a staunchly d20-oriented company and, as such, they would have nothing but contempt for anything pre-d20 which is the dominant mentality out there with many gamers too young to have been part of the earlier editions. When I was a member of their forums (esp. the Conan RPG forum) there was a lot of D&D- and Gygax-bashing a few years ago, including by one of the line's authors. IIRC, Arneson's name never came up, and certainly nothing was mentioned of Maj. Wesely. I only started learning about Arneson (and his friends) and Wesely after leaving d20 behind and researching the primordial era of the hobby.
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Post by Mr. Darke on Nov 6, 2011 12:35:53 GMT -6
I don't see this as any form of contempt; it is more like shoddy reporting and research. I would call this as simply Mongoose being Mongoose. Which means they more than likely heard about the Gygax movie and did their usual move where they put a similar but inferior product out. Think of Mongoose as The Asylum of the RPG world.
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Post by kesher on Nov 7, 2011 10:09:46 GMT -6
This is disappointing. I downloaded the preview and will still read it, but then Dan posted his review (have an Exalt for that!) Speculation and secondary sources trying to pass as actual research is particularly ridiculous with this subject, since a fair amount of the individuals involved are still alive and willing to talk, and those who've passed on talked a fair amount themselves.
I also find the format and price tag of the book misguided. If they decide to also publish it in a reasonably-priced ebook format, even given the above, I'd still probably buy a copy just to see what can be gleaned, grains of salt in hand. But at $50 (+ shipping)? Never.
What a wasted opportunity.
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Post by Finarvyn on Nov 7, 2011 10:32:48 GMT -6
Dan posted his review (have an Exalt for that!) Have one from me as well. A nice, detailed review with some very specific examples. Speculation and secondary sources trying to pass as actual research is particularly ridiculous with this subject, since a fair amount of the individuals involved are still alive and willing to talk, and those who've passed on talked a fair amount themselves. Agreed. I'd love an "inside look" on the early days from an industry perspective (compared to my own player perspective) but apparently this book isn't that at all.
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Post by bigjackbrass on Nov 7, 2011 11:29:58 GMT -6
It's an odd duck, compared to previous books on the hobby. In particular, the focus of this book is on the companies rather more than the games, individuals or even the hobby itself. All of those are covered, to some degree, through the articles on the companies but there are many occasions when the history of company Y repeats the history of company X to such a degree that I do wish we'd had more of an emphasis on the people. In a nutshell, RPG companies tend to start enthusiastically, continue in a slightly haphazard and extremely underfunded way and then collapse or disappear into a different company: you can read a variation on that obvious history over and again in this book.
The binding is nice (much better than many earlier Mongoose efforts), but hardly impressive, and the paper is rather poor given the price. Editing lives down to Mongoose's reputation, I'm afraid, with stray apostrophes being only one frequent annoyance. There's also a very grating matter of style, a legacy, I suspect, of the book starting life as a series of articles. It seems that almost every page has some variation on "as we will see" or "something we will return to later", sometimes cropping up more than once on a two-page spread. On top of that is the author's somewhat eccentric understanding of what "ironically" means.
That said, and bearing in mind the factual blunders mentioned in aldarron's review above, there is much to enjoy here. As a first draft it's quite good... but of course it's supposed to be a finished product. Retro-clones and the "old school renaissance" get short shrift (barely a sidebar, if I recall) and the "indie" crowd are currently being quite vocal about having the entire "story game" movement crammed into the chapter about Ron Edwards's Adept Press, but given the focus of the book on companies both of those problems are hard to avoid. I should also mention that Mr. Appelcline does a fair job of avoiding glaring bias in discussing, for example, Chaosium and other areas where he has been directly involved.
Overall I have mostly enjoyed the book, despite the horrendous editing and clumsy style, yet it's a difficult thing to recommend. The price is very high, not at all helped by nagging concerns of accuracy. There are no footnotes, few sources, and generally a sense of falling rather short of its goals. The final few chapters were increasingly a slog to get through, but perhaps it's best digested in shorter bursts.
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Post by grodog on Nov 7, 2011 22:10:27 GMT -6
I had a chance to read several of the chapters before they went to press, and they were well-written, well-edited, and pretty thoroughly researched. I'll be very disappointed to hear that Mongoose screwed up what was a very good history, at the least, if not an excellent one :/
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Post by Deleted on Nov 8, 2011 0:23:15 GMT -6
I wanted to briefly respond to a few of aldarron's comments, because they offer some misinformation on Designers & Dragons. Though it might not be the book aldarron wanted to read, I choose to create a history that reads casually and enjoyably rather than a manuscript footnoted within an inch of its life. It is not a thesis or a scientific proof. My focus was on narrative. However, that doesn't mean it's not well researched. It is. It was based on hundreds of interviews, company newsletters, ads, design notes, and other primary sources. This was supplemented by a dozen or so secondary sources which are listed in the bibliography. The book was then fact-checked by over 100 people, most of whom worked at the various companies (but in a very few cases, fact checkers also or alternatively included people with good knowledge of the company). Fact checkers for the TSR article included Allan Grohe, Jeff Grubb, Scott Haring, Jim Lowder, Kim Mohan, Dori Olmesdahl, Steven Schend, Stephen D. Sullivan, James M. Ward, Steve Winter, and David Witts. Beyond that, I'll address a few of his points about the text of the book: * It's a pity no one caught the misspelling of Dave Wesely. I've marked it up in my error copy of the book. * I was well aware of the Banana Republic game mentioned, but opted not to include that detail, because in a book covering 90 or so companies, you have to pick how deep to go into everything. As a particular scholar of this period, I can understand why aldarron would love to see every detail covered, but I don't think that was possible. I can see how aldarron could read my comment about Arneson expanding into other periods as suggesting that Wesely did not, which was not the intent. * Aldarron claims that there's no disagreement over when Arneson and Gygax got together to play Blackmoor. I can only say that the confusion I described does exist in some interviews and articles over the years. Heck, some of them said they met to play Blackmoor at GenCon IV in 1972, which is a contradiction in itself, as GenCon IV occurred in 1971. I can well believe that Aldarron has delved deep enough into the period to be very comfortable with the 1972 date. At the time of the writing, I was not. * As for the name, "The Fantasy Game", nothing in the book contradicts Gygax's interview at RPGnet. He said it was a "working title". I said he "called" it that, but "knew that ... was not a very catchy title ... and so he brainstormed better names for the game". In an interview, Gygax said, "I wrote a 50 page manuscript that I titled 'The Fantasy Game' late in 1972."(1) That sounds like what Designers & Dragons says unless you want to argue the semantics of the words "called" and "titled". * As for the D&D page counts of 50 and 150 pages, I'll quote Gygax: "In the spring of 1973 I revised the material to 150 page length - essentially what was printed as the D&D game's three rules booklets in January 1974. "(1) 1. Here's that: www.thekyngdoms.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=37Frankly, I found the early pre- and TSR history, from 1970-1985 or so one of the most challenging elements of the book. That's in part because there were fewer trade magazines at the time and so fewer places that topical things could be written about. But it's also because Gary Gygax's memories of things definitely changed over time. aldarron alludes to this when he disagrees with Gygax's page counts of the D&D manuscripts. When I explicitly saw different details of the same encounter, as was the case with that Arneson/Gygax meeting, I flagged them. And, of course the other problem was that Gygax and Arneson were both dead before I could get their comments on the article and more of the folks who read the article were at TSR in the '80s than the '70s. The article is worse for their not having read it, I have no doubt. In most of the articles, a principal from the company read the article, but for TSR I did still have a good list of fact checkers who were able to cover most of the company's history. I do clearly and honestly acknowledge the problems with early TSR history in the book, saying "More than any other history, that of TSR seems to be filled with different remembrances, often from the same people, suggesting that some of these early days are a 'best guess'."
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Post by Finarvyn on Nov 8, 2011 5:26:07 GMT -6
Shannon -- welcome to the boards and thanks for your perspective on the book. We do have some scholars who take their history of OD&D and it's roots quite seriously, and it's too bad that some discussions on the early days couldn't have happened here on these boards before the book went to press, but I can certainly see why you made some of the decisions you did in its creation. I'm pretty open-minded (as I believe most of the posters here are) and will give the book a look-over at my local game store if I can find a copy there, then I'll decide. I'll confess that the early OD&D years are the ones I find most interesting and it's distressing if there are too many "grey area" sections there, but the rest of the book may make its purchase worthwhile. And the fact-checker names you cite are certainly ones whom I recognize and respect, which is a huge point in your favor. Still sounds kind of expensive. I'm interested more in content than a collectable.
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Post by kesher on Nov 8, 2011 9:01:34 GMT -6
Shannon--thanks for joining and replying; I appreciate the perspective. I also applaud the effort to approach this subject from a pretty global p.o.v.
I will agree with Finarvyn, and I guess repeat my earlier concern (which maybe you had nothing to do with), that the format kills the deal for me. I'm really interested in the content, and would be more than willing to pay a reasonable amount for an ebook; it doesn't make a lot of sense to me that this is presented as some sort of deluxe collectible item.
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Post by aldarron on Nov 8, 2011 12:22:50 GMT -6
Heh, may not be ideal circumstances, but welcome to the forum (seriously) Before I respond specifically, I want to be clear that my hope is constructive, in that in this day and age, corrected and expanded editions are fairly easy to produce. I would hope that the something like that will happen in this case. Second is that I can really only speak to the preview. It seems likely that a similar approach is taken in the rest of the book, but I can't know that, and I would assume that other sections are, at least, more accurate. I wanted to briefly respond to a few of aldarron's comments, because they offer some misinformation on Designers & Dragons. Though it might not be the book aldarron wanted to read, I choose to create a history that reads casually and enjoyably rather than a manuscript footnoted within an inch of its life. It is not a thesis or a scientific proof. My focus was on narrative. That's no excuse. None. Narrative histories are very common and popular, have been for years. They are nonetheless referenced extensively, just like any other kind of history. All you have to do is put a little number at the end of a sentence or paragraph that links to a key in the back of the book. I'm sure you must have this kind of info in your notes. Put it in the book. Otherwise it's nothing more than hearsay. However, that doesn't mean it's not well researched. It is. It was based on hundreds of interviews, company newsletters, ads, design notes, and other primary sources. This was supplemented by a dozen or so secondary sources which are listed in the bibliography. The book was then fact-checked by over 100 people, most of whom worked at the various companies (but in a very few cases, fact checkers also or alternatively included people with good knowledge of the company). Fact checkers for the TSR article included Allan Grohe, Jeff Grubb, Scott Haring, Jim Lowder, Kim Mohan, Dori Olmesdahl, Steven Schend, Stephen D. Sullivan, James M. Ward, Steve Winter, and David Witts. Then for heaven's sake "show the work". Give us the source info. If you really have that level of intensive research why would you hide it!? I'm not really doubting what you are saying Shannon, particularly as I recognize the sources you were drawing on, but you are leaving other researchers with no way to evaluate your work or statements, which creates two problems. 1) The reader must rely solely on your interpretation/presentation of the facts, and 2) Your work cannot be cited by any other researcher when it is not demostrably grounded in original source material; "just cause I say so" even though it may be perfectly right, won't fly and makes what could be an important contribution to history, nearly useless to historians. Even Wikipedia expects you to do that much. * Aldarron claims that there's no disagreement over when Arneson and Gygax got together to play Blackmoor. I can only say that the confusion I described does exist in some interviews and articles over the years. Heck, some of them said they met to play Blackmoor at GenCon IV in 1972, which is a contradiction in itself, as GenCon IV occurred in 1971. I can well believe that Aldarron has delved deep enough into the period to be very comfortable with the 1972 date. At the time of the writing, I was not. Ah well, two slightly different issues: 1) Was Gary's first Blackmoor game at a Gencon and 2) What was the year? So as I said, there is no disagreement among the persons directly involved (excepting that I'm not aware of Terry Kuntz, ever commenting on the matter) who have said it was a personal trip, to L. Geneva, not a gencon. What other "TSR" people who were not there may have said is just background noise. Historians must know how to prioitize and evaluate sources, and if there were questions, despite what Gygax and Arneson have said on the matter, why not track down either of the Kuntz's or Dave Megarry? The year they decided to write D&D is trickier and should not be set in stone, so to speak, without caveates, and if you knew that, why in the world did you cite 1971!? 1972 is the far more likely date as given by both Gygax and Arneson in numerous instances and the date to which everything seems best to fit, including, for ex when when John Snider entered the service and the dates of play given in Rob Kuntz recollection of the matter. ..... * As for the name, "The Fantasy Game", nothing in the book contradicts Gygax's interview at RPGnet. He said it was a "working title". I said he "called" it that, but "knew that ... was not a very catchy title ... and so he brainstormed better names for the game". In an interview, Gygax said, "I wrote a 50 page manuscript that I titled 'The Fantasy Game' late in 1972."(1) That sounds like what Designers & Dragons says unless you want to argue the semantics of the words "called" and "titled". Fair enough; I'll grant that semantics could be at play here. I'd argue that readers would reasonably conclude from your sentence that "The Fantasy Game" was Gygax and Arneson's original intended name, which would not be true. Of course, since you don't give any references, there is no way for the interested but uniformed reader to check without embarking on a reasearch quest themselves. (Just in case you hadn't noticed I'm pushing hard for you to add references to the book) In most cases people will trust what they think they have just learned and happily repeat the misinformation. * As for the D&D page counts of 50 and 150 pages, I'll quote Gygax: "In the spring of 1973 I revised the material to 150 page length - essentially what was printed as the D&D game's three rules booklets in January 1974. "(1) 1. Here's that: www.thekyngdoms.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=37Yep, and here is another: www.theweem.com/2010/08/23/weem-interviews-gary-gygax-2001-part-1-of-2/and another www.rpgconsortium.com/articles/article.cfm?id=320Any of which you could have cited and simply written, "According to Gygax", as should be done and can still be done in any revision, instead of simply stating 150 pages as established and unsourced fact. In fact, the 3LBB's are 150 6" x 9" booklet pages, and that may well be why Gygax is remembering that number, but a 150 typewritten page manuscript, even had it been illustrated, is almost certainly not the case. Why does this matter? It has been reported, and is likely true, that at least one of Gygax's "second expansion" manuscripts still exists. If the page count, as I suspect, is no where near 150, then anyone relying solely on your book would assume that there must be an even bigger missing manuscript or that pages must be missing, when that is not the case. Sourcing and attributing facts is important. Frankly, I found the early pre- and TSR history, from 1970-1985 or so one of the most challenging elements of the book. That's in part because there were fewer trade magazines at the time and so fewer places that topical things could be written about. But it's also because Gary Gygax's memories of things definitely changed over time. aldarron alludes to this when he disagrees with Gygax's page counts of the D&D manuscripts. When I explicitly saw different details of the same encounter, as was the case with that Arneson/Gygax meeting, I flagged them. And, of course the other problem was that Gygax and Arneson were both dead before I could get their comments on the article and more of the folks who read the article were at TSR in the '80s than the '70s. The article is worse for their not having read it, I have no doubt. In most of the articles, a principal from the company read the article, but for TSR I did still have a good list of fact checkers who were able to cover most of the company's history. I do clearly and honestly acknowledge the problems with early TSR history in the book, saying "More than any other history, that of TSR seems to be filled with different remembrances, often from the same people, suggesting that some of these early days are a 'best guess'." Right, all of which is all the more reason to use a careful comparative methodolgy, trace every verifyable fact of record you can and be meticulous with what you put in print. There is a much higher standard to authoritative history than casual web posts, and given that you are talking about the formative period and the hobby's seminal work, it is more important to be as careful and transparent as possible. The entire rest of the book hangs on that. Shannon, you've clearly put a lot of effort into this and it is definetly a worthwhile undertaking, but if you really want your work to shine and be considered reliable, you are going to have to up the standards and revise the book. I hope you do.
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Post by Deleted on Nov 8, 2011 13:49:26 GMT -6
I will respectfully disagree with you. You wanted a specific type of book, which was not the book I wanted to write, not the book my existing readers wanted to read, and not the book my publisher wanted to publish. Coming from a more scientific discipline, I think you fundamentally don't understand what the average reader is interested in.
You're certainly welcome to your opinion about what sort of history book you'd like to see, but your way is not the way that all casual/entertainment histories should be written.
With all that said, I consider the most important citations to the accuracy of the work to be the list of fact-checkers, which appears clearly at the end of the book and which specify which company each person looked over. They often provided details not in printed sources and/or corrected what was said in printed sources. That's why they're in there, for those persons who do want to know more about the sources of the work.
I've marked a few corrections in my error book for the couple of actual problems you noted and I'm grateful for them (and I think you're right on the dating of '72, but as I said it's not without confusion).
I think that's all I have to say here. Ciao.
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Post by Deleted on Nov 8, 2011 14:22:37 GMT -6
OK, I lied. One more thing. I just pulled 5 random history books off of my shelf:
A History of Wales, by John Davies (Penguin, 1993) Asimov's Chronology of the World, by Isaac Asimov (HarperCollins, 1991) The House of Medici: Its Rise and Fall, by Chris Hibbert (Morrow Quill, 1980) A History of Ireland, by Peter and Fiona Somerset Fry (Barnes & Noble, 1993) The United States: Becoming a World Power, Sixth Edition, Volume II (Prentice-Hall, 1987)
Those span the spectrum from serious to casual to high school text book. Not a one of them has the references and footnotes which aldarron thinks are a requirement of any modern history book. Only one has a bibliography at all, while two others list further reading. One has end notes, but they're almost entirely details, with a handful being citations.
Designers & Dragons is a well-researched and well-fact-checked book. More of that "work" is shown in the list of books, web sites, magazines, and fact checkers at the end of the book than appears in 4 out of 5 history books I picked off my shelf. It surely has some errors which have fallen through the gaps of my and my fact-checker's knowledge, but everything has been done to minimize that.
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Post by Finarvyn on Nov 8, 2011 14:30:07 GMT -6
I will respectfully disagree with you. You wanted a specific type of book, which was not the book I wanted to write, not the book my existing readers wanted to read, and not the book my publisher wanted to publish. Coming from a more scientific discipline, I think you fundamentally don't understand what the average reader is interested in. This is quite possibly true. The average reader takes OD&D, Holmes, Moldvay/Cook B/X, Mentzer BECMI, the RC, et all, and calls them "Classic" D&D. Clearly we are a more scholarly audience than the typical gamer. I'm still going to check this book out, but I'd also love to read a history book such as aldarron has proposed.
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Post by Finarvyn on Nov 8, 2011 14:41:19 GMT -6
I think that's all I have to say here. Ciao. Hopefully you haven't been chased away from the boards. I think that in general we enjoy a somewhat relaxed form of discussion and I doubt that aldarron intended his words to be an actual attack per se but instead an analysis of what he has seen. Aldarron has done extensive research into some of the early days and is certainly a qualified scholar on the topic, and to me he ranks up there with many of the other qualified scholars who did your fact-checking. And please keep in mind that most of our impressions are based on only a small preview and not the entire text. Hopefully once folks get a chance to read the whole thing we can get some additional reviews.
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Post by aldarron on Nov 8, 2011 15:54:04 GMT -6
I think that's all I have to say here. Ciao. Hopefully you haven't been chased away from the boards. I think that in general we enjoy a somewhat relaxed form of discussion and I doubt that aldarron intended his words to be an actual attack per se but instead an analysis of what he has seen. Aldarron has done extensive research into some of the early days and is certainly a qualified scholar on the topic, and to me he ranks up there with many of the other qualified scholars who did your fact-checking. And please keep in mind that most of our impressions are based on only a small preview and not the entire text. Hopefully once folks get a chance to read the whole thing we can get some additional reviews. Ditto that and exactly so. The OD&D74 forum is the best place to explore an interest in the game and the story behind it. Shannona I would seriously hope you will contribute to the discussions here. As a friend of mine likes to say, if we don't share knowledge, we share ignorance.
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Post by grodog on Nov 9, 2011 21:42:43 GMT -6
I'm pleased to report that my dear wife gave me a copy of Designers & Dragons for my birthday, so I'll get a chance to check out Shannon's final product much sooner than I had thought I would!
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Post by Finarvyn on Nov 10, 2011 5:37:37 GMT -6
I'm pleased to report that my dear wife gave me a copy of Designers & Dragons for my birthday, so I'll get a chance to check out Shannon's final product much sooner than I had thought I would! Fantastic! 1. Happy birthday! 2. I'd like a review once you read it!
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Post by grodog on Nov 11, 2011 14:23:47 GMT -6
Thanks Marv!
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Post by krusader74 on Jan 6, 2015 18:12:06 GMT -6
I don't wish to endorse or oppose this book, but I do want to point out the following changes: * Mongoose no longer publishes this book * Evil Hat Productions now publishes a revised version of the book. It got funded on Kickstarter. The series homepage is here. * It is now broken into 4 volumes: covering the 1970s, the 80s, the 90s and the 00s. Each volume is about 400 pages. * The volume on the 1970s has a foreword by Greg Stafford, author of the Glorantha and Pendragon RPGs. * The volume on the 1970s has a 121-page PDF preview covering TSR. * RPG.net has reviews of all four volumes: 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s. The section on OD&D only comprises pages 13-33. Obviously, you're not getting into anything too deep in 20 pages. If that's all you're interested in, Jon Peterson's Playing at the World is your book. But this 1600-page series as a whole offers very broad coverage of RPGs in general. I played in the 80s and 00s, skipping RPGs in the 90s entirely, so I could probably learn a lot about what I missed reading that volume. In sum, while it won't satisfy someone who's only interested in OD&D, it might be fun for someone with a wide taste in RPGs.
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