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Post by cadriel on Mar 26, 2018 10:48:06 GMT -6
One note about clarity in historical retrospective. We know how attacks per round were supposed to work in Holmes, and that it was actually some rather unfortunate editing that gives daggers the ability to strike more often. Once you see what Zach shared from the original manuscript it becomes obvious that dagger supremacy was not intentional, and the musings about it are kind of moot.
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Post by cadriel on Mar 26, 2018 9:25:41 GMT -6
It was a solid episode and I was happy to spend a morning listening to you guys.
That said - I did have two notes about it.
First, DM Corbett miscalculated when describing the coins. They aren't like dimes (2.2 grams) but are all of 45.4 grams, which should be on the scale of half-dollar coins, but thicker. So those ogres are definitely good for using their coin bags as weapons.
Second, I was a bit surprised there wasn't any discussion of the Sample Dungeon or Skull Mountain. It'd be fun to have a follow-up half episode focusing on that, maybe in the context of an interview with @zenopus ?
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Post by cadriel on Jul 25, 2017 15:31:00 GMT -6
Having a weekend off from refereeing our group's Napolenic campaign (A wargame with national goals set by the players) I spent the time reading CONAN novels and watching old monster movies while munching on popcorn. (Original: jovianclouds.com/blackmoor/Archive_OLD/rpg2.html) Ever curious about this, I've found that Arneson had no recollection of which Conan book he was reading; he didn't recall, and the Lancer series was all available by April 1971. But he mentioned that his monster movies were on "channel 5," which in the Twin Cities meant KSTP. They ran a weekend double feature of monster flicks, "Horror Incorporated," and there happens to be a retrospective tribute site for them. Dave was running a "medieval Braunstein" on April 17, so the weekends leading up to it look like this: Saturday, March 27, 1971: The Raven (1935) / The Great Impersonation (1935)Saturday, April 3, 1971: The Wolf Man (1941) / The Mad Ghoul (1943)Saturday, April 10, 1971: Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943) / She-Wolf of London (1946)I wonder if we have sufficient dates and times for Dave's Napoleonic campaign to determine what movies he was actually watching? Not that it's important, but it's a fun bit of trivia that we might have the puzzle pieces to suss out.
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Post by cadriel on Jul 16, 2017 18:13:34 GMT -6
Right now we are in the period since about 1990 until who knows when that much less than 5% will be remembered 50-80 years from now. So much stuff right now has a socio-political agenda attached to the point where much is just unreadable. If I wanted to get into those things I would go volunteer for groups on whichever side I agreed with. I read fantasy and science-fiction to escape the current world and imagine some other world, I don't read to wallow in the worst that this world has to offer. Give me an REH world where I can take up a sword and kill evil when it butts into my life. I'll be honest, I can't think of a work of fantasy or sci-fi where the social or political "agenda" is why I didn't like it. I mean, there are books that do have agendas that I don't agree with - Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series springs to mind - but I dislike it because it is bad writing. I've read a fair amount of the modern popular fantasy fiction, and to be honest I find most of it insipid. I somewhat dislike the popular A Song of Ice and Fire, not because of any political or social reason, but simply because I resent the author's attempt to make all of fantasy horribly nasty and unpleasant while capitalizing on it. (I'll probably read the next d**n book, though.) I found The Wheel of Time to become a tiresome soap opera, and find efforts like Shannara bland and uninspired. I've found some of them pleasant, though, like Tad Williams's Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn and more recently Patrick Rothfuss's The Kingkiller Chronicles. I've even read a bunch of The Dresden Files that are so poorly written and cliched that I forget I've read them. There are a few authors I particularly like who vaguely remind me of classic fantasy authors, like Stephen Brust or a recent discovery, Matt Hughes. But I've found very little of this to have anything to do with social or political themes in the authors' works, and that's a good chunk of the post-1990 fantasy I've read. You're not the only person I've heard with this kind of rant, but it's never really made sense compared to what I see on the bookshelves. I agree that a lot of popular fantasy is bad, but because of problems with the product, not with the author's agenda.
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Post by cadriel on Jun 21, 2017 13:42:57 GMT -6
Probably true, but, some people find value in the exercise. I learned something cool from it, though, not sure if it was ultimately worth the abuse. Yeah, the close parsing of character sheets can give us small insights. It's the characteristic of this board that it usually goes deeper into minutiae than is productive, but finds some insights as a byproduct. Thanks for clarifying that. Not having access to early documents sometimes makes this history as frustrating as trying to map a Gygaxian dungeon.
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Post by cadriel on Jun 21, 2017 5:19:55 GMT -6
So ... I know that we're pretty far into this whole discussion, and I don't think most of it is worth theorizing over. But I want to clarify something since the people who know / knew the pre-publication versions of D&D are here.
1. Wisdom in 1974 OD&D is the Prime Requisite for Clerics. From what I understand, Cunning was the Prime Requisite for Clerics in pre-publication D&D.
2. Wisdom in 1974 OD&D is listed as working similarly to Intelligence, presumably inasmuch as it would "affect referees’ decisions as to whether or not certain action would be taken." Was Cunning or any other stat described in a similar way?
3. Dexterity in 1974 OD&D gives a bonus or penalty to hit with ranged attacks (depending on its value). Was there any stat in the pre-publication versions that did this before Dexterity appeared (including Cunning)?
4. Dexterity in 1974 OD&D is described as determining "speed with actions such as firing first, getting off a spell, etc." Is there any stat that does this in pre-publication D&D (including Cunning)?
These are the concrete things that are true about Wisdom and Dexterity. So the question I'd have is: how many of 1, 2, 3, and 4 describe Cunning in the pre-publication D&D? If 3 and 4 don't describe Cunning, then its relationship to Dexterity would be at best a minor curiosity about pre-publication play.
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Post by cadriel on Jun 20, 2017 7:49:07 GMT -6
It was one relieving thing about both The Force Awakens and Rogue One: between the two films they only spend one scene on a planet that we've seen in another film, in Vader's castle on Mustafar. Don't forget the fourth moon of Yavin in Rogue One! That's true, although that was a necessary plot point and not just "Let's set it on Tattooine for some reason."
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Post by cadriel on Jun 19, 2017 12:21:06 GMT -6
I drove a bit more than an hour but visited two game stores; got different stuff at each. I just ordered a new Runequest booklet from Noble Knight explicitly because the staples are already coming undone from my one copy. Neither had the bright idea to do a mini-con, though. The store I went to in 2013 and 2014 had done this, and it was great, but that store went under.
The Runequest booklet is very nice and encouraging; there is hope that the new Chaosium will do well by it. The Lamentations of the Flame Princess book reminds us that James Raggi is a provocateur and likes to upset game owners ("girl thingys Are Magic!" caused quite a stir) - the contents are all "How to Break Your Campaign with One Spell!". The Dungeon Crawl Classics offering has a nice little module featuring gnoles, which I can't begrudge as the Dunsany / St. Clair gnoles are a favorite trope of mine, but also spends 40-some pages delivering a stripped-down DCC and the already published Portal Under the Stars. I'm happy with the new Michael Curtis adventure but let down by the repeat on the flip side.
I also picked up the Numenera and Starfinder booklets out of curiosity. Not really much to talk about with them.
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Post by cadriel on Jun 19, 2017 12:04:57 GMT -6
"The message was that even a lowly peasant from the middle of nowhere could rescue a beautiful princess and confound an aristocratic villain."
This is a bit off, though. In the internal canon of Star Wars, Luke is not a lowly peasant. He is the son of a Jedi Knight, who was betrayed and murdered by a young Jedi who turned to the Dark Side of the Force. That rogue Jedi's name was Darth Vader, and always had been. The name "Anakin Skywalker" wasn't yet attached to the father; it came up in Return of the Jedi only after the retcon (Vader=Luke's father) had already been made.
The degree of self-reference in the storytelling is extreme, though. Even having Darth Vader be from Tattooine was an odd choice; I mean, he makes no comment on the fact that the Tantive IV was heading directly to his home planet, of all places. It was one relieving thing about both The Force Awakens and Rogue One: between the two films they only spend one scene on a planet that we've seen in another film, in Vader's castle on Mustafar.
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Post by cadriel on Jun 12, 2017 5:20:13 GMT -6
Philosophically I agree with this - the original Star Wars is by far the great achievement of the series and things afterward never reached that level. I also think it would've been better off being followed by Splinters of the Mind's Eye.
Viscerally ... well, I'd watch a movie that was basically 2 hours of lightsaber duels, so I'm just not objective on this.
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Post by cadriel on Jun 9, 2017 19:57:05 GMT -6
To be far too pithy about it, ERB's Barsoom novels are essentially H. Rider Haggard's Allan Quatermain stories transported to Percival Lowell's Mars. (It's an oversimplification, but one rooted in reality.) Not to mention the threads in American society, like theosophy, that run like an electric current through a great deal of early sci-fi and fantasy. Burroughs did some marvelous world-building and his stories are fine adventures, but he adhered so strictly to formula that you can just about see the innards working when you've read enough of his books. There's nothing wrong with a good formula story, but it's hardly an unreachable pinnacle of literary genius.
Probably the most lasting impact of Burroughs's work was to merge adventure fiction with science fiction as Verne and Wells had established it. That played a big part in getting SF into the pulps, which proved to be fertile ground for all kinds of new experiments - some brilliant, some not so much. I don't want to downplay that I've found his books to be excellent reading, I just don't think they're even the pinnacle of "planetary" SF. (My own bias is in favor of Dune, which I still think is the best SF novel I've ever read; it was unquestionably influenced by ERB in a major way, but went far beyond what he had to offer.)
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Post by cadriel on Jun 6, 2017 5:03:08 GMT -6
It didn't just happened, either. But there is a school of thought and a brand of criticism that intentionally dethroned them and replaced them with lesser authors. I have no way to respond to this. You believe that there is a conspiracy to get people to read inferior books, I just can't help you with that. Publishing is a market much more than it is an ideology; this kind of literature isn't what sells.
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Post by cadriel on Jun 5, 2017 18:18:13 GMT -6
Looking through some later entries, the book proves to be awash in the mythology and spurious history of the D&D game. For instance, there is the implication that the thief skills Hide in Shadows and Climb Sheer Surfaces come from the book Jack of Shadows by Roger Zelazny. This is a nice just-so story, and in fact it's one that Gygax himself perpetuated, claiming that the thief class came from a mix of Cugel the Clever with Shadowjack. However, it's unfortunately spurious. Actual historical research has shown that Gary Switzer, who was part of the scene at Aero Hobbies in Los Angeles, gave Gary the idea for the thief class, and that it came out of that variant. (More of this history is related on this very board.) Reading the entry for Nine Princes in Amber is surreal. When Johnson says, "In the first place, few adventuring groups are going to play long enough to get to this stage of the game, so why bother laying all of this stuff out in such careful detail?" - it makes it seem like he's ignorant of the play style of the Blackmoor and Greyhawk campaigns - to a startling degree. The "domain game" was a huge part of those campaigns, and you can't read The First Fantasy Campaign without concluding it was majorly a wargame campaign. Complaining that no one ever gets to those levels is weird when the first two campaigns really were that way. This is ABC history of Dungeons & Dragons; charging for insights that call the way Greyhawk and Blackmoor were played, "crazy," is honestly a huge ask for me.
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Post by cadriel on Jun 5, 2017 14:14:06 GMT -6
These books are all a lot older than we are and we find them to be fascinating and by comparison most of what has been written over the last 25 years is pretty pale lifeless stuff. Everyone seems to be too scared to write anything good anymore. I don't know, back in the 1950s Theodore Sturgeon wrote this: With time, the better stuff tends to rise to the top, and people forget about the crap. Sturgeon was talking about the "golden age" of science fiction, and the period just after it, and saying that 90% of that was crap. The stuff that survives, and it's generally between 5% and 20% of the output, tends to be the material that has a lasting quality. (Appendix N is interesting in that it actually does contain bits of dross that would otherwise have failed this survival test.)
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Post by cadriel on Jun 2, 2017 8:27:32 GMT -6
I received the book yesterday, by pre-order. It's ... well, you have to kind of understand what it is.
Everything in this book is published elsewhere. If you have The Silmarillion, The Book of Lost Tales Part Two, The Lays of Beleriand, The Shaping of Middle-Earth, The Lost Road and Other Writings, and Morgoth's Ring, you basically have most of what is presented here.
The longest narrative prose portion is "The Tale of Tinúviel" from The Book of Lost Tales, and the remainder of the book consists primarily of "The Lay of Leithian" interspersed with the Beren and Lúthien story as it is written in various later versions of the Quenta. It isn't a continuous prose novel like The Children of Húrin managed to be It simply collects all of the material in one book.
This winds up being, well, a testament to the fact that J.R.R. Tolkien never managed to finish his "Beren and Lúthien" story in an extended format. The preface has a heavy finality to it; Christopher is in his nineties and is unlikely to finish what ought to have been the "trilogy" of Beren and Lúthien , Túrin Turambar and the fall of Gondolin. I would trade The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and the rest of JRRT's publications during his lifetime in a heartbeat to have a proper novel trilogy of those three stories.
I love Beren and Lúthien more than probably any other story, so it feels melancholy that the best that CJRT could do was to put his father's work in order, but reading the book you quickly understand why. The language of "The Tale of Tinúviel" couldn't have been meshed with the later narrative versions of the Quenta, and "The Lay of Leithian" is both idiosyncratic and a poem.
It does also have new art by Alan Lee, which is lovely.
Look, if you're not a Tolkien scholar, you should get this book. It will save you having to hunt down six other books for the material. This is Tolkien's greatest story, and it's an enduring shame that it doesn't have a "perfect" version. But you'll come as close as we ever can.
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Post by cadriel on Jun 1, 2017 18:22:11 GMT -6
Was Karl even in print to have been included in the bookshelves of Gary, who was reading 2nd hand paperbacks from mid-1950s to maybe 1971? He was still "just" a local boy at the comics swaps in Edwin Murray's backyard in 1977, though he'd been published by then. Still he was so new as a professional writer, that we kidded him about not being able to find his book (books?) and had him autographing Popeye magazines. As for Gar Fox - Well, there might still be enough Fox fans to outnumber you. We were as grateful as he, when the comics field spit him out, because he finally had time to commit to his "Adam Strange with gonads" novels. (Commander Craig, IIRC) Wagner was definitely there with Death Angel's Shadow in 1973 which was the same year as Hiero's Journey. Bloodstone was out in 1975, and Dark Crusade in 1976. Darkness Weaves was 1978 but so was Swords Against Darkness III, so not too late. As for Fox, I mean, there were certainly worse authors of "barbarian" fantasy and I understand that had a certain appeal to a certain crowd. Not my cup of tea.
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Post by cadriel on Jun 1, 2017 15:17:04 GMT -6
SO WHAT? Everyone accepts that. If your objection is merely to the subtitle, "A Literary History of D&D," then okay. But with respect, why do you think you keep needing to say it? I got it the first time you said it. Because people keep banging on about Appendix N. It's a trope I object to and Jeffro's book plays into it. I mean, there's a podcast called "Sanctum Secorum" where they literally talk about "Appendix N" and the DCC RPG and other things have put Gary's list on a pedestal. Hell, I'm even guilty of this, having used Appendix N for a tournament on my blog. But I do try and push back, for a few reasons. First, I think some of the authors on Appendix N are downright terrible, particularly Lin Carter and August Derleth, while others like Gardner Fox or Fred Saberhagen I could do without. Second, because I want to push back against the notion that the list forms a coherent genre or even the best list of authors of its type, when it doesn't have Clark Ashton Smith or C.L. Moore or Henry Kuttner or Karl Edward Wagner or a half-dozen other authors I would place on it. And third, because I think the full list is of at best marginal value for understanding D&D. I do think that the short list ("de Camp & Pratt, R. E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, H. P. Lovecraft, and A. Merritt") is useful for understanding Gary Gygax, though.
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Post by cadriel on Jun 1, 2017 12:50:52 GMT -6
"I find Jeffro's ideas fairly repulsive. For instance, bashing Star Wars on the grounds that it is not sexist enough (as he does in his paean to A Princess of Mars) is the kind of thing that would make me throw the book violently if it were in print. It makes me feel unseemly for liking the adventure literature that I like." "He complains that Princess Leia wasn't in a metal bikini until Return of the Jedi, and that a better space princess would have worn nothing but skimpy outfits like Dejah Thoris. I have a daughter to raise, I can't put up with that stuff, man." A book that doesn't discuss Tarnsman of Gor isn't a literary history of D&D; it is at best a book about Gary Gygax's personal favorites. This is glorious. I never said I liked the Gor novels, but their influence on D&D is significant and shouldn't be papered over just because the novels get really heavy on the squick factor.
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Post by cadriel on May 31, 2017 13:39:05 GMT -6
I think @hedgehobbit is exactly right here, and it's why I am skeptical of people sitting down and reading Appendix N to divine how it influenced D&D. Saying that Gary Gygax got the megadungeon idea from The Sign of the Labrys is provably wrong, because Gygax got the idea from Dave Arneson. A book that doesn't discuss Tarnsman of Gor isn't a literary history of D&D; it is at best a book about Gary Gygax's personal favorites. As far as influence goes, this is what Dave Arneson thought ( source):
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Post by cadriel on May 26, 2017 9:21:39 GMT -6
Jeffro, of course, never says any such thing. "Not sexist enough" is your label. I should also point out that Jeffro spends a paragraph of the book favorably citing you and your blog. He complains that Princess Leia wasn't in a metal bikini until Return of the Jedi, and that a better space princess would have worn nothing but skimpy outfits like Dejah Thoris. I have a daughter to raise, I can't put up with that stuff, man. Although I hadn't caught the reference to my blog.
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Post by cadriel on May 26, 2017 7:26:37 GMT -6
I find Jeffro's ideas fairly repulsive. For instance, bashing Star Wars on the grounds that it is not sexist enough (as he does in his paean to A Princess of Mars) is the kind of thing that would make me throw the book violently if it were in print. It makes me feel unseemly for liking the adventure literature that I like.
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Post by cadriel on May 25, 2017 8:04:55 GMT -6
Granted, it COULD be that, I suppose. But how do you know it is? Remember, these are not random fantasy classics. These were chosen by the original authors/designers of D&D as being influential. So, given, that, if you find a "pattern-match," shouldn't the presumption be that it was an influence? Ernie Gygax said of Appendix N, "These are just the novels that Dad had on the wall in his den." ( Sanctum Secorum podcast, quote around 2:11) There are a few places where D&D obviously steals from - particularly The Lord of the Rings and Three Hearts and Three Lions. But when people start to try associating X mechanic with Y putative literary antecedent, without documentation of clear inspiration, it's as likely to have come from wargaming or movies or history or some other source in parallel. Treating Appendix N as the key to D&D is a poor way to do D&D history.
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Post by cadriel on May 23, 2017 17:42:13 GMT -6
I haven't read it cover to cover, but it makes the same mistake that a lot of Appendix N analysis makes when it tries to link books in Appendix N to specific ideas and mechanics in D&D. The connections are as often as not errors of pattern-matching; D&D didn't pull that directly from its literary antecedents.
It has a bit of charm in its enthusiasm, but there's a lot of rambling, for instance in Jeffro's attempt to score points against Star Wars by comparison to things in A Princess of Mars that are, frankly, cliches. There's never any reflection on how a lot of the authors, including Burroughs, wrote with such transparent formulas that you could see the tracks in the story halfway through. (That doesn't mean Burroughs isn't a fun read, but you have to put that aside to enjoy him.) So I mean, I wouldn't at all equate it to a work of serious history like Playing at the World.
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Post by cadriel on May 5, 2017 14:28:14 GMT -6
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Post by cadriel on May 4, 2017 8:32:18 GMT -6
I think Dune rewards re-readings. The original novel is a classic that is deeply rewarding on re-reading. The sequels ... not so much.
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Post by cadriel on May 4, 2017 4:43:55 GMT -6
Morrow Project would have been my #6 if I had a sixth selection.
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Post by cadriel on May 3, 2017 20:11:55 GMT -6
I have a completely different top 5.
1. Tunnels & Trolls, 5th Edition (Flying Buffalo) 2. Classic Traveller (Game Design Workshop) - just the LBBs 3. Empire of the Petal Throne (TSR) 4. Gangbusters (TSR) - especially if you could get Mark Hunt on to discuss it with you 5. Skyrealms of Jorune (SkyRealms Publishing / Chessex)
- Wayne
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Post by cadriel on May 2, 2017 12:51:07 GMT -6
Can someone who has read the book help me understand what Arneson is supposed to have come up with here? I gather it is presented as something unprecedented in the history of game design, but I've been having some trouble seeing how it is different from the free Kriegsspiel principles of the 1870s that trickled down to the 1970s through intermediaries like Totten, Korns, Bath, the Midgard folks, etc. There was a lot of this going around. I mean, everyone sliced it a little differently, and small differences can yield big impacts, but it seems like something that is hard to sell as a bolt out of the blue. I don't know that I could, despite having read the book. Rob listed 26 separate things that Dave Arneson did that are "leaps" in system design away from what previously existed on the market, but he wrote them all in the language of systems theory so it's literally a list of things like "Ongoing applied design and design theory in real-time; embedded extensions of the design processing brought to bear in designing the game." If you'd be interested in reviewing it, PM me. I'd be willing to send you my copy gratis as long as you'd write a review on your blog.
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Post by cadriel on May 1, 2017 20:36:17 GMT -6
I read the book, and I don't want to reply on my blog because I am concerned that any opinions I register there will be received in the wrong tone. I'll put forward what at this point are some tentative notes about Rob's book.
First, the system theory concepts. I don't think that this is a useful way to look at roleplaying games. The entire book is written at a very high level of abstraction from what actually goes on at the table, and I am by nature more pragmatist than that. There are points where the level of abstraction gets so high that it's not clear what Rob is talking about, mostly in the second essay. I read the thing on Friday and still haven't figured out what the referent is for "This" in "This is what it is." Also, the list of design leaps that Rob puts forward in the first essay read like a description of roleplaying from some nightmare bureaucracy: "Ongoing applied design and design theory in real-time; embedded extensions of the design processing brought to bear in designing the game" is a monstrous assault upon the English language. So this makes me negatively disposed toward the book from pretty early on.
Second, I think he's remarkably unfair to Gary in talking about the shift from "open form" to "formula D&D." Yes, Gary said some regrettable things in Dragon magazine editorials in the '70s, but it feels unfair to re-litigate them when Gary embraced an open approach toward gaming late in his life. The whole first essay reads as negative on Gary, who was instrumental in making D&D a thing that could be run by people other than Dave Arneson.
Third, I'm not really sure this deserved to be its own book. There are too many references back to A New Ethos in Game Design, and the Arneson essays would have made a great deal more sense as an appendix to that book rather than publishing it without the larger work that it more or less requires to make sense, for instance, of the leaps that Kuntz lists in the first essay. It kind of felt like a very expensive advertisement for a later, forthcoming book.
Fourth, the whole derivation concept. I find the whole idea of "true designer" to put me in a bad mood, it's like talking about a "true Scotsman." I think that what was shown in Playing at the World and what we've learned since it was written shows that Blackmoor was a synthesis. It was a combination of a "dungeon Braunstein" and a Chainmail campaign. It added substantial innovations, but we see over and over in PatW that things like gaining levels and changing characters was not entirely new. Merely saying "no" to a bunch of design leaps is not proof that the game's main elements don't aren't an extension of Braunstein and Chainmail.
Finally, I found it to have no insight at all into Dave Arneson as a game designer. Because everything is in this heavy systems theory abstraction, there is no discussion of what Arneson actually did at the table that Kuntz thinks was brilliant. There's no discussion of what Dave's games were like or what they did that had never been done; indeed, there's really no sense of what Dave did aside from the systems theory descriptions which never give a really clear picure (by design).
So my thoughts are fairly harsh, and I don't want to do an in-depth review when it's clear that a lot of the leg work is in the larger book. But this one was a fairly big letdown for me.
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Post by cadriel on Apr 28, 2017 8:40:10 GMT -6
So much goodness! I love it.
The Dying Earth is one of the great works of picaresque science-fantasy and a main inspiration for D&D. The Eyes of the Overworld is the follow-up; Cugel is a serious antihero, and your reaction to it will depend on how you feel about antiheroes.
Voodoo Planet and Plague Ship are both from Andre Norton's Solar Queen series, which is prime material for a free trader Traveller campaign. I'd recommend the Witch World book but that one is fairly far into the series.
The Trouble Twisters and Trader to the Stars are from Poul Anderson's Polesotechnic League future timeline; it's a terrific adventure merchant series and Nicholas Van Rijn is an incredible character.
You have a few of the Eric John Stark series by Leigh Brackett, start with Eric John Stark: Outlaw of Mars before the later Hounds of Skaith. You may want to see about finding The Ginger Star that comes before Hounds.
The Sowers of the Thunder is a collection of historical stories by Robert E. Howard. It's always worth reading the two-fisted Texan.
Otis Adelbert Kline's Planet of Peril is a solid planetary romance set on his Venus, Kline was the "rival" of Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Out of the list, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and The Stars My Destination are considered something of classics and should probably be near the top of the pack.
There's a ton of good material here, and I love seeing so many Ace paperbacks. You look at them and you can really feel how much that publisher shaped the modern science fiction world. You could probably pick any of a dozen of them and read something great that I haven't even gotten to here.
If there's anything I have mixed feelings about, it's the Gor series which turned toward its, ah, idiosyncratic views on sexuality and slavery. It started off as planetary romance but drifted away. (The early books were an influence on Dave Arneson, though.)
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