This was his version of an obituary.
(posted Mar 14, 2008)
Open Letter to Slate.Com's Erik Sofge. You tried to whack Gary Gygax ...
... you only proved you haven't read the Player's Handbook or the Dungeon Master's Guide.
You posted a contra retrospective, with narry a fact-check to be found. It's my intention to not flamethrow a thing at you, rather just point out to you the facts; facts readily available in a Player's Handbook (PHB), a Dungeon Master's Guide (DMG), and even on-line at
www.d20srd.org. Here's what you posted at
http://www.slate.com/id/2186203/pagenum/all/When Gary Gygax died, the gaming community lost an icon, its founding genius. At least that's the story being told in countless obituaries this past week by writers as eager to praise Gygax as they are to out themselves—with faux embarrassment—as former nerds whose lives he changed with 20-sided dice. And lo, what a fascinating and tortured bunch we are, with our tales of marathon role-playing game (RPG) sessions in windowless basements, our fingers hardened to nacho-cheese-encrusted talons, and our monklike vows of celibacy. Part testament to Gygax, part cathartic confessional, these obituaries are rapidly cementing his position at the head of the geek pantheon.
But it has to be said: Gary Gygax wasn't a visionary to all of us. The real geeks out there—my homies—know the awkward truth: When you cut through the nostalgia, Dungeons & Dragons isn't a good role-playing game; in fact, it's one of the worst on the market. Sadly, Gygax's creation defines our strange corner of the entertainment world and drowns out all the more innovative and sophisticated games that have made D&D obsolete for decades. (As a game designer, Gygax is far outclassed by contemporaries such as Steve Jackson and Greg Stafford.) It's the reason that tabletop gaming is not only stuck in the pop culture gutter but considered pathetic even by the standards of mouth-breathing Star Trek conventioneers. And with the entire industry continuing to collapse in the face of online gaming, this might be the last chance to see Gygax for what he was—an unrepentant hack, more Michael Bay than Ingmar Bergman.
What's wrong with Dungeons & Dragons? It plays like a video game. A good role-playing game provides the framework for a unique kind of narrative, a collaborative thought experiment crossed with improvisational theater. But D&D, particularly the first edition that Gygax co-wrote in 1975, makes this sort of creative play an afterthought. The problem is most apparent in one of Gygax's central (and celebrated) innovations: "experience points." To become a more powerful wizard, a sneakier thief, or an elfier elf (being an elf was its own profession in early editions, which is kind of like saying being Chinese is a full-time job), you need to gain "levels," which requires experience points. And the best way to get experience points is to kill stuff. Every monster, from an ankle-biting goblin to a massive fire-spewing dragon, has a specific number of points associated with it—your reward for hacking it to pieces. So while it's one player's job—the so-called Dungeon Master—to come up with the plot for each gaming session and play the parts of the various enemies and supporting characters, in practice that putative storyteller merely referees one imagined slaughter after another. This is not Tolkien's Middle-Earth, with its anti-fascist political commentary and yearning for an end to glory and the triumph of peace. This is violence without pretense, an endless hobgoblin holocaust.
Here's the narrative arithmetic that Gygax came up with: You come across a family of sleeping orcs, huddled around their overflowing chest of gold coins and magical weapons. Why do orcs and other monsters horde gold when they can't buy anything from the local "shoppes," or share a jug of mead in the tavern, or do anything but gnash their teeth in the darkness and wait for someone to show up and fight them? Who knows, but there they are, and you now have a choice. You can let sleeping orcs lie and get on with the task at hand—saving a damsel, recovering some ancient scepter, whatever. Or you can start slitting throats—after all, mercy doesn't have an experience point value in D&D. It's the kind of atrocity that commits itself.
For decades, gamers have argued that since D&D came first, its lame, morally repulsive experience system can be forgiven. But the damage is still being done: New generations of players are introduced to RPGs as little more than a collective fantasy of massacre and greed. If the multiplayer online game World of Warcraft is the direct descendant of D&D, then what, exactly, has Gygax bequeathed to us unwashed, nerdy masses? The notion that emotionally complex story lines are window dressing for an endless series of hack-and-slash encounters? There's a reason so many players are turned off after a brush with D&D. It promises something great—a lively (if dorky) bit of performance art—but delivers a small-minded and ignorant fantasy of rage, distilled to a bunch of arcane charts and die rolls. Dungeons & Dragons strips the "role-playing" out of RPGs; it's a videogame without the graphics, and a pretty boring one, at that.
There is a way to wring real creativity, and possibly even artistic merit, from this bizarre medium—and it has nothing to do with Gygax and his tradition of sociopathic storytelling. In the mid-1980s, right around the time that Gygax was selling off his company, Steve Jackson began publishing the Generic Universal Roleplaying System, or GURPS. Jackson's goal was to provide the rules to play games in any genre. More importantly, characters in this new system could be fleshed out down to the smallest detail, from a crippling phobia of snakes to a severe food allergy. And when it came to experience points, characters got whatever the "gamemaster" decided. They might earn points for succeeding at a given task or simply for playing their character in a compelling way. Of course, players could still take out their real-life bitterness in a fictional killing spree, and the game master might end up with a bumbling and incoherent story line. But GURPS created the potential for so much more.
There are other complex, challenging games out there, and GURPS is still in print. But the bloodthirsty Dungeons & Dragons franchise remains a bestseller. If it seems overly harsh to fault Gygax for his seminal work, keep in mind that in 1987 he helped create the gaming equivalent of Plan 9 From Outer Space. In the now-infamous Cyborg Commando, you play a man-bot battling an invasion of alien insects. Unfortunately, you seem to have been built for comedic effect, with lasers that shoot out of your knuckles and your brain inexplicably transferred to your torso. That frees up cranial space so you can suck liquids through your nose for further analysis. Not that there are any rules for said chemical analysis, or for much of anything, really. Gygax wasn't much for the details. In the end, his games are a lot like his legacy: goofy, malformed, and fodder for a self-deprecating joke or two—before being shoved in the closet for good.
**
The basic outline to contra your contra is A for Alignment, B for Bill Gates, C for Challenge Ratings, D for Diplomacy Checks , E for Experience Points, and some other stuff. Easy enough to remember. You can/could've looked all this up.
A ... Alignment is found in the PHB in Chapter 6, and also throughout all Dungeons and Dragons books (D&D). Similarly, it's available right now at
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/description.htm. If you had fact checked, you'd've noticed that the behavior you describe as a "normal" game, is very not that way. There is a Prestige Class that works the way you want D&D to work; it's called the Assassin, here:
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/prestigeClasses/assassin.htm. You'll note, there is only one small class that does what you accuse all of D&D to do. Alignment of the Planes is here:
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/planes.htm#outerPlanes , and again also available in the PHB and the DMG.
The Planes are an awful interesting place, especially in regards to "moral" discussions. In the real world, Jerry Falwell Protestants, Jesuit Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox, line up in slight opposition to Calvinist Protestants, Dominican Catholics, and Lutherans; the free-will vs. determinism debate. To oversimplify: you pick god vs. god picks you. In D&D, some creatures have free-will; but some creatures are made by the planes, planes which are the em(supra-)bodyment of a particular alignment, the creatures unable to behave in any way other than exactly the way the plane made them. The creatures that act like what you think D&D has them act, are parcelled off on the Plane of Archeron, the plane of eternal war. And even there, they don't have infinite resources to kill, and kill, and not need to lick their wounds, and not need to check there rankings in the army they belong to. Some of the creatures in D&D are Hyper-Calvinism Gone Wild, and some of them act like the videos I'm referencing.
C ... Challenge Ratings for Traps, is available right now at
http://www.d20srd.org/indexes/traps.htm ; also in the DMG under "Traps" in Chapter 3. No killing here. You do need a really smart Wizard, or a Cleric with a specific spell, or more typically, a Rogue to find the trap and disable it. And then something interesting happens, you get experience points. Way back in the day, the trapfinder was called a Thief, but most of the time, the Thief was not thieving. Weird, huh?
D ... Diplomacy Checks and other skills, are in the PHB Chapter 4, and the DMG Chapter 4 NPC attitudes section, and online at
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/skills/diplomacy.htm. Provided you can talk to the monster, and you can with minimal spell investment, and later Telepathy, adjust the bad guy's attitude. You can make it friendly. You can make it helpful, even better. You can make it Fanatical, and have it follow you around like a puppy, even in the face of a horrible Dragon. No killing here. And then something interesting happens, you get experience points. Charm Person and Charm Monster are well know spells, that do the same thing except faster and flashier. Maybe you use the Giant to fix the Barn he wrecked a few days ago. Let's sing Kum-Bye-Ya in Orcish (sweetly).
E ... Experience Points are in the DMG Chapter 2 under Rewards. It is detailed with Experience Awards and Story Awards, both of which may involve no killing. This one isn't linked online, because it's crucial to game play; perhaps the only rule that is a rule that must not be mentioned, lest the dreaded Abomination of the Copyright Dimension, sticks a supernatural suggestion on your soul, forever ... a mighty long time. Question: If you assign a CR to an Orc baby, one with ~maybe 1 hit point and can't move, of perhaps 1/10 - what level would you be when you wouldn't receive any experience points for killing all of them ???
In 1st Edition D&D, you could have terminal levels on immortal creatures, that could do what you want to do with Orc babies, for eternity, just like that "dude" in Greek Mythology that rolled a rock up a hill, and rolled a rock up a hill, and ... never ever get ahead. Literally Hell - in a D&D sense - and only one very small corner of an infinite number of infinite planes. Oh, and no experience points ever, for all that killing.
B ... Bill Gates is your boss, via Michael Kinsley. This is a rather distasteful line of reasoning for me. Bill Gates made Microsoft. Gary Gygax made D&D. You (and I) use Microsoft. You (and I) use D&D. You use D&D for *indirect object A*. I use D&D for *indirect object B*. The same sentence model can be used for Microsoft. Some people use D&D for 'distaseful indirect object'. Some people use Microsoft for 'distasteful indirect object'. You blame Gary Gygax for your own indirect object, a.k.a. hack-and-slash.
Should I blame Bill Gates for people using Microsoft for child-prawn and/or soupy-sized bombing? Ick.
By the way, this compares real-world bad behavior, to imaginary-world bad behavior.
F ... Fie on you, knave. { ... sorry, couldn't resist ... }
G ... Generically, there are 9th graders playing D&D somewhere near where you are. I'm sure they could help you out of the mess you've made of your own game. D&D is a huge rule-set. Real world Freshman Introductory Psychology will tell you, that people remember 30% of what they've read. You either didn't read the rules, or you read them but didn't remember them. Read 'em again, maybe 3 or 4 more times. In D&D, there's a skill called Autohypnosis,
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/psionic/skills/autohypnosis.htm. Let's say I'm the DM and I'm'n'a give you 1 rank in the trained skill. You need to roll a (15-1) on a d20, to "memorize - You can attempt to memorize a long string of numbers, a long passage of verse, or some other particularly difficult piece of information (but you can’t memorize magical writing or similarly exotic scripts). Each successful check allows you to memorize a single page of text (up to 800 words), numbers, diagrams, or sigils (even if you don’t recognize their meaning). If a document is longer than one page, you can make additional checks for each additional page. You always retain this information (lucky!); however, you can recall it only with another successful Autohypnosis check." Even in D&D, you don't memorize everything, unless you are really really skilled. In the real world, you don't "always retain this information".
(clicky please)
Hide
Relax, sit back, click a few links, meditate, and an eventual apology would be appropriate. I hereby sentence you to 6 months of playtesting, and a published book review of D&D for Dummies. I apologize to Bill Gates for dragging him into this.
Thanks,
signed ... awaken_Dungeon_Master_golem
**
I'll clean this up later.
EDIT ---- added sblock to sofge's
link for wayback purposes
http://community.wizards.com/forum/previous-editions-character-optimization/threads/1174866
