Nice read! Glad to hear that he's rebounding health-wise. Not too happy that he's abandoned Kalibruhn; but, that's his perogative. Would be neat if it saw the light of day.

a nice compliment from Rob Kuntz to our very own Faro & Grodog!

Great thoughtstream (I'm not exactly sure it was an interview).     It encapsulates a lot of what my friends used to argue about circa 1982, when one group went do-it-yourself Greyhawk and another went on-the-rails Dragonlance.

I think the unspoken subtext, at least from my early experience, is that there were two Dungeons & Dragons.  One was the art, the other the product.  Those who were lucky enough to be in Wisconsin / Minneapolis / Detroit / wherever in the 70s and who managed to run into a mentor got to experience the art of D&D.  The rest of us, introduced to it in the schoolyards, hobby shops, libraries and Bookmobiles, got the product.  Those of us who wished we got the art, too, were usually the buyers of modules, Dragon, Endless Quest, etc.

Without those examples, and without "Midwest Mentors," it was kids teaching kids.  Before the widespread Internet, the only way to learn about D&D world and adventure creation was through example.  The modules were the adventures, Dragon was the rules modifications, and EQ (as poor as many of them were) was sessions in progress.  Being 13 and saying "Hey mom, I want to go to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin" for the summer (which I said!) didn't fly so well.

The individuality of RPG creation is important, but I think the community of D&D was equally important.  The reason why things like B2, G1, S1, etc. are so nostalgic is because they represent focal touchstones which everyone from that time can relate to.  Those were the foundation stones of synergistic thought.

We tried to create our own stuff frequently, but when you're a teenager it's very, very hard to create something that's not Monty Haul and have the players like it.  I wrote a lot of my adventures but for many of us, it's that root-growth community that embodies the golden age in physical product.

Anyway, meh.  I could go on but am wasting time  

MetamorphosisSigma wrote:Very well stated, darkseraphim. This pretty much sums up my reaction to the interview. It sounds as if Rob would have preferred that D&D remain a strictly hobbyist phenomenon, something that happened in Gygax's basement and the basements of other creative types that "got it" and ran with it, like Hargrave, Barker, etc. And for him I guess it has.

The problem I have with this perspective is that, had this been the case, I never would have heard of the damn game, and neither would 90% of the people who still play it or are involved with it in one way or another. While the mass-marketing and product development strategies that went on in the late '70s and onwards might not have been an unalloyed boon for the D&D game in terms of its "artistic" merit, they did have the virtue of making the RPG hobby accessible to me and a host of other 10-year-olds. For that, I'm grateful, and I'm glad TSR "sold out".

Bah... D&D/AD&D should have been a niche like wargaming for one reason only, Gygax. The Man should have been able to create material for his game and his setting as long as he wanted. I would love to have seen a much less popular AD&D where it brought in enough money for Gygax and company to work at what they wanted to, but not enough to get the sharks prowling around the company or go crazy buying company cars or waste Gygax's time on D&D cartoons, beach towels, lunch boxes and blankets.

That being said, other than pushing Gygax and company out of AD&D the rise and fall of TSR means nothing to me. Like Rob is saying, the framework is there, the match has been lit and the game will either set your imagination on fire or it won't, and maybe nothing will. The three little booklets didn't do it for me but the Holmes blue book did. When we ran out of rules, monsters, experience levels, magic spells and magic items, we just made up our own. If TSR had been sucked into the void at that moment D&D would have lived on. So it doesn't matter what kind of crap was created later by TSR and sundry, we'd already drunk the cool-aid, mixed our metaphors, and D&D was in our blood. The trick today is to sift through the mountains of material, good and bad, and find the magic that started everything rolling. Notimpossible, but it was easier to use your own imagination, create your own adventures when you had no other choice.

AD&D all the way. Once I got a hold of that, it's all I really wanted to play. Back in the day, we use to scoff at OD&D as being too simple.

Kaskoid wrote:Ahh, the folly of ignorance and youth....

It had very little to do with ignorance and folly, though everything to do with youth. AD&D was simply the first form of the game available to us Gen-Xers, rather than baby-boomers. By the time many of us noticed the AD&D hardcovers on the shelves of our mall B. Dalton's and Waldenbooks as middle-schoolers and were intrigued enough to beg our parents to buy them, the original game was no longer widely available. We had to "catch up" on the fantasy literature you guys took for granted as a baseline, largely being referred to it by Appendix N of the DMG and the fictional mythoi in Deities and Demigods (as a starting point). Most of us were only vaguely aware that there even had been an "original" D&D, and even fewer of us had actually seen a copy. I had the opportunity to look through a set fairly early on, and had no idea what to make of it.

Scoffing at OD&D as "simple" is probably the wrong way to express it, for those few of us who caught a glimpse of it at all and were baffled. It incorporated so many unspoken assumptions, and was so badly organized and written, that we just assumed that the AD&D version was in some objective way superior and an improvement. Progress. This might be the case to some extent, though that's arguable, but in any case we were unequipped to understand the original rules as written.

On the "interview": Hmmm, is that so? Interesting take on the very earliest days of the company (the first five, when I was there) for someone who had no hand in running it, making any marketing decisions and was seldom about the place.

Can't argue with you there, and this was more or less my surmise concerning RJK's role.

Maybe you were a little older than I was, I guess. To me, Arneson was just somebody mentioned in passing in the books I first played with, and the only DM I ever knew aside from my autodidact self before high school 6-7 years later was some kid down the street who was a year older than I (11), and he had nothing but the AD&D books too (and Traveller ). I'm just saying, we didn't all grow up in Wisconsin, or some other place where OD&D was prevalent (or even heard of), before AD&D came online.

Badmike wrote:Well I can say for a fact we were young and stupid.

There are plusses & minuses to what Kuntz is saying. True, a Dragonlance module is a tradeoff, with the author's creativity substituting for what should be that of the DM & players. But the old-school approach could also be uncreative - random encounters for random treasures, a kind of pre-digital Pac-man.

I started with the Holmes Basic Set.  

One of my friends had a copy of Greyhawk.  The book's cover said it was a "supplement."  Supplement to what?     We'd never seen a white box set.

Advanced Dungeons and Dragons appeared within a year of our starting out.  I remember when the Dungeon Master's Guide was published.  

As I recall, the Monster Manual was out before the Players Handbook.  Now...the PHB...that was a game changer.

OH...and the pumpkin-headed bugbear...best illustration I've seen yet.  Nothing is quite so scarey/cool as that picture.