Hi everyone, I'm doing a series of video posts at my Adept Play site called "Finding D&D." So far I've put up three out of five.
Holmes plays a role in my basic claim, as I see it and the line which follows as being less of an Icon Of Gaming and more of an actual played-game with enjoyable play-properties. Therefore it serves as the only practical linchpin for my first video, as a sort of house-heretic for the second, and unsurprisingly as the most fruitful or valuable source-material for the third.
Anyway, the series starts with The Standalone Complex, which I've linked here, and goes on to Communion and The Fundamentals which you can find in the same section of my site. I'll be doing the last two over the next couple weeks.
http://adeptplay.com/seminar-hearts-minds/discuss-stand-alone-complex
Oh yeah - these are just drafts, actually - not all that slick in production, plenty of minor fumbles in presentation and in the occasional factual error. Feedback is appreciated but please help me fix stuff rather than reviewing as if they were a final product.
http://adeptplay.com/seminar-hearts-minds/discuss-stand-alone-complex
On the Watch Later list! Thanks for posting Ron.
ReplyDeleteLooks interesting, and I'm excited to watch, but what's far more intriguing is this "Adept-Play" web site? When did that happen? Looks like the oldest post is from last October?
ReplyDelete[sorry, I don't really follow individuals on G+ or Facebook, so I probably missed something informative there]
Anyway, cool to see you're still "deep in it," man!
: )
Jonathan Becker I'm really happy it interests you. This is my new business, here in Sweden! Like, a job!
ReplyDeleteIt actually technically launched in mid-January; the older stuff was put in early as test/startup. The original idea was to have people pay a bit in order to continue commenting and posting per thread ... that's not working out quite as well as I hoped so I'm going to restructure the payments in to a more freely-comment method. Same goes for the seminars - again, it was clear in my mind but not so clear to anyone else, so now I have to restructure.
Please feel free to browse around, and anyone, if you'd like, consider posting about your game sessions there.
Ron Edwards Thanks for posting. I'm listening to it right now. I've had your adeptpress blog in my blogroll for the last few years and read not a few of your comics posts. I was particularly interested in your discussions of Marvel in the 60s/70s. The Cosmic Zap series was a stand-out, and got me to read the Jim Starlin Adam Warlock compilation. I was very spotty comics reader as a kid but I've been going back and reading various compilations.
ReplyDeleteOne comment near the beginning. You are correct that most mistakenly conflate OD&D with the "White Box", and the original is properly the "Brown Box". But the pic you show is of the actual "White Box", a later revision with David Sutherland cover art. The "Brown Box" from 1974 had a woodgrain box with a sticker only on top with art of a mounted warrior (swiped from a Dr Strange comic, btw). acaeum.com - Original D&D Set
ReplyDeleteAnother good pic of the original format:
ReplyDelete2.bp.blogspot.com
Dice vs chits: you have the order reversed; initial printings that came with the Geomorphs & M&TA sets had the "low impact" dice set. At some point in a later printing they switched over to the chits, supposedly due to a dice shortage. It may have been supply vs demand problem - the Basic set was selling so well they couldn't get enough of the cheap dice to fill them.
ReplyDeleteZach H thanks! I had trouble finding 1974 pics. As for the chits, I was always confused. If you could post these at the site, I won’t lose them. Social media isn’t good to me for remembering and finding.
ReplyDeleteHey, Ron:
ReplyDeleteI finished watching the first video and got about twelve minutes through the second ("Communion") before stopping it to write this post.
I think the idea of the series, its discussion and comparison of the rise of the RPG hobby (specifically D&D) with the rise of an organized religion is pretty good, certainly interesting, but I'm having some difficulty with it. Here's my problem:
Despite stating your intention to not retread historical ground covered by other historians (as you...correctly...point out, such things have been hashed out quite a bit over the last decade) you do cite a LOT of publications as grounds for your thesis, and a lot of your citations seem flawed and...well, uninformed. It's not that I think your conclusions are wrong, but the groundwork you're laying isn't good; certainly not entirely accurate as far as chronology goes and, in some instances, not what I'd call firm evidence to use as a foundation for the talk.
It's probably because I'm one of those armchair historian types that I find it particularly cringe-worthy, but I do. The real shift in presentation of product doesn't occur until 1983, arguably after Patricia Pulling decided to organize B.A.D.D. Against the Cult of the Reptile Gods was designed as a Novice module for AD&D (much as the earlier Search for the Unknown and Keep on the Borderlands had been developed in 1979 as beginner modules), and has far less in common with the heavy railroads found in the later Hickman modules (Ravenloft, Dragonlance, etc.), post-1983. The idea of publishing novels came from the surprising success of the Dragonlance books (the first was published in 1984), and Gygax didn't pen his first Gord novel till 1985, long after the Lorraine Williams involvement, the creation of TSR Entertainment, and the attempts to mass-market the D&D brand in new and diverse ways.
In other words, the Gygax "cult of personality" wasn't in full swing, DL was a bit of a surprise, and it was still the gaming fans feeding the consumer base for other product, not the other way around...and that all happened AFTER Moldvay's boxed set made its way onto toy store shelve (even after Frank Mentzer's boxes).
I agree with the game's cargo cult status in the early years, but by 1981(and the advent of Moldvay and Cook Basic and Expert sets), there was a clear path into the game, and it had nothing to do with the convention scene of the midwest (at least out here in Seattle). Having played in those years (1981-1987) with a wide variety of folks who had no connection to the game's midwest roots (as far as I know) I can attest that cons were not part of our collective learning experience.
Anyway...there are at least a couple excellent books on Gygax (I like Michael Witwer's "Empire of Imagination") that I'd suggest picking up for a webinar of this type (only because you talk about the business aspect so much, but in such a loosey-goosey fashion, "oh, sometime around THIS year, it APPEARS this was happening"...that information is available, Ron, in great specificity based on eyewitness accounts that can be cited).
Again, I think it's an interesting series, and I don't think your ideas are off (as a lifelong Catholic, I can readily see the parallels you're drawing). But for it to be MORE EFFECTIVE, I'd want to see a deeper base of knowledge to hang the theory on.
Jonathan Becker I accept all that! It’s why I’m posting here. My only quibble is Reptile God which is an egregious railroad using a trick technique but we can discuss that some other time.
ReplyDeleteRon Edwards Cool...because I wasn't trying to tear you down in a horrible internet-y way or anything.
ReplyDeleteWent and finished Part 2: it is looooong. The second half is less egregious, which makes me wonder if there's a way to postulate the connections with orthodoxy without even getting into the evolution of the game (and simultaneously shorten/edit the video down to something that isn't quite the mouthful to absorb). Just a thought. For me a tight, 45-50 minute lecture is superior to a 90 minute sprawl (I say this knowing full well my own tendencies to meander around in my writing just make a long circuitous path back to the point).
I got through most of Part 3, but it was super late and I was having difficulty tracking; I'll give it another go later.
[slightly off topic: spent several hours reading your comics blog yesterday and found most of it to be fantastic and insightful. Your videos could benefit from a bit of the same polish found in your writing]
Ron Edwards, any chance of these video posts being transcribed and posted in their entirety? I read faster than I can watch a video, and thus don't watch gaming video content (or listen to podcasts). That said, re: length I'd agree with Jonathan Becker above - shorter is better; TV show/movie lengths and feasible length of a class are good comparisons - 45 mins for a lecture is rpobably the sweet spot, at 90s mins you'll likely have folks either bailing or stopping/starting over multiple sessions and losing the thread a bit.
ReplyDeleteThat aside, re: cargo cultism.. I get where you're going with the idea, but I'm not entirely sure its applicable. Among other things, you'd need to distinguish between the play experiences of the older wargaming crowd and kids (like me) who had no preconceptions and just dug into things. The older crowd would have a much different experience than we did, much as I at 48 have a much different experience with a new modern game than would a 10 year old. For us kids, there was no ideal play experience at all - it was a tabula rasa experience, with most of our ideas coming from reading The Hobbit and LOTR, seeing the Bakshi LOTR film in the theater, and Rankin & Bass Hobby on TV, reading comic books (Weird War Tales was my favorite), and growing up on Saturday afternoon monster movies. I started playing around 1980, and we kids all gamed with each other (no older folks in any of our groups) making things up as we went along. None of us knew any older gamers, and for us TSR was a mythical Santa Claus style workshop in a hazy, faraway place (I grew up outside Philly). Only by 81 or so did I start subscribing to Dragon, but even then it wasn't to receive wisdom so much as to comb it for new classes, monsters, treasure and adventure ideas. And that's just my experience - there are surely as many stories and experiences out there as there were gamers in that era.
re: the cult of personality aspect.. from all I've read about early gaming, that seems like pretty much a natural result of the small relative size of the hobby back then. Miniatures wargaming ws very much dominated by its early lights - Charles Grant, Donald Featherstone, Tony Bath; likewise, the early RPG community was very much dominated by its pioneers who in the absence of any preexisting body of knowledge about the hobby became its high priests and arbiters of questions. Reading Jon Peterson's "Playing at the World", it's been fascinating to see how the early days of gaming were not so much D&D leaping from the foreheads of Gygax and Arneson like Athena from the forehead of Zeus, but very much an organic growth process with many inputs from the Lake Geneva, Minnesota and other gaming communities.