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Interview with Gary Gygax
the_bahua writes "Have a look at this one-on-one with Gary Gygax, over at KCGeek.com. It's a tell-all, see-all, look into the mind of the man behind the second-best thing to do at four in the morning. Responsible for one of the cornerstones of geekdom, he is largely unknown to many, including many RPG fans."
I met him at a GenCon once and he is a big freak. But the again, so am I. Too bad he got dicked-over by the former equity partners at TSR in the 1980s.
1980s=TSR
1990s=WotC
2000s=????
It's an age thing.
If you played with the 1st edition D&D books, Gary Gygax's name was on them. Not sure if he's on the later editions, because I haven't played D&D in probably 10 years.
I don't have an anger problem, I have an idiot problem
Visit his site to see what he's been up to lately!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
DnD get its number tracking from miniature warfare like chainmail, and other before it.
If you look at the old rules, you can see the correlation between the to.
Chainmail 1st level guy with a dagger has a 50% chance to hit another first level character, no armor.
DnD 1st level fighter needs to roll a ten or better to hit as 10.
plus's in chainmail were in 5% increments
plus's in dnd where in increments of one.
and so on.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Perhaps you're looking for Murphy's Rules, published by SJG in Pyramid magazine and later compiled into a book format.
13 years ago (*gak*) we invited him to speak at our dorm at Stanford; it became a campus-wide event and was quite well-attended by some 100+ people.
:)
As I recall, he was witty, self-effacing, yet very respectful of the community he helped create (in sharp contrast to some other cult figures, esp. amongst the Trek cast). This was in the midst of his fall-out with TSR, so he didn't exactly have glowing words for the company that booted him.
Afterwards there was a long line of Ur-geeks with Monster Manuals and Players Handbooks in-hand for him to sign. I'm glad I brought my DM Guide...
He's a great public speaker; consider him if you are involved in any kind of college / geek community.
At the moment it is literally an open standard - WoTC introduced some kind of license to use their basic rules in your own products (it is at the back of the 3rd edition PHB.) A number of other companies are churning out 3rd edition supplements under this license.
:)
A long, long answer to your question:
The early history of RPGs is somewhat convoluted and murky - very little was actually published and it is not certain that Gary Gygax really invented the roleplaying game and he certainly didn't invent table top miniature gaming, although he popularised both - but many of the early xeroxed rules sets mentioned in the article were not, in fact, xeroxes of Gygax' rules, but xeroxes of other rules sets (Warlock and a pre-publication version of Arduin are two of these early RPGs which I have actually played - these days, you'd think of them as just house rules for D&D, not seperate games) some of which were eventually printed in small commercial releases and said things like "Major D&D variant" or the like, on the cover. Many of the rules appearing in subsequent editions of Greyhawk/D&D actually first appeared in these house rules sets that were floating about, and TSR/Gygax earned a certain amount of emnity from people for failing to credit them with their ideas (to be fair, some of them were somewhat obvious and Gygax could've come up with them on his own, or encountered them via third parties who didn't know who had invented a particular rule, making it impossible to give proper credit.)
At one point, TSR initialised some sort of legal action against the people who printed Warlock, claiming a combination of infringement on the Dungeons and Dragons trademark (which I'll grant) as well as some malarky about owning the concept of the roleplaying game. After that, and some other similar events, there was a certain movement among people who printed roleplaying games to avoid using TSR's game mechanics.
In the mid 1980s, Palladium (among other game companies) starting getting away with more-or-less duplicating TSR's game mechanics, without any repurcussions or legal trouble to my knowledge. Also, I think Dave Hargrave (Arduin) had been doing it all this time.
All of this is based on interviews I did with older gamers as part of an abortive anthro project (I dropped the course and never finished it,) most of whom do not like Gary Gygax AT ALL (about a third of the interview material, which I haven't saved, consisted of reasons he's a jerk), so take them with a grain of salt. Don't accept them as gospel like you would any other slashdot post
Nowadays, if you wanted to print a game and copy any number of rules-as-ideas (as opposed to verbatim text) from 3rd edition D&D, or any of a number of other games, you could certainly get away with it. You can get an idea of this by looking in the back of a Vampire rulebook, which (at least used to) credit all of the games it had "borrowed" ideas from.
Most of these games, or information about them, can be found on the net, except for Warlock (Warlock: The Black Spiral, which I found doing a search just now, is not related to the 1970s Warlock D&D Variant in any way.)
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
I was hopelessly addicted to this for a few months last year-- if you don't want to muck about with emulators, just click here.
~Philly
Dude! Those sigs are great for fame rubs.
Remember, left-to-right for high numbers, right-to-left for low numbers.
;)
For anyone who's interested, you can find out about Dave Arneson's latest enevours at his webpage. I'm personally interested in his rewriting(for the d20 rules) of his Blackmoor campaign....
I'd rather be flying
1. Most of the original ideas for D&D came from Dave Arneson and others. Mr. Gygax simply put them together into a book.
2. Dave Arneson and E. Gary Gygax had a grave difference in opinion about how to run TSR and so Mr. Arneson left. However, he made sure his lawyers made it clear that he would continue to receive benefits (such as money) from his previous work. The Monster Manual in particular.
2a. Years later TSR came out with Monster Manual 2 and several other hardback books. They also stopped paying Dave Arneson his royalties. Mr. Arneson did not like this and so he sued. Unlike M.A. Barker though, Mr. Arneson was rich enough to force TSR to begin paying him again. Eventually thought, TSR bought Mr. Arneson out completely. To read about this go to D&D History or do a google search or go to the newsgroup on D&D (D&D FAQ).
3. TSR, over the years, ripped off many ideas et al from people. One story in particular stands out. M.A. Barker's "Empire of the Petal Throne" was released by TSR minus it's copyright notice. Mr. Barker did not notice this right off and by the time it was brought to his attention TSR used an obscure copyright technical issue (since modified by Congress) to assume total control over Mr. Barker's work. Mr. Barker (of course) filed suit and went bankrupt trying to get his work back. Years later, a Mr. Lou Zaukie (spelling?) - the inventor of the high impact die and friend of Mr. Barker - convinced TSR to sell the rights to him and Mr. Zaukie returned the rights to Mr. Barker. Who has since gone on to print the rules again as well as to produce other tomes.
4. The heires to the Flash Gordon fortune, who happened to be nuts over D&D, was the person who bought up most of TSR's outstanding stock and kicked Mr. Gygax out of TSR. (This is mainly what I read and heard about many years ago so take it with a grain of salt.) From what I heard, Mr. Gygax kicked out several of the people this lady liked from TSR and in a fit of revenge she did this.
5. Then came several years of nothing new from TSR and, according to accounting records, TSR went heavily in debt as the heiress sucked all of the money out of TSR in order to build some sort of an amusement park dedicated to Flash Gordon. The amusement park deal went sour and she went shopping for someone to buy TSR. Especially since most of the creative people either were not allowed to finish works and/or left when Mr. Gygax left. (Some to other companies and some with Mr. Gygax - according to other reports.)
6. Then, from left field we have Wizards of the Coast. WotC originally was another company. TSR put them out of business. So they had to re-invent their company and did so using a novel idea - playing cards like you would D&D. WotC's revenge was that they bought TSR from the heiress (who, from some accounts had doctored the books so TSR looked like it was a great thing to buy but subsequently WotC found out that all of this inventory TSR had was rotting in various warehouses because no one was buying it anymore since it was so outdated.).
7. So now we come to the latest chapter in TSR's history. Hasbro bought WotC recently. Just when WotC was beginning to breath new life into TSR; Hasbro and WotC's owner had a falling out. As of today, Hasbro has sold off most (if not all) of the electronic/computer software related to both WotC and TSR games. Only the board/book rights are left and Hasbro has let it be known that they are not looking exactly - but would not be against having offers made to buy WotC/TSR.
But that's just some of the past history of Mr. Gygax and TSR. :-)
Lou Zocchi helped MAR Barker with the EPT copyright issues, but he was also known for whipping out not-too-good "clones" of popular games in short order.
TSR was known for pulling nasty crap on a regular basis, and while they'd sue at the drop of a hat for copyright infringement, they'd use "inspirations" from other games and sources quite freely. All of the smart gamers made sure to never show any works in progress to TSR employees, because those works would be the next TSR "invention." For example, Steve Jackson Games was working on a vampire-hunting game called, of course, "Vampire," and after some TSR employees got wind of it, TSR announced a game with that exact same title (and no game to sell with that title - that came later. Shades of Microsoft, there).
Sorry, but I think the statement that Gary Gygax is unknown, is sorta unfounded. Hell, Homer even met him on the Simpsons.
Hello, I am Gary Gygax, I am.........(rolls D20)....... happy to meet you.
If you read the FAQ that is linked in the article you will see that for most of TSR's existance Gary Gygax was a minority shareholder who had little control of the company. Over 60% of the shares were controlled by Brian and Kevin Blume. 90 of the Blumes relatives were employed by the company, that is the nepotism the Wallstreet Journal spoke of.
At some point in 1984 Gygax convinced the board of directors (The two Blumes, Gygax and 3 other directors brought in by the Blumes) to remove Kevin Blume as president and replace him with Richard Koenigs as president pro-tem. At this point those 90 relatives of the Blumes were let go and many other changes were made in order to save the company from bankruptcy.
Eventually Gygax sold off his shares when an associate of the Blumes acquired a majority interest in the company.
For most of TSR's existance Gary Gygax was not in control of the company, he just had the misfortune of being the famous figurehead of a notoriously badly run business.
I browse with my threshold at 2 so I can't read my own comments :-)