cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/3992477
Elon Musk, the owner of the app formerly known as Twitter, is calling on Wizards of the Coast and its parent company Hasbro to "burn in hell" for the publication of Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons. On November 21st, former gaming executive turned culture warrior Mark Hern posted several passages from Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons on Twitter, criticizing the book for providing context about some of the misogyny and cultural insensitivity found in early rulebooks. These passages were pulled from the foreword written by Jason Tondro, a senior designer for the D&D team who also worked extensively on the book. Hern stated that these passages, along with the release of the new 2024 Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide for D&D's "40th anniversary" (it is actually D&D's 50th anniversary) both "erased and slandered" Gary Gygax and other creators of Dungeons & Dragons.
In response, Musk wrote "Nobody, and I mean nobody, gets to trash E. Gary Gygax and the geniuses who created Dungeons & Dragons. What the [naughty word] is wrong with Hasbro and WoTC?? May they burn in hell." Musk had played Dungeons & Dragons at some point in his youth, but it's unclear when the last time he ever played the game.
Notably, Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons contains countless correspondences and letters written by both Gygax and Dave Arneson, including annotated copies of early D&D rulesets. Most early D&D rules supplements as well as early Dragon magazines are also found in the book. It seems odd to contain one of the most extensive compliations of Gygax's work an "erasure," but it's unclear whether Hern or Musk actually read the book given the incorrect information about the anniversary.
Additionally, Gygax and Arneson are both credited in the 2024 Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide. The exact credit reads: "Building on the original game created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson and then developed by many others over the past 50 years." Wizards of the Coast also regularly collaborates with Gygax's youngest son Luke and is a participant at Gary Con, a convention held in Gygax's honor. The opening paragraph of the 2024 Player's Handbook is written by Jeremy Crawford and specifically lauds both Gygax and Arneson for making Dungeons & Dragons and contains an anecdote about Crawford meeting Gygax.
Musk has increasingly leaned into culture war controversies in recent years, usually amplifying misinformation to suit his own political agenda.
Elon Musk hints at buying Hasbro for D&D after announcing AI game studio
A week later, on November 27, X user Ian Miles Cheong posted a screenshot showing Tondro’s response to Musk’s prior concerns.
When addressing Musk’s criticism of the book, Tondro explained that he and others agreed that backlash would come from “progressives and people from underrepresented groups who justly took offense at the language of OD&D.”
“How much is Hasbro?” Musk asked.
Although the X owner didn’t elaborate on a potential purchase, if Musk does end up acquiring Hasbro, he would also secure the rights to Transformers, Axis & Allies, Monopoly, Magic The Gathering, and even My Little Pony.
We’ll have to wait and see how this unfolds and if Musk is serious about potentially acquiring the entertainment juggernaut.
Gygax was a genocidal racist, as was made quite clear in (probably among other places) some forum posts he made.
He's probably the reason his son grew up to be weirdo Nazi freak.
I hope Musk does destroy wotc, d&d is too big for the rpg industry's good. A lot of companies produce higher quality products at lower prices with not nearly their level of scale. Getting more people to consider alternatives to the $150 three "core books" and $50 adventure modules that you have to read through carefully three times to run without fucking up would be great.
EDIT:
Oh shit
Hopefully I can get a Sephiroth precon first though.
I would absolutely LOVE DnD to lose popularity, so many more people are playing tttpgs but it's always fucking 5e DnD. Fantasy is stupid and boring and just full of Victorian era racist and classist tropes and it's not a great system either. I wanna play Call of Cthulhu dammit! Power fantasies suck, I wanna die easy and solve mysteries.
It's always 5e! Even if you like power fantasy rpgs Pathfinder does virtually everything better than 5e, and if you want something grittier or more lethal there are dozens of other systems out there. Hundreds even! If I have to see another horrible "how do I hack 5e into X setting" when X setting already has 3 rpg lines I fuckin swear...
I like GURPS. Get the, like, two core books and wing it. There're more source books if you want more inspiration. And then if I like a setting, I don't need to buy and learn a new system, and this system is flexible enough I can hack in anything. I feel like an IP might do better to get some license and write their own GURPS sourcebook or something, if Steve Jackson Games allows that...
I love GURPS but one thing is I find the games lack a good sense of progression especially once characters are over the skill 14 hump and succeed 90% of the time. That and while turns only have 1 second with 1 action it can still take 4 or 5 rolls to fully resolve an attack. I'd really like a Fifth edition of GURPS that pushes the play faster and makes more nuance within rolls, rather than having to make more of them.
GURPS is the champ
The weddging 5e into settings that already have perfectly good RPGs is nuts. A different co-worker got invited to play star wars 5e and like...there's a very well established star wars tabletop, play that.
To be fair, both the Fantasy Flight version and the d20 versuon are hot garbage, with the original just being mediocre. If I'm playing Star Wars, it's going to be a Blades in the Dark adaptation or similar. Star Wars is made for this sort of push-your-luck-with-consequences story forward play
My group really liked the Genesys FFG Star Wars game. Talent trees were very cool. Equipment and mods felt great. Only vehicle system and combat I've actually liked after getting a feeling for it.
The nerds i used to hang out with likes the fantasy flight version but I'm also certain they homebrewed it to hell and back, hippie math phds that played poker instead of having a job
The nice thing about the FFG system, in my experience anyway, is that you don't really need to homebrew much since the narrative dice system encourages players to improvise really creative situations. It can create a fun back & forth even for people who aren't very well versed in TTRPGs.
Never played it buy that does seem good for the setting.
It's got its merits, but it's a terrible fit for star wars. It locks you into weird class trees that mostly don't fit thematically into the sort of thing you see in star wars media, the ship combat is no fun at all, and the jedi stuff doesnt get at the story of being a jedi.
Like what does every force.user struggle with? The inner confloct between good and evil, with evil being tempting in its sheer power. FFGSW doesn't really capture that. The BITD mechanic of being able to bump a failure up to a success reflects that perfectly. You may face an unwinnable fight for serious personal stakes, but you have a win button right there. You can save your girlfriend's life easily, but you might lose a piece of yourself, and next time, you may find this devil's bargain yet easier with the promise of greater and greater results.
That's the sort of dramatic conflict I expect from SW in regards to the force.
Normies are free of such worries, but their stories aren't about just getting more powerful. Han Solo's story isnt about gaining ranks in Scoundrel. Cassian Andor comes into the rebellion with a skillset already suitable to the tasks he's facing. Han's story is to discover he cares about people beyond himself. Andor learns he can't run away from his opressors or his community. Star Wars isn't a power fantasy. It's a show about facing your demons. I don't want to climb a skill tree, I want to learn life lessons and help shape the galaxy
I tend to agree the weakest parts are the force & vehicular combat, but I gotta say I haven't had any real issues with the specialization trees. The fact that you can easily mix & match abilities between them prevents the feeling of being locked into a tree IMO.
Isn't this exactly how the force power rolls work? You can accept a failed force power roll if you choose not to use the dark side, but the option to use the points is almost always there which will lower your morality score. Plus, since light side & dark side have the same number of pips on the force die with DS pips spread over more faces, using DS points is almost always an "easier" way to accomplish your goal since the dice will come up DS more often. Eventually, you are able to use the DS points with no "detriment" but only after crossing a certain low morality threshold which has its own gameplay and narrative implications - the path does lead to easier power as one continues to use the dark side. Some powers & abilities are locked to dark side or generate negative morality points on their own, and those tend to be the absolute most powerful.
That being said, I've mostly run it for parties of scummy villains or rebel special agents - the force & morality systems don't tend to factor in much. Maybe it's just a difference in GM & player philosophy but I've never felt boxed in by the system mechanics and we've had tons of incredibly different characters at the table.
edit: as for the shipbuilding, I figure that stuff, the specific character of the vessels, probably shouldn't be the purview of strict game mechanics; I created ships that were part of the party "family" by working with my players, adding narrative details and quirks to the ships themselves. I've done this sort of thing across a number of systems (sailing ships in pathfinder, carriers in lancer etc.) and maybe aside from a suggestion from the rulebook I think this really depends on the creativity and fun generated between players & GM
And another thing! The shipbuilding is weird and not oriented enough he specialness of a.group's ship. Ships are basically characters in star wars which shape the narrative around the sorts if stories being told. Shipbuilding shpuld tell the GM what sort.of stories the players are after, and should make available some sort of unique traits.
Millenium Falcon: It's well faster and more maneuverable than most ships its size and its really good.at hiding shit. It breaks down at the worst possible times. Those are all story hooks. "It's a corellian so-and-so with this specific engine" is tactical fluff that doesnt fit the melodramatic tone of SW
The ship from Rebels: Has an inobvious mini ship that lets the crew be in two places at once. That's good for the sprt.of storytelling in that show.
The ship.from Andor: Is full of surprises. Is literally a character.in that it has a droid built right into it. Can bust tractor beams easily and apparently fight melee.
Managing systems and modules is star trek shit, but there.it is in FFSW
I love power fantasy, and also fantasy in general, but have little love for 5e. I ran a Werewolf the Forsaken game for my family recently and that was a ton of fun and is about being an almost indestructible shape shifting spirit hunter. I'd love to play something like Exalted Essence, had my eye on Aether Nexus recently also, which is about fantasy battle mecha à la Escaflowne fighting giant demonic bugs
Even scifi power fantasy sounds so interesting, I've been considering Trinity Continuum: Aeon for years to run "psychics exploring space and making first contact with aliens."
There's so much out there, and I'm going to get to run maybe 3-4 campaigns per decade at most, why would I run 5e.
The only fantasy I like is Tolkien and I'm otherwise a bit too much of a mudevsl nerd to not want to know minute details that no DM would consider. I have helped my DM co worker a few times that way, he wanted to do a courtroom drama thing to his party and I helped him establish how a court system might work that was familiar enough for players to work with but closer to an early modern period kinda thing, DnD isn't medieval fantasy it'd early modern period minus guns.
I also really wanna try a star trek rpg but finding the exact right nerds for that is tuff
Artificer has entered the chat
With somehow only like 20 people having guns. There
Campaign idea: an artificer’s guild fights off a group of early capitalists who are industrializing the production of firearms
See, I like games where I can run the same character for ten years and flesh out a J.Sawyer, Joshua Graham-sized binder's worth of unbroken story for said character. Call of Cthulhu chews up way too many sheets for that and I do not have the kind of spiteful focus that Old Man Henderson's writer has to just BS that into existence for someone who could live all of about three days max lmao
That's generally why I try to get players to roll stats and then make a character around those stats for CoC, they're the character you're playing, not a Main Character
...So what, only 'main characters' get to live long enough to build a (personal) story around or smth? I dunno-- games like that are how you get my lowest-effort outputs; 'cause if this character I'm working on isn't even expected to live as long as a mayfly does, I'm not writing heavy backstory or connections for them, I'm not exploring their tics or quirks, I might not even invest myself that much in finding a name that rolls off my tongue-- and that's why I like tabletop games in the first place. I like showcasing my creativity in what I can build for a GM that doesn't look at their games like a toon grinder.
This kind of mindset out of GMs typically gets me to randomize as many 'narrative pieces' of the character as possible, if I'm not totally omitting them; like deadass they are just a table of stat numbers to me at that point. I hate characters that feel like that lmao
CoC isn't a game about character building. Its a horror game.
I'd argue a tabletop roleplaying game that isn't "about character building" is a failure of a roleplaying game honestly; but to each their own ig
It's very popular
Even if Musk destroyed WOTC,DND would be fine and people can just keep home brews and whatever is currently available for eternity. It’s not like most people recommend new DND anyways it’s mostly 3.5 and pathfinder with some saying to use 5.
You're running in the grognard circles if you think it's all pathfinder and 3.5. 5e is the most popular edition of DND ever and the most popular ttrpg ever. I've met so many people who think the entire hobby is just 5e. They've never heard of pathfinder and frequently don't understand why people wouldn't play the newest edition of DND instead of older ones
I would absolutely never suggest someone use 3.5.
If someone absolutely insisted on playing a D&D based RPG I'd suggest 5e for ease of finding a group, 4e if they wanted something where things are basically balanced and all the players and playing the same game, or one of the many good OSR games if they wanted access to a ton of good adventure modules (or wanted decisions to be more logistics based than tactical, but I'm not sure a new player would consider this at all).
3.5 is all the complexity and fiddlyness of 4e but instead of deciding what cool special move you want to use you count up your charge attack damage multipliers and then the wizard just trivializes the whole encounter with one spell anyways.
4e was the best version of DnD and I will die on this hill
4e is one of the best things to come out of D&D because it's the only version of D&D that is honest about what D&D is and was designed with intent to make everyone play on a roughly even playing field, AND to make sure that everyone got basically the same amount of cool stuff to do.
It had a ton of flaws but basically none of them are the things people shit on it for, especially by the end of its lifespan.
EDIT: if someone wanted to play low powered adventures dealing with situations that could kill them if they fuck up, I'd still push them towards like, something OSR, but if they want to play Gandalt, Legolas and Gimli fucking up a bunch of demons or something, 4e absolutely rules. Just wish the feat system/bonuses were less fiddly.
One of us
5th edition is still insanely popular, but I think it's a result of timing and luck. Everyone plays it, but half the reason is because everyone else plays it lol.
When it first came out, I recall hearing "it's everyone's second favorite edition" and that still seems to remain true.
5th is something like 1/2 of all games played on Roll20. I'd bet it's that proportion or more in person, if people could even quantify that. DnD 5th is so big, it's almost like TTRPGs as a genre should be split off lol - like theres TTRPGs and then DnD 5th ed. Between DnD 5th, Pathfinder 1 and 2, Call of Cthulhu to some extent, everything else (including previous editions of dnd) are fighting for scraps
Damn whats the story with gygax
Context uh... You know, I'm just gonna spoiler tag the whole thing:
CW: violence against prisoners, racism against indigenous people, genocide
spoiler
Context here is someone explained that in their game, a dwarf killed a paladin's horse in retaliation for the paladin killing his prisoner (the one surviving member of a group they'd just fought) after interrogation because the paladin deemed that keeping the prisoner alive wasn't expedient.
Now it's generally disturbing in a "Jack Bauer fan" way to say that murdering POWs is fine, like, it's a war crime. But the bolded part is VERY concerning. Another poster pointed out that the guy responsible for that quote was a genocidal murderer who was explaining why he felt compelled to kill native children.
Gygax claimed that the quote was much older than that guy but if you Google the quote he's all that comes up. This is a "the swastika is actually an ancient Eastern symbol that represents..." argument.
EDIT: this is what Chivington, the guy Gygax was quoting, is known for. The quotes are chilling:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_Creek_massacre
There's a few things, this article covers sexism specifically, the quotes directly from Gygax himself are all you need to prove he was a chud in his day.
Is this an "I'm old" thing? Card packs are the OG loot boxes lol. Its like, circular logic for me.
No, I'm old too, loot boxes are absolutely the digital version of card packs and not the other way around, but loot boxes have a bad reputation in a way that card packs don't, and should. I just wanted to make the similarity clear.
Didn't mean to imply that loot boxes predate CCGs.
Lol its all good. I was just imaging someone in their 20s writing that and suddenly I'm like this while reading it:
Yes, lootboxes were clearly inspired by shit like booster packs. In general, a lot of the lootbox microtransactions rot can be traced back to Magic. And game devs absolutely were trying to see how they could bring that form of monetization. There's an early design doc of Diablo 1 when it wasn't even called Diablo yet about them thinking of some hair-brained scheme where they would sell in-game items through floppies or CDs that you had to buy at a physical store except the items were completely random. So basically game devs working on a game that came out in 1997 were already trying to come up with lootboxes, and I think they even cited MtG as an inspiration.
This is how deep the rot is.
The art in MtG is increasingly obviously AI generated. When half your game appeal is pretty pictures and those go away, why am I wasting time on you?
This, the transition is noticeable when comparing 90s to 2010s art to now with more and more out there shot compositions that do not at all feel like they were made by an actual human being.