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.
God I hate Musk so much. Gary Gygax was a fucking turbo chud libertarian and he worked to screw Dave Arneson out of his credit and royalties for co-creating D&D, and whitewashing him as some genius game designer (when in fact he sucked quite a bit in ways that people didn't really understand until later) is a discredit to the entire hobby.
DnD originally was a not really playable series of pamphlets vaguely describing a game that many many nerds played their own way based on these vague ideas and wrote to each other and to fanzines where various ways of play were compared and contrasted and sometimes integrated by all. A lot of DIY people were publishing their own fleshed out DnD rulesets and Gary didn't wanna share that potential money, which is why AD&D is so notoriously rules heavy and so many of those rules are poorly thought out or not playtested, a big part of AD&D was to squeeze out people making and potentially selling their own versions. Dude was a shitty guy and a bad game designer as well.
But the art in AD&D was dope. Love that old cheesy fantasy style art, both the hyperrealistic stuff and the goofy monster stuff that looks like is was drawn in they year 800
I agree with that. The only DnD I ever ayed was a heavily homebrewed version of ADnD2 made up by the professional poker playing math PhD hippie nerd who was stranger things kid age and had gradually made an simpler but also more robust overhaul thar played great.
This is true with so many tabletop games. If I have to homebrew, why the fuck am I paying you for anything? I've never played D&D (other RPGs, tho), but I know enough that it's not well made or balanced (even with 5th. Edition). Gygax just compiled a mish-mash of wargames and other fantasy games into a single book. It shows. So many of the original rules of D&D are poorly written, as though they were lifted from another place and jammed together.
Nice to have a physical copy of the core rules, especially before you could get it all easily via the Internet.