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.
It would be really cool if D&D turned into the chud game no cool person plays. I would love that. it would be the one way D&Ds cultural cache could be destroyed in the short term rather then the long term by the ongoing failing and money grubbing of Hasbro.
Because FUCK D&D. Mediocre-ass system with no choices to make and no balance. Play better games. I hate that it is seen as the one and only TTRPG so much, because this garbage should not be in every show under the sun. The only good writers they ever had the core team fucked over and alienated. The only good media out of it in recent years is a computer game whose company the same core team also alienated to the point where they won't be working with them ever again. They also alienated Critical Role, another chief reason D&D got so big. They don't deserve to be on top, not in the slightest, they just got to be top dog in spite of all their blunders because people think D&D is all of TTRPGs. That should stop. That and Elon really needs to burn even more of
hisembezzled tax payer money, it would b funny.Elon Musk hints at buying Hasbro for D&D after announcing AI game studio
Do it, coward. You have the power to finally get this hobby away from D&D.
What does the next generation of TTEPGs even look like as we watch literacy rates tank and attention spans flatline?
I don't even dislike 5e per say, but they've been aggressively stripping it of mathematics and steadily flensing away much of the prose.
No wonder Larian isn't interested in making a BG4. The Forgotten Realms is increasingly living up to its name. Who is still reading anymore?
I mean literacy has been a problem for a while and, when 5e is included, this is a golden age of RPG participation.
Idk what that means.
The portion of the population likely to play an RPG has less likelihood to be affected by the literacy crisis?
GMs who complain that players refuse to read rulebooks are right and GMs are mostly subbing in for player willingness to read?
Idk, I don't think RPGs are gonna die out.
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.
If I have to homebrew, why the fuck am I paying you for anything?
Nice to have a physical copy of the core rules, especially before you could get it all easily via the Internet.
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Gygax was a genocidal racist, as was made quite clear in (probably among other places) some forum posts he made.
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He's probably the reason his son grew up to be weirdo Nazi freak.
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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
- I hope he kills the cash cow that is Magic: the Gathering at the same time. The game is fine but the CCG distribution model is literally physical loot boxes, AKA scratch tickets that can be legally sold to children. This shit should just be illegal but I'll settle for destroyed by mismanagement.
Hopefully I can get a Sephiroth precon first though.
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?
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.
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
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...
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
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 CCG distribution model is literally physical loot boxes
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:
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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.
So...
That is wasn't the paladin's warhorse makes the matter less serious, but only marginally so. the paladin's honor was besmirched by the dwarf, and as the DM I would call that to the attention of the player of the paladin if there was less than great umbrage taken. To allow the incident to pass without punishing the offending dwarf would be a dark stain on the honor of the paladin.
Paladins are not stupid, and in general there is no rule of Lawful Good against killing enemies. The old addage about nits making lice applies. Also, as I have often noted, a paladin can freely dispatch prisoners of Evil alignment that have surrrendered and renounced that alignment in favor of Lawful Good. They are then sent on to their reward before thay can backslide :lol:
Cheers, Gary
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.
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 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.
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
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Gygax is already burning in hell so shrug. Anyway old D&D bad & racist as fuck, new D&D also bad, play pathfinder, genesys, pbta or smth
Please, buy Hasbro, ruin D&D
It hasn't been very good in a long time
BG3 is good because it basically ignores all the shit that makes 5e bad
And even then, they had to set a low level ceiling because once you get past 12th, the rules basically go down into the shit pit because they didn't bother balancing anything past that point
Even the new 5.5e doesn't fix any of this, it's basically them trying to crib the good stuff from Pathfinder 2e
A dude I work with has been running a campaign with his pals for fucking years now and they're still playing the sa.e characters. He has said it's a pain to DM cause they can trivialize anything but really tough combat. Any kinda traps or puzzles they can kinda just use abilities and spells to bypass with no real danger.
Yeah, like, I've had people say I'm nuts for memorizing all the rules for Pathfinder 2e, but at least they managed to figure out some decent balancing along with making a living game world with interesting shit to experience
Also, canonical trans characters, options for playing as a disabled character and my personal favorite,
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I mostly like Call of Cthulhu and wish anyone wanted to play a game where you roll your characters and they for sure can and will eventually die, it's horror. I've got cool stories that I wrote and wanna play too, one is about a house where when inside each window looks out to some different weird dimension until it's open but it's not cause opening makes it go away, the glass from the windows make the weird dimensions visible so invisible monsters can start creeping in any open window and to see them hopefully a character thinks to break a window and look.through a shard of glass.
But... he would also ruin GI Joe
It's a price I'm willing to pay
One detail they got slightly wrong: it’s Mark Kern, not Hern. That’s the same guy Shaun just did a 2 hour video essay on over his “anti-woke” crusades.
I really fell off that game over the past year and never actually went beyond 3.5. (scheduling conflicts and my style of group kept me from 5). From the sounds of it (pinkertons and all), it sounds like there's not much left for him to ruin.
For better or worse 5e is the best selling TTRPG ever and the community is stronger than it ever has been. Sucks if you wanted to play something else, also sucks if you wanted to play for free since everyone is online now and half the GMs charge money.
It kinda stings, really. I wanted a Ravnica campaign setting since the card set was released, but my Magic circle did that without me. My main DnD group is really a bunch of old-heads that like spreadsheets, so 3.5 it is.
