(Note: I liked many games Wick was involved in and I'm hoping the new 7th Sea surprises me pleasantly, but I'm not getting my hopes up after some of the previews.)

http://johnwickpresents.com/updates/the-worst-adventure-of-all-times/

John Wick posted this about a month ago and I just discovered it. It's so revealing and full of eye-opening quotes. It pretty much explains everything about his famously strong gaming opinions.

For instance:

Quote from: WickTHIS IS THE WORST, SHITTIEST, MOST DISGUSTING PIECE OF PIG VOMIT EVER PUBLISHED.  AND EVERY PLAYER AND GM SHOULD KNOW WHY SO SOMETHING LIKE THIS NEVER HAPPENS AGAIN.

Quote from: Wick(While running the module at age 12) When the last character climbed in and was utterly destroyed, I jumped up and laughed at all of them. "YOU'RE ALL DEAD!" I shouted.

They looked at me confused. One of them asked, "What are you talking about?"

I read the text to them. They didn't believe me. I showed the text to them, laughing.

"You guys didn't even make it passed the first corridor!" I said, laughing in their faces.

It was at that point one of my friends—someone I had known for three years—punched me right in the face. Then, he jumped on me. Kicking me. My other friends had to pull him off.

This was the second week in a row we invoked the appearance of parents.

I should say that the next Monday at school was rough. As a geek, I had precious little friends. That Monday, I quickly discovered I had none.

Bashful and lacking any kind of the confidence I would find later in life, I was unable to summon the courage to apologize. I spent the rest of that year without any friends at all. They continued playing games. I spent the rest of the year just reading. Alone.

Quote from: WickMuch later in life, I met the author of that adventure. Gary and I were on a game design panel together. I said something I don't quite remember and he called me a "wanna be community theater actor." I wanted to tell him how his adventure nearly lost me every friend I had when I was twelve. Didn't seem appropriate at the time.

Quote from: WickI dropped my d20 like a mic and left the room. Because I'm a wanna be community theater actor. And that's how we fuckin' roll.

Both are in the wrong here.  Gary for creating this nega dungeon.  Wick for taking great joy in tpk with instant death effects.  Both are prickish.

Quote from: Snowman0147;881718Both are in the wrong here.  Gary for creating this nega dungeon.  Wick for taking great joy in tpk with instant death effects.  Both are prickish.

   Hmm...I'm not sure I'd say Gary was in the wrong so much as there were some problems with the way the hobby was presented and marketed in the early days that contributed to this problem. And Wick was a jerk, but he was also 12 years old. I have very little engagement with Wick's work and have been thoroughly unimpressed by what I've seen of his online persona, so maybe he hasn't grown up much. I am aware that he wrote an article encouraging Champions GMs to exploit every last bit of their PCs' Disadvantages, so he appears to have, at one point, followed in the footsteps of Gygax's most "never give a sucker an even break" aspect. But designers change, like everyone else.

   The problems I see were:

   1. The way that D&D (and especially AD&D) became the 800-lb. gorilla of the hobby;
   2. The tendency to push AD&D at the expense of D&D

   D&D was written by wargamers for wargamers, and AD&D continued that trend. Hence, you get a 1E DMG and certain modules that sound very adversarial and punishing at times. That's perfectly fine for an adult game of "PCs against the dungeon" where the DM is working under the implicit rule of 'be nasty in design, but scrupulously fair in execution'. But Gygax was not the greatest of communicators, and a lot of that message seems to have gotten lost when the game was picked up by a younger audience without the ear for his style or the background to understand the assumptions it contained.

  If there had been a less punishing, high-visibility alternative to D&D, or if the market of the time hadn't seemed to encourage jumping straight from the Red Box into the Gygax hardcovers, things might be different. D&D would be more 'one choice among many' with its own distinctive identity, rather than often being used to be all things to everyone, which seems to be part of the ground for the Edition Wars. And people turned off by D&D might be more inclined to stay with the hobby instead of being embittered by misused AD&D and either abandoning the hobby or acting as though the tool was wholly at fault for its abuse.

  (Give me a time machine for the hobby, and I'd be tempted to send copies of Prince Valiant, d6 Star Wars, Savage Worlds and Champions 4E back to GenCon 1977. I'd also stop off in 1983 and encourage TSR to assign this Hickman fellow and the rest of the "Project Overlord" team to Basic D&D instead of AD&D, tying Ravenloft and Dragonlance to Basic and thus giving that stream of the game strong properties that would probably be better fits for one another.)

Tomb of Horrors was a tournament module, thus showing that old Wick is just as stupid as 12 yo Wick.

He regurgitates this crap every now and then. As he's got his money-grab going on at the moment i suggest he's giving grogs a poke in the hope of threads like this drawing more attention to his ball-shrivellingly uninformed views on gaming in the hope of a few more dollars.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;881723D&D was written by wargamers for wargamers, and AD&D continued that trend. Hence, you get a 1E DMG and certain modules that sound very adversarial and punishing at times. That's perfectly fine for an adult game of "PCs against the dungeon" where the DM is working under the implicit rule of 'be nasty in design, but scrupulously fair in execution'. But Gygax was not the greatest of communicators, and a lot of that message seems to have gotten lost when the game was picked up by a younger audience without the ear for his style or the background to understand the assumptions it contained.

  If there had been a less punishing, high-visibility alternative to D&D, or if the market of the time hadn't seemed to encourage jumping straight from the Red Box into the Gygax hardcovers, things might be different.

Ok, where to begin here...

First off, congratulations to John Wick for having the most successful RPG Kickstarter of all time. Pretty sure this is going to break a million dollars before they are done with this. He doesn't have to worry about the naysayers anymore, because with this success, he'll be able to make his own game exactly the way he wants its, which should be quite unlike worst of the old school modules like, for example, Tomb of Horrors.

I'm really happy that he didn't quit gaming, that he's successful, and that he has a bunch of friends who want to buy, and run his games! I'd call that a win for RPG gaming.


Second, Tomb of Horrors really did suck, A few weeks back I posted my commentary on this over at Enworld starting about right here;

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?476160-Is-TOMB-OF-HORRORS-the-Worst-Adventure-Of-All-Time/page16

It was a good module to show me everything that I didn't want in my own home games. And after playing it, it would be almost 25 years before I would buy another dungeon module for D&D with the exception of Judges Guild stuff. I never bought a game module from TSR primarily because of my own poor experience in ToH.

Also there were lots of high visibility alternatives to D&D for the discerning gamer that were available back then, and much more so, with the OSR now. Back then we played Warlock, the Cal-State D&D variant, Chivalry & Sorcery was very popular as well, and it had Jousting Rules. I played a few games of Tunnels and Trolls as one of the GMs in out group really liked running T&T games. We also played Melee and Wizard from Metagaming, these were the precursor to what everyone these days knows as GURPS. later, when they were released we played advanced Melee and Advanced Wizard as well. We also tried Rolemaster when it came out, and I tried Runequest in 1980, but didn't actually end up running it until buying my own copy from Avalon Hill in 1987 or so...

D&D was better than wargames, because we didn't have to make the games about fighting and war only, we could consider a bunch of other things as well... different qualities of leadership, the effects of magic, different realms and different worlds. I'll post a bit more on this later, as I have an appointment atm.

I think by far the biggest problem with Tomb of Horrors was that it was just thrown out there without much of an explanation of what was. Of course it was obvious to TSR and people who had very closely followed everything TSR had been doing that this was a tournament module!

But most of the audience wouldn't have come to it knowing what being a "tournament module" actually meant - only those who had attended the convention in question or who had read accurate reports of it would had had the faintest idea of how the module was run under actual tournament conditions, and you have to remember that this was before the Internet, when all that information was spread over a range of different sources which you would have to physically acquire, usually for money. Even very invested, enthusiastic gamers at the time would have had to be quite lucky to have read those old con reports.

What ended up happening was, well, more or less what Wick reports: people just ran it as written without consideration in their home games, TPKs happened, people got mad.

It could have really done with a more fleshed-out introduction explaining what purpose it was written for, how the tournament was run, what considerations went into it, and so on and so forth. And it should have had a big fat warning against running it with any PCs that you were especially invested in, because many would die arbitrarily. (It already provided pregens, but it could have done with giving people a lot more encouragement to use the pregens.)

In fact, ideally, the way it should have come out would have been as part of a "tournament kit", with full guidance on running amateur tournaments, designing adventures for tournaments, and so on and with the Tomb as a sample module. That would have been a great little product. Simply putting it out there described as a "tournament module" without much built-in guidance on what that actually meant was a mistake.

Hindsight is 20/20, though, and TSR were having to crank out material fast to feed a hungry market.

Quote from: Snowman0147;881718Both are in the wrong here.  Gary for creating this nega dungeon.  Wick for taking great joy in tpk with instant death effects.  Both are prickish.

As well as his friends, who didn't think to use lots of sheep:D!

I have no idea who John Wick is so there's no opinion or loyalty to him. I agree that his complaints of Tomb of Horrors are stupid for the reasons already given. Yes, it's a tournament module which would seriously disrupt any regular home campaign. He should have known better but being a 12 year old dickhead... Well, this is why 12 year olds shouldn't GM. He deserved to lose all his friends for a year, good for them for dumping his idiot ass.

I've never run ToH, if I did it would strictly be with pre-gen characters or a "This is a dream..." scenario. Really, how difficult is to to write stuff like "You walk by a small, hidden mark on a wall. A 10 ton stone drops on you, take 20d6 damage." Or "You open the chest and a magical gem is activated. Asmodeus and his 10 Councilmen teleport into the room. Roll for initiative."

Crom's fucking hairy nutsack!

So Wick is an insecure whiny little puke who's still snivelling over something that happened to him when he was 12.

He should put some of that million dollars into therapy.

And TOMB OF HORRORS was CLEARLY labelled as a way to kill ultra high level characters, and Gary never made ANY bones about it.

Waah, waah, waah, waah, waah.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;881760Crom's fucking hairy nutsack!

So Wick is an insecure whiny little puke who's still snivelling over something that happened to him when he was 12.

He should put some of that million dollars into therapy.

And TOMB OF HORRORS was CLEARLY labelled as a way to kill ultra high level characters, and Gary never made ANY bones about it.

Waah, waah, waah, waah, waah.

As someone who has never seen said module, nor has any particular desire to see it, how "clearly" is "clearly" in this case? Is it on the cover, in the intro, or what:)?

Regardless, I think that the story of how some players beat ToH with sheep deserves more attention than it's getting;).

I think I first heard about it while Gary was developing it.

It's also worth noting that 14 year old Ernie Gygax romped through the place.  That's right, the module that still has Wick whining decades later got beaten by a 14 year old kid.

Also, notice Wickless has closed comments on that post?  Poor baby must have gotten some heat back.

Quote from: AsenRG;881762As someone who has never seen said module, nor has any particular desire to see it, how "clearly" is "clearly" in this case? Is it on the cover, in the intro, or what:)?

Regardless, I think that the story of how some players beat ToH with sheep deserves more attention than it's getting;).

The only warning in it is that there aren't a lot of monsters so "hack and slay" types won't like it. It says that players who like using their brains will find it to their liking. It also emphasizes that the module teaches brainwork, so playing it will be a valuable experience.

Part of the surprise for me was that Wick - a famously adversarial GM who peppers his books with advice on how to viciously screw with players without outright killing them - would resent a module like this one. So it's ok to torture players by fucking with their heads, their character's heads, their expectations of the game, and their sense of actual freedom and control, but PC death is going too far? :confused:

Our PF GM ran it while back for Halloween. As a one-off with some high-level pre-gens. We didn't get very far at all but it WAS a lot of fun... and my first visit to the infamous place.
I'm wondering if it might make a decent litmus test for new people to see if we want to game with them or not... to see if they throw tantrums or can enjoy it for what it is.

Quote from: AsenRG;881762As someone who has never seen said module, nor has any particular desire to see it, how "clearly" is "clearly" in this case? Is it on the cover, in the intro, or what:)?

Caveat: I don't have the original, just the one in the S1-4 compilation, so the original module might have had more warnings on it. But the one in the compilation talks about using characters from ongoing campaigns in the tomb and doesn't seem to say "by the way, most of the characters who go into the adventure will probably die". It claims that it's an adventure where smart characters will survive where foolish ones won't, though to be honest I'm not sure how true that is - there's a lot of stuff in there where "smart play" corresponds to "guess what Gary Gygax was thinking when he wrote this part", which isn't very helpful to anyone who didn't regularly game with Gary.

It's kind of like the old Deathtrap Dungeon gamebook, which was so sparse on clues that you basically had to guess which way to turn at various points and almost certainly would have to replay the gamebook a lot because of how arbitrary the deaths were.