Quote from: estar;967884Hey look something we can agree on!

I'd agree with letting things go as soon as the losing side agrees the things they did wrong Actually Happened.

Quote from: estar;967899Tying this back to what Pundit is contending. What impact they had on the growth and content of the OSR i.e people, playing, publishing, and promoting classic edition of D&D?

Everyone on the very well-researched list by Voros served to retard the OSR's maturation into an actual fucking design movement and not a nostalgic movement of Gygax Worship and Purity-Seeking.

Quote from: S'mon;967919Is he really 'far-right' BTW, or just a right-libertarian Castalia House type? As far as I can see there is a lot of clear blue water between Varg Vikernes and what I see on http://www.castaliahouse.com/ (I see he's the top post on their blog today) - Are you just using 'far right' to mean these anti-SJW types, which would seem to pretty much cover RPGPundit too? Or is he a National Socialist racial purity type?

"Far Right" is a useless term at this point. He is, like most of Castalia House, a New-Right non-religious Socio-Conservative who happens to believe in Free Speech (at least, in terms of his track record thus far, while it is unclear whether he would continue to believe so if he and his friends were the ones in power).

Jeffro is absolutely not a Neo-nazi as far as I've ever seen.

He spends way too much time talking about degenerate art or the importance of traditional male/female roles, for me to really feel like I could call him a Libertarian.

Quote from: CRKrueger;968010Well, one thing I think people need to get a grip on is that identifying elements of Appendix N fiction as the source of certain D&D assumptions is NOT...
1. Declaring these texts to be the only influence.
2. Declaring that playing a certain way is Right or Wrong.
3. Worshipping those texts or Gary Gygax in any way, shape or form.
4. Saying that if you've never read them, you can't possibly understand D&D.

I'm not saying Jmal, Jeffro or whoever else didn't say these things.  I'm saying that looking up an author's influences to see to what extent they influenced their works is hardly rare, in fact it's pretty standard...except if it's Gygax and Appendix N, in which case you're automatically this obsessed One True Wayist.

Gimme a fucking break.

But that's the point: it was never meant to be anything but a recommended reading list. In terms of gameability, it was probably the LEAST IMPORTANT (certainly one of the  least) of all the appendices in the DMG.

These assholes turned it into the Dead Sea Scrolls and demanded everyone listen to their retarded ideas about what this means about how we have to play. EVEN THOSE OF US WHO (UNLIKE JMAL) WERE ACTUALLY FUCKING THERE. We were told, some of us who had actually been Old-School gamers, that we "weren't REAL Old School Gamers" because we weren't doing it the way Jmal said Appendix N said we had to do it.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;968372Okay, seriously, does anybody -- not just here, but anybody anywhere over the age of 14 -- actually think that Appendix N was anything other than "some of Gary's favorite fantasyish books"?

Yes. I've spoken to several of the OSR-taliban types who have insisted it was a precise and carefully crafted list that was intended for every gamer to understand the secret details of the OSR.  It wasn't just "books Gygax liked", they insist, but rather every single book on the list is there for an instructive reason, and any book absent from that list has nothing whatsoever to reveal about D&D.


So, you know, morons.

Quote from: Dumarest;968540Gary Gygax made a game that has been a lot of fun for a lot of people for 43+ years now. I'm not sure what else people are hoping to discover by parsing phrases with a fine-tooth comb.

Their own sense of self-importance.

Quote from: RPGPundit;970428Appendix N is currently literally being used by radical sociocon-reactionary elements of the anti-SJW Right to make an elaborate argument that all Sci-fi and Fantasy written after 1960 is Stupid and Degenerate.

Whereas moderates put the cut-off ca 1980. Maybe sometime in the '80s for a few he's-not-dead-yet classic authors.

You must admit something pretty appalling has happened to literary sf, certainly since 1990 or so.

Quote from: RPGPundit;970433He spends way too much time talking about degenerate art or the importance of traditional male/female roles, for me to really feel like I could call him a Libertarian.

Well Lauren Southern called herself a "Libertarian Nationalist" when Rubin asked her to name her ideology. She had a recent video on the importance of gender roles. That seems to fit a lot of these people (and me to some extent). The Alt-Right call them the Alt-Lite. They're clearly distinct from Bill Maher style Left-Libertarians. You seem to be in the middle, supporting Trump but generally closer to Maher.

Quote from: RPGPundit;970426Yes, it did that for a TON OF PEOPLE who would otherwise have been natural allies of the OSR.

  In fairness,
  1) No one with my Hickmanist sympathies was ever going to be a natural ally of the OSR,
   2) If you had been my first encounter, especially around 2014, I probably would have been even more alienated, not only from the OSR, but from D&D in general. Even as it was, I stated several times that your involvement and enthusiasm about 5E were points against it for me.

Quote from: S'mon;970448Whereas moderates put the cut-off ca 1980. Maybe sometime in the '80s for a few he's-not-dead-yet classic authors.

You must admit something pretty appalling has happened to literary sf, certainly since 1990 or so.

Robert Heinlein published his strange tale of how a man came back from Mars in order to start a nudist scientologist orgy cult in 1961...so...

Quote from: RPGPundit;970441Yes. I've spoken to several of the OSR-taliban types who have insisted it was a precise and carefully crafted list that was intended for every gamer to understand the secret details of the OSR.  It wasn't just "books Gygax liked", they insist, but rather every single book on the list is there for an instructive reason, and any book absent from that list has nothing whatsoever to reveal about D&D.

Jesus wept.

Quote from: RPGPundit;970441So, you know, morons.

Bonus points for Blazing Saddles reference.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;970473Robert Heinlein published his strange tale of how a man came back from Mars in order to start a nudist scientologist orgy cult in 1961...so...

I'm sure Castalia are fine with that.

Heinlein was actually one of those not-yet-dead-in-84 authors I was thinking about, I recall a book by him (Friday, I think) being panned in White Dwarf around then. Also Arthur C Clarke, who turned out to be a bit of a homosexual paedophile, but did very little to push that in his fiction.

Quote from: S'mon;970477I'm sure Castalia are fine with that.

   Depends on who you talk to. John C. Wright, one of their headliners, has had some less than laudatory things to say about Heinlein, even in his pre-conversion days.

Quote from: Krimson;969890I went to Catholic School in the 80s, and we certainly were not allowed to play D&D at school. So we played Marvel Superheroes. It's funny because the group I ended up playing with for 30 years came about when they had people from the local Boy's and Girls club come to the school and tell us about D&D night. So yeah, D&D in Catholic School bad. Inviting people from outside the school to tell us about D&D was somehow okay.

Quote from: Dumarest;969897I also went to Catholic school in the early 80s and nobody cared a whit whether we played D&D or not. I'm always curious about where this "Satanic Panic" happened, as it never seemed to be anywhere I was. Was it a rural thing?

Not in the least was it only rural. My mother would have been living in Milwaukee (yes that city from happy days) during the 80s and she sure as shit bought that crap till I set her straight.

Quote from: S'mon;970448Whereas moderates put the cut-off ca 1980. Maybe sometime in the '80s for a few he's-not-dead-yet classic authors.

You must admit something pretty appalling has happened to literary sf, certainly since 1990 or so.

Personally I find that the whole "new sci-fi is bad" shtick to be over blown drivel. After all the idea that "all sci fi must be deeps"(exaggerated for effect) is crap its completely contrary to the idea of genre fiction after all lets be honest Alice in wonder land, The princess and the goblin, red wall, and the lord of the rings  are all fantasy but vastly different forms and styles to that end I'd say sci-fi is the same.
That also means while some story's are about deeper human, psychological, moral and social issues some aren't some are simply entertainment for enjoyment and shouldn't be taken as any more nor should they be magically called "bad sci-fi"(again exaggerated) simply because they don't fit someone's predigested notion of what science fiction should or should not be.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;970473Robert Heinlein published his strange tale of how a man came back from Mars in order to start a nudist scientologist orgy cult in 1961...so...

Mind if I ask what the hell the name of this book is as I am unfamiliar with it.

Stranger in a Strange Land. Great premise, mediocre book. Like Starship Troopers it had a huge cult following, particularly with the hippies in the 60s/70s. I much prefer Heinlein's novellas and juveniles: The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag, Universe, By His Bootstraps, Red Planet, Time for the Stars, Farmer in the Sky and Starman Jones are all excellent (you almost can't go wrong with any of his juvenile novels).