Post #3005407

You may not want to hear this, but I'll say it again anyway: The primary motivation for AD&D was that Gary Gygax thought Dave Arneson deserved no more money for the game he invented. A game that, admittedly, Gary Gygax much improved; so much so that he's quite deservedly thought of as a co-creator of D&D. Note that it doesn't matter (much) that both of these people were different variants of "endearing assholes" to use a technical term. They had beef, and they each went on to write more RPGs, presumably to outdo D&D. Gary had better instincts for naming mind you, no doubt helped by TSR owning the D&D trademarks. "But Peter, you were not there, how do you know for sure?" Well, nobody "knows for sure" anymore these days (despite some people claiming otherwise), but the AD&D books provide AMPLE evidence with all the COMPLETELY BOGUS CHANGES that were put in JUST to make AD&D "different" from (O)D&D. For example, nobody in their right mind replaces perfectly fine die rolls (d4, 2d6, etc.) with percentile dice (and a table) UNLESS they want to be able to say, in court maybe, "Well just look, it's a different die roll! These two things are not the same!" like an overconfident pissed-off teenage nerd monster. Careful now: I am not saying AD&D is not a fun game. I am not saying AD&D is a worse game than D&D or AiF or whatever. I am talking about the motivation behind AD&D. And it was certainly not "tournament play," not by a long shot. #hottake #adnd #dnd #aif