Lack of Fully Developed Worlds

[Super Squirrel]

I'm going to take a stab at something I think doesn't help the Hero System and its popularity. I'm going to do this, because I think if it is agreed that this is a problem that doesn't help Hero System, then I think we have a possible solution. But I'm going to guage what others think on the matter before addressing solutions.

 

Hero System is a complex system. For a GM to design games, it requires time. This is more time than your average game system. This can be viewed as a turn off to many game masters and will put them towards systems like Mutants and Masterminds which have quicker prep time. In most gaming circles I've been in anyway, you are lucky if all of the players have a core rules book. It is the GM that owns the bulk of the books.

 

Now bare in mind that "Fully Developed Worlds" is a bit misleading. A game world is never fully developed nor should it be fully developed as it hinders a GM's ability to stretch. Fully Developed Worlds, I mean worlds developed enough that a GM can pull from available wealth of resources to simplify the game process. This simplification needs to be higher in systems that take longer design. A GM's job, after all, is to prepare the game for the players and not put a heavy burdon on the GM.

 

Further complicating Hero System is that anything is possible. You can have a Pulp Hero Game, a Star Hero Game, you can have a Cyberpunk, and so on. If you look at the Hero System lineup, it gives them a lot of product potential but makes it difficult to lock on to a setting and "develop it to all hell" which is the primary advantage of systems that are simpler in prep-time to begin with.

 

Compare this to other game systems:

WotC: I'm not going to address D&D 3rd Edition as a d20 system. I'm discussing specifically the world systems and core books by WotC. First, game preperation is relatively easy for a GM. Depending on how in depth they wish to go with an individual session, it can take a couple of minutes to hours. You can grab the Monsters Manual flip to a page, pull a monster's stats and copy it down. If you want to build an NPC it takes a bit longer but you can do it. It leaves more time to fun fillers like maps, miniatures and so on. Furthermore, the core WotC lineup is fantasy base. You have two major WotC campaign settings to pick from. You have Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms. Each book has an assortment of supplement books.

 

WW: White Wolf has another unique simple approach. Game design is fairly simple though from what I understand you do spend more time than you would with a WotC game. The campaign setting is unique approached though. The campaign setting is Earth. The approach is stealth. You aren't supposed to expose yourself to the real world so that there is no public acknowledgement of their existance. Also, as it is the real world, game design is fairly simple. Every major city is presumed to have a Prince. As such, each city has someone in charge of making sure things runs smoothly in the shadows. You can pick a city, get basic city information from some web searches, design the Prince and some major NPCs and be good to go on an entire campaign in no time.

 

Hero System can be anything, anywhere, anyworld. Building things takes longer. This means you have two choices, you can go with one of the existing settings (limit 1 per genre from the company) or you can devote a lot of time to game design to make your own world. Also, because of the broad scope of Hero System, they can't devote the number of resources as I'm sure they would like to on a genre. Further, unlike the real world setting of Vampire, the locals are more public. You don't have a system where you know that every city has a superhero team and if they do, you don't have a simple system for who it is. And it is a lot harder to create it on the fly as well.

 

It isn't that bad with Hero System but I kind of feel it can't help in the long run. Many people like things simple and time is a luxury these days for people. It is at least my opinion, that one of the biggest drawbacks to the Hero System is intrinsic to advantages the system offers. By giving players the world, you take away a set, well defined, and easy to work with campaign world.

 

Does this make sense to people? Any thoughts or reactions on what I am getting at?

[Fitz]

Re: Lack of Fully Developed Worlds

 

I would agree to the extent that support material for the GM -- I'm thinking of the Bestiary and MMM specifically, but it also applies to the FH Grimoire and others -- doesn't include useful adventure design features that other systems do. For example, if I'm planning a sea-borne adventure for a fantasy campaign, there's no centralized location that I can go to to find out what critters from the Bestiary or MMM would be appropriate for sea encounters. Or arctic encounters, or forests, and so forth.

 

There's a common idea put forward that the GM should select his or her encounters with forethought, and I agree with that to a certain extent*, but I do think that it's expecting too much of GMs (especially newbie GMs who should be given as much comfort and support as possible) to have to know the resource material forward and backward just to slap together a more or less coherent evening's gaming.

 

*I actually quite like random encounter tables, but that's because I like really weird things happening in my games.

[CourtFool]

Support Material

 

I will agree with your assessment but what, exactly, do you propose that Hero Games do?

 

Hero Games has released Champions Universe, Turakian Age, The Valdorian Age and Terran Empire. I will grant you that none of these ‘world’ books have received as extensive support as say Forgotten Realms. Champions at least has received as much as Eberron (again comparing to the big bad).

 

Hero Games could pump more time into one of the worlds, but they would alienate those who are not interested in that particular world. They could hire more staff to keep production on schedule and add focus to one of the worlds but I doubt that would be profitable enough for them. The more you focus on any one world the narrower the interest becomes.

 

I would love to see a new Turakian Age supplement every month but the bottom line is, it would hurt Hero Game’s bottom line.

[nexus]

Re: Lack of Fully Developed Worlds

 

There's also the sad fact that, for all the cries "worlds" it seems like no one likes the worlds Hero has developed. Their considered bland and generic among other things. IIRC, allot of the setting books have been relative failures compared to the genre books and such (I expect this thread to turn into a series of rants about how horrible and unessecary the genre books are within a few posts). Maybe DOJ is playing to its strengths, I dunno.

 

Personally, I don't buy games for "worlds" and setting material. I rarely use any setting unaltered or the settings I would use don't get sourcebooks. I like books like CKC, the grimore, etc, based on a particular setting but really useful anywhere more than I would like things like "The Complete Book of Hobgoblins" or "Bugtussle By Night".

 

The choices seem to be DOJ gives up the "generic" nature of Hero and starts focusing on a house setting, leaving the generic system market to Unisystem, Gurps and a couple of others to give everyone the "sports car" they crave or keep doing what they're doing. Which is better really depends on your preference for gaming material.

 

Overall, I agree in large part with Super Squirrel's asesment, I just don't see much of a way around it without some fairly drastic changes.

[MitchellS]

Re: Lack of Fully Developed Worlds

 

I don't believe it's the lack of fully developed worlds that keeps players from buying into the Hero System. The Freedom City universe is only two books [Freedom City and Foes of Freedom] but gamers flock to M&M. There are several factors involved:

 

1- Game system complexity:

Hero Games had the opportunity to make the game simpler and easier to understand. They chose to make the game wordy and rules-heavy. Other games are just as wordy and rules-heavy but they hide that fact within multiple books. 5Er scares fans because they believe they need to master it all.

 

2- Book presentation:

Hero books look like school text books rather then gaming books, and now Hero's chosen "simplistic style" is beginning to look amateurish in presentation with the poor art and layout. Games are supposed to be about fun and imaginative stimulation. They are not supposed to be text books.

 

3- Generic directioning:

No game can serve 10 masters. The more generic you make a system the more individual genre flavor it loses. The simple fact is a superhero game should have a different feel then a fantasy game. In Hero they all have the same feel.

 

4- Lack of world support:

SS covered this pretty well. What good is having 5+ worlds/genres if they aren't going to be properly supported? Most of my Hero gaming life has been about converting other products to Hero. That has grown old.

[OddHat]

Re: Lack of Fully Developed Worlds

 

I've got a mixed bag of agreements and disagreements here.

 

If you're running a Supers game, Hero is well supported. We have many enemies books, gadgets, and locations.

 

If you're running a Fantasy game, Hero is less well supported, but the material is still out there. The same goes for Sci-Fi.

 

It's in the ability of settings to capture the players' imagination that Hero starts to break down. The art is generally mediocre (with rare exceptions). Hero doesn't have a Bradstreet to bring people to the products on the quality of the art alone. The settings themselves are intentionally generic; the CU is an uneven pastiche of Marvel's Bronze Age with a few Silver and Iron Age bits thrown in, and its the best developped of the world settings. I can think of a half-dozen or more game boolss that I came back to many times for the pure pleasure of reading (Nightlife, Aberrant, Godlike, Shadowrun, GURPS Voodoo, GURPS Black Ops, Paranoia, more). I've purchased more books from those companies, and I've built campaigns in those worlds.

 

On the other hand, it doesn't do much good to say "Come up with something new and brilliant". GOO had great art and high production values in many of their games, and they're down to a one man opperation now. Stellar Games produced funny, inovative game books, and they've been gone for years.

 

From a personal guess pov, I'd say that Hero would do better breaking the core rules down into a few Sidekick sized books of increasing complxity, each with the best art they can afford. Follow that with a series of setting books that are as tightly focussed as possible. It's the GURPS model, and it has produced some great game-books.

 

OTOH, fans would just complain about that as well.

[teh bunneh]

Re: Lack of Fully Developed Worlds

 

Here's what I'd like to think about more: If lack of fully developed worlds is a problem, how can DOJ (as a company) and/or we (as fans) fix the problem?

 

(I'd prefer to work on solving problems rather than whinging about them, myself).

 

We can beg and plead DOJ to start churning out worldbooks/Ecology of the X-Monster books, but I seriously doubt that fits into their business model. So that leaves it up to the fans.

 

I doubt anyone wants to buy a liscence from DOJ to try to create published supplements, so anything we do will have to be unofficial. But that doesn't mean we can't get a blessing from the Powers That Be to create official-unofficial things (like what appears in Digital Hero -- it's not official, but it's official enough).

 

Do we create a "Wikipedia" style website where various contributers can develop Ambruthel/CU/Terran Empire (create a web-based sourcebook (or sourcebooks) so to speak)?

 

Do we use the web to create a Hero-specific but non-generic shared universe for one or more genres?

 

It's all well and good to complain, but I'd like to see people put their effort where their mouth is.

 

Bill.

[teh bunneh]

Re: Lack of Fully Developed Worlds

 

Do we use the web to create a Hero-specific but non-generic shared universe for one or more genres?

 

Here's what I can offer to put on the table:

 

I've got a fully fleshed out Fantasy Hero universe I'd be willing to stick out in the public domain, to create a non-generic, semi-official Hero World.

 

I've written a few DH articles (which ain't much, but at least you can see how me am good to make writing yes).

 

I lack web skills to any degree. I'm no artist (though I can paint miniatures pretty well, and I've got a fair degree of photoshop skills). I have nearly 10 years of experience as a professional editor, and about half that many years doing layout/page design. I've got access to FrameMaker and Publisher, as well as the full version of Acrobat.

 

So, who's good at doing web-stuff, who's good at doing art, and (most importantly), who's willing to volunteer?

 

Bill.

[Killer Shrike]

Re: Lack of Fully Developed Worlds

 

Ill push the HERO centric view to cover the other side of the coin.

 

Many other games systems need a somewhat interesting, well packaged, and well developed setting as a hook because their rules basically suck and they are catering to a least common denominator of players that lack sufficient imagination and/or motivation to do anything for themselves.

 

One of the reasons I dont play games like that is because I dont think the creators of those games are any more imaginative than I am, I dont want to be straight jacketed by their arbitrary decisions about what the setting and rules are like, and I dont want to deal with a player base drawn from the ranks of the lazy and/or unimaginative.

 

Fortunately there are still a few games out there that are framework oriented rather than setting oriented that give me the freedom to do what I want to do, rather than what someone else thinks I should do. Of them, I prefer the HERO System and I'm generally happy with the balance struck between conceptual books and specific detail books.

[Eosin]

Re: Lack of Fully Developed Worlds

 

I think the real question is can Hero Gamers support a fully realized, fully illustrated setting? A setting cannot be a money sink for a company.

[BlackSword]

Re: Lack of Fully Developed Worlds

 

I'll start of by saying some DoJ books are my most referenced books on my shelves, almost all the others have been very helpful and I enjoy them. CKC and USPD are probably two of the best books for Champions. I enjoy not only the write-ups of the villains, but adding the plot seeds was great.

 

(I'd prefer to work on solving problems rather than whinging about them, myself).

 

It's all well and good to complain, but I'd like to see people put their effort where their mouth is.

Well, the first part is having to define the problem. So it may seem like whining, but if everyone sees a different problem than there is no way to go towards a solution.

 

If we want to do a fan solution, that will require some planning and likely a core group of fans to help organize and track it. I would recommend a small cabal, as that way when life issues interfere for a person, then others can help pick up the slack.

 

Something I would not mind seeing, and would even help contribute to would be a shared world. From a thread way back in '03:

http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6651

 

I don't know how to make it a not-official, official world. It would be nice to see maps, NPCs, information done in short pdfs. That way someone can use a web page as a reference, but also download smaller documents to reference in game. The other nice thing is that making it fairly top level, its easy to drop a campaign into it.

 

Even looking through the other threads while searching for this one, there have been numerous threads on villains, NPCs and characters. It would be great if some of those were put into a world and easily available.

[Guest Black Lotus]

Re: Lack of Fully Developed Worlds

 

Eosin has a point.

 

I love HERO because I can create a totally unique setting of my own design, and make all the items, vehicles, powers, creatures, etcetera. I believe my approach to HERO -- i.e., the "Gamer's Toolkit" -- is a substantial subsection of HERO gamers. I purchase supplements such as Ultimate Martial Artist, Equipment Guide, Star HERO, and the like -- but I haven't, and probably never will, use HERO to run a pre-made campaign setting (Champions, Dark Champions, etcetera).

 

HERO does have some fully realized settings -- Hudson City, the basic Champions universe, etcetera. Basically, HERO only makes fully-realized settings for the Supers genre, in much the same way that d20 primarily only makes settings for the Fantasy genre (I know they do others, such as Modern and Star Wars, but you see what I mean).

[ghost-angel]

Re: Lack of Fully Developed Worlds

 

First my stance is that i completely agree with KillerShrike here.

 

I like Hero specifically because the genre books give me ideas can fuel my fire. Second the detailed books aren't attached to anything in particular meaning they have a certain degree of modularity to them. I can take an idea in an Ultimate book and with a few tweaks and a SFX change adapt it to any genre really.

 

I look at it this way Hero is not a Role Playing Game. Hero is a toolbox that lets you make a Role Playing Game.

 

That's why the book say "The ultimate gamer's toolkit" on it, because you make the Game, not just a bunch of character to essentially play in someone elses game (*cough*forgottenrealms*cough*).

[BlackSword]

Re: Lack of Fully Developed Worlds

 

I would say that Hero developing a fleshed out world does not force you to play in it, or ruin your ability to build your own world. Even D&D core book only makes the assumption that the characters will be in a High Magic world, but does not define the world. In one groups d20 game we are in a homebrew world, but the GM took information from other sources to ease his burden in creating the world.

 

On the other hand, to bring more new players into the game system, I think a fleshed out world with more details would be a great benefit.

[Guest Black Lotus]

Re: Lack of Fully Developed Worlds

 

[N]ot just a bunch of character to essentially play in someone elses game (*cough*forgottenrealms*cough*).

 

Bwahahahahaha, yeah. Forgotten Realms is the campaign setting that the creators of Dungeons and Dragons and TSR actually play in (and created) themselves, I believe. Better to create something new and make it your own. True, your average guy will never be able to make a profit from their own setting... but roleplaying isn't about profits for me, anyway.

[teh bunneh]

Re: Lack of Fully Developed Worlds

 

One of the reasons I dont play games like that is because I dont think the creators of those games are any more imaginative than I am' date=' I dont want to be straight jacketed by their arbitrary decisions about what the setting and rules are like, and I dont want to deal with a player base drawn from the ranks of the lazy and/or unimaginative.[/quote']

 

100% in agreement. I have never used pre-packaged worlds. But the complaint comes up often enough that it may be something worth pursuing -- at the very least, to prove that it isn't necessary.

 

Well' date=' the first part is having to define the problem. So it may seem like whining, but if everyone sees a different problem than there is no way to go towards a solution. [/quote']

 

You've got a point there.

 

If we want to do a fan solution, that will require some planning and likely a core group of fans to help organize and track it. I would recommend a small cabal, as that way when life issues interfere for a person, then others can help pick up the slack.

 

Something I would not mind seeing, and would even help contribute to would be a shared world. From a thread way back in '03:

http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6651

 

I don't know how to make it a not-official, official world. It would be nice to see maps, NPCs, information done in short pdfs. That way someone can use a web page as a reference, but also download smaller documents to reference in game. The other nice thing is that making it fairly top level, its easy to drop a campaign into it.

 

Even looking through the other threads while searching for this one, there have been numerous threads on villains, NPCs and characters. It would be great if some of those were put into a world and easily available.

 

Yes, a shared world is what I was thinking. The more I think about this, the more I think it would be a good idea to try to make it as "official" as possible (if we were to do it). Get permission from Steve, Darren, et al. Create a plan ahead of time. Assign rolls for each person (webmaster, editor, artist, mapmaker, etc).

 

At the very least, we'll prove that Hero fans don't need someone else to build a world for them. At middle level, we'll have some neat cities, NPCs, and monsters/villains. At best, we'll have a cool shared world that we can point to when people ask for a fully fleshed-out, official Hero world.

 

I'll volunteer an hour or two per week. Anyone else?

 

Bill.

[Susano]

Re: Lack of Fully Developed Worlds

 

I have been (very slowly) working on a 5th Edition of KAZEI 5. But my ability to do things publicly are limited until after HERO produces (I hope) some sort of CYBER HERO supplement. And that's not until 2007, if I'm lucky.

[Lord Liaden]

Re: Lack of Fully Developed Worlds

 

I know that there will be people who'll disagree with the points I'm about to raise, and may have very reasonable and well-reasoned rebuttals to them; but since the purpose of this thread is to gauge support for the topic, I'll just offer my perspective.

 

One thing about developing a "fully fleshed-out world" is, just because you put the effort into it doesn't mean the public is going to jump on its bandwagon. For Hero, Terran Empire is a very good example. Listening to the way that the DOJ folks talked about it before and since its release, they didn't think they were putting out a "bland vanilla" setting. They believed they had something really cool and exciting and fun. They had a sizeable series of support books planned for the line. But fans didn't embrace it the way they hoped, and DOJ had to cut back support for purely economic reasons.

 

I see WotC and Forgotten Realms mentioned several times here as an example of a fully-supported setting. WotC is devoting a lot of energy to this setting, and to Greyhawk to a lesser extent. Keep in mind, though, that these are worlds that have proven to have staying power. The history of the D&D game worlds is littered with interesting, original examples that were pushed hard and given slick, solid support, but fell by the wayside. Mystara, gone. Al-Qadim, gone. Spelljammer, gone. Ravenloft, gone. Dark Sun, gone. There's no predicting what the buying public will go for, and no-one has a surefire formula for success. I have serious doubts that pouring money into harcover full-color-art game books would interest large numbers of people who wouldn't be interested otherwise.

 

Hero Games does have one setting that clearly has drawn in a significant fanbase - the Champions Universe. It sells well, even without the prettiest artwork and hardcovers. Not surprisingly, DOJ devotes more energy to supporting it than any of their other settings, because it makes the most money for them.

 

I sympathize with people who want to create a fully developed world as a fan effort, but with all due respect, there are already fine examples of this on the Internet. For example, Keith Curtis's Savage Earth, or Mark Doherty's Sengoku and Gothick Empires, are as rich and detailed as many published game settings. That doesn't include all the quality adaptations of worlds for other games that HERO fans have produced.

 

This thread has shown that the HERO fanbase has a significant split between the people who want extensive prepackaged stuff and those who want toolkits that they can create their own settings with; those for whom slick production values matter and those who don't care about them. IMO DOJ is trying hard to provide something for all those groups while not alienating any of them, within the economic realities that they have to deal with. Like any compromise, many people will be left unsatisfied. My own feeling is that DOJ would be well served by putting more resources into consistently slicker art for their books, even if it's just B&W, because I always hear how that matters to many gamers. Otherwise, though, I feel that the company is making the best compromises they can.

[OddHat]

Re: Lack of Fully Developed Worlds

 

This thread has shown that the HERO fanbase has a significant split between the people who want extensive prepackaged stuff and those who want toolkits that they can create their own settings with; those for whom slick production values matter and those who don't care about them.

 

I doubt it's a clean split. I always create my own settings and characters, both because that's why I enjoy gaming and because I've never seen a setting I thought was perfect for the stories I want to tell. Still, higher production values and more interesting settings would help spark my ideas, and would get me to buy more Hero products than I currently do.

 

 

IMO DOJ is trying hard to provide something for all those groups while not alienating any of them, within the economic realities that they have to deal with. Like any compromise, many people will be left unsatisfied. My own feeling is that DOJ would be well served by putting more resources into consistently slicker art for their books, even if it's just B&W, because I always hear how that matters to many gamers.

 

Agreed here.

[Killer Shrike]

Re: Lack of Fully Developed Worlds

 

Bwahahahahaha' date=' yeah. Forgotten Realms is the campaign setting that the creators of Dungeons and Dragons and TSR actually play in (and created) themselves, I believe. Better to create something new and make it your own. True, your average guy will never be able to make a profit from their own setting... but roleplaying isn't about profits for me, anyway. [/quote']

Actually, Greyhawk and Blackmoor were the original settings, created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson respectively. They were developed in the late 60's and early 70's and later expanded on in the early 80's.

 

As the two collaborated on the original version of D&D, a version of Blackmoor was included in the officially published Greyhawk setting as an extention in a kind of vague fashion -- it was somewhere to the north and west.

 

Later when the Greyhawk map was drafted a definite location on the far outskirts of Gary's part of the combined setting was pinned down as the location of Blackmoor. Meanwhile Dave Arneson's version of Blackmoor continued to develop independently. The two Blackmoors don't even look alike, but they share a common origin.

 

Forgotten Realms came much later, in the late 80's, during the Lorraine Williams era of TSR.

 

 

One web search later:

 

Heres an interesting link I found with some good origin info to help bring you up to speed, though keep in mind there are other alternate tellings of it. A lot of it comes down to how much of D&D was really created by Gygax and how much by Arneson. This one seems to be pretty fair in indicating who did what at a high level.

 

http://pc.gamespy.com/articles/538/538848p1.html

 

Check out the various History of D&D articles across the days

 

 

Amusingly I found this quote in the article, which sums up my own opinion of the matter of LotR succinctly:

 

"I'm not a big J.R.R. Tolkien fan," Gygax said, "though I really enjoyed the movies. I pretty much yawned my way through The Lord of the Rings."

[Lord Mhoram]

Re: Lack of Fully Developed Worlds

 

Amusingly I found this quote in the article, which sums up my own opinion of the matter of LotR succinctly:

 

"I'm not a big J.R.R. Tolkien fan," Gygax said, "though I really enjoyed the movies. I pretty much yawned my way through The Lord of the Rings."

 

 

On FR- It was Ed Greenwood's world. He had articles that used his setting in Dragon Magazine dating to way back when, it only became "the official" setting later, but some FR stuff dates back to the early days.

 

On the Gygax quote I say "And this is coming from someone who loves the Conan books, and complained about the original Conan movie because of the color of the main character's hair?"

I've used Gary's opinions of fantasy lit as a guide before - if he loves it I hate it and usually vice versa (Could never finish Conan, and didn't like Vance).

[ghost-angel]

Re: Lack of Fully Developed Worlds

 

Well said Lord Liaden, I happen to agree with what you have had to say regarding what's being done and why.

 

Personally I prefer the fact that Hero is a toolkit I use to make stuff with and not a set of prepackaged worlds that I feel like I'm borrowing. But I am but one segment of the population they sell to. So while my opinion counts it carries no more or less weight than anyone elses.

[ghost-angel]

Re: Lack of Fully Developed Worlds

 

Bwahahahahaha' date=' yeah. Forgotten Realms is the campaign setting that the creators of Dungeons and Dragons and TSR actually play in (and created) themselves, I believe. Better to create something new and make it your own. True, your average guy will never be able to make a profit from their own setting... but roleplaying isn't about profits for me, anyway. [/quote']

 

FR is Ed Greenwood's home game, it's his creation and his world.

[Dr. Anomaly]

Re: Lack of Fully Developed Worlds

 

I'll volunteer an hour or two per week. Anyone else?

Because my depression has really flared up again, I don't feel exactly 'creative', but I suppose an hour or two a week isn't out of the question.

 

And I can certainly offer webhosting for the files. I've got far more storage and bandwidth than I currently have plans for using on my own.

[Killer Shrike]

Re: Lack of Fully Developed Worlds

 

On FR- It was Ed Greenwood's world. He had articles that used his setting in Dragon Magazine dating to way back when' date=' it only became "the official" setting later, but some FR stuff dates back to the early days.[/quote']

Im generally familiar with Ed Greenwood's background as a fan contributor, but the point I was making is that the Forgotten Realms was not the setting of D&D's creators as Black Lotus thought; it wasn't even published until almost a decade after the fact.

 

Forgotten Realms main claim to fame is that it benefited from good timing both in the timeframe it was introduced to the market, and the political infighting/drama at TSR that led to it being published in the first place. And the popularity of that damned Drow ranger in fiction of course.

On the Gygax quote I say "And this is coming from someone who loves the Conan books, and complained about the original Conan movie because of the color of the main character's hair?"

I've used Gary's opinions of fantasy lit as a guide before - if he loves it I hate it and usually vice versa (Could never finish Conan, and didn't like Vance).

I sometimes agree with Gary and I sometimes don't, much as I would with any person. I definitely don't agree with his general ideas on rules design. I just thought that particular quote was amusing because it so closely matches my own opinion (almost to the word), which I'm generally in the minority on among gamers.