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.
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,
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.
Love call of Cthulhu and Delta Green. I run DG a lot for my friends. Still would like to be a player sometime.
Never tried it heard of Delta Green
Homie needs to find a way to mechanically reset the toons in ways kin to how BG3 did it; 'cause I’m kind of the same way about my characters-- if I’m with a good table, and the GM’s running an interconnected story through multiple different campaigns, I’m gonna play the same character for as long as I can until death claims them because I love long-term storytelling; but after even three years, without a mechanical reset, you’re just a bull staring down a china shop.
low key traps and puzzles got ruined with the addition of skills to AD&D
To use one example: the first hallway of the Tomb of Horrors. When that module was released, in order to avoid the traps players had to think about what the GM was describing to them and say stuff like, “I hit every tile on the floor with a 10 foot pole, I throw an object into the strange black orb, I cut into the fresco on the wall (and find the door hidden behind it)”, etc etc. You had to probe and prod and explore the dungeon in the theater of the mind, and the GM had to know how the traps worked so that they could adequately respond to player actions.
But if you give that same group of players the skills “trapfinding” and “disable device” then it’s just “I roll a d20” “you find trap number 1” “I roll a d20” “you find secret door number 1” etc etc and it sucks. Especially because trap and secret finding went from something everyone in the group contributes to to something that the rogue does while everyone else watches - it’s no wonder lots of players stop paying attention when it’s not their turn in combat when you design the game like this!