Was Gygax a good DM?

[Hazzardevil]

Now, almost everyone that has played a role playing game has either heard horror story's or been in one, fact. And after listening to a podcast where some people started talking about dungeons and dragons with one of the people saying they had been told that Gygax was a terrible DM who would kill players in the most unfair ways possible. So, was Gygax really a bad DM?

[Madara]

Well, I suppose we can't exactly answer from our own experience, but what we do know can give us some hints.

Good:

He was very descriptive and creative, I believe having him as DM would have brought the game to life in many ways.

He was innovative. If there was a concept you wanted to play, he probably would make up new material for it, since he made the game you know.

The original source: You have to wonder. It was before optimization, power gaming, Roll play vs roleplay. So, how was he if such things did come up? There were certainly flaws in the game, did he admit to them and try to fix them, or ignore them?

Bad:

It seems a lot of his GMing was about the worldbuilding, also I think he had DMPCs. Rather than focusing on the players, he may have focused on the NPCs.

His inspiration was obvious in the early editions, and I can imagine the players getting sick of running into hundreds of Bilbos and Gandalfs.

His Adventure Modules are DM vs Players. Seriously intense, and I wouldn't get attached to a character if he was DM.

[Tyndmyr]

I don't mind a worldbuilding focus, or even a certain degree of GM vs players.

However, dude did have an ego(you can sort of tell reading his works from back then), and I've never found a big ego to be a positive trait in a DM.

The DMPCs I wouldn't be a fan of, and I fear that he's to blame for much of the "DM is boss" attitude in roleplaying.

[valadil]

That's hardly a fair question. Richard Pryor was undeniably a good standup comic, but I find him hard to listen to because he's so bland compared to today's standards. But today's standards wouldn't be what they are if he hadn't paved the way. Gygax may have done things that we call mistakes today, but when he did them nobody knew they were mistakes yet.

[Lapak]

It seems a lot of his GMing was about the worldbuilding, also I think he had DMPCs. Rather than focusing on the players, he may have focused on the NPCs.

His inspiration was obvious in the early editions, and I can imagine the players getting sick of running into hundreds of Bilbos and Gandalfs.

Where do you get this from? Most of the named characters that grew into the early editions of the game were PCs (Mordenkainen was Gygax, but as player rather than DM, Melf was one of his kids, Leomund was one of the early players and designers, and so on.

[Tyndmyr]

That's hardly a fair question. Richard Pryor was undeniably a good standup comic, but I find him hard to listen to because he's so bland compared to today's standards. But today's standards wouldn't be what they are if he hadn't paved the way. Gygax may have done things that we call mistakes today, but when he did them nobody knew they were mistakes yet.

This is also very true. Gygax was, for the time, an excellent GM, because he was one of very, very few people exploring the hobby.

We've improved a lot since then, though.

[jackattack]

Original/early D&D was a very lethal system with a lot of instant kills.

So if you fault a game for that, is it the fault of the DM or the fault of the game designer?

Who, in this case, are the same guy.

[NikitaDarkstar]

Hard to say, but I can see him being a frustrating DM after a while, but also very interesting if you enjoy detailed worlds.

[Stubbazubba]

I disagree with valadil; the 70's were not that long ago.

The man made his children cry when they played. That should be a red flag. The stuff he wrote for the game were almost creepy about the players being utterly powerless against the DM whenever there was a disagreement. Given the impression I've got from the modules he created, where characters just died when they tried something, the rules he wrote, where players had no say in what happened to them, and the games he ran, where his will was all that mattered, to the point of his own children in tears, he seemed like an unmitigated egomaniac, and used DMing as a power fantasy. I'd call that a bad DM in the 70's as much as the same traits made bad kings in bygone centuries, the ones that people revolted against. His games were all about him having fun with imaginary power, not the group having fun accomplishing anything.

Maybe he was very descriptive and such, but all that means to me is that he should have been an author, not an actuary-turned-game-designer. My gut tells me his books wouldn't have sold well, since there was actually competition there, as opposed to RPGs, a conveniently empty market.

[Augmental]

Original/early D&D was a very lethal system with a lot of instant kills.

So if you fault a game for that, is it the fault of the DM or the fault of the game designer?

Who, in this case, are the same guy.

Which means it's Gygax's fault either way.

[Grac]

We're at a very weird time for the hobby. The creators are dead, we have lots of stories about them, their games, and their players, and the people who had direct contact with their games are growing older. The new generation only has the nonsense being pushed in this thread to explain the early days to them.

I am on the wrong continent, and from the wrong generation to give first hand accounts, however there are forums, interviews, whatever. The fact that the AD&D 1st edition DMG is still suggested as THE best book for anyone who's into GMing in any system shows that its author knew what he was doing. That author was Gygax. The other things that people know him for, his dungeons, are misleading, because they were either ripped from his own campaigns without context, or churned out, or made for tornament play. The latter are infamous as being 'DM v Players' because that's what they were, they were not, however, meant to have a fun story. Compare Keep on the Borderlands, widely loved as an introductory module.

[Vorr]

Yes.

He was a great DM. Though, of course, it does depend on what you think 'great' is after all. Gary was very Old School, and would not fit in well with many modern new school gamers.

To put it as simply as possible: A good DM is one that provides an interesting, entertaining and fun game for a group of players. Did Gary do that? Yes he did, in spades.

But it's hard to see the 'good' stretched out over the decades. In Ye Olden Days, if a player had a character killed they would just shrug and go on with life and the game. And no one was into 'fair and balanced' back in Ye Old Days, as life is not fair. So Way Back When it was normal for a character to touch an evil idol and loose a level, no save.

The more modern D&D is seen by many as a 'storytelling game'. So the idea is that the characters will tell a story and everything will be fair and balanced, in the players favor, of course. A modern player hates everything about Old School type gaming: the unfairness, the character death, the hardships and so forth.

So it's clear the modern gamer would not think Gary is a good DM after they had a character 'just fall in a pit and die', but all the Old School gamers would think that was just fine.

[Hand_of_Vecna]

So if you fault a game for that, is it the fault of the DM or the fault of the game designer?

Who, in this case, are the same guy.

I'd say it's largely irrelevant, he designed the game he wanted to run and ran the game he designed. You could point to the idiosyncrasies of the system when defending another DM of the time, but not the Allfather. He was an excellent writer, but very confrontational.

He clearly enjoyed screwing over people through random chance with no real interaction. He also created horrible meta traps that worked counter real world logic because he said so and it screwed players. If people started tapping the area in front of them with ten foot poles he put hair trigger pressure plates that opened pits ten feet behind them.

There was simply no concept of fairness. You know all the ways we like to roll stats or point buy? He preferred 3d6 down the line in a system that didn't reward anything below a 16 and expected something akin to natural selection to kill 90% of characters (and a greater portion of inferior characters) at low levels. Speaking of that he also tossed fresh level 1's into the dungeon making them mooch xp till they became more capable.

He did get better over time, but was defiantly behind the curb so yes, in any era he was a bad DM.

[valadil]

I disagree with valadil; the 70's were not that long ago.

The man made his children cry when they played. That should be a red flag. The stuff he wrote for the game were almost creepy about the players being utterly powerless against the DM whenever there was a disagreement. Given the impression I've got from the modules he created, where characters just died when they tried something, the rules he wrote, where players had no say in what happened to them, and the games he ran, where his will was all that mattered, to the point of his own children in tears, he seemed like an unmitigated egomaniac, and used DMing as a power fantasy.

As far as fantasy gaming is concerned, the 70's were practically the beginning of time. A lot has been learned since then.

I hadn't heard those particular stories. If true, that's pretty messed up.

OTOH, when I first started playing it was kind of like that. There were arbitrary death traps. Like, the GM would give you two doors to pick from and one was death, with no hints whatsoever. I couldn't play like that anymore, but it was fun at the time. I'm not saying Gygax should have put his kids through that game when it's clear they were miserable, but there are 11 year olds out there (or were when I was 11) who enjoy that sort of thing.

[kyoryu]

Where do you get this from? Most of the named characters that grew into the early editions of the game were PCs (Mordenkainen was Gygax, but as player rather than DM, Melf was one of his kids, Leomund was one of the early players and designers, and so on.

This was pretty common in lots of old-school games, where things like character retirement were common.

Original/early D&D was a very lethal system with a lot of instant kills.

So if you fault a game for that, is it the fault of the DM or the fault of the game designer?

Who, in this case, are the same guy.

Old school D&D is what it is. It being lethal wasn't a bug, it was a feature. Now that may not be what people want nowadays, but that's what the game was at that time. And it worked well for *what it was*. I'd suggest reading Luke Crane's playthrough of old-school D&D - it's illuminating. And he's the author of Burning Wheel, which a highly narrative system.

So it's clear the modern gamer would not think Gary is a good DM after they had a character 'just fall in a pit and die', but all the Old School gamers would think that was just fine.

Exactly. And this is why the #1 thing that the new version of D&D needs to do, IMHO, is figure out what game it wants to be, and *design for that*. "Modern" D&D has too much of the old-school design philosophy left in it to be effective at being a storytelling based system.

[Tyndmyr]

. The fact that the AD&D 1st edition DMG is still suggested as THE best book for anyone who's into GMing in any system shows that its author knew what he was doing. That author was Gygax.

I would honestly never use the AD&D 1st edition as the "best book" among any system. It's very useful from a historical context, but it's not really the pinnacle of game design or GMing advice.

What about it is so good in your opinion?

[Dr.Epic]

Now, almost everyone that has played a role playing game has either heard horror story's or been in one, fact. And after listening to a podcast where some people started talking about dungeons and dragons with one of the people saying they had been told that Gygax was a terrible DM who would kill players in the most unfair ways possible. So, was Gygax really a bad DM?

Define "unfair." Maybe the people just thought it was unfair. Maybe he was just being really creative with the game and trying to keep the PCs on their toes.

[valadil]

Which means it's Gygax's fault either way.

But that doesn't imply anything about his GMing. He might be an awesome GM and a poor game designed. IMO a GM who makes a bad game fun is a good GM.

[Yora]

Did he run games that the players in his group enjoyed? I guess so and that'd probably mean yes.

However personally, I find both his work on settings and modules severely lacking. Are they good at what they do? I don't know as I don't like what they do.

I do recognize that he did a great job as a merketer. From all that I know, he was running the show that became RPGs as we know them.
However, while doing some superficial reading on the early days of D&D and modern RPGs, I discovered that many of the aspects I really care about are actually credited to "that other guy", Dave Arneson. But would that have found an audience without the traction of Gygax Chainmail wargame? I'm not so sure about it and it seems really to have been the synthesis of the two approaches that really got RPGs going.

[snoopy13a]

I probably wouldn't have enjoyed his games, but that isn't necessarily relevant to whether he was a good DM. What makes a DM "good" is whether she is competent at the style of game she wants to run. Everything else is player opinion.

As an analogy, I hate modern art. So, I would detest the work of a particular modern artist. This doesn't necessarily mean that person is a poor artist.

[NichG]

This is me hypothesizing now, but I'd guess the harshness and the acceptability of that harshness is somewhat of a consequence of the wargaming roots of tabletop RPGs. Basically, imagine you're playing a game that has just evolved from wargames, where that was all anyone knew. Losing a unit in a wargame is like losing hitpoints in D&D, much less of a big deal, and units are basically interchangeable within their 'type' so its not like you lose a lot of effort or anything. This is mirrored in older editions of D&D: making a new character at 1st level might take 30 minutes to an hour in 1ed D&D depending how used to it you are. The same would be true of making a new 10th level character. Contrasting 3ed, a 1st level character might take 10 minutes but a 10th level character could take several hours, especially if you're trying for something unique and optimized.

So now go to the first tabletop game, where you're now playing 'the adventures of a particular unit'. The idea that those characters would necessarily have a high chance of being the ones you end up with is inconsistent with the wargame roots of "units die because they're the army's hitpoints". Something that arbitrarily kills a character? In the modern sense we'd say "that just killed the player's agency, its like saying their entire army dies!" but back when the idea of player agency wasn't a well-formed thing, it'd be the equivalent of "That lever was coated with acid - take 3hp of damage". A little obnoxious if arbitrary, but nothing to get worked up over.

Then of course the game evolved in different directions due to passing hands, influences of other games that emerged, and an overall change in gaming culture. I don't personally know if Gygax moved with the times or retained his style or what. I'd guess though that Gygax was a very good DM within the context of his style, by which I mean that he likely knew exactly what to do and how to run his style of game (as opposed to a bad DM that runs a game that is contrary to what they're actually trying to accomplish due to not knowing the rules, not understanding players, whatever)

[Vorr]

{{Scrubbed}}

[Anxe]

The latest KODT, #188, had a conversation in it between Barbara Blackburn and Ernie Gygax, one of Gary's children. Gary DMed many solo sessions for Ernie when he was growing up. Ernie told the story of one of his characters known only as Erac's Cousin. He had a lot of fun with the character, but there were often random "rocks fall" incidents. He also decided he wanted to play his character on Barsoom, so his dad just teleported him there and had him start jumping around like John Carter.

There were a lot of things that I wouldn't have liked in the way Ernie described Gary's DMing. However, Ernie's opinion of it was clearly positive. As the DM's goal is to make his players happy, I think Gary succeeded.

[Lapak]

This is mirrored in older editions of D&D: making a new character at 1st level might take 30 minutes to an hour in 1ed D&D depending how used to it you are. The same would be true of making a new 10th level character.

Replace "30 minutes" with "3 minutes" for early D&D and you're more on the right track.

3d6 X 6, in order, pick a class, roll a hit die, pick a name, you've still got 2 and a half minutes to pick equipment from a list that all fits on one page (and, if you're a wizard, either pick or roll a couple of entries from a list of less than 20 spells.)

[kyoryu]

I would honestly never use the AD&D 1st edition as the "best book" among any system. It's very useful from a historical context, but it's not really the pinnacle of game design or GMing advice.

What about it is so good in your opinion?

I mostly use it as a resource of a bunch of interesting charts, random tables, etc. I don't know that I'd base running a game off of it.

making a new character at 1st level might take 30 minutes to an hour in 1ed D&D depending how used to it you are. The same would be true of making a new 10th level character. Contrasting 3ed, a 1st level character might take 10 minutes but a 10th level character could take several hours, especially if you're trying for something unique and optimized.

I seriously doubt that creating a 1st level character in 1e took longer than a 1st level character in 3e.

1e: Roll the dice, pick race/class, buy gear, pick spells if caster, copy a bunch of stuff from charts

3e (as typically played): Point buy (which takes longer than rolling), pick race/class (from more choices), buy gear, pick spells if caster, pick feats.

Something that arbitrarily kills a character? In the modern sense we'd say "that just killed the player's agency, its like saying their entire army dies!" but back when the idea of player agency wasn't a well-formed thing, it'd be the equivalent of "That lever was coated with acid - take 3hp of damage". A little obnoxious if arbitrary, but nothing to get worked up over.

Again, I'd recommend reading Luke Crane's description of playing D&D (Moldvay edition, FWIW - the version I started with, yay?). He describes a pretty enjoyable game that has almost nothing in common with a "modern" game except for a few mechanics.

To a Modern Gamer, almost any character death is unfair. But add to that anything where anything bad happens to a character.

The easy example is that a Modern DM will tip toe around and handwave the idea that any foe with an intelligence over 6 would go for a characters weak spots. Such as their equipment, weapons, magic items, familiars, spellbooks, mounts, pets and such. That is all Unfair(with a big U) to a Modern Gamer. The idea that Archer Alex would loose his bow, and then not be able to play his character or have fun, is unfair.

That's a little unfair (snert) to the Modern Gamer. It's more accurate to say that the fundamental gameplay has changed. It's no longer a dungeon simulator, or a world, it's a story in which the players create the characters. Modern RPGs are really about The Story to the exclusion of everything else, whereas old school games where the story is what happened to the characters.

And to give an Awesome, but Unfair(to some) direct Gary Example:

"Against the Giants (pg7) Any creature standing before the wall and looking at the writhing amorphous form has a 50% chance of going insane.'' Note no save or anything, just roll the dice.

I think this is an excellent example. There are others, too - lots of the "worthless" 1e items were fine within the context of the time - including things like cursed items which generally are avoided now.

To make an analogy: old-school D&D is nethack, modern games are Baldur's Gate.

[hamlet]

"Against the Giants (pg7) Any creature standing before the wall and looking at the writhing amorphous form has a 50% chance of going insane.'' Note no save or anything, just roll the dice.

Given the inspiration for that particular bit of architecture and the fact that just about everybody at that game would have been familiar with HP Lovecraft, just about every savvy player there would have said immediately "I avert my eyes" and thus eschewed the issue.

[kyoryu]

BTW, since I've referred to it a few times:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/11126696...ts/Q8qRhCw7az5

Keep in mind that Luke Crane is the author of Burning Wheel, a game which is pretty antithetical to the core goals of original D&D.

[Hiro Protagonest]

To a Modern Gamer, almost any character death is unfair. But add to that anything where anything bad happens to a character.

The easy example is that a Modern DM will tip toe around and handwave the idea that any foe with an intelligence over 6 would go for a characters weak spots. Such as their equipment, weapons, magic items, familiars, spellbooks, mounts, pets and such. That is all Unfair(with a big U) to a Modern Gamer. The idea that Archer Alex would loose his bow, and then not be able to play his character or have fun, is unfair.

And to give an Awesome, but Unfair(to some) direct Gary Example:

"Against the Giants (pg7) Any creature standing before the wall and looking at the writhing amorphous form has a 50% chance of going insane.'' Note no save or anything, just roll the dice.

That's inaccurate. And rather offensive to me, personally. A creature without any ranks in knowledge (arcana) or wizard levels shouldn't be attacking the wizard's spellbook. Those that do know probably won't, because it won't have any effect on saving their lives since the wizard can still destroy them with already prepared spells, and in the middle of heated combat, it's better to deal with the thing threatening your life right now. This is assuming that you're not playing 3.5, PF, or 4e, the "modern" editions. If you do, 3.X has many ways to make the wizard not get hit in the first place, and also have many things to protect their book (like, say, stuff it in a Bag of Holding and cast an Alarm on the extradimensional space). I don't think 4e wizards rely on their spellbook for anything other than rituals, and if they do, I'm pretty sure it's only Daily Powers.

Now weapons? That's different. Practically every creature past a certain point has DR/magic. Either the group's low-op, which means the fighter just has a mundane backup weapon, or it's prepared, which means the fighter has a backup +1 Keen Falchion and the wizard or cleric has Greater Magic Weapon prepared.

There is no middle ground. Either the old school style is bad, or it's ineffective. New or casual players who just want to play are punished, experienced or well-read players who take the mechanics of the game seriously can negate everything.

[Mono Vertigo]

I don't know about D&D, but this thread has convinced me he would have made a great Paranoia GM. Now, the world will never know.

[Augmental]

And to give an Awesome, but Unfair(to some) direct Gary Example:

"Against the Giants (pg7) Any creature standing before the wall and looking at the writhing amorphous form has a 50% chance of going insane.'' Note no save or anything, just roll the dice.

No, that's just unfair. Out-of-the-blue death (or may-as-well-be-death) traps like that are one of the worst things a DM can pull.