Grognardia: Still the G.O.A.T.*?

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Nobby-W said:
I was more of a Traveller than a D&D fanboy back in the early days, so I don't have any particular nostalgia for OD&D - in fact I never played OD&D, just various editions of AD&D. I think the OSR is more significant for the effect it had on the industry rather than anything intrinsic to its philosophies. From that perspective, I'm indifferent to it at the level of not really having the sort of strong opinions that might motivate one to get into arguments about it on forums. A lot of the time it feels like old grogs nostalgic for that awesome campaign they had back in 1982, which I can relate to as I have that sort of memories about Traveller games I played back in the late jurassic.

However, I'm not anti-OSR either. I'd quite happily play in a game of (say) Dungeon Crawl Classics if one was going.

OTOH, when fanboys start taking themselves that seriously the temptation is strong ...
I totally don't regenerate 10 hit points per turn or have special vulnerabilities to fire and acid damage.
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I'm not anti-OSR, but like yourself, my nostalgia lies in other systems. Though I carry a little bit for 2nd edition, there's just too much of the basic conciets of D&D that don't mesh with my approach to gamig. Mostly I'm interested in the creativity behind modules that can be adapted
 
I am an OSR fan, but it's not really tied up into nostalgia for me. While I did start with D&D back in the early '80s, I quickly got into other games. My nostalgia is tied more to BRP, WFRP, D6, pre-MDC Palladium, and DC Heroes. It's been more of a novelty for me than a return.
 
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Endless Flight said:
I personally don’t know a lot of the stuff he reminisces about . .
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Well then, you're in luck, 'cause neither does James: 'Oh, I never played Azhanti High Lightning, but I admired the ad for it!'

Among the things I don't care for about Maliszewski is that he's so preternaturally fussy, like a contestant solid contender for Upper Class Twit of the Year: 'I'm a Gygaxian fanboy!' 'I'm terrible at strategy and tactics!' 'I wouldn't DREAM of using something published by a third party!' 'I have an A-level in camel hygiene!'

Okay, that last one's not true - sadly, the others are.

I understand he speaks to a lot of people, but I was in the Blue Bottle Saloon in Wichita the night English Bob killed Two-Gun Corcoran, and I don't remember seeing Maliszewski there.
 
James was at one point a PhD candidate in Medieval Philosophy. I think "fussy" comes with the territory there.

EDIT: As a medieval literature professor, I say this with love. However, I do think that philosophy is a special breed of medieval studies ...
 
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I feel mean and guilty saying bad things about James M because in his early years (2008-09) he pretty regularly said nice things about me on his blog, but looking back at some of his stuff recently the squareness and fuddy-duddiness of it really overwhelmed me. He comes off like a tweedy professor giving a lecture about a scene that he was an outside observer of and making it seem way less fun and interesting than it actually was. It's ironic that he hitched his wagon to the 1974-83 era, because his own sensibilities and stylistic tendencies seem to align much more closely with the later era. He seems to me to have much more in common with the workmanlike professional late-80s to mid-90s TSR folks like Jeff Grubb, Roger Moore, Bruce Heard, Aaron Allston, Skip Williams, John Rateliff, Sean Reynolds, etc. than he does with the druggy beardo amateur hobbyists of the 70s who he devoted so many words to lionizing without ever seeming to have an intuitive, internalized "grokking" of what they, and the version of the hobby they created, were all about.

He praised DIY hobbyism and amateur enthusiasm and decried post-1983 TSR as soulless, but his own approach was so conservative, so devoted to coloring within the lines, maintaining tradition, and sticking exactly and solely to what had been handed down that he ended up in the exact same place - a sort of paint-by-numbers simulacrum echo of the explosively imaginative and creative hobby of the earlier era. He retroactively imposed rules and methods and order on something that's whole purpose in being was that there were none of those things, that it was all wide open and everything was being made up as they went along based on what seemed like it would be most fun and interesting. It really does seem to me like for all of his study of that era and the people who shaped it that he completely missed the point of who they were and what they did.
 
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I enjoy his prose style, and looking back at a lot of stuff I missed, or have fond memories of. Whatever his overall gaming beliefs, I imagine I never cared enough to pay attention.
 
Black Vulmea Black Vulmea mentioned this up thread, I used to laugh at his posts where he would say “I never owned or played this game, but I saw it in a store or ad”. Compared to some people who claim to know everything about RPGs, I eventually came to find that refreshing.
 
What's the feeling about his game Thousand Suns? It's the deal of the day at Drivethru, so it's only $3 today.
 
Lofgeornost said:
What's the feeling about his game Thousand Suns? It's the deal of the day at Drivethru, so it's only $3 today.
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In true Maliszewskian fashion I never owned or played it but will nonetheless share an opinion of it :wink:

As far as I understand it doesn't really offer anything that isn't already present in Traveller. It seems like his intent was to capture the same spirit as Traveller (that 50s-70s "Imperial" sf of Poul Anderson, H. Beam Piper, Jerry Pournelle, etc.) without the canon baggage of the Official Traveller Universe setting. But you can already do that in Traveller by just ignoring the OTU stuff (which isn't even present in the original rules). So it seems at least somewhat pointless and unnecessary. But hey, for $3, it's probably worth taking a chance on anyway if you like that source material - maybe you can mine it for some stuff (planets, cultures, races) for a Traveller campaign...
 
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T. Foster said:
I feel mean and guilty saying bad things about James M because in his early years (2008-09) he pretty regularly said nice things about me on his blog, but looking back at some of his stuff recently the squareness and fuddy-duddiness of it really overwhelmed me. He comes off like a tweedy professor giving a lecture about a scene that he was an outside observer of and making it seem way less fun and interesting than it actually was. It's ironic that he hitched his wagon to the 1974-83 era, because his own sensibilities and stylistic tendencies seem to align much more closely with the later era. He seems to me to have much more in common with the workmanlike professional late-80s to mid-90s TSR folks like Jeff Grubb, Roger Moore, Bruce Heard, Aaron Allston, Skip Williams, John Rateliff, Sean Reynolds, etc. than he does with the druggy beardo amateur hobbyists of the 70s who he devoted so many words to lionizing without ever seeming to have an intuitive, internalized "grokking" of what they, and the version of the hobby they created, were all about.

He praised DIY hobbyism and amateur enthusiasm and decried post-1983 TSR as soulless, but his own approach was so conservative, so devoted to coloring within the lines, maintaining tradition, and sticking exactly and solely to what had been handed down that he ended up in the exact same place - a sort of paint-by-numbers simulacrum echo of the explosively imaginative and creative hobby of the earlier era. He retroactively imposed rules and methods and order on something that's whole purpose in being was that there were none of those things, that it was all wide open and everything was being made up as they went along based on what seemed like it would be most fun and interesting. It really does seem to me like for all of his study of that era and the people who shaped it that he completely missed the point of who they were and what they did.
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I'd disagree that the work of Heard (Glantri, the Gazateers), Grubb (Al-Qadim, Manual of the Planes, MSH) and Aaron Allston (Treasure Hunt, Under Illefarn) was 'workmanlike' but I do agree that he, perhaps inadvertently, laid out the 'rules' for old school play that are not only in all probablity inaccurate but more importantly counter-productive to creativity by enforcing orthodoxy instead of experimentation.

In terms of his bungled KS, I can feel for someone who suffers from writers block for any reason, as a former editor I know that nothing helps focus the mind like a deadline. Many writers will lose steam on a book more than halfway through but they aren't beholden to a public group with high expectations if they decide to drop the project due to a dearth of energy, interest and inspiration.

JMal's KS is the kind of cautionary tale that makes most responsible designers have the writing done before even launching their KS these days.
 
T. Foster said:
In true Maliszewskian fashion I never owned or played it but will nonetheless share an opinion of it :wink:

As far as I understand it doesn't really offer anything that isn't already present in Traveller. It seems like his intent was to capture the same spirit as Traveller (that 50s-70s "Imperial" sf of Poul Anderson, H. Beam Piper, Jerry Pournelle, etc.) without the canon baggage of the Official Traveller Universe setting. But you can already do that in Traveller by just ignoring the OTU stuff (which isn't even present in the original rules). So it seems at least somewhat pointless and unnecessary. But hey, for $3, it's probably worth taking a chance on anyway if you like that source material - maybe you can mine it for some stuff (planets, cultures, races) for a Traveller campaign...
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Does it use the Traveller system? Because it sort of sounds like you're saying the Sci-fi equivalent of "We have AD&D so we don't need BX".
Covering the same general area is pretty common. The details do matter.
 
TristramEvans said:
Wait, is that really a thing? Isn't that in complete contradiction of the spirit of the OSR?
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Maliszewski was speaking of his younger self, in his 'retrospective' on Role Aids' Dark Folk.

Trent and I are on the same page here.
T. Foster said:
He comes off like a tweedy professor giving a lecture about a scene that he was an outside observer of and making it seem way less fun and interesting than it actually was. It's ironic that he hitched his wagon to the 1974-83 era, because his own sensibilities and stylistic tendencies seem to align much more closely with the later era. He seems to me to have much more in common with the workmanlike professional late-80s to mid-90s TSR folks like Jeff Grubb, Roger Moore, Bruce Heard, Aaron Allston, Skip Williams, John Rateliff, Sean Reynolds, etc. than he does with the druggy beardo amateur hobbyists of the 70s who he devoted so many words to lionizing without ever seeming to have an intuitive, internalized "grokking" of what they, and the version of the hobby they created, were all about.
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This is spot on.

Maliszewski's a classic dilettante. Many of his blog posts read to me like the diary of a stuffy Victorian traveler, pompous and superficial, observation lacking insight.

I remember him posting at Knights and Knaves a few times; he was completely out of his depth, though to be fair, K&K's a rough crowd.

Endless Flight said:
He probably types on his computer while he’s got his smoking jacket and slippers on.
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I'm more a fan of the shorts and t-shirt, alternating between an edible and a cold Modelo Negra kinda blogger. :shade:

Endless Flight said:
Black Vulmea Black Vulmea mentioned this up thread, I used to laugh at his posts where he would say “I never owned or played this game, but I saw it in a store or ad”. Compared to some people who claim to know everything about RPGs, I eventually came to find that refreshing.
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I can see that. For me, it signaled he didn't have anything to say I really needed to hear.

Let me be clear here: I'm not suggesting anyone should agree with me - I'm a well known crank, after all - and I'm not trying to harsh on anyone's groove. He spoke - and speaks - to a lot of people, and he was the gateway drug for a lot of gamers who'd either put aside old school games or never experienced them in the first place, and that's not nothing. Our hobby is better for the presence of Grognardia.
 
T. Foster said:
And yet, I never liked his style. He always came off to me as very milquetoast and square, not somebody who it seemed like would be fun to hang out and shoot the shit with, much less to play D&D with. His voice and tone always seemed so flavorless and safe. It always struck me as weird and ironic that he professed such adoration for pulp writers like Howard and Leiber (and Gygax, for that matter) whose writing was full of blood and passion, but talked about them all in such a nerdily schoolmarmish manner. It always felt dissonant to me, and also offputting. I usually pretty much agreed with the substance of what he was saying, but the way he said it made me want to find things to disagree with - I instinctively didn’t want to be on the same side as someone so uncool-seeming.
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You know what man? I agree with you that he is square. The blogger I read the most, DM David, is the same way. Mild, square, kid-friendly, etc. That said, if the content is good and prolific you just gotta push thru it. The milquetoast and square personalities who write decent gaming blogs outnumber the bro-tier, metal-as-fuck dudes by a large margin.
 
Although adopting a look of some sort goes with the rock star territory, sometimes straight looking folks can be the most interesting ones. Dexter Holland (for example) has published several peer-researched papers and produced a brand of chilli sauce, amongst other things. OTOH You can still look like a rock star and do interesting stuff - Brian May's PhD for example.

People can adopt out-there or not so out there looks and it doesn't necessarily tell you a lot about what they can achieve. You can still do good, competent work within a conservative viewpoint or be right out there and produce good things as well.

Brock Savage said:
You know what man? I agree with you that he is square. The blogger I read the most, DM David, is the same way. Mild, square, kid-friendly, etc. That said, if the content is good and prolific you just gotta push thru it. The milquetoast and square personalities who write decent gaming blogs outnumber the bro-tier, metal-as-fuck dudes by a large margin.
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And the metal stuff may or may not be all that interesting. Edge lord-ism doesn't really do a lot for me, although it's some folks' cup of tea.
 
Séadna said:
I think all this shite about him being milquetoast is from people who have the 18+ filter on on his blog. You've obviously not read his "Inchoate Rage of the Transfinite Anal Lords" setting for DCC.
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Filter? He should be making that Patreon-only content and rake in that sweet, sweet cash!
 
Of all the OSR bloggers out there, people probably would have paid $$$ to read his posts years ago. I'm not sure how true that is today.
 
T. Foster said:
He seems to me to have much more in common with the workmanlike professional late-80s to mid-90s TSR folks like Jeff Grubb, Roger Moore, Bruce Heard, Aaron Allston, Skip Williams, John Rateliff, Sean Reynolds, etc. than he does with the druggy beardo amateur hobbyists of the 70s who he devoted so many words to lionizing without ever seeming to have an intuitive, internalized "grokking" of what they, and the version of the hobby they created, were all about.
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I get absolutely the same vibe from him. I am there also; Silver Age D&D, he called it (incidentally, another Malizewskism I find useful).

Voros said:
I'd disagree that the work of Heard (Glantri, the Gazateers), Grubb (Al-Qadim, Manual of the Planes, MSH) and Aaron Allston (Treasure Hunt, Under Illefarn) was 'workmanlike'
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Seconded. Those are some of my favorite bits of D&D. Heard and Allston were huge in the BECMI/RC line, where I cut my teeth.

Voros said:
In terms of his bungled KS, I can feel for someone who suffers from writers block for any reason, as a former editor I know that nothing helps focus the mind like a deadline. Many writers will lose steam on a book more than halfway through but they aren't beholden to a public group with high expectations if they decide to drop the project due to a dearth of energy, interest and inspiration.

JMal's KS is the kind of cautionary tale that makes most responsible designers have the writing done before even launching their KS these days.
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He was direly mistaken to launch the Kickstarter without having everything written down. I do feel sorry for his personal life woes, though.

T. Foster said:
As far as I understand it doesn't really offer anything that isn't already present in Traveller. It seems like his intent was to capture the same spirit as Traveller (that 50s-70s "Imperial" sf of Poul Anderson, H. Beam Piper, Jerry Pournelle, etc.) without the canon baggage of the Official Traveller Universe setting. But you can already do that in Traveller by just ignoring the OTU stuff (which isn't even present in the original rules). So it seems at least somewhat pointless and unnecessary. But hey, for $3, it's probably worth taking a chance on anyway if you like that source material - maybe you can mine it for some stuff (planets, cultures, races) for a Traveller campaign...
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As someone who was both a newcomer to Traveller, and not quite conversant in the source material, the TS "meta-setting" offered some interesting alternatives to generate one's own Traveller universe. And the alien races were fun in a 2300AD way. I couldn't care less about the mechanical bits, though. (d12??? Really???)
 
spittingimage said:
What did Maliszewski do to hurt so many of you? I see people re-entering the thread to pile on more and more complaints.
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JM was probably the most popular blogger in the OSR for his time. Nobody else came close, and usually when somebody is popular there are critics of the popularity. The audience for the OSR tends to have a lot of people with prickly opinions as well.

It reminds me of the rise of Critical Role -- people who dislike a new trend and it turns out to be popular. It brings out tinges of jealousy too for those who are also writers or bloggers but have nowhere near the audience.

I really hated though what I thought was the pig-pile due to the Kickstarter. Was criticism deserved, yes. But everybody felt they needed to comment. There were some ugly people -- I remember there was even a guy calling himself "I Run With Scissors" who was posting in several message boards, started a tumbler, and used anonymizing services to protect his own identity, and even was at the end borderline stalking his wife and kids. You have to be a real crazy person to get kicked off TheRPGSite.
 
JRT said:
It reminds me of the rise of Critical Role -- people who dislike a new trend and it turns out to be popular. It brings out tinges of jealousy too for those who are also writers or bloggers but have nowhere near the audience.
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I don't hate them for their success, I am sure they work very hard and deserve it. I just don't like fake reality TV posing as RPG sessions.
 
spittingimage said:
What did Maliszewski do to hurt so many of you? I see people re-entering the thread to pile on more and more complaints.
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Only seems fair to critque a critic? I do agree though that it would be best to avoid going too personal. During my few interactions with JMal back on Google + I found him much more reasonable and good natured than a lot of his acolytes, that usually comes through on his blog I think.

I do think he is much more convincing when discussing something he likes, I find his negative 'reviews,' that notably are absent any actual close reading of material, too sweeping and rhetorical (his DL rant is a low point imo).

But that's actual something to say in his favour, most critics know it is much harder to be interesting and insightful when writing a positive review than it is to write a negative review. A perfect example would be the well known film critic Pauline Kael whose negative reviews were often insightful and on target but whose positive reviews degenerated into gushing and adjectives.
 
Brock Savage said:
I don't hate them for their success, I am sure they work very hard and deserve it. I just don't like fake reality TV posing as RPG sessions.
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I've never watched Critical Role but I made it through a few episodes of the Force Grey liveplay (the presence of Deborah Ann Woll always helps) and it seemed like a pretty normal session of D&D to me.
 
Voros said:
A perfect example would be the well known film critic Pauline Kael whose negative reviews were often insightful and on target but whose positive reviews degenerated into gushing and adjectives.
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I would put Bryce at Ten Foot Pole in the same category as Pauline Kael. Great critical reviews but his positive ones are all emotion and adjective.
 
Voros said:
I'd disagree that the work of Heard (Glantri, the Gazateers), Grubb (Al-Qadim, Manual of the Planes, MSH) and Aaron Allston (Treasure Hunt, Under Illefarn) was 'workmanlike'
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The Butcher said:
I get absolutely the same vibe from him. I am there also; Silver Age D&D, he called it (incidentally, another Malizewskism I find useful).

Seconded. Those are some of my favorite bits of D&D. Heard and Allston were huge in the BECMI/RC line, where I cut my teeth.
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I meant workmanlike in the sense that they were generally working to refine or expand things within an already-existing paradigm rather than blazing new conceptual trails, and didn't mean it as insulting (in which case I would've probably said "hacky" and cited some different names).

I'll also admit that my list was maybe overly broad, and who I really primarily had in mind and think is a close cognate to James M is Roger Moore, who had a remarkable knack for taking small, throwaway pieces of rulebook text and extrapolating them out into extended essays that brought all of those disparate bits and pieces together into a logical and coherent whole but also (at least to me) stripped away a lot of the magic and charm of the sketchier and more open-ended originals, making it seem more prosaic and less mysterious and inspiring. His articles always felt to me more like they closed things off than opened up new vistas - he was focused on answers when I wanted intriguing new questions. He did this repeatedly in the 80s in Dragon magazine (most famously in his Demi-human Point of View article series and Astral Plane article, but other times as well - with his revision of the half-ogre, his analysis of two-weapon fighting, etc.) and also did it to the World of Greyhawk setting in the late 90s - bringing together all of the disparate bits and pieces of setting canon from Gygax, Sargent, and everywhere in between, and reshaping the setting into something that (at least to me) felt completely different and way less open and interesting.

That feels analogous to me with what James M did with "old-school" - to take something sprawling and chaotic and nebulous and organize and codify it into a comprehensive and easily digested form at a cost of a lot of the variety and openness and quirky individuality that made it intriguing and appealing in the first place. It felt weird and uncomfortable to me to have trends I'd observed and ideas I'd extrapolated from them - and that were intriguing to me because they seemed contrary to then-current (90s-early 00s) conventional wisdom - reconfigured into a narrow orthodoxy that managed to leave my favorite stuff ("Silver Age" Gygaxiana - his baroque and idiosyncratic later modules (S4, WG4, EX1 & 2, T1-4, WG6) and rulebooks (MM2, UA), and the expanded development of the World of Greyhawk through the boxed set and Gord novels) on the outside because it didn't check the correct set of boxes.

Grognardia's exegesis of "old school" D&D was clearly interesting and illuminating to a lot of people, and certainly inspired a whole lot of copycat blogs c. 2010-2012 and seemingly, at least indirectly, sparked a lot of the current interest in Original and "BX style" D&D and cultish fixation on the "Appendix N" reading list. It just feels to me like his, and especially their, perspective was too narrow and doctrinaire, and reduced something broad and varied and very individualistic to a set of narrow maxims and formulas that encouraged orthodoxy and conformity when it should have done the opposite.
 
I largely agree, it is odd how there's this sometimes uncritical praise of Gygax but just how strange and imaginative his module work was seems to be overlooked.

To bring it back to his current blog posts he discusses 'The Howling Tower' and Leiber where he claims Fafhrd and Grey Mouser 'most strongly evokes playing D&D.'

A claim I've never found convincing in any real way. This particular story he even describes as 'a well executed ghost story, filled with mounting dread and barreling toward a terrific climax' which hardly describes most sessions of D&D to me, more likely a session of CoC.

I love Leiber, there are ideas to nick from him and the early stories may have the rough outline of an adventure but to me the mere plots are incidental to Leiber's stories. They are much more about character, imagnative landscapes, wit and satire. His plots are just vehicles for his real interests as his great picaresque masterpiece The Swords of Lankhmar shows (how many D&D sessions take time out for an erotic love affair between a barbarian and a transparent ghoul?).

I wonder if this issue here may be that some in the OSR are reading Leiber outside of his context, fellow writers like Henry Kuttner, C.L. Moore and the great Leigh Brackett all use very similar plots to early Leiber, it is his elegant prose and perverse adult irony that distinguishes his stories from not only his contemporaries but almost all fantasy writers since.
 
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Voros said:
I largely agree, it is odd how there's this sometimes uncritical praise of Gygax but just how strange and imaginative his module work was seems to be overlooked.

To bring it back to his current blog posts he discusses 'The Howling Tower' and Leiber where he claims Fafhrd and Grey Mouser 'most strongly evokes playing D&D.'

A claim I've never found convincing in any real way. This particular story he even describes as 'a well executed ghost story, filled with mounting dread and barreling toward a terrific climax' which hardly describes most sessions of D&D to me, more likely a session of CoC.

I love Leiber, there are ideas to nick from him and the early stories may have the rough outline of an adventure but to me the mere plots are incidental to Leiber's stories. They are much more about character, imagnative landscapes, wit and satire.

I wonder if this issue here may be that some in the OSR are reading Leiber outside of his context, fellow writers like Henry Kuttner, C.L. Moore and the great Leigh Brackett all use very similar plots to early Leiber, it is his elegant prose and perverse adult irony that distinguishes his stories from not only his contemporaries bit almost all fantasy writers since.
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Yeah, that Leiber post is what set me off on this multi-post rant, because it really feels to me like a misreading of both Leiber and D&D and managed to dredge up a lot of stuff that I'd let go of and kind of forgotten about over the last 8 years (plus his description of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser as "the Twain" is so stilted and corny that it brought everything I always disliked about his writing style viscerally flooding back into my memory).
 
Especially when we all know that it's really "The Jewels in the Forest" that is the most D&Dish of Leiber's stories. :wink:
 
T. Foster said:
(plus his description of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser as "the Twain" is so stilted and corny that it brought everything I always disliked about his writing style viscerally flooding back into my memory).
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Forsooth, wherefore consider thou his usage of the most noble "twain" to be peccant? It maketh him neither a coxcomb nor a fainéant, sirrah! Mayhap he doth merely display an appetency to play communicant of proper English to the divers denizens his online demesne. Prithee hereupon bethink thyself of the dandiprats, magdalens, piepowders, mooncalves, and lordlings peradventure educated by the barest orts of his overbrimming pate, thou most base and malapert blackguard!
 
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