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I believe it is the only book that made me write an IC poem halfway through.

Once you got into the vibe, Grailquest was great fun and as a young man I genuinely shared his sense of humour. "Oh, not section 13 again!"

"Let the dice tell the story". Gary was such a fucking theater kid.

Obviously Korns as well, but while his ideas were ahead of his time, it's harder to judge actual infuence there. But generally, Gygax and Arneson existed in a whole ecosystem of this stuff; the sea that D&D was to later swim in.

In fact I'd say of equal significance for the birth of RPGs (although without Gygax's gift for self promotion) were Jack Scruby and his fanzines printing rules for man to man combat, New England Wargamers Association (NEWA) doing the first public demo of a skirmish game and Western Gunfight.

That applies to older wargames as well. When you actually start looking into stuff that was going on in those circles at the time it quickly becomes clear that OD&D is much more a "natural next step" rather than the gamechanging revelation it's portrayed as.

One thing I do find that storygamers are generally better at than a lot of modern RPG designers (often from an outside perspective) is not being overly reductionist about wargames and saying silly things like "the difference between RPGs and wargames is that wargames don't have a narrative).

I think Brennan did actually massively improve as a designer post gamebooks when he'd learnt to keep the wonderfully mad ideas (vampire carrots! The Poetic Fiend! A magic sword called Excalibur Junior that is sarcastic and scared of spiders!) but actually remember they needed to work as a game.

Although the big thing a lot of people seem to bounce off is that they find the downtime phase too "gamey" whereas I was just "oh, cool, it's like the Pendragon summer turn but less wargame influenced".

Notably, I largely bounce off most Apocalypse World variant type PbtA but really enjoyed the BitD campaign I was in. I think it may be a bit friendly to "mostly trad but willing to branch out now and again" players.

I've never been but it sounds like it's a nice medium between the big guys and the wonderful but incredibly niche stuff like Fighting Fantasy Fest or Consequences.

Even the people that wouldn't in some cases. There's a difference between "I would actively stop people doing the thing" and "I don't see the supposed benefit to me others claim of people doing the thing" and the mainstreaming of RPGs is definitely one of them.

I'm not even convinced that less people playing TTRPGs would be a bad thing overall.

"ruin the entire dnd brand" There has to be some downsides as well.

Marie Lloyd, obviously., www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6P_...

Marie Lloyd: A Little of What You Fancy Does You Good! With Lyrics!YouTube video by Rcamels30www.youtube.com

I'm not a curmudgeon, I'm a classical cynic.

Not canon but we got Gary's words of wisdom in Dragon, including the time he said if you used any house rules it wasn't D&D.

There's nothing wrong with not having experience as long as you know when you can't contribute I think. Like, I steer well clear away from jazz or classical discussions. (Although with you I suspect the danger is not contributing when you do have things to contribute rather than the opposite)

And I think what you're probably drawn to in part is that it's stuff that doesn't respect official canon; it's people who were fans of the game back then, often not much older than you.