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I love this deep dive. More of this D&D history. It adds a lot of personality to the original authors and helps replicate the good design methods they've used for new creations.

A book on aristacrates sound interesting 🤔 song

@40:26 It seems Gary agrees with my previous comment. RPing is about problem solving and exploration. Whether you use sword, spells, prayers, or stealth - the role you play - it's about a challenge. It isn't primarily a thespian activity. Play acting a personality (with voices) can and often does add to the gaming experience, but it isn't what was intended.

Martin, another 20! It becomes more clear that your historian's hat did not come with a free bowl of soup. It is not "harping" that you emphasize what the text says. Gary, like any dedicated author chose his words. Words matter because their meaning forms ideas, and ideas have consequences. Armed with a clear understanding of the "rules", the guidelines that Gary published, one would tread lightly before they changed or discarded rules. It's the "campaign" from which subsequent editions of D&D moved. They moved toward the video game experience as that technology informed players' experiences and expectations. Too many of our generation were precocious - and that's great - but we got to playing and didn't necessarily read the texts carefully, or implement the rules (guidelines) as written. We forgot the forwards and intros, if we ever read them, and implemented "house rules" whimsically. If the system is corrupted or diluted it can seem "broken" or "unorganized" years later. Never mind decades. Gary and his circle labored over what they loved for several years. Not only were they pioneers in a niche realm, they took it to another level and published their play, transforming it to work. And they worked at it. And worked more. Role-playing, and the term itself evolved. In my opinion "role" refers primarily to Cleric, Fighter, MU, & Thief. Players then, instinctively, focused on personality for the role they played. Too much emphasis on the personality and the game-like experience begins to move toward what came to be known as LARPing. Think about our mundane lives at work. What role do you play for your company? You perform a job, tasks, with a goal. Your personality is not supposed to matter. You will more likely to be successful if you get along with your colleagues. You don't have to, but you should. Same with the roles in a D&D party. Thanks Martin, keep 'em coming. Hope your campaign with your girls is chugging along.

After I listen to these videos I always think about going into the basement to find which of these things I have buried in my old D&D stuff - good job on the videos

I can't even wrap my head around the dislike of wandering monsters. What is actually is not logical is set piece encounters, which make the environment feel static. The dislike of wandering monsters goes hand in hand with the expectation of a pre-defined story/plot and is antithetical to a quality gaming experience. Nothing is ever tied absolutely to a fixed place in any location I build, monsters move around in and out of the locations, dynamically, you know, the way living things always do. BTW, I do like your content. I run a theology channel but I do gaming content du temps en temps, if you'd ever like to stop by Grail Country for a visit I'd love to have you.

Star Frontiers was my go to RPG for years. Came back to it a couple of years ago. It didn’t hold up as well. Still love it for nostalgia purposes.

Only just bought my replacement POD 2 weeks ago of this!

I loved Star Frontiers! I got giddy when I saw some of the races from SF show up in D20 Future.

Monster Manual II is now available as a POD!

Yeah knowing what we know today, this article speaks more to the character of Gygax as a person, and not to any historical accuracy, as Gary was clearly trying to take more credit than was his due in this matter in order to justify his cutting Dave out of DnD profits by adding the word "Advanced" to the game.

I have 2 copies of Dungeon! that I found at thrift stores but have never had a chance to play it.

"You don't need miniatures, but you do kinda need miniatures" 😂

That's hilarious. That was my first X-men comic too

Another well-researched, thoughtful discussion. Thank you for doing this.

I would love a Star Frontiers video.

Thank you, Martin. ❤

Wish I had heard of this KS a day earlier!

These are absolutely some interesting videos. I do enjoy the history but this video can easily have 20 minutes cut as you tend to rehash and meander here and it's difficult to keep it straight as a viewer. You read a whole foreword you didn't need to read during a section about 'proving why a game can be considered roleplaying". This is very common in most of your videos and it can take multiple days for me to get through one of them. I almost didn't watch your 'From Imirrhos to Mystara: The Known World' video because it's almost 2 hours and it took me 3 days to get all the way through it. This video is the most evident one to date showing your disdain for Gary Gygax. I realize the history should be set straight but the tone is on the negative side. Maybe be more concise with your points and examples and also less trying to denounce every argument or counter-argument you've ever found about a particular subject. Or maybe there's a better way (visually?) to present fact vs. fiction for any particular issue or factoid.

Arneson's El Paucho character was in Duane Jenkin's Brownstone game in 1971 - this had nothing to do with Boot Hill other than possibly inspiring it. I don't know one way or the other if Arneson ever played Boot Hill, except to say he was never involved in any campaigns. Easy slip up to make Martin.

Speculation: in Europa, Gygax may still have been pushing back against the assertion by some historical wargamers that games with fantasy elements weren't "serious". Do you know if Greg Bell *lifted* any of his Warriors of Mars artwork? I don't think convention scoring is the equivalent of a boardgames victory condition. Experience points are a "scoring" mechanism too of course. 1st ed Boot Hill *can* be engaged with as a role playing game, but needn't be. But I guess this debate won't run out of steam unless the term RPG gets a precise, shared definition. I'd happily listen to you talk about Star Frontiers for 60 min.😊 Reading "The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons". Page 197 reproduces a letter from Gary to Dave immediately before D&D goes to print. "Have John get on the Space Rules & think up a title."

Terrible game.

"Hocus Pocus" and "Blitzkrieg Bop" on the same side of the same LP is hilarious to me.

The art in Star Empires has a very clip-art look to it, in a good way.

Wisconsin has a deep German heritage and sausage is a core part of that identity. It's just less prominent than the beer and cheese.

"Warlock's Menagerie (1980)" is the follow up DM book, with Monsters, Treasure, and additional rules. See also "Warlock Towers, Reference and Advance Rules (1979)" and "Monkey God's Curse Dungeon Adventure" by Balboa Game Company

Thanks for the video! I love the survival guides as DMG extensions. I don't feel the need to have them at the table but as long as a DM has read through them, the DM is equipped to adjudicate most anything that might come up in the game, IMO.

Thanks for the video! We picked up fairly early the idea of rolling against an Ability score, as suggested by the DM or rolled secretly by the DM against an Ability score, to resolve various situations. So, while it is RAW to say Ability scores didn't matter much, in practice they were more valuable than the rules suggest. Did you ever finish the Angel's Envy? I have a small stack of Featherstone books, btw, that I sometimes reference for lore or ideas.

Thanks for the video! Catching up with some ones I missed. New name for cocktail? Sword of Cynar (or on the rocks, Elfstones of Cynar)! Have a good holiday,

Any chance of a Warhammer fantasy role play game episode as i know next to nonothing about that game

Are used to play a space RPG it was called gamma was a pretty good game, but they never really went anywhere.

Something about Star Frontiers would be interesting. Of itself, there was relatively little product support to sustain it as line. D&D lines were prioritised above all else, but I do wonder whether basic system design or rules originally for Star Frontiers were repurposed for Buck Roger in the 25th Century, and whether some original concepts were later used in Spell Jammer. Spell Jammer was a very rapidly developed, and it seems like use of stuff from old notebooks the designers had around might happen.

Greetings, Starfighter! You have been recruited by the Star League.... oh wait, sorry wrong universe 🙂.

Thanks for the video! As always, keen insights and observations!

Traveller came out in 1977.

All Science-Fiction RPG's take a back seat to the real sci fi 800 pound gorilla TRAVELLER....

Please do a video on Star Frontiers.

Similar flow chart in S3 Expedition to Barrier Peaks as well

well, star probe and empire sounds like interesting games so does star frontiers - would love to see more about them

Man, this episode gave me a nostalgia blast, but from a completely unexpected source. You talking about "Just Say 50" in the bonus content made me think of all the other "Just Say..." CD compilations from Sire I used to collect in the 80s and 90s. Time to break out all those Depeche Mode remixes!

this is very good

Dude, you're awesome.

Expedition to the Barrier Peaks has the same style tech mastery flow chart. But it does appear to be different -- like Gary couldn't get permission to use the same charts again???

I'd be up for a video devoted to Star Frontiers.

another great video Martin... this might be a nice segue into what could easily be considered the 2nd greatest and most influential RPG of all time. Traveller. The ultimate Science Fiction RPG.. complete with the most notorious but hilarious gaming meme of all time. What vast differences in the flagship RPG games those two companies put out. Level based... skill based. Love what you do and the history of RPG's... perhaps at some point you might jump to what others were doing. Would love to hear your thoughts on those. You haven't really lived until ....

This is a topic I know little about. I’m looking forward to watching!

I found the interview with Gygax quite telling. By 1980 I was fed up with GG and his whole approach to RPGs. I found the Dungeon Master's Guide was full of (borderline control freak) asides about how to manage and control the players. I always found his approach too adversarial, which ultimately led me away from D&D in 1981 (I used Rolemaster for years). I have only just realized that I felt Gygax style D&D was like a SAW movie; led by a diabolical adversary laying out life-threatening traps and torturous puzzles. I always thought that it was just his wargamer background, but the idea that he saw the games as fundamentally more about solving challenges than story telling really brings the things I disliked about his rules into a new light. I had a whole Boot Hill campaign built around the outlaw trail (Four Corners, to Brown's Park, to the Arches). However, we mostly played one shots, like individual western movies. The main scenario cue was "100 years Ago Today," which in the late 1970s worked really well. Thanks again Martin, I really love your delivery and content.

I used to own and play a copy of Star Probe. Silly little matrix game, but showed the open world potential of matrix tables to table top gaming. If anything, I think it would be a model for PC 4x games that have a touch of role playing, kind of like PC BBS games from the 1980s and 1990s when the internet was still a physically limited by data transfer speeds.

Oh my gosh. I used to get the Europa Zine. What a memory moment. ❤

Great video as usual.