Archive | July 20, 2012

1) I tend to divide the D&D people I know into two groups. On the one side, there are the people who are more influenced by material that was around before the advent of D&D (in, say, 1974) and, on the other side, there are the people who are more influenced by post-D&D material. The folks in the first group tend to be influenced by the same things that had a big impact on Gygax and Arneson themselves. These are the DMs who have already read the books in “Appendix N.” For them, it wasn’t a matter of being introduced to these ideas and tropes – it was about rediscovering all of them in the context of the game. Even though I was a kid in Junior High when I started playing, I had already been steeped in the “Appendix N” books before I had ever heard of D&D. D&D, for me, wasn’t about something new in that sense. It was more like coming home.