>>98826612
Want to know a secret? The western world is hopelessly corrupt (because we ignored thousands of years of religious truth and common sense by idolizing greedy rich cunts) to the point where TSR isn’t even an unusual company. Shitters stole the game from Gygax after he tried to steal it from his fellow designers, then it stumbled on inertia for a few decades with the people in charge being shitters, then its assets went to a major corporation. Nothing unusual here, it’s happening all around you, the unusual thing is just that you know the story. People tend to have a similar reaction when they look into how video games are made, it seems like absolute crazy-town, but that’s just because we’re informed enough to see and understand how stupid it is.

>>98826612
>no sound knowledge of business
None of them were business men.
>no sound knowledge of game design
Game design as a field of study wasn't really a thing in the 70s and they were making something pretty much completely novel.
>or even fun.
Now you are just scrapping the bottom of the barrel but if you want to go there studies on human psychology weren't incorporated into game design back then either. Which was good because shit like that gave us gacha games and loot boxes.
>Gygax wanted hundreds of thousands of rules for every action.
Provide one, singular example. Just one. I will wait. It can be about any action and although the action may not require literally "hundreds of thousands of rules" it should require more rules to resolve than the same action on the average ttrpg.
>but also throws them away as he pleases in favor of instant death traps that require constant metagaming.
Tomb of Horrors was a one off in order to make point, poke a certain type of player. It wasn't a magnum opus or the fruits of his accumulated knowledge and experience.

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Gygax wasn't that good at business, but made one big move that was brilliant. Before D&D came out, the concept of roleplaying games had been already developing in various stages in the war gaming and board game communities, with various board games already acting as proto-RPGs and war game fanzines describing players adding diplomacy and negotiations on top of longer campaigns. When Arneson showed Gygax what he had done with Jeff Perren's and Gygax's Chainmail rules, he recognized that this was a multi-million dollar idea.

He first tried pitching the game to companies like Avalon Hill, who were already making similar fantasy proto-RPG games and were unimpressed by Gygax's pitch and previous games' sales. So, Gygax decided to rush out a very amateur and very rough self-published edition of D&D out, in an effort to take advantage of first mover advantage.

And it worked. Not immediately, but by word-of-mouth people realized they could use D&D for far more than what Gygax or Arneson had expected and the community rapidly grew around it, shaping the game and building it in a way TSR could not do alone.

Later on, Gygax would try to create a version of D&D that would provide uniform gameplay between DMs and could even be used to provide a fair and unbiased tournament experience. AD&D 1e was his attempt to do that, but he ultimately realized the very idea was fundamentally flawed (since even with trained GMs and a higher council of judges, tournaments remained a very subjective experience). Gygax would later return to favoring a more loose approach towards rules with his post-TSR games, and not long before his death would say that the original, looser D&D was his favorite to run.

>>98826749
Learning spells in AD&D.
Take your time, we’ll wait.

>Bunch of nerds who liked crunchy wargame sims.
>Accidentally make elfgame.
>Wildly successful; oops, they aren't businessmen.
>Some she-bitch runs TSR into the ground and everyone sues everyone.

>>98826758
>Later on, Gygax would try to create a version of D&D that would provide uniform gameplay between DMs and could even be used to provide a fair and unbiased tournament experience. AD&D 1e was his attempt to do that
>AD&D 1e was his attempt to do that
That’s some bullshit and you know it. AD&D was his attempt to outsell Basic.
“Hey kiddies, you want to play a ranger don’t you?”
“Hey kiddies, you want to multiclass don’t you?”
“Hey kiddies, you want your character to maybe have psionic powers don’t you?”
AD&D was the first-and-worst splatbook.

>>98826760
A 4 step process for magic-users isn't a hundred thousand rules by any stretch, I don't think.

>>98826933
Basic was just supposed to act as an intro to AD&D, rather than a stand-alone game. AD&D was actually already in development before Holmes approached TSR with the offer to write Basic, and they were released in the same year. It was the popularity of Basic that lead to B/X, and it's with B/X that AD&D and Basic became distinctly separate game lines.

>>98826689
"Religious truth" and "common sense" retardation is what gave us the satanic panic. If you want stupidity that is "Religious truth" you can find a middle east shithole be a nogames in.

>>98827749
Yes, it is sorry that you are this retarded.

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>>98826612

Tbh, their board games were way better.

>>98826612
>Gygax in particular comes across as a tremendous stick in the mud who simultaneously wants hundreds of thousands of rules for every action, but also throws them away as he pleases in favor of instant death traps that require constant metagaming.

You need to understand that early RPGs weren't coming from any kind of place of storytelling. They were based on tabletop battle rules; 1st edition D&D had more spiritually in common with Mordheim than with modern RPGs.

For Gygax, those thousand fiddly rules were a simplification of what had come before. THAC0 replaced to-hit tables.

As for the instant death traps...again, telling stories and developing personality and character was not a priority. For Gygax, the game was composed entirely of what we would consider to be min-maxing rules lawyering metagaming. He saw a dungeon as a puzzle, not an adventure. And that's why something like the Tomb of Horrors seems like a series of puzzles, many of which had to be solved by trial and error: because that's exactly what it was designed to be.

2e represented a huge step not in that it was very different from 1e (or OD&D or the Boxed Set or whatever the fuck you want to call the early editions) rules-wise, but in that someone actually stopped and tried to consider which rules were fun and which were not, as well as things like Nonweapon Proficiencies that started supporting gameplay aside from combat and "classic" puzzles.

tl;dr don't compare the first editions of D&D to modern RPGs; they weren't the same thing and weren't supposed to be

>>98826760
it's like learning spells in some Wathammer Fantasy
It's a level of crunch some people like

>>98826933
AD&D was in production before Basic, Holmes text was changed to add proto-AD&D rules so it would fit better.

>>98826770
like another anon said before, ttrpgs were happening. TSR rushed to print something that pushed beyond the current market at the time.

>>98829703
>2e represented a huge step not in that it was very different from 1e (or OD&D or the Boxed Set or whatever the fuck you want to call the early editions) rules-wise, but in that someone actually stopped and tried to consider which rules were fun and which were not, as well as things like Nonweapon Proficiencies that started supporting gameplay aside from combat and "classic" puzzles.
after 15 years of other people doing that

>>98826933
>to outsell Basic.
kek
You stupid fuck.

>>98829765
>after 15 years of other people doing that
Oh, others were doing that in 1972, you say?
Huh. Neat. Sounds totes legit, senpai.