rpg-wall-of-shame

[rpg-wall-of-shame]

Screw Gary Gygax (Lorraine Williams certainly did)

Why is it that so many people feel the need to lionise Gary Gygax? The guy was a buffoon. Consider the facts. He screwed over Arneson and tried to erase him from history, then cried foul when Lorraine Williams did it back to him. He backstabbed every business partner he ever had. He wasn't a very good writer - the 1st Edition AD&D DM Guide reads like the most boring college textbook you've seen outside of a chartered accountancy course, and every project he did outside of D&D, every novel, every script - hell, even other RPGs - were utter trash. He didn't see the point in creating settings or adventure modules until other people had success with it, at which point he stole that idea too. He was so milquetoast he would immediately agree with whoever he was speaking to, resulting in a complex web of quotes that contradict each other like he was Donald Judas Trump, Vice President of the Divided States. He told people his wife thought he was cheating on her, and she burst into the basement just to find him and some players bending over some maps - oh ho ho, great anecdote - except he really did cheat on his first wife and she left him for it. He went to Hollywood, leaving TSR in the hands of people so mercilessly incompetent they nearly wrecked the company, turned in an unshootable script, and in a haze of cocaine abuse created a single series of a mediocre animated show that didn't even have a proper ending until a Brazilian car commercial in the last decade wrapped it up for him (they got home, they just needed a lift). He bought in Lorraine Williams. And let's just conveniently ignore ALLLLLL the women over the years that suddenly and mysteriously pulled a 180 degree turn on their opinions of him after they were left alone with him at a convention, shall we? He was a racist, a misogynist, a biological essentialist, and he had terrible taste in clothing.. and worst of all, he tried to patent the idea of roleplaying games, meaning all these tiny independent creators who light candles in a tiny Gygax shrine in their bedrooms would be legally and totally barred from producing banal booklet games like Deathbringer. So remind me... apart from the fact that he stole Arneson's ideas and passed it off as his own, why are we worshipping this chump? None of us cared who he was in '93, he was already yesterday's news. He's about as relevant to today's D&D scene as Charles Babbage is to Fortnite.

[rpg-wall-of-shame]

RPG Pundit allegedly abusing his cat..?

Look, I'm not saying the guy beats his cat and throws it against walls when it annoys him. I'm not entertaining speculation that he starves it and makes it miserable, performatively taking pictures to post on social media and pretend he cares about the animal - that would be utterly slanderous, and I won't entertain such notions. ...all I'm saying is, a guy who has certain "opinions" about the strong having the right to abuse the weak, and about "certain people" being removed from society, doesn't strike me as someone who is terribly kind to the smallest of god's creations. Psychologically, it's more in line with those individuals who spent their formative years starting fires, compulsively bed-wetting and breaking into pet shelters to steal animals for obscure and horrible rituals by the train tracks... that's all I'm saying.

[rpg-wall-of-shame]

Total Party Skills skilled my last brain cell

It was a while ago now, but one of the most galling moments of the last few years in retro gaming was when Waspinator - with all three of his remaining scalp hairs blowing wispily in the breeze like Homer Simpson in front of an air vent - mused about the Kevin Siembieda game RIFTS in his oh-so-enlighten'd centrist way. Total Party Skills has long been a channel I only watched for the wild music outros and strange dreamlike intro featuring what looked like Waspinator having a stroke or dementia episode, and they had recently given way to some bullshit with a snake sock puppet that seemed designed to waste time and annoy the viewer into accelerating the playback to 150% speed, so I had avoided some of his more spicy takes on "literally WHO?" figures in the RPG scene and other enlighten'd views... but there it was. In his community notes, Waspinator mused like a Temu brand philosoraptor - "Could it have been," he thought, "that the only reason that people hated the Coalition in Rifts was because they adopted the stylings of a certain Austrian painter and his Hugo Boss outfits? Surely it isn't bad to be pro-human in a world full of demons, magic and cyborgs?" I stared at the post for a long time before clicking away. I'm not doing it, I thought. I'm not going to explain to a grown-ass man, older than me, that the army of hyperfascistic "pure humanity only, stick that person who is 1/64 Dee-Bee into a ghetto" assholes reading Mein Kampf and decorating everything from their armour to their tanks to their robots to their DOGS with skulls and black panels were the bad guys. Either Waspinator was trolling, or arguing in bad faith, or he is a complete moron. Either way, my attempts to explain things would gain no traction.

...it was like the comedy sketch from Mitchell and Webb. "Hans... are we the baddies??"

[rpg-wall-of-shame]

RPG Elite is anything but

This week's "pick me" award goes to Servant of Shiloh, who uploaded a video to his YouTube Channel "RPG Elite" calling for an end to what he called "identity politics in gaming", claiming that the election of Donald Judas Trump to the Vice Presidency was a clear signal - nay, a mandate - for the "majority" to rise up and cast aside the yoke of "idpol". My Brother in Christ, you are a certain hue. You are a Person of Colour. You are also in gaming. Do you REALLY think championing the reduction of minority representation in gaming is going to work out well for you? Do you imagine they will have a place for you, as "one of the good ones"? ...I'm sure it will be fine. It's not like, historically, selling out your own people to earn scraps of respect and kudos from people that hate you winds up with you getting used, dumped and then abandoned by both sides of the aisle or anything...