Michael Mornard (aka Gronan of Simmerya) played in Arneson’s Blackmoor, Gygax’s Greyhawk, & Barker’s Tékumel. He is also “the original thinker-up” of the gelatinous cube. I’ve found many of his posts to fora such as Pied Piper Publishing’s & RPG.net’s very informative, insightful, & entertaining.

Herein, I collect some of that wisdom so I don’t have to go googling for it again.

---

“CHARGE!” is an ancient Simmeryan word meaning “Them buggers over there stole our beer!”

---

“To steal your enemies’ beer,
roll the kegs before you,
and hear the lamentations of their brewmasters.”

---

(The major Simmeryan dieties being Cram and Mirthless, of course...)

---

Robilar: “Barkeep! Two Guinnesses!”
Gronan: “Good idea! I’ll have two Guinnesses too!”

---

On role-playing:

We added it on our own. There were no rules about it because nobody thought they were needed; the rules were just for the “nuts and bolts” mechanicals.

The night Ernie (Gygax) talked the chimera out of attacking us, it depended on how well Ernie talked, not any rules. The night my 3rd level Balrog pretended to be a photographer for “Balrog Times” magazine, our success depended on how well we amused the referee.

The rules were written with an “Everything not forbidden is permitted” attitude.

---

This one is really a “Fute” quote with Gronan’s approval. On why D&D had rules for combat but not for role playing:

Fute quotha:

“I further posit that the decision of what to codify with resolution mechanics and what to leave fuzzy is not based on some logical analysis of mediating factors, but on what the designers think is fun to roll dice for, and what they think is fun to improvise.”

That, sir (or ms), is the single most insightful comment on game design I have seen in 33 years. Seriously. You have nailed it exactly.

On the “cultural norms” of D&D worlds:

D&D grew out of (mostly) miniatures gaming groups in Minneapolis (Blackmoor) and Lake Geneva (Greyhawk).

We’d all read the same books (pretty much off Gary’s shelves). So, even when we did our own world, they shared a lot of unstated assumptions with Greyhawk just because we’d all read the same books.

Though there were lots of Tolkien’s critters, the “cultural norms” were mostly influenced by Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, and Poul Anderson (with an unhealthy dose of Lovecraft thrown in).

---

On morale (mechanics in wargames):

Broken morale sucks when it happens to you, and is frickin’ hilarious when it happens to the other guy. (Come back and fight, you yellow bastard! I’ll bite your legs off!)

---

On hit points:

Why the HP jump (long story, bear with me):

Back before D&D (Greyhawk, we called it) (hak, caff, wheeze...)

There was this simple, fun little miniatures game called Chainmail.

Just before I came along to the bunch (1971) there was a medieval miniatures battle up in Minneapolis. By his own words, Dave Arneson said he didn’t like medieval miniatures, so he threw in Godzilla as a dragon.

So, everybody said, “Hey, let’s do dragon rules.” And since Tolkien was enjoying his first mass market popularity, everybody figured, “Hey, let’s do orcs and goblins and elves and Ents and Balrogs and, and, and...”

Now, even though these games were published, please remember that the prevailing attitude was that these were “our house rules”. Yes, they were published and sold, but the attitude of using ideas from Tolkien, Moorcock, et al was very much the notion of “House rules to let us play with cool stuff.”

Anyway...

The gang figured, “Hey, no way Conan or Aragorn or Elric or Launcelot or (whoever) is just some ordinary guy on the field.”

Thus—remember, we are still talking Chainmail miniatures rules—the concept arose of the “Hero” miniature. In combat, the Hero fought like four men; you rolled four times for his hits, and that one figure had to have four “kills” scored against him in a single turn to actually be “killed”. There was also a character called a “Super Hero”, who was worth eight men in combat.

Remember, the original D&D combat system was a derivative of Chainmail.

I’m sure you see where this is heading.

When we started playing Greyhawk and Blackmoor, the thought was “how does a Hero become a Hero?” Well, obviously, you start as a single man, then you eventually are worth 2 men, then 3...

And that, Grasshopper, is why hit points increase so drastically in D&D.

---

In the mode of Vance or Gygax:

I fear, dear colleague, that I must essay gently, nay tenderly, to press upon your mind the possibility that forces and perhaps, even, persons, have conspired in this unfortunate instance to result in your utterance not, alas, being aligned to the utmost atom with the absolute truth, which occurance, all will surely agree, is a thing of rareness beyond all mention.

But if you do pursue the words and writings of one Gary Gygax, proclaimed by some savant and others charlatan (such petty squabblings, of course, are beneath the dignity of persons of our undoubted excellence and I dismiss them forthwith) with your usual energy and undenied sagacity, I feel most warmly reassured that you will find (with a speed befitting one of your intellectual prowess) that the accredation of resemblance of the 'spell slots’ of that jejune entertainment known colloquially as “Dungeons and Dragons” to the epistolary, scholarly, and literary revelations of M. Vance originates, springs forth from, and in all other ways has its genesis from the aforementioned Gygax himself.

---

On the nature of the game (& a bit about Pendragon):

Purely for the record, the Fantasy expansion to CHAINMAIL (original 2nd Ed., 1970) was there for “house rules”. Most wargames back then, except for SPI and Avalon Hill, were house rules—you just got a couple hundred copies printed up.

And what became D&D started later, originally as a wargame-type campaign. There were good players and evil players, but as evil kept getting whomped and evil players kept defecting, it reached the point where only the referee, Dave Arneson, was left to play the evil critters.

Not that it really matters anymore, I just feel this tug to try to keep the history accurate.

And Pendragon is an awesome game. It’s one of the four RPGs ever published that really grabbed and excited me from the beginning.

1. Original D&D
2. 1st Edition CHAMPIONS
3. 1st Edition Star Wars RPG by West End
4. Pendragon

Your mileage may vary.

---

On the origin of clerics:

Back in Dave Arneson’s original game, it was “zero-sum”—that is, players played monsters too.

One of the most successful players played a vampire, “Sir Fang”. As he got more power, he got more Hammer Film-type powers. Pretty soon, he was pretty much invincible.

Clerics were invented as a countermeasure to Sir Fang.

Honest.

---

On the written rules:

There are two totally different ways people approach a set of game rules (RPG or other):

1. Anything not specifically forbidden is permitted
2. Anything not specifically permitted is forbidden

Which one of these you accept will make an incredible difference in how the game works. A lot of people seem to take the #2 viewpoint.

---

On editions:

I never really ran true 1E either.

I go back to D&D OE (Only Edition), and the days of “it’s your game, do what you want”.

When AD&D came out, TSR had this “official viewpoint” of “This is a tournament game, don’t modify the rules”.

Our response was, “Yeah sure right”. There’s a lot of stuff from AD&D 1E we just never used. Nobody ever liked psionics in my group, so we didn’t use them. We diddled around with the weapon vs AC modifiers for a few weeks and then said “bugger that”.

And so on. We looked at 1E as some new spells, monsters, and goodies for existing campaigns. If someone had said “it’s an entirely different game” we would have looked at him funny.

I never played, or even looked at, 2nd ed. so I can have no meaningful opinion.

I’ve looked at 3rd Ed, and my reaction is the same as my reaction to Hero System 5th Ed —

“Oh, sweet suffering Crom and Mitra!”

I just think 3E was a huge step in the wrong direction; we need games with simpler rules sets, not larger ones. As a software professional it reminds me of a “crisis point” in software system design; there comes a point where, rather than putting in yet one more code patch to fix a problem, you’re better off just starting over.

The basic d20 mechanic works fine — d20 for attack vs either a defense number or a fixed base, and then do damage.

But what this industry needs is a game with 32 pages of rules, not 320.

And the all-purpose rule of “The generic modifer is +2, either for you or against you depending on situation.”

---

On “realistic” combat:

As far as 3E combat being more “realistic”, this argument disintegrates under its own weight in nanoseconds. You have a Paladin with a Holy Avenger versus a Lich flinging Magic Missiles, and you use the word “realistic”? Not to mention as I have said before, “We have absolutely no idea of how mediaeval knights actually fought”.

Now, if you want to talk about things like “The richer set of combat options in 3E combined with some rules streamlining makes the 3E combat system a more fun game to play”, you might get some listeners.

---

Though it sort of makes me wonder if some of this is “teaching tactical gaming to non-wargamers”... nobody ever had to tell us that flanking was an advantage. Nor did we need special modifiers (the all-purpose modifier is +2)(+4 if behind).

---

But honestly, one of the reasons that I drifted away from D&D is that, frankly, the actual process of fighting—the game of combat—really wasn’t much fun. Let’s contrast this to The Fantasy Trip, which was really a neat little skirmish game in its own right. You couldn’t do the epic sorts of things D&D let you, but it was better for more dramatic confrontations.

Example:

• Aragorn vs. a dozen orcs — D&D is better.
• Parsifal vs. the Red Knight — Fantasy Trip is better.

---

A cost:benefit analysis:

For me, truthfully, it’s a matter of “the rules I know”.

I know the original OD&D/AD&D1E really well. To learn 3E would be a lot of work. To justify the added work, I would have to get added fun.

Nobody has convinced me that 3E is * sufficiently more fun * than 1E.

Please note that I explicitly avoid any concept of better/worse here; it is purely a matter of marginal effort vs marginal reward — is it enough more fun to justify the extra work.

---

A post to the “I discover that 1st ed. AD&D is the best RPG ever made” thread on RPG.NET.

There's a big, fat, juicy, stinking misconception hovering in the air here exactly the way watermelon-sized turds don't.

That is that D&D is somehow 'misdesigned' because some things are missing.

This is, quite simply, not true. OD&D, and AD&D Ist ed, its child on steriods, were deliberately designed with large amounts not covered.

That is because - wait for it - MAKING THINGS UP WAS CONSIDERED TO BE A MAJOR, PERHAPS EVEN THE MAJOR, FUN OF BEING A DM!!!!!

Damn, that's important enough to bear repeating. MAKING THINGS UP WAS CONSIDERED TO BE A MAJOR, PERHAPS EVEN THE MAJOR, FUN OF BEING A DM!!!!!

There are no rules for a half-succubus/half man-eating trout PC because MAKING UP THE RULES WOULD BE FUN!

This is also seen in a recent review here on RPG.net of the old, original Blackmoor. The reviewer complained that "there were no rules or suggestions on how to integrate Monks into your campaign."

The answer to that is, quite simply, "Why do you want someone else to take the fun away?"

Please note that this is not mere conjecture on my part -- I maintained a frequent correspondence with Gary Gygax, Rob Kuntz, Dave Arneson, and a few others at TSR until the early 80s. And this very sort of thing was a frequent subject of discussion -- why, we wondered, did people want questions answered when making up the answers was the fun part of the game? Why did people not want to have fun?

The answer, of course, is that it's a different hobby. Building a world and the rules to play in it is a very different experience from playing in someone else's fully developed world and rules.

And right here and now, the strawman of "the latter is more advanced gaming" DIES, and I take its stuff and set its body on fire.

Neither form of gaming is "more advanced". They are merely different.

Just like there are still model railroaders who enjoy building models from raw materials - bits of wood, sheet brass, and the like. The fact that I can buy a breathtakingly accurate model engine for $50 has nothing to do with the fact that someone else is building one from scratch BECAUSE HE HAS FUN DOING SO.

Not because he is in some way engaging in a "more primitve" or "incomplete" version of the model railroad hobby, or that his engine is "deficient" because he had to spend time working on it himself.

For him, the POINT is the time spent doing it himself. Just like for me -- and, I think, perhaps, for Lars - the POINT of D&D is the things I put into it.

Yes. OD&D does NOT have rules for succubus/aardvark Player Characters nor for integrating a Monk into your existing world.

That is precisely why I like it.

It's not for everyone, just like carving your own locomotive wheels on a lathe isn't for everyone.

But "I don't like this" does NOT equal "this is primitive/incomplete/badly designed".

---

Classic D&D

last updated 1 year ago #