D&D General When We Were Wizards: Review of the Completed Podcast!

Mike @SlyFlourish mentioned a series of videos featuring Peter Adkinson where they play each edition of D&D. Each session is preceded by a panel discussion of the original creators or others who had been around for the development.

I’ve not seen them myself so I don’t have the link…

Farbjoðr said:

"if you are looking for a podcast that carefully examines the evolution of D&D's rules,"

If I was looking for something like this, is there something anyone could recommend?

Thanks

(I'm more interested in the story in When We Were..., which is really really good so far, but when that's finished I might be interested in moving on to the history of the game itself.)

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I don't think there's a podcast which does this, though I'd be happy to hear otherwise.

If you're up for a book, Playing at the World is the most complete and authoritative work on the evolution of D&D from all its myriad influences and precursors. It's about ten years old now, though (which means some info is missing which has since come to light), and can be expensive on the secondary market. Good news is that it's being reprinted in a revised edition, in two volumes, and the first volume came out this year (from MIT Press).

Peterson's more recent The Elusive Shift is shorter and should be easy to find, and it chronicles and analyzes what happened after D&D got published, as players and designers made OTHER RPGs and debated what RPGs were capable of and best for.
The same author's Game Wizards is about the business side, from before TSR was founded until Gary left in the mid 80s.

PatW doesn't go much beyond Original D&D, though, so if what you're really looking for is discussion of how the game mechanics have changed through its various versions and editions in the past 50 years, I don't know it there's any one good source for that. The panel discussions of the editions Mr. Fahey just mentioned are pretty good, but they are a bit informal and loose. Delta's D&D Hotspot, a venerable OSR blog, has an intermittent series of articles titled "[subject] Through the Ages" which examines various parts of the rules and how they've changed over the editions. Often it's a deep dive into a particular spell, but sometimes it's a broader topic like how healing works, or aging.

I read The Elusive Shift recently and I have to say it was an excellent book that dug deep into interesting areas. And I also read Game Wizards recently, another excellent book overlapping with When We Were.... And I have Playing at the World Vol. 1 sitting on my Kindle. But I think all of these are about the early history of D&D and also they don't talk that much about the game mechanics.

But...Through the Ages looks like it might cover some of what I'm looking for so thanks for that!

I used to play D&D in the 70s and 80s and among other things I thought it's about time I find out what changes I've missed in the last 4 decades

Mr. Lahey said:

Mike @SlyFlourish mentioned a series of videos featuring Peter Adkinson where they play each edition of D&D. Each session is preceded by a panel discussion of the original creators or others who had been around for the development.

I’ve not seen them myself so I don’t have the link…

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There are two sets and they're awesome:


I thought the interviews in this one were better. Don't be intimidated by the length of the videos – the first two hours are the best parts:

I listened to the the whole thing on a road trip. It's my favorite documentary by far!

Finally listening to this.

And man, what a huge bummer it is. Gygax, as has been mentioned, comes off really, really poorly, even from people who are otherwise vocal supporters of his nowadays, like Rob Kuntz.

And this sort of ruins the Gygax-promulgated idea that the Blumes are the villains of this story. Without them, it's entirely likely we wouldn't really know of D&D as anything other than the precursor to whatever RPG came out after from someone with slightly less disastrous business sense. (Speaking of which, I had no idea that Arneson ever put out his own RPG after separating from Gygax.)

Still have more episodes to go, but man, I need to take them a few at a time. It's just too grim a lot of the time, hearing everyone careen from misstep to misstep.

Whizbang Dustyboots said:

Finally listening to this.

And man, what a huge bummer it is. Gygax, as has been mentioned, comes off really, really poorly, even from people who are otherwise vocal supporters of his nowadays, like Rob Kuntz.

And yeah, this sort of ruins the Gygax-promulgated idea that the Blumes are the villains of this story. Without them, it's entirely likely we wouldn't really know of D&D as anything other than the precursor to whatever RPG came out after from someone with slightly less disastrous business sense. (Like, I had no idea that Arneson ever put out his own RPG after separating from Gygax.)

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Well, that's one of the benefits of having a bully pulpit in the pages of Dragon Magazine as well as a legion of hero-worshipers who will unquestioningly carry water for you. You get a lot of power to shape the narrative to your liking. And that kind of damage takes a long time to dismantle so that people have a better, more complete, more nuanced accounting of the history of D&D.

Whizbang Dustyboots said:

Still have more episodes to go, but man, I need to take them a few at a time. It's just too grim a lot of the time, hearing everyone careen from misstep to misstep.

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They do careen a bit. But missteps are something I expect from people who tumble onto a windfall and get it going by the seat of their pants. If they had been able to prove they were learning from the experience, it would all be a lot more forgivable.

billd91 said:

They do careen a bit. But missteps are something I expect from people who tumble onto a windfall and get it going by the seat of their pants. If they had been able to prove they were learning from the experience, it would all be a lot more forgivable.

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Yeah, that's my big issue, I think. I am on the periphery of Silicon Valley culture and don't view failure as a failing, so much as the natural consequence of making big swings.

But TSR had people in-house who were desperate to explain that this is going to end badly unless we take steps X and Y and Gygax's response was to view those warnings as personal attacks, rather than to ask for copies of the business books being cited and read them for himself.

Likewise, his meltdown after a shareholder meeting which, again, he viewed people arguing against his ideas as an attempted coup is just insane. If you issue shares, you're inviting input. Learn to handle that or don't do it.

It seems like anyone who didn't understand D&D was cast as a villain, but those were often the unsung heroes. And just as often caused collateral damage.

Just got to the podcast where Gary proclaims that they're obviously great business people because D&D is selling so well.

Certain types of myopia and hubris never go out of style, it seems.