PlayingAtTheWorld

Depends on how broad a set of work you mean by "the hobby." I'd like to believe MMOs will finally stop making "me too" versions of WoW and promote worlds with genuine dynamism and far more integration with the principles of social media.

For tabletop RPGs, I'm obviously looking forward to seeing WotC's new release the summer, and where their new cross-platform strategy takes us. I'm also just thrilled by the indie community today: so many create games coming out in more artisanal, boutique printing: everything from 13th Age and Numenera to Dungeon World and Burning Wheel to... where could I even stop?

What I guess I'd like to see most is an integration of technology with the tabletop in a way that keeps tabletop gaming a personal experience shared by people sitting around the table, but takes care of the mechanics and the busywork of adjudicating combat. I know a lot of companies are trying to find the sweet spot there. I want computers to know what dice I roll, to know where my character is in a room, to render results on a table, and to have it just work. In a decade, we could have that.

This is a topic I never got tired of - really, this is exactly the sort of research that I was hoping to be able to do. The short answer is that some new pre-publication D&D fragments have come to light, thanks to my friend Mike Mornard, who was one of the original D&D playtesters. He got photocopies of this working draft made by Gary Gygax from Gary, back in the day, and only recently recovered them.

These new pieces of evidence show pretty decisively that the system preserved by the Dalluhn Manuscript is a 1973 pre-publication system. We can see Gary's hand edits in the Mornard Fragments bringing the text into conformity with what we see typed up in Dalluhn. While of course I've been convinced of the authenticity of Dalluhn for some time, seeing Dalluhn and the Mornard Fragments side-by-side has seemed to mollify a few of the skeptics out there.

Stay tuned - there's more coming on all this, and I'm really excited to be able to share this with the community. I think collectively all of this will give us unprecedented insight into how D&D was created.

Always hard to pick favorites. The flavor of D&D that I've played the most myself is probably 3rd Edition (and then 3.5). I loved the White Wolf games in the 1990s, and did a bit of Mind's Eye Theater LARPing. I also played a heavily variant system devised by a friend of mine which has since published under the title Wayfarers. But in terms of games that I think are important, that changed the world most, how could I not say the original 1974 version of D&D - celebrating its 40th birthday today!

Tough question. It was a lot. Some of the reasons I took on this project though is that I do travel a lot, and can tack on a few extra days here and there, I got a good head-start on collecting by picking up many items more than a decade ago before valuations went through the roof, and ultimately I do have the means to try to secure items of critical historical importance today, and to get them where they belong: in museums. I think in the long run this last point may be the most valuable service I would end up having done for the community.

I do talk about this a bit in PatW. There were historical reasons to deprive clerics of bloodletting weapons, based on certain prohibitions on priests practicing medicine (many of which were actually intended to prevent priests from moonlighting in a very remunerative profession). There are also many historical accounts that were known to Gygax and Arneson that showed clerics wielding maces. I actually found a great quote in a book that I know Gary read that could very well be the prototype for the bludgeon-wielding cleric - but I only found it after PatW was done. Maybe next edition.