More is better; Who Cares and What is the proper response?

More is better: First things first — I no longer feel obligated to post on every Old School Renaissance event or outrage, but in my web wanderings I frequently come across people expressing the sentiment that when hobbyist gamers sit down to write their ‘own’ rule book, they should write something new and different from what has come before. “Don’t give us another cut-and-paste job!” the masses scream en masse from the internets with the same rage that others reserve for dolphin killers and child molesters.

I think that’s dumb advice.  I think if someone sits down to write their own rule book, they should write it exactly the way they want to write it.  If that means that the only difference between your new ‘Towers & Trolls‘  and the original game written by Gygax & Arneson is the name and just enough of the text to stave off a cease and desist letter from Wizards of the Coast, then so be it.  In the scheme of things, who cares if ‘Towers & Trolls’ sells only 3 copies and never gets played? I’m under the impression most people in the OSR do this for fun and love rather than money… and, for most of us, if we make enough $$$ to buy a pizza and a sixer we can consider it a job well done.  Like collecting stamps or building ships inside bottles, rewriting games is a niche hobby.

I realize that producing yet another clone is probably not the winning strategy if your goal is to support yourself by selling games, so the true entrepreneurs who are out to sell books and games in order to make big money might want to avoid tossing yet another undifferentiated clone onto the heap of available games… but the few OSR-ers I’ve met via the internet who are doing this for money already seem to have figured that out, anyway.

One of the reasons why I think this is so cool is I have been reading these posts on A-Plus’s “Outland” game and think it is just the shiznit.  I wish I was in his group.

Who Cares?: Paul Jaquays is now a woman named Jannelle Allyn Jaquays (sp?).  If you follow that link and read the responses, you will find out that the fact that he is now a she makes some people mad — which is really fucking weird.  What are the angry people angry about?  I imagine them saying things like, “I played ‘Dark Tower’ back in 1982 and loved it… and Paul Jaquays wrote ‘Dark Tower’ so now I feel like my world has been rocked… how could he betray us by becoming a woman!?!” 

One poster wrote something like, “This cannot be true because I know he is a conservative.”  I didn’t know there was a single specific conservative viewpoint on gender reassignment.  Is there?

I’m reasonably certain Jannelle Allyn Jaquays will not read this, but, if you do, I hope all this works out for you.

If you are one of the people who is made mad by Paul Jaquays becoming Janelle Allyn Jaquays, please post why in comments. I want to know why someone else changing their gender harms you.

What is the proper response?:  A few days ago I posted something stupid about new years resolutions and old fruit cakes selling for big money at auction and how I ought to invest in fruit cakes since I could either sell or eat them if worse came to worse. One person responded to tell me something along the lines of, “For your new year’s resolution you could try being less of a douche bag,” or something like that. I deleted the response.  In your opinion, what is the proper etiquette in this case?