D&D General High Gygaxian: Time To Post Your Favorite Purple Verbiage

[Malmuria]

This passage is not so purple, but does create a rather ridiculous scene of what his dungeon exploration turns looked like. It's quoted from The Alexandrian who provides commentary:

Here’s Gary Gygax giving some of the worst GMing advice you’ll hopefully ever read (Dungeon Master’s Guide, 1979):

Assume your players are continually wasting time (thus making the so-called adventure drag out into a boring session of dice rolling and delay) if they are checking endlessly for traps and listening at every door. If this persists, despite the obvious displeasure you express, the requirement that helmets be doffed and mail coifs removed to listen at a door, and then be carefully replaced, the warnings about ear seekers, and frequent checks for wandering monsters (q.v.), then you will have to take more direct part in things. Mocking their over-cautious behavior as near cowardice, rolling huge handfuls of dice and then telling them the results are negative, and statements to the effect that: “You detect nothing, and nothing has detected YOU so far—” might suffice. If the problem should continue, then rooms full of silent monsters will turn the tide, but that is the stuff of later adventures.
Uh… yeah. Do literally none of that. But you can feel Gygax’s palpable frustration with the style of play his own killer dungeons had created boiling off the page.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Gygax being frustrated by all of this and also being the person who included ear seekers (little monsters in the door that burrow into one's ears if they decide to listen at the door) and, more generally, the person who wrote the Tomb of Horrors, is pretty rich.

They learned it by watching you, Dad! By watching you!

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Try playing that on Heward's Mystical Organ!

I've never been anywhere near Heward's organ, not even at the 1977 Christmas party, no matter what you may have heard.

 

[steeldragons]

I will forever have Gygax to thank for the introduction and understanding of the word "aesthetic," ...and importantly, and more specifically, why and how it differs from the word "ascetic." (It's in the 1e description of the Monk class.)

Whether it was some flowery "Gygaxian" that I was unable to parse, or a simple mistake, or some "errata" missed/not understood by an editor, I can't say. But I have, from the age of around 10, known what "aesthetic" and "ascetic" mean because of Gygax and D&D.

 

[James Gasik]

I will say that Gygax's room descriptions caused me some problems as a young DM, because he used words that I wasn't familiar with, and my attempting to say them caused some yuks at the table.

Two infamous examples were "brooch" and "brazier", lol.

 

[MNblockhead]

Gygaxian prose certainly deserves a lot of the criticism it gets if your goal is to clearly communicate how to run a game and make adventures easy to run in game.

But reading the descriptions in the OP's post, it still sucks me in, in a way that few adventure module descriptions can. I get it that we don't want an adventure novel to be a novel, but I find that langue very evocative. And besides, it was not like every room and area got that treatment. Many rooms would only get a few lines and adventure modules back then were short.

I find decades later, that I still appreciate Gygaxian prose in adventures, but not for explaining rules.