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    A Hard Look at Dungeons and Dragons

    by [8]Ron Edwards

    It's time to set aside long-established habits of thought regarding the

    various versions or even conceivably separate games that go by this

    name. In the culture of gaming, it's quite the thing to diss D&D, or to

    toss it backhanded praise like, "Well, it was first, but ...", in order

    to establish some sort of personal cachet as a real grown-up gamer.

    Enough, already. What the hell was it, anyway?

    The following ideas were mainly worked out, for me anyway, on two

    threads on the Forge: [9]Dungeons & Dragons history - help wanted and

    [10]Precursors to AD&D2. I am especially indebted to Christopher Pramas,

    M. J. Young, Julie Stauffer, Paul Czege, and Maurice Forrester, as well

    as to readers Clinton R. Nixon, Rob MacDougall, Grant Gigee, and Peter

    Adkison.

    This essay is limited to the period from the early 1970s to the early

    1980s. Two later periods deserve analysis and essays of their own: the

    first, from the mid-1980s to the late-1990s, might best be described as

    "The corporate bear-trap," and the second, about 1999 to the present, as

    "Frankenstein's lightning-bolt." Most of these discussions concern

    economics of the role-playing hobby and are best left until my essay

    about role-playing business and marketing is available.

    Textual history

    The following is much less detailed or explanatory than many accounts of

    these developments available on the internet. My goal is not to provide

    the Real & Complete Official History, but rather to make a specific

    point about the origins of role-playing as a hobby. The point is that

    modern references to earlier "editions" or "Basic/Advanced" versions of

    Dungeons & Dragons are extremely misleading. There was no "first

    edition." There is no single "old D&D."

    Texts do not equal play, and the origins of role-playing and the origins

    of D&D are two separate things. No one seems to be able to discuss the

    history in modulated tones, but I know what I think - that Dave Arneson

    and a variety of other wargame hobbyists around the country had found

    that people liked playing characters in the wargaming-worlds, and they

    even enjoyed the development of those characters through adventures.

    Chainmail (1971, by Gary Gygax & Jeff Perren) was not a role-playing

    game. In my view, Arneson (and as I say, he was not unique in the

    activity) found a system to conduct this new imaginative activity, and

    Chainmail just happened to be it. His experiences are summarized to some

    extent in The First Fantasy Campaign (see also the [11]Castle Blackmoor

    website and associated links).

    Chainmail's second and third editions contained supplemental

    fantasy-setting rules, as well as alternate rules that show similarities

    to later D&D rules. However, the most memorable published result of the

    Arneson-Gygax hobby crossover appeared at GenCon, 1974, in a

    thousand-copy print run, as Dungeons & Dragons, 1974, by Gary Gygax and

    Dave Arneson. It consisted of three roughly digest-sized brown pamphlets

    in a deepish brown box with white labels. (People are often confused

    because a very-nearly identical product, marked with "Original

    Collector's Edition," was released in 1978 in a white cardboard box,

    hence the mistaken name "white box D&D" to refer to the 1974 product.)

    Word about this "new game" spread mainly through hobby store culture and

    the usual mysterious pop-culture grapevine that seems to require no

    medium but aether. A larger culture began to develop as well, within

    certain societal strictures. Wargaming was already a favored hobby among

    American enlisted men, and many Army bases developed long-running D&D

    games. Also, APAs (a kind of fanzine that operated like a modern

    internet forum) began to appear, such as Alarums & Excursions and The

    Wild Hunt. People were meeting, talking, comparing, and theorizing about

    play.

    One unifying or at least visible factor was tournament play; this new

    (or new-ish) activity was called "fantasy wargaming," after all, and had

    first been released and understood as a modification of wargaming. So

    tournaments were held, and people ran characters in squads against

    referee-directed dangers. Imagine, if you will, fifty tables of eight

    players apiece, each one presided over by a single referee. At the end

    of the set time period, who had survived? Which group had collected the

    most treasure? Which had killed the most opponents, and how tough were

    those opponents? If this all sounds odd to the modern role-player,

    you'll have to put up with knowing, patronizing looks from us old guys.

    Where do you think Experience Points came from, anyway?

    As the culture spread and developed, secondary texts began to appear.

    Many, many rules and play ideas proliferated in TSR's magazine The

    Dragon, renamed from its precursor The Strategic Review. A company

    called the Judges Guild, associated mainly with the tournament scene,

    published a slew of adventure modules and other support material largely

    taken from tournaments. The RPGA became active, including their magazine

    Polyhedron. Dave Hargrave published the first of a nine-volume series of

    supplements beginning with the Arduin Grimoire, introducing such things

    as barbarians and critical hits. I cannot over-stress the impact of

    these publications on the text-hungry culture. These became the texts of

    play, far more so than any "rules-set" that anyone could actually pick

    up and read. Soon, they operated as constraints (and some say, as raw

    material) for the eventual rules that would follow.

    Dungeons & Dragons, 1977 (listed copyright in the text included 1974

    and, in later printings, 1979), by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, edited

    by Eric Holmes - a full-sized saddle-stitched blue-cover booklet,

    contained in a box with a color cover, including chits to be used in

    place of dice. Significantly, "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons" was already

    in development by Gygax, and this product was written by Holmes mainly

    as an intentional introduction and commercial intermediary to the

    forthcoming text.

    Speaking of an actual rulebook, as all of this was occurring like

    wildfire, Gary Gygax's own version of the Dungeons & Dragons book was

    under way, now referred to as "Advanced." About the sources for this

    writing, I can (but will not) speculate, but its eventual content

    clearly deviates from Arneson's play as observed from his

    later-published The First Fantasy Campaign. Not to put too fine a point

    on it, Gygax's Simulationist priorities did not blend well with

    Arneson's goals, which to my possibly biased eyes smack of Narrativism,

    or with the parallel development of a lively, even fierce competitive

    Gamist culture. Regarding this new text, Gygax had to deal with the

    latter as a commercial constraint; the former, frankly, was drowned

    nearly at birth. Dave Arneson, in the first of very many complex and

    not-especially pleasant ownership conflicts with the property, was

    significantly absent from the new version's authorship.

    The eventual release of the hardback Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in

    three volumes (Monster Manual, Player's Handbook, and Dungeon Master's

    Guide) was a very big deal in the hobby culture, not the least because

    they were sold in places like Waldenbooks instead of Sid's Train Model

    and Army Miniatures Hobby Shop. It provided a centralized textual

    authority for play for the first time. However, nothing changed - the

    local and widely varying standards and procedures for play were

    established, more coherent competitor games (e.g. Tunnels & Trolls,

    RuneQuest, DragonQuest, Traveller, The Fantasy Trip) had already

    appeared, and these books, frankly, simply added to the raw material for

    the existing role-players. To newcomers, indeed, things were different:

    here are the books, hence here is the game, and now let's use the book

    to play. But that came later.

    Oh, just to be clear about some textual issues: in 1983, a series of

    boxed sets was released from TSR called "Basic Dungeons & Dragons,"

    which some people mistakenly believe to precede "Advanced Dungeons &

    Dragons." It was re-released at least once more in later years. This

    series was written mainly by Tom Moldvay and is best understood to be a

    completely separate role-playing game. All references to "red-box" and

    "blue-box" D&D, and similar, should be limited to this game alone.

    To repeat my point, the concept that Dungeons & Dragons "invented

    role-playing" is patently false. Rather, D&D was the first publishing

    epiphenomenon of role-playing as a hobby, intertwined with its

    development but providing, itself, only raw material, not procedure. It

    provided the first official role-playing texts, but those texts

    themselves invented very little; rather they provided patchy stuff that

    had to be shaped into role-playing at the local level.

    Following the appearance of further hard-back supplements, and

    concordant yet further ownership disputes and editorial leadership,

    further TSR products were mainly Simulationist in nature, most

    especially Oriental Adventures, The Wilderness Survival Guide, and the

    Dragonlance adventure modules, culminating in Advanced Dungeons &

    Dragons Second Edition (AD&D2). The game, and its radically-changed

    relationship of text to play, had changed so much that it passes out of

    this essay.

    Early D&D as hobby culture

    I think that the available discussions, interesting as they are, about

    Arneson's and Gygax's relative contributions (a) to the hobby activity

    and (b) to the actual publication of Dungeons & Dragons is overlooking a

    crucial issue regarding late 1970s role-playing. Prior to AD&D2, the

    available texts were reflective, not prescriptive, of actual play. Their

    content was filtered through authors' priorities which were very

    diverse. Furthermore, any particular area or group had only piecemeal

    combinations of the texts. In 1978, one might find a group with

    Chainmail, ten issues of Dragon, and a copy of the Monster Manual; as

    well as a group with the 1977 boxed set and three or four volumes of

    Arduin's Grimoire. No one, or very few people, had all of it, and as I

    recall anyway, hardly anyone knew much about what books "went" when, or

    made much distinction between TSR products and anything else.

    Rob MacDougall stated it best: we are talking about Cargo Cults.

    Everyone knew about "this new great game." Everyone had on hand a

    hodgepodge of several texts, which in retrospect seem to me to be almost

    archeological in their fragmentary, semi-compatible but not-quite,

    layered-in-time-of-publication nature. Also, although newly-available

    texts obviously modified local oral traditions, they also arose from

    them, generating a seething hotbed of how-to-play instructions in print

    in other locations. Everyone had to shape, socially and procedurally,

    just what the hell you did such that "role-playing" happened. How did

    you know it worked? What did you do it for? All of it, from Social

    Contract right down to Stance, had to be created in the faith that it

    worked "out there" somewhere, and somehow, some way, it was supposed to

    work here.

    So everyone just did it locally. I consider role-playing to have been

    constructed independently in a vast number of instances across the

    landscape, sometimes in parallel, sometimes very differently. Over time,

    further unifications or contact-compromises occurred, whether through

    tournament standards, military bases, conventions, or APAs, or simply by

    people meeting when they converged on college campuses. Full unification

    never occurred. There never existed a single, original D&D.

    During this time, what was established about role-playing per se? Even

    if there was no actual, single D&D, the perception that some such thing

    existed was widespread, and ultimately it became a (partly)

    self-fulfilling perception. So what was it?

      * Players fell into categories of the team member, the rules-lawyer,

        and the advancer/powergamer.

      * Character creation was conceptually locked into the Column A, Column

        B method of Class + Race, to the extent that different combinations

        were playing by almost-completely different rules sets.

      * Character behavior fell into two categories - (1) Strict

        alignment-based parameters, taken essentially as Social Contract for

        any and all play of characters; and (2) complete laissez-faire based

        on metagame priorities of the moment, using alignment, if at all,

        merely for Color.

      * The process of long-term play focused on the Gamble to start,

        evolving into Crunch-heavy play as character effectiveness and

        survival-probabilities increased, and eventually into a Powergamer

        phase.

      * A certain degree of rules-customizing was forced to be standard,

        particularly regarding magic systems and anything else pertaining to

        fantastical elements.

    What happened to the subject matter, which is to say, the Explorative

    content?

    "D&D fantasy" became an actual genre of pop culture, later to be

    reflected in actual bookstore-book fantasy. It's often characterized as

    high fantasy, epic fantasy, or Tolkienesque fantasy, but it is, was, and

    is only composed of D&D. My articles [12]Fantasy Heartbreakers and

    [13]More Fantasy Heartbreakers address some of the resulting effects on

    role-playing game design.

    One cannot properly say "D&D does this," or that a game "plays like

    D&D," without specifying exactly which D&D one means. It's likely that

    what's being referenced is far more based on local practices and

    interpretations than on any actual game text.

    An astounding diversity existed regarding role-playing goals and

    practices all the way from the very beginning of the hobby. It's badly

    mistaken to characterize early role-playing as Gamist, based on the

    texts alone.

    What characterized specifically-Gamist role-player culture, arising from

    this subcultural cauldron?

      * Arguing about "what happened" or "what would happen" became

        entrenched into play, such that rules-agreements, rules-debriefing

        or fairness-negotiating was part and parcel of characters moving

        around in the imaginary space.

      * Calvinball tactics were therefore entrenched as well, leading much

        play straight into the Hard Core.

      * Role-playing as a hobby became socially isolated, a venue for people

        who were unsuccessful at socializing in other activities rather than

        one of many activities.

    No wonder people either idealize or vilify their youthful experiences

    playing D&D. On the one hand, it was you and your best-est friends,

    working something out together and arriving at (quite possibly) your

    first-ever Social Contract with other people, completely isolated from

    adults-approved activities. In other words, you remember it fondly not

    because the game itself was good, but because it wasn't - you remember

    your repair of it at the Step On Up and Challenge levels, and the good

    moments, however common or few they were, were all triumphs.

    On the other hand, it may have been a horrific degeneration into the

    worst moments of social breakdown, on a par with any other form of

    social abuse, and consequently it's reserved in the cellars of your mind

    with being beaten up in locker rooms, confronted by older kids on the

    way home from school, or humiliated by siblings.

    Hip to geek

    The following is strictly a personal reflection from my own experiences

    of late 1970s and early-1980s role-playing, as a hobby culture. I was

    13-14 years old in 1977-79 when I discovered the hobby, and through the

    age of, roughly, sixteen, I battered my head against (A)D&D in a variety

    of groups. They fell into the following categories:

      * Mainly older people with a sprinkling of teens who tried to do adult

        things as much as possible. The adults were usually Army guys, with

        some hip types who ran kids' groups or community-course programs.

        The latter ran some damn good games, as I recall.

      * Fellow teens - these get-togethers were often the least satisfying,

        on the one hand due to individuals who owned "special" rules that no

        one else did (brrrr ... what one guy armed with an Arduin Grimoire

        can do to a Social Contract ...), and on the other because of the

        perfectly reasonable assessment by many that the textual game itself

        wasn't particularly fun.

      * I also knew of several college groups during this time, up through

        the early 1980s, mainly playing RuneQuest. I burned with jealousy

        and desperately wanted to be in college and to play with folks like

        that.

    Significantly, many groups, even the teen ones, included women in their

    late twenties who were interested in role-playing and not at all

    concerned about the propriety of hanging out with boys ten years

    younger. This was the late 1970s, after all. I remember quite a few such

    individuals.

    By 1983, things had changed drastically; in some ways, it mirrored a

    general subcultural shift across the entire country (see the film Boogie

    Nights if you didn't live through it). I'd realized that D&D had become

    a "pube" activity, meaning 10-13-year-olds exclusively, most of whom

    played once and then walked.

    The content resembled video games of the time: lives, levels, and

    skyrocketing success scores, with no real loss at all. It was utterly

    divorced from fantasy or mythic literature, and the comics and fantasy

    authors of the day disavowed the hobby en masse. Successful play became

    more and more a matter of who could break the game fastest, and the

    social gamer became more and more consistently the social-outcast gamer.

    Gaming communities weren't an edifying bunch, actually; they'd been

    transformed socially and procedurally by the Cargo Cult context into a

    rabidly-abusive, nitpicky bunch, in which the Social Contract actually

    included making others upset.

    It had lost its cool factor entirely, just in time for me to go to

    college in the fall of that year. The aforementioned Willing Female

    Factor had vanished like smoke, and, my priorities firmly in place, I

    swore off the hobby. The oath didn't last long, of course. I did find a

    lot of people to role-play with, including women my own age, but always

    on the basis that we "weren't like those gamers." Conversations about

    role-playing ceased instantly if anyone nearby evinced interest in D&D.

    We played Champions and Stormbringer, and looked forward to the buzz of

    GURPS.

    Conclusion

    The honeymoon was over long ago. Even in terms of this first phase of

    D&D history alone, I suggest that we all would do well to recognize that

    role-playing as an activity did not stem from a single game text, or

    most importantly, from a single most-common mode or priority of play.

    Judgments aren't the issue; whether all this was a good or bad thing is

    completely beside the point. What matters are the consequences of this

    recognition, including:

      * No one role-playing technique may be cited as "the original" way.

      * No single combination of rules and presentation formats may be

        considered archetypal.

      * "D&D" as a term cannot be taken to indicate any particular form of

        play, especially in reference to the origins of the hobby.

    I don't know whether I'll ever get to further discussion of the history

    of D&D; in many ways, it's out of my sphere of interest except in

    strictly marketing and industry terms, and I don't have much personal

    history either as player or professional to draw upon.

    The Forge created and administrated by [14]Clinton R. Nixon and [15]Ron

    Edwards.

    All articles, reviews, and posts on this site are copyright their

    designated author.

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