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     5 

     6     A Hard Look at Dungeons and Dragons

     7     by [8]Ron Edwards

     8 

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

    10     various versions or even conceivably separate games that go by this

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

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

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

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

    15 

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

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

    18     [10]Precursors to AD&D2. I am especially indebted to Christopher Pramas,

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

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

    21     Adkison.

    22 

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

    24     1980s. Two later periods deserve analysis and essays of their own: the

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

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

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

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

    29     about role-playing business and marketing is available.

    30 

    31     Textual history

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    39 

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

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

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

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

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

    45     even enjoyed the development of those characters through adventures.

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

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

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

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

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

    51     website and associated links).

    52 

    53     Chainmail's second and third editions contained supplemental

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    63 

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

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

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

    67     certain societal strictures. Wargaming was already a favored hobby among

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

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

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

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

    72     play.

    73 

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

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

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

    77     tournaments were held, and people ran characters in squads against

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

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

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

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

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

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

    84     Where do you think Experience Points came from, anyway?

    85 

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

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

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

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

    90     published a slew of adventure modules and other support material largely

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

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

    93     supplements beginning with the Arduin Grimoire, introducing such things

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

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

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

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

    98     material) for the eventual rules that would follow.

    99 

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

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

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

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

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

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

   106     as an intentional introduction and commercial intermediary to the

   107     forthcoming text.

   108 

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

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

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

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

   113     clearly deviates from Arneson's play as observed from his

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   121     not-especially pleasant ownership conflicts with the property, was

   122     significantly absent from the new version's authorship.

   123 

   124     The eventual release of the hardback Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in

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

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

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

   128     and Army Miniatures Hobby Shop. It provided a centralized textual

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

   130     local and widely varying standards and procedures for play were

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

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

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

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

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

   136     to play. But that came later.

   137 

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

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

   140     which some people mistakenly believe to precede "Advanced Dungeons &

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

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

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

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

   145 

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

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

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

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

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

   151     themselves invented very little; rather they provided patchy stuff that

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

   153 

   154     Following the appearance of further hard-back supplements, and

   155     concordant yet further ownership disputes and editorial leadership,

   156     further TSR products were mainly Simulationist in nature, most

   157     especially Oriental Adventures, The Wilderness Survival Guide, and the

   158     Dragonlance adventure modules, culminating in Advanced Dungeons &

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

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

   161     this essay.

   162 

   163     Early D&D as hobby culture

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

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

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

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

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

   169     content was filtered through authors' priorities which were very

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

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

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

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

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

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

   176     made much distinction between TSR products and anything else.

   177 

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

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

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

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

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

   183     texts obviously modified local oral traditions, they also arose from

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

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

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

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

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

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

   190     work here.

   191 

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

   193     constructed independently in a vast number of instances across the

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

   195     further unifications or contact-compromises occurred, whether through

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

   197     people meeting when they converged on college campuses. Full unification

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

   199 

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

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

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

   203     self-fulfilling perception. So what was it?

   204 

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

   206         and the advancer/powergamer.

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

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

   209         were playing by almost-completely different rules sets.

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

   211         alignment-based parameters, taken essentially as Social Contract for

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

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

   214         merely for Color.

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

   216         evolving into Crunch-heavy play as character effectiveness and

   217         survival-probabilities increased, and eventually into a Powergamer

   218         phase.

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

   220         particularly regarding magic systems and anything else pertaining to

   221         fantastical elements.

   222 

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

   224     content?

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

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

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

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

   229     [13]More Fantasy Heartbreakers address some of the resulting effects on

   230     role-playing game design.

   231 

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

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

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

   235     interpretations than on any actual game text.

   236     An astounding diversity existed regarding role-playing goals and

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

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

   239     texts alone.

   240 

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

   242     this subcultural cauldron?

   243 

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

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

   246         or fairness-negotiating was part and parcel of characters moving

   247         around in the imaginary space.

   248       * Calvinball tactics were therefore entrenched as well, leading much

   249         play straight into the Hard Core.

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

   251         who were unsuccessful at socializing in other activities rather than

   252         one of many activities.

   253 

   254     No wonder people either idealize or vilify their youthful experiences

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   262 

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

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

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

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

   267     way home from school, or humiliated by siblings.

   268 

   269     Hip to geek

   270     The following is strictly a personal reflection from my own experiences

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

   272     13-14 years old in 1977-79 when I discovered the hobby, and through the

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

   274     of groups. They fell into the following categories:

   275 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   284         perfectly reasonable assessment by many that the textual game itself

   285         wasn't particularly fun.

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

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

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

   289         that.

   290 

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

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

   293     concerned about the propriety of hanging out with boys ten years

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

   295     individuals.

   296 

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

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

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

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

   301     played once and then walked.

   302 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   310     transformed socially and procedurally by the Cargo Cult context into a

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

   312     included making others upset.

   313 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   322     GURPS.

   323 

   324     Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

   331     recognition, including:

   332 

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

   334       * No single combination of rules and presentation formats may be

   335         considered archetypal.

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

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

   338 

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

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

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

   342     history either as player or professional to draw upon.

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

   344     Edwards.

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

   346     designated author.

   347 

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