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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.
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