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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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