A year ago yesterday Gary Gygax departed this world. Though some partisans have attempted to do so over the years, it would be difficult to overstate his accomplishments within our hobby. On top of that, as I myself was fortunate to learn, he was a heck of a great guy. A lot of people who have never heard his name owe their hobbies to him – not just tabletop gamers, but computer game players as well, and people who read fantasy novels.
At the same time, there’s been a movement which began even before Gary’s death but which seems even more pronounced today to try to somehow take the very earliest set of RPG rules, brown box D&D or OD&D, and try to derive some measure of Gary’s (and Dave Arneson’s, I suppose, although Arneson seems less in the minds of gamers,) original intent, and build campaigns (theoretical ones, at least) therefrom.
As an intellectual exercise, I think this is valuable, because it cuts at the very reasons RPGs are fun in the first place. It’s one of a couple of alternate ways floating around right now of answering the same questions that what would become Forge-style RPG theory was developed to try to answer – and if you ask me, the world of RPG Theory desperately needs approaches other than the Forge Big Model.
But at the same time, it seems to me that some of the proponents of this historicist approach are succumbing to a mindset wherein the practice of RPGs (that is, actual play,) was somehow superior to that to later eras. This has gone far enough now that the pre-AD&D period is being referred to as a “Golden Age,” implicitly indicting play in later years as somehow lessened in value against that of the early years. This is, of course, utter nonsense, a never-never land impossible to construct without plastering over a whole host of issues and problems with nostalgia. You remember the good times you had with friends, not beating your head against those impenetrable rulebooks or the incessant arguments they generated.
To try to dissect OD&D rules to divine Gary’s intent is of limited value in understanding the history of RPGs as they developed through play – i. e. the way they actually developed. Gary knew that no two groups would play D&D exactly the same way, and he wasn’t sitting at your table back in 1976 explaining the game and how it was supposed to be run to you. You played it as best you knew, took what was fun and did more of that, maybe added some Ardruin or Judges’ Guild stuff on top of it, and gradually something like a mean playstyle emerged from the chaotic sea of different groups doing their own thing. Expectations were gradually established, and gradually evolved from the point where D&D was a dungeon-based wargame into something where the character you played was as important as the numbers on the sheet.
Especially in the pre-internet era, when communication between groups was accomplished largely through conventions or in magazine letter columns, sharing of ideas between different groups was far more sporadic. There were clubs, of course, but those were local or at best regional, and those who met more than sporadically were the exception rather than the rule.
The lesson here, and I think Gary would have recognized this, is that he might have been one of the people who set down the rules by which RPG were played, but that it was us that worked out the methods by which those rules were actually employed at the table. Gary set the broad paradigm, but we determined how that paradigm would work in practice.
AD&D, misorganized and baroque as it was, was a far more coherent example of an RPG than OD&D was, because by the time Gary wrote it, we had worked out exactly how the rules would be employed in practice. At the very least, we knew a whole lot more about it by 1977 than we did in 1974. My use of we here is intentional – Gary gave the rules to us, and we showed him the practical conventions by which those rules would be applied, at his own table, and by passed anecdote, at those of others. Once AD&D was complete it very quickly became the standard by which D&D was played. The people playing OD&D didn’t necessarily abandon it or switch to AD&D, but virtually everybody coming into the hobby after 1978 or 1979 – quickly the majority – saw D&D as the beginner’s version of the game and AD&D as the real thing. The “controversy surge,” when D&D grew by far the fastest, occurred well into the AD&D era.
Theoretical OD&D reconstructionism, while possibly interesting, seems to ignore the fact that the people doing it are seeing it through the lens of 30+ years of development within the hobby, a lens now tinted with the rosy hue of nostalgia. And again the question becomes whether play – you know, the thing you’re actually doing – was really better in the days when the rules were unintelligible (Ken St. Andre famously designed Tunnels & Trolls after recognizing the OD&D rules as gibberish.) Maybe you think it was, and if so, that’s totally fair, but why?
Because the rules were less structured? I have to call BS on that – there are a ton of unstructured RPGs released in the last decade that nobody is even playing, much less bothering to blog about. Some of them are so unstructured that they’re practically systemless, but there’s a whole spectrum running from the ultra-light to brain-crushers like D&D3.5. Because the experience was “purer”? If so, why are you trying to reconstruct that purity from the written rules, which were only one part (and possibly not the most important part) of the experience? RPGs are played by people, not by rules.
Gary was the father of our hobby, and we owe him a lot – and not just us. Maybe we didn’t recognize that before he died. Maybe the fact that his death was so widely reported (Forbes magazine ran a whole article on it,) clued us in to the impact on what gets cavalierly called “pop culture” by a guy we had always seen as one of us – part of our little niche hobby. But while Gary gave us the game, we – us and Gary together – built the hobby around it. It was a collaboration. That’s why trying to reconstruct “intent” by dissecting the text of OD&D is valueless – because those written rules were less than half of the picture. Even in the “Golden Age”.
March 5, 2009
Misplaced Nostalgia
Posted by Ardwulf under Commentary, Dungeons & DragonsLeave a Comment
A year ago yesterday Gary Gygax departed this world. Though some partisans have attempted to do so over the years, it would be difficult to overstate his accomplishments within our hobby. On top of that, as I myself was fortunate to learn, he was a heck of a great guy. A lot of people who have never heard his name owe their hobbies to him – not just tabletop gamers, but computer game players as well, and people who read fantasy novels.
At the same time, there’s been a movement which began even before Gary’s death but which seems even more pronounced today to try to somehow take the very earliest set of RPG rules, brown box D&D or OD&D, and try to derive some measure of Gary’s (and Dave Arneson’s, I suppose, although Arneson seems less in the minds of gamers,) original intent, and build campaigns (theoretical ones, at least) therefrom.
As an intellectual exercise, I think this is valuable, because it cuts at the very reasons RPGs are fun in the first place. It’s one of a couple of alternate ways floating around right now of answering the same questions that what would become Forge-style RPG theory was developed to try to answer – and if you ask me, the world of RPG Theory desperately needs approaches other than the Forge Big Model.
But at the same time, it seems to me that some of the proponents of this historicist approach are succumbing to a mindset wherein the practice of RPGs (that is, actual play,) was somehow superior to that to later eras. This has gone far enough now that the pre-AD&D period is being referred to as a “Golden Age,” implicitly indicting play in later years as somehow lessened in value against that of the early years. This is, of course, utter nonsense, a never-never land impossible to construct without plastering over a whole host of issues and problems with nostalgia. You remember the good times you had with friends, not beating your head against those impenetrable rulebooks or the incessant arguments they generated.
To try to dissect OD&D rules to divine Gary’s intent is of limited value in understanding the history of RPGs as they developed through play – i. e. the way they actually developed. Gary knew that no two groups would play D&D exactly the same way, and he wasn’t sitting at your table back in 1976 explaining the game and how it was supposed to be run to you. You played it as best you knew, took what was fun and did more of that, maybe added some Ardruin or Judges’ Guild stuff on top of it, and gradually something like a mean playstyle emerged from the chaotic sea of different groups doing their own thing. Expectations were gradually established, and gradually evolved from the point where D&D was a dungeon-based wargame into something where the character you played was as important as the numbers on the sheet.
Especially in the pre-internet era, when communication between groups was accomplished largely through conventions or in magazine letter columns, sharing of ideas between different groups was far more sporadic. There were clubs, of course, but those were local or at best regional, and those who met more than sporadically were the exception rather than the rule.
The lesson here, and I think Gary would have recognized this, is that he might have been one of the people who set down the rules by which RPG were played, but that it was us that worked out the methods by which those rules were actually employed at the table. Gary set the broad paradigm, but we determined how that paradigm would work in practice.
AD&D, misorganized and baroque as it was, was a far more coherent example of an RPG than OD&D was, because by the time Gary wrote it, we had worked out exactly how the rules would be employed in practice. At the very least, we knew a whole lot more about it by 1977 than we did in 1974. My use of we here is intentional – Gary gave the rules to us, and we showed him the practical conventions by which those rules would be applied, at his own table, and by passed anecdote, at those of others. Once AD&D was complete it very quickly became the standard by which D&D was played. The people playing OD&D didn’t necessarily abandon it or switch to AD&D, but virtually everybody coming into the hobby after 1978 or 1979 – quickly the majority – saw D&D as the beginner’s version of the game and AD&D as the real thing. The “controversy surge,” when D&D grew by far the fastest, occurred well into the AD&D era.
Theoretical OD&D reconstructionism, while possibly interesting, seems to ignore the fact that the people doing it are seeing it through the lens of 30+ years of development within the hobby, a lens now tinted with the rosy hue of nostalgia. And again the question becomes whether play – you know, the thing you’re actually doing – was really better in the days when the rules were unintelligible (Ken St. Andre famously designed Tunnels & Trolls after recognizing the OD&D rules as gibberish.) Maybe you think it was, and if so, that’s totally fair, but why?
Because the rules were less structured? I have to call BS on that – there are a ton of unstructured RPGs released in the last decade that nobody is even playing, much less bothering to blog about. Some of them are so unstructured that they’re practically systemless, but there’s a whole spectrum running from the ultra-light to brain-crushers like D&D3.5. Because the experience was “purer”? If so, why are you trying to reconstruct that purity from the written rules, which were only one part (and possibly not the most important part) of the experience? RPGs are played by people, not by rules.
Gary was the father of our hobby, and we owe him a lot – and not just us. Maybe we didn’t recognize that before he died. Maybe the fact that his death was so widely reported (Forbes magazine ran a whole article on it,) clued us in to the impact on what gets cavalierly called “pop culture” by a guy we had always seen as one of us – part of our little niche hobby. But while Gary gave us the game, we – us and Gary together – built the hobby around it. It was a collaboration. That’s why trying to reconstruct “intent” by dissecting the text of OD&D is valueless – because those written rules were less than half of the picture. Even in the “Golden Age”.