Dungeons & Dragons began with fans; co-creator Gary Gygax contributed to many wargaming fanzines before launching D&D. In the beginning fans were welcomed with open arms...until competitors arose to threaten TSR's dominance in the fantasy role-playing game market. TSR's relationship with fans soured as the company shifted its attitude from treating fans as collaborators to treating them as competition. This installment covers the Dark Ages of D&D fandom.
Suddenly, TSR wasn't leaving dungeon creation to DMs' imaginations. The reaction was mixed, as described by Peterson:
D&D for All?
Gygax's original descriptions of Dungeons & Dragons made it clear that the onus of a game's development was largely on the shoulders of the players and dungeon masters. The original boxed set of Dungeons & Dragons didn't come with any adventures just two pages of a sample dungeon (one if you discount the map); it was assumed DMs would develop that content as needed. Gygax's own words in Men & Magic:This anything goes philosophy extended beyond adventures to the rules themselves. Gygax made it clear in Men & Magicset that players could play anything they wanted, including dragons:These rules are as complete as possible within the limitations imposed by the space of three booklets. That is, they cover the major aspects of fantasy campaigns but still remain flexible. As with any other set of miniatures rules they are guidelines to follow in designing your own fantastic-medieval campaign. They provide the framework around which you will build a game of simplicity or tremendous complexity — your time and imagination are about the only limiting factors, and the fact that you have purchased these rules tends to indicate that there is no lack of imagination — the fascination of the game will tend to make participants find more and more time.
For a time, this extended to later iterations of D&D. Gygax continued the free-form thinking in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide:There is no reason that players cannot be allowed to play as virtually anything, provided they begin relatively weak and work up to the top, i.e., a player wishing to be a Dragon would have to begin as let us say, a "young" one and progress upwards in the usual manner, steps being predetermined by the campaign referee.
It wouldn't last.What follows herein is strictly for the eyes of you, the campaign referee. As the creator and ultimate authority in your respective game, this work is written as one Dungeon Master equal to another…Naturally, everything possible cannot be included in the whole of this work. As a participant in the game, I would not care to have anyone telling me exactly what must go into a campaign and how it must be handled; if so, why not play some game like chess? As the author I also realize that there are limits to my creativity and imagination. Others will think of things I didn’t, and devise things beyond my capability.
The Rise of the Module
For an excellent example of what these heady early days were like, The Habitition of the Stone Giant Lord demonstrates what DMs were capable of:DMs made their own adventures and, while the spelling and grammar must be viewed in light of a pre-spell correct world, created entire worlds just as Gygax had envisioned:In 1981, 13-year-old Gaius Stern wrote and illustrated The Habitition of the Stone Giant Lord in imitation of TSR’s Dungeons and Dragons adventure modules. The Habitition is a true labor of love, typed and drawn as a DIY addition to the “Against the Giants” series of modules, part time capsule and part outsider art.
Back then, publishing adventures was unheard of. Jon Peterson explains in the foreword to The Habitition:As art, its text and image show how a creative teen made his own contribution to the genre of roleplaying adventures, but where most such books were the work of a writer, a crew of play-testers, editors, and a stable of artists, Stern went it alone. As a time capsule, it provides a window on a particular way Dungeons & Dragons was played at a particular time.
TSR was slow to recognize this need at first. Pete and Judy Kerestan, released the Palace of the Vampire Queen in 1976 followed by The Dungeoneer magazine which contained a dungeon in each issue beginning with F'Chelrak's Tomb. The need for adventures accelerated when tournament participants released their dungeons for a small fee by mail, similar to the DM's Guild of today. It wasn't until 1978 that TSR formally entered the distribution of adventures on its own terms, calling the "modules" and selling tournament adventures to the public after they debuted at Origins. Thus the Giant (G) series was promptly followed by the Drow (D) series....no one back then published their dungeons for public consumption. Referees jealously guarded their documentation to prevent players from learning their secrets and spoiling future adventures. Thus, there was little thought at first that dungeons should be made into commercial products.
Suddenly, TSR wasn't leaving dungeon creation to DMs' imaginations. The reaction was mixed, as described by Peterson:
The problem was that TSR was in both the business of imagination and innovation, and neither of those made the company money locked up in fandom. As TSR learned from its fans what they wanted, it also became increasingly protective of the D&D brand.Fans eagerly bought these modules, but an undercurrent of resentment had long been voiced by those who felt TSR spoon-fed the community material that anyone could have produced. The introduction to Eldritch Wizardry (1976) expressed TSR’s side of the story, noting that “as originally conceived, D&D was limited in scope only by the imagination and devotion of Dungeon Masters everywhere,” yet “somewhere along the line, D&D lost some of its flavor, and began to get predictable.” Because “all the players had all the rules in front of them, it became next to impossible to beguile them into danger or mischief.” In other words, players knew all the secrets, all the properties of monsters and magic items, so the only solution was for TSR constantly to publish more: more classes, more magic system, more adversaries, and more rewards, just so referees could stay one step ahead of players. But that assumes fans couldn’t just invent all this themselves.
Getting Defensive
Over time, Gygax and TSR shifted from welcoming all kinds of feedback to sharply defining what was and wasn't D&D. Former TSR employee Lawrence Schick explains in Heroic Worlds:To be fair, this likely had as much to do with the nascent role-playing game industry as it did with sales. D&D was seeing the rise of competitors like Tunnels & Trolls that sought to expand and improve D&D -- and by doing so, competing for D&D's dollars in the market. David Ewalt explains in Of Dice & Men:As publisher of Dungeons and Dragons, TSR felt that role-playing was their special territory. As far as they were able, they tried to call the shots in the industry. They engaged in petty “turf” wars with other publishers and convention organizers, threatened legal action on the slightest provocation, and generally acted like the bully of the block. Another cause of resentment against TSR was Gygax's abrasive articles in Dragon magazine about fannish publishers as well as his apparent disapproval of others' ways of playing role-playing games.
Gygax's tone shifted from welcoming everyone to contribute to the game to defining what was a "D&D experience" and what wasn't. By November 1982, Gygax was sharply defending the game's turf in Dragon Magazine #67:The threat was obvious: Dungeons & Dragons was conceived out of Guidon Games’s Chainmail rules and quickly eclipsed it in both popularity and sales. No one at TSR wanted to see the same thing happen to them.
If it wasn't clear that Gygax is saying that TSR has the final word on how D&D should be played, he spells it out a few paragraphs later in the same article:Using the relationship of games, think about this: Would any intelligent person purchase a copy of the MONOPOLY® game, add in some parts of THE MAD MAGAZINE® game, imagine it to be somehow “better” than either one alone, and then announce to everyone far and wide that the end product was not only superior, but it was still a MONOPOLY game? As ludicrous as that sounds, that is pretty much what happens when even well-meaning players of TSR games try to mix and match different systems.
Gygax even directly contradicts his statement in the Dungeon Master's Guide:Notice that TSR owns the ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS game system. Well, they own the DUNGEONS & DRAGONS game, too — just as Parker Brothers owns MONOPOLY and THE MAD MAGAZINE game. TSR holds the copyrights to the D&D and AD&D games. They own the Trade Marks. Use of either must be by TSR or with its permission. Neither game is public domain. No other firm can make any commercial use whatsoever of either game without permission from TSR. Furthermore, house rules are as different from place to place as can be imagined, so that of the several million D&D game players, the only recognized basis for intra-group play are the rules furnished by TSR.
TSR got stingier with its licensees as a result, with disagreements over how to demonstrate D&D compatibility culminating in lawsuits between Mayfair Games and TSR.The AD&D game system does not allow the injection of extraneous material. That is clearly stated in the rule books. It is thus a simple matter: Either one plays the AD&D game, or one plays something else, just as one either plays poker according to Hoyle, or one plays (Western) chess by tournament rules, or one does not. Since the game is the sole property of TSR and its designer, what is official and what is not has meaning if one plays the game. Serious players will only accept official material, for they play the game rather than playing at it, as do those who enjoy “house rules” poker, or who push pawns around the chess board. No power on earth can dictate that gamers not add spurious rules and material to either the D&D or AD&D game systems, but likewise no claim to playing either game can then be made. Such games are not D&D or AD&D games — they are something else, classifiable only under the generic “FRPG” catch-all. To be succinct, whether you play either game or not is your business, but in order to state that you play either, it is obviously necessary to play them with the official rules, as written.
Laying Down the Law
Shannon Appelcline explains in Designers & Dragons - the 70s:It hurt TSR's reputation among players, who felt D&D was always THEIR game and hadn't stopped writing their own homebrew worlds and adventures. Things got particularly ugly when TSR began going after fan-published works, which sat in comfortable solitude on DM's tables at home but were suddenly exposed to the glare of the public network TSR helped create. Ewalt explains:We’ve already seen that TSR began issuing legal threats as early as 1976. By the early ’80s it was increasingly common for other members of the industry to receive threatening letters from TSR’s lawyers. Steve Jackson commented on one such incident when TSR threatened him for using a beholder in a cartoon in The Space Gamer. TSR’s most notable legal action of the early ’80s was the first Role Aids lawsuit. As we’ve already seen, other companies were increasingly presenting AD&D supplements as “generic” because of an inability to get a license from TSR. Mayfair Games decided not to toe this line...Trademark disputes also often go to court, even when legal advice has been followed. TSR thus sued Mayfair over the Role Aids products.
Joseph Laycock shares the broader perspective of fans in Dangerous Games:TSR had sent a cease-and-desist to one of its own fans, Boston gamer Robert Ruppert, who made the mistake of typing up a blank form with the header “Dungeons & Dragons Character Sheet” and selling it to fellow war gamers for two cents a copy. The crackdown was especially ironic considering TSR’s poor record in regards to other people’s copyrights; the company had already been spanked by the estate of Edgar Rice Burroughs for ripping off the John Carter novels in the game Warriors of Mars.
TSR's grip on D&D was slipping as the role-playing genre it helped launch evolved in different directions. D&D was no longer the only role-playing game, much less the only fantasy role-playing game. Of course, part of TSR's attitude likely stemmed from its precipitous rise and fall as a business, with litigation the final straw in a long series of missteps before the company was sold to Wizards of the Coast.Some gamers began to feel that TSR were not artists producing a new art form but greedy capitalists who exploited other people’s love of their game. The slogan “D& D is too important to leave to Gary Gygax” began to appear in independent magazines for fantasy gaming.
