Yeah, you saw the title! It's been a while, right? (Checking ....) Almost a month! How did that happen..... how did I go so long without starting a thread? I mean, I know that my dissipated life has led me to my sorry fate of non-posting, and yet ... I blame society. Society made me what I am. Did you miss me?
Anyway, my recent life of sloth and indolence was disturbed by
this thread, wherein
@GMforPowergamers was wondering if 1e and 2e really hold much sway any longer? And I realized that this is something that I needed to fully flesh out, because it touches on two favorite subjects of mine- (1) path dependency, and (2) D&D history. So I am reinstituting HAWT TAEK THURSDAY for the following topic:
TSR-era D&D will always dominate D&D.*
*For certain values of "always."
Bring it on.
That said, in order to understand what I am discussing, I first will have to detail a little into the issue of path dependency. Then, I will offer the more concrete examples of my thesis.
A. Path Dependency, and the Road Not Taken.
I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.
Path dependency is a very useful concept to understand that is helpful in understanding why many things are the way they are and so resistant to change. Before getting into the nitty-gritty of the concept, it's often helpful to think of the poem so familiar to most,
The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
I know, I know ... no one told you that there would be homework on ENworld. But the salient point here is that choosing one road
necessarily forecloses the other road. Once a choice is made, you can wonder what might have happened if you had taken the other path ... but you didn't .... and "that has made all the difference." In a nutshell, that's kind of the concept of path dependency. It's a concept that is simple, yet also profoundly powerful.
Choices are not made in a vacuum; the choices that came before influence the choices that you are making now. To use the simplest example from Robert Frost (and to ignore the deeper meanings), if you are traveling in the woods, and you come to a fork in the road, you can choose to go left or right. Let's say you go left .... now, regardless of what happens at that road, the further down the path you go, the more likely you are to keep going because you've already gone down that path. To go "right" would require you to go all the way back.
We see this all the time around us. For example, a lot of the transition from ICE vehicles running on petroleum to some other type of vehicles (electric, other sources) has been slowed by path dependency; there was already so much infrastructure, engineering, etc. built to support ICE vehicles that it was a challenge that required concerted policy. Or legacy skeumorphic design- think of the famous example of using a floppy disk as the save icon, long past the time when many people recognize what a floppy disk is. In the common law legal system, path dependence can be seen in the use of past precedent that will continue to control and the difficulty in moving away from it. Many have argued that the widespread QWERTY keyboard is much less efficient than other alternatives- but it continues in use. Others point to the continued use of rockets for space travel and launching satellites- some say that but for the V2 and massive expenditures during the cold war to hurl nukes (ICBMs) that led to the "rocket infrastructure" we would have developed much better ways for space launch.
Anyway, you get the idea. Path dependency, at its most simple, is the idea that history matters- and that it can serve to constrain decision-making in the present. This is an idea that can be both banal and profound. So, what does all of that have to do with today's HAWT TAEK? Why do I think that TSR-era D&D will always dominate D&D?
B. D&D Has Followed, and Will Continue to Follow, the TSR Path.
Hell is not what I expected at all. We got totally lied to by our album covers!
I have written a lot (a LOT!) about how the historical antecedents of D&D developed. For example,
here is the thread where I go into the history of the saving throw. It's pretty fascinating to (IMO) to see how "saving throws" were borrowed from wargames and incorporated into D&D as an early sort of plot armor, and gradually evolved into part of the system that calibrates challenge (difficulty to character) to power (character's ability to overcome challenges). Pretty cool, huh!
But wait- on a more fundamental level, and despite some changes in the underpinnings ... we are
still using the term saving throw. I mean ... think about that! And so it goes with a whole bunch of the decisions that were codified in OD&D and AD&D (1e). Here's a few-
1. The six ability scores of Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. Sure, the order might have moved around, but we are still using the exact same ability scores.
2. The core races are primarily the same. There are nine races in the 5e PHB, of which seven of them are identical to the ones codified in the 1e PHB.
3. The core classes are primarily the same. There are twelve classes in the 5e PHB, and nine of them are in the 1e PHB. Another (the Barbarian) was a popular optional class in the 70s (from Brian Asbury's article) and was first codified in 1e's UA.
4. The dice are the same. Famously, D&D was originally going to use just a d6 with a d20 option, but by the Greyhawk supplement they included the use of the Platonic solids (d4, d6, d8, d12, d20). While percentiles existed before, they were rolled using the d20 and the first d10 as we know it now didn't ship with D&D until the Moldvay set. Regardless, we still use the exact same dice.
5. Levels? Yeah, we still use the confusing term to refer to both class level and spell level. Luckily, we don't refer to dungeon level quite as often.
6. Hit points. Whether they are meat, or not, they are still hit points.
7. Experience points. Again, mostly the same.
8. Names and effects of spells. There is a staggering amount of overlap between the basic spells in the 1e PHB and 5e PHB; everything from fireball and magic missile to Leomund's Tiny Hut.
9. Primary Monsters. The vast majority of iconic monsters in D&D all date back to the TSR era; Beholders and Mind Flayers and Tarrasques, oh my!
10. The "primary loop," while somewhat different (with the action economy) is still very familiar- initiative, attack, repeat.
I could continue on, but I think you get the idea. The marvel isn't that things have changed .... because, over 50 years and five editions and two owners ... of course they will change. The amazing thing is that things are still so familiar. The decisions made decades ago profoundly influenced the evolution of the game, and continue to constrain the possibilities today.
C. A Specific Example- Armor Class.
He hoped and prayed that there wasn’t an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn’t an afterlife.
One of my favorite examples of this is the continuing use of "Armor Class." Now, if you play D&D, you're probably so used to the term (and the abbreviation, "AC") that you don't even give it a second thought. It's just, you know, armor class! But wait ... what? What does it mean? Why are we using it?
Think about it- to begin with, it's a pretty confusing term. D&D has already appropriated the term "class" for something very specific- the "class system," that define the majority of your character's abilities. And Armor Class has
absolutely nothing to do with your class.
Okay, but it also doesn't mean anything in plain English, either. When you unpack it, it's just a number (or a ranking) of how difficult your character is to hit- it certainly doesn't refer to the class (or TYPE) of armor you are wearing. A lot of characters will have an identical "class of armor" even though one character will be wearing armor, and one won't. So ... why are we using this term?
Well, the history is confusing (whether it was pulled by Arneson from a naval combat game or directly from Chainmail), but in Chainmail (the original combat system for OD&D) .... the likelihood of hitting varied depending on both the weapon used by the attacked
and the type of armor worn by the defender. The very first edition of Chainmail referred to this as "defender's armor protection type" before it was later revised to ... wait for it ...
armor class. (Here's a quick
source on that).
Later, we would see some echo of that in the "weapon v. armor table" in the 1e PHB, but for the most part ... by the time that D&D was being played in the 70s, armor class was already somewhat inscrutable. Yet here we are, still using the term. Why don't we change? Well, primarily because people use it. They are familiar with it. It's part of D&D.
And because a road was taken 50 years ago, and it's really hard to switch paths now.
So there you have it. Enjoy!
