The Origins of ‘Rule Zero’

Jon Peterson discusses the origins of Rule Zero on his blog. It featured as early as 1978 in Alarums & Excursions #38.

 

[Minigiant]

A crap game compared to what? Was there anything like it in 1974? I tend to put more stock in opinions from the same era of the work that was produced. If OD&D was a terrible system, or thought of as a terrible system, it wouldn't have spread like wildfire.

OD&D is a bad game by the standard of modern game design. It's not a fair comparison as TTRPG design was in its infancy. It's not fair to rate OD&D based on games that game decades after it when game design developed.

But it is nearly impossible to defend it as being "purposely designed to create a specific style or genre of game" or "purpusely having mechanics to fill most of the slots of and archetypes of the style/genre it wants to make". It was full of holes and required a constant stream of tweaks to get the right feel.

And that's why it heavily used Rule Zero.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Truth.

By today's design standards OD&D's system was a bit pants. But as a game it was lightning in a bottle.

Yeah. No wide-spread group had seen anything like it before, and it spread like lightning. Best I can tell when I was introduced to it (in West Coast SF and wargaming fandom) about six months in, it was all over those groups. It had expanded the way a lifeform does when it moves into an ecological niche with no competition.

By the time The Modvay B/X hit - no can defend...

While general play/design preferences have changed, B/X are quite playable games RAW..

And even though RQ landed in 78, it went in a direction that would not compete with D&D.

Whether it theoretically could or not (in hindsight, I suspect not) the niche was already filled; T&T didn't really make a dent, nor did C&S. There's some speculation Dragon Quest could have (I'm not convinced, but the argument isn't stupid) but, well, TSR took care that never became an issue. And of course the SF and superhero games that sprouted early on were fishing in slightly different ponds in the first place and didn't have quite as simple and low-overhead play-cycle.

 

[Thomas Shey]

A crap game compared to what? Was there anything like it in 1974? I tend to put more stock in opinions from the same era of the work that was produced. If OD&D was a terrible system, or thought of as a terrible system, it wouldn't have spread like wildfire.

Yeah it would, because as the prior poster put it it had no competition. It was conceptual wildfire, and its substandard mechanical structure couldn't hurt that.

A lot of really objectively poor products can get by and even flourish when they have no competition. By the time there was any real competition, at least modestly better mechanically versions of the system were in play, and the general structure had set expectations so any problems there were only going to be pursued by a subset of users.

It'd be far from the only product to ever do well even though there were better versions of them when they moved into a market first and fast. Its really hard to dislodge a product that fills a market unless its not just mediocre but really is missing components for the majority of its market, and that's not even accounting for the intrinsic benefit an RPG has in usage and networking over products that are used individually. And for all its problems, later, but still early versions of the game like the B/X line and AD&D did at least supply a structure with less massive holes than OD&D had. Though I doubt there's any way to prove it, I'd be willing to put money that by 1978 the people playing OD&D were a minuscule part of the RPG playing populace; the vast majority had moved to AD&D, B/X or one of its kin, or out of D&D entirely.

All OD&D had to be was good enough to expand like crazy for the first year or two to fill the niche, and then its successor games could take advantage of that while still only leaving a limited amount of room for the various other games emerging at that time.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The original game did everything we (see below for who "we" were) needed it to do in 1974. That's not "a crap game".

You, however, weren't the whole market. It absolutely wasn't doing everything its whole market needed, as even the ones staying with D&D were bolting things onto it regularly. If OD&D had stayed the schematic thing it was, that would have caused serious problems for its market over time...but it didn't. Within two years there was the Basic line starting, and within three AD&D had landed.

 

[Thomas Shey]

OD&D is a bad game by the standard of modern game design. It's not a fair comparison as TTRPG design was in its infancy. It's not fair to rate OD&D based on games that game decades after it when game design developed.

I'm not. I'm comparing it to other games that were contemporaries of related but similar types (referee administered wargames) or RPGs of very near vintage where, while you could argue they had D&D to learn from, but they certainly weren't decades along. TSR itself produced games with better and more coherent design at the time; heck, Chainmail was a better game.

What D&D had going for it was originality and hitting the zeitgeist.

 

[MGibster]

Yeah it would, because as the prior poster put it it had no competition. It was conceptual wildfire, and its substandard mechanical structure couldn't hurt that.

As you point out, D&D had no competition back in 1974 because it was the first of its kind. And as it was the first, there was no standard by which it could be judged. So if you want to say the rules were crap it begs the question, compared to what? I do not believe the general consensus of contemporaries believed the game to be crap, and, if it was the general consensus, I do not believe D&D would have become popular.

 

[Thomas Shey]

As you point out, D&D had no competition back in 1974 because it was the first of its kind. And as it was the first, there was no standard by which it could be judged. So if you want to say the rules were crap it begs the question, compared to what? I do not believe the general consensus of contemporaries believed the game to be crap, and, if it was the general consensus, I do not believe D&D would have become popular.

Compared to even referee overseen wargames by the same company?

 

[Minigiant]

I'm not. I'm comparing it to other games that were contemporaries of related but similar types (referee administered wargames) or RPGs of very near vintage where, while you could argue they had D&D to learn from, but they certainly weren't decades along. TSR itself produced games with better and more coherent design at the time; heck, Chainmail was a better game.

What D&D had going for it was originality and hitting the zeitgeist.

I didn't say you compared it to modern games. I'm just saying by modern standards, OD&D would unfairly be rated as bad as it leaned hard on Rule Zero to get its cobbled together sets of rules to work.

Luckily it was first and modern game design didn't exist yet.

 

[MGibster]

Compared to even referee overseen wargames by the same company?

Do you have evidence that there was a general consensus among contemporaries that the rules for D&D were crap compared to the more traditional war games? If you think they're crap, okay. Personally, I'd rather pop boils on my body with a crab fork than run AD&D games again so it's not like I'm a big fan of those old systems. But for the era they were produced, they weren't crap.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Do you have evidence that there was a general consensus among contemporaries that the rules for D&D were crap compared to the more traditional war games? If you think they're crap, okay. Personally, I'd rather pop boils on my body with a crab fork than run AD&D games again so it's not like I'm a big fan of those old systems. But for the era they were produced, they weren't crap.

The problem you'll run into with that is the people most capable of generating opinions of the rules were wargamers; and the wargamers split pretty heavily on how accepting they were of the RPG idea. So its going to be hard to tease apart the people who disliked OD&D because the rules were crap and the ones who disliked it because they were hostile to the idea of RPGs that were also cutting into what they viewed as their turf.

On the other hand, I can't recall back in the day anyone complimenting OD&D on its rules. It was either a case of "good enough", doing their own reworks to various degrees, or, in extreme cases, writing whole new games. It wasn't until the OSR days I saw anyone seem to think much of the rules, and that was amid the pile of various editions.

Now, as always, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but if there was a big set of respecters of the OD&D rules, they hid it pretty well. The best you'd say was that there were people who thought AD&D was bloated, but it seemed like most of those were in the B/X camp or its close kin. So if there were many people who really thought OD&D was a good rules set, they hid it pretty well, and there were plenty who clearly thought to the contrary.