Snarf Zagyg
Notorious Liquefactionist
This is the second in three essays based off of Jon Peterson's book, The Elusive Shift ("ES"). While I will be discussing concepts he raised, I will also be extrapolating from his concepts with some of my own thoughts in these essays. That means some of these conclusions are my own, after reading the book. I also don't want to discuss everything in the book since I really think people should read it.
I highly recommend that anyone with an interest in TTRPGs, TTRPG theory, or the history of D&D get the book. After all, the holidays are coming up!
A. Roots of OD&D- I am un chien andalusia.
OD&D (Original D&D, or 0E ... the original product put out in 1974) was very much a product of its antecedents, and construed by the communities that played it. Which is a fancy way of saying that Arneson & Gygax created the product based upon their experiences, and the people that bought, played, and discussed it were a limited group that interpreted those rules largely based on their prior experiences. This is something that we see ES keep returning to.
So what community did Gygax and Arneson come from? Well, that's obvious. The wargaming community. In fact, OD&D (hereafter, just D&D) wasn't called a roleplaying game- the booklet announced that it was "Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencils and Miniature Figures." From that foundation, we had the concept of miniatures that were well-established, along with the debates over Kriegspiel (both free, meaning with few or no rules, and regular- which bound the referee with more complex rules for adjudication) and the small, but established, hobbyist world.
And what community did it go out into? Obviously, the wargaming community! But, in addition to that one, the Science Fiction community (which included fantasy) also quickly took it up. And that's where we get the immediate frisson of debate over what it meant to play D&D ... over what it meant to even be an RPG. In fact, there was not even a consensus over the proper term to use, with FRP (fantasy role play) used instead of RPG early on, and some advocating for terms like "adventure game" instead of "roleplaying game." The wargame community had once set of norms (mostly around competitive play) and the SciFi community had another set of norms (mostly about collaborative storytelling). There was some overlap, but also very different priorities.
In the early years, then, we had people come at D&D from a multitude of perspectives. Why? Well, just look at the rules- at best, they were incomplete. In other words, you couldn't do very much with just the original boxed set - so much was left outside of the rules! At worst, of course, the rules as originally presented were pretty much unplayable, and unexplained. Simple issue like whether players rolled weren't explicit in the rules. And yet, these original rules took these small communities, after they experienced what it could do, by storm. ...but not in the same way.
To understand why, it helps to understand that there was no consensus as to what D&D even was, should be, or could be. To the extent that Gygax was the authorial voice and evangelist, he repeatedly told people to modify it as they saw fit, and to make it their own. More importantly, you had such a diversity of desires and play experiences. For example, you had people versed in free kriegspiel who advocated for fewer and fewer rules; most of whom wanted the game as a black box to increase player immersion. Others who came at the game from a history of playing the game Diplomacy (or had played En Garde) chafed at the idea of referee control, and contemplated a game without any referee at all- just players. Still others would claim that the referee, in charge of the world, could not be neutral, and then divided into camps who either advocated for a referee that was the adversary of the players (the infamous 50%+ mortality rate of the MIT dungeons) or should collaborate with the players (using techniques to "steer" - what we would call railroading, force, or fudging - to ensure that there was a coherent story or narrative to the adventure). There were others, still, who focused solely on the roleplaying aspects of the game, and there are accounts of games that were pacifist or added additional RPing rules or laws- just as there are accounts of games were people dispensed with any RP requirements and turned every game into a "gilded hole" of combat in dungeons.
In short, in the years after the launch of D&D during the 1970s, there was an explosion of creative approaches to what D&D even meant. How it should be played. What the rules were, or should be. Even the smallest details - things like, "Should players roll to attack? Should they roll at all? Do we need a referee? Can we play a game without any dice? Should there be rules to reward RPing? What about skills? Hey, can we have some type of system to allow players to take control of the game and create narrative?" were unresolved.
B. Closing of the System- Your head will collapse if there's nothing in it.
If you've read Peterson's other, more recent book, Game Wizards (also a great Holiday Present!), you know that a lot of the received wisdom about the Gygax/Arneson dispute over D&D isn't accurate. One issue that I don't think he has fully tackled (IIRC, and I welcome correction on this) is the specific reasons for the creation of AD&D. While many people simply assert it was created to screw Arneson out of royalties, I don't think it's that simple (or accurate) after reading the other books. I'd make a more simple claim- Gygax saw that the bread of TSR was buttered by D&D, and he realized that he needed more bread ... in all senses of the word. AD&D wasn't about screwing Arneson, it was about screwing everyone.
Let's back up a second. As I wrote before, D&D sprung from a wargaming culture- a remix culture, where people freely borrowed concepts and rules from each other, then would play with their modifications, and then would occasionally publish their rules .... usually for little money. When TSR started, D&D was jut one of many wargames that was going to be published. That's why it was considered perfectly acceptable for Gygax to tell people to make it their own- to modify it, to change the rules, to do with it what they needed to. And they did!
Rules modifications were everywhere. Tables all played to rules that they made up. What became increasingly common was that people would publish their own rules supplements to D&D (such as the Arduin Grimoire) or, even more worryingly to Gygax, write up their rules supplements to D&D into brand new, and competing, RPGs! Most early competitors to D&D were, in fact, house-rules to D&D that were modified. Some were obvious ... Chivalry & Sorcery started as a D&D campaign. Some are ... less so. Superhero:2044 (the first superhero RPG) was created when characters in an OD&D campaign went to alternate material plane and encountered superheroes.
D&D wasn't just an RPG, then, it was (and I'm borrowing a phrase from ES here) a toolkit for creating RPGs. Which is great! Unless you're Gygax, and TSR, and you see that all these people that aren't you are going to start making money off of your product.
Commercialization, then, was the impetus for Gygax's volte-face. With 1e (AD&D), Gygax announced that he was closing the system (aside- obviously, he wasn't, because it wasn't a complete system no matter how much he claimed otherwise). From that point on, TSR's products were AD&D, and everything else ... wasn't. And then you had the fortuitous timing of two events- the publication of the DMG in August of 1979, and the disappearance of Egbert the same month, which led private investigator William Dear to blame D&D over the ensuing weeks. Simply put, 1e was "complete" at the same time that D&D became wildly popular, and attracted a massive influx of new, young gamers who were not from either the wargame nor the SciFi groups (and, not so coincidentally, launched the first in a series of munchkin/grognard, powergamer/roleplayer debates the continue to this day).
But the echoes of the original debates continued on, because D&D had never closed. People kept treating it both as a commercial product, and as a toolkit. As bizarre as that seems to some (it's both a desert topping AND a floor wax!), that's the history of the product. The product continues to be both a highly commercial product demanding standardization, as well as a malleable product amenable to customization. Whether that makes it a good product at either of those is usually an exercise left for the individual gamer.
I highly recommend that anyone with an interest in TTRPGs, TTRPG theory, or the history of D&D get the book. After all, the holidays are coming up!
A. Roots of OD&D- I am un chien andalusia.
OD&D (Original D&D, or 0E ... the original product put out in 1974) was very much a product of its antecedents, and construed by the communities that played it. Which is a fancy way of saying that Arneson & Gygax created the product based upon their experiences, and the people that bought, played, and discussed it were a limited group that interpreted those rules largely based on their prior experiences. This is something that we see ES keep returning to.
So what community did Gygax and Arneson come from? Well, that's obvious. The wargaming community. In fact, OD&D (hereafter, just D&D) wasn't called a roleplaying game- the booklet announced that it was "Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencils and Miniature Figures." From that foundation, we had the concept of miniatures that were well-established, along with the debates over Kriegspiel (both free, meaning with few or no rules, and regular- which bound the referee with more complex rules for adjudication) and the small, but established, hobbyist world.
And what community did it go out into? Obviously, the wargaming community! But, in addition to that one, the Science Fiction community (which included fantasy) also quickly took it up. And that's where we get the immediate frisson of debate over what it meant to play D&D ... over what it meant to even be an RPG. In fact, there was not even a consensus over the proper term to use, with FRP (fantasy role play) used instead of RPG early on, and some advocating for terms like "adventure game" instead of "roleplaying game." The wargame community had once set of norms (mostly around competitive play) and the SciFi community had another set of norms (mostly about collaborative storytelling). There was some overlap, but also very different priorities.
In the early years, then, we had people come at D&D from a multitude of perspectives. Why? Well, just look at the rules- at best, they were incomplete. In other words, you couldn't do very much with just the original boxed set - so much was left outside of the rules! At worst, of course, the rules as originally presented were pretty much unplayable, and unexplained. Simple issue like whether players rolled weren't explicit in the rules. And yet, these original rules took these small communities, after they experienced what it could do, by storm. ...but not in the same way.
To understand why, it helps to understand that there was no consensus as to what D&D even was, should be, or could be. To the extent that Gygax was the authorial voice and evangelist, he repeatedly told people to modify it as they saw fit, and to make it their own. More importantly, you had such a diversity of desires and play experiences. For example, you had people versed in free kriegspiel who advocated for fewer and fewer rules; most of whom wanted the game as a black box to increase player immersion. Others who came at the game from a history of playing the game Diplomacy (or had played En Garde) chafed at the idea of referee control, and contemplated a game without any referee at all- just players. Still others would claim that the referee, in charge of the world, could not be neutral, and then divided into camps who either advocated for a referee that was the adversary of the players (the infamous 50%+ mortality rate of the MIT dungeons) or should collaborate with the players (using techniques to "steer" - what we would call railroading, force, or fudging - to ensure that there was a coherent story or narrative to the adventure). There were others, still, who focused solely on the roleplaying aspects of the game, and there are accounts of games that were pacifist or added additional RPing rules or laws- just as there are accounts of games were people dispensed with any RP requirements and turned every game into a "gilded hole" of combat in dungeons.
In short, in the years after the launch of D&D during the 1970s, there was an explosion of creative approaches to what D&D even meant. How it should be played. What the rules were, or should be. Even the smallest details - things like, "Should players roll to attack? Should they roll at all? Do we need a referee? Can we play a game without any dice? Should there be rules to reward RPing? What about skills? Hey, can we have some type of system to allow players to take control of the game and create narrative?" were unresolved.
B. Closing of the System- Your head will collapse if there's nothing in it.
If you've read Peterson's other, more recent book, Game Wizards (also a great Holiday Present!), you know that a lot of the received wisdom about the Gygax/Arneson dispute over D&D isn't accurate. One issue that I don't think he has fully tackled (IIRC, and I welcome correction on this) is the specific reasons for the creation of AD&D. While many people simply assert it was created to screw Arneson out of royalties, I don't think it's that simple (or accurate) after reading the other books. I'd make a more simple claim- Gygax saw that the bread of TSR was buttered by D&D, and he realized that he needed more bread ... in all senses of the word. AD&D wasn't about screwing Arneson, it was about screwing everyone.
Let's back up a second. As I wrote before, D&D sprung from a wargaming culture- a remix culture, where people freely borrowed concepts and rules from each other, then would play with their modifications, and then would occasionally publish their rules .... usually for little money. When TSR started, D&D was jut one of many wargames that was going to be published. That's why it was considered perfectly acceptable for Gygax to tell people to make it their own- to modify it, to change the rules, to do with it what they needed to. And they did!
Rules modifications were everywhere. Tables all played to rules that they made up. What became increasingly common was that people would publish their own rules supplements to D&D (such as the Arduin Grimoire) or, even more worryingly to Gygax, write up their rules supplements to D&D into brand new, and competing, RPGs! Most early competitors to D&D were, in fact, house-rules to D&D that were modified. Some were obvious ... Chivalry & Sorcery started as a D&D campaign. Some are ... less so. Superhero:2044 (the first superhero RPG) was created when characters in an OD&D campaign went to alternate material plane and encountered superheroes.
D&D wasn't just an RPG, then, it was (and I'm borrowing a phrase from ES here) a toolkit for creating RPGs. Which is great! Unless you're Gygax, and TSR, and you see that all these people that aren't you are going to start making money off of your product.
Commercialization, then, was the impetus for Gygax's volte-face. With 1e (AD&D), Gygax announced that he was closing the system (aside- obviously, he wasn't, because it wasn't a complete system no matter how much he claimed otherwise). From that point on, TSR's products were AD&D, and everything else ... wasn't. And then you had the fortuitous timing of two events- the publication of the DMG in August of 1979, and the disappearance of Egbert the same month, which led private investigator William Dear to blame D&D over the ensuing weeks. Simply put, 1e was "complete" at the same time that D&D became wildly popular, and attracted a massive influx of new, young gamers who were not from either the wargame nor the SciFi groups (and, not so coincidentally, launched the first in a series of munchkin/grognard, powergamer/roleplayer debates the continue to this day).
But the echoes of the original debates continued on, because D&D had never closed. People kept treating it both as a commercial product, and as a toolkit. As bizarre as that seems to some (it's both a desert topping AND a floor wax!), that's the history of the product. The product continues to be both a highly commercial product demanding standardization, as well as a malleable product amenable to customization. Whether that makes it a good product at either of those is usually an exercise left for the individual gamer.
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