D&D General Understanding the Design Principles in Early D&D

[jgsugden]

...The fundamental thing to understand is that 0e and 1e were never designed to be complete systems, or designed to be complete- they were always intended to be used as toolkits. As detailed further below, it is only with that basic approach that you can begin to make sense of early D&D's design principles.

From the Foreward of the Players Handbook (AD&D)

This is the second release of the ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS series, and is designed to be a player's book in every respect - giving you all the background you require on the game system, as well as all the information you'll need to go adventuring.

...and from the Foreward of the DMG:

This book ... is your primary tool in constructing your own "world", or milieu. It contains a wealth of material, and combined with the other workd of ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS (the MONSTER MANUAL and [/b]PLAYER'S HANDBOOK[/b]) gives you all the information you need to play AD&D.

There was absolutely an intent, by the designers, that these books would be a comprehensive, cohesive, and capable set of tools from which you could run D&D with no other materials required. They failed miserably, but that was absolutely the intent. They were intended to be all you needed, not just a toolkit.

Please note that while I am using information learned from various great sources, I don't have my books handy, so I will be doing this mostly from memory.

Unfortunately, the books contradict you, as do many of the interview notes from historians of the games when they've interviewed those designers.

The books were intended to be a be all perfect compilation of the rules. They failed, miserably, because the designers massively underestimated the difficulty of the task they undertook, but the books were intended to be all you needed.

 

[Yaarel]

From the Foreward of the Players Handbook (AD&D)...and from the Foreward of the DMG:There was absolutely an intent, by the designers, that these books would be a comprehensive, cohesive, and capable set of tools from which you could run D&D with no other materials required. They failed miserably, but that was absolutely the intent. They were intended to be all you needed, not just a toolkit.
Unfortunately, the books contradict you, as do many of the interview notes from historians of the games when they've interviewed those designers.

The books were intended to be a be all perfect compilation of the rules. They failed, miserably, because the designers massively underestimated the difficulty of the task they undertook, but the books were intended to be all you needed.

Both are true. Enough rules to play, including content one might not want to use. Hence a tool kit.

The 1e core books never claimed to have rules that are "cohesive". Heh, I am unsure where you got that from.

1e PH: "giving you all the background you require on the game system, as well as all the information you'll need to go adventuring."

That is true, there is enough to get a game going, plus lots of info that will never happen, and lots of conflictive bespoke rules, that the DM will need to sort thru, plus lots of missing content that the DM is instructed to make up on the fly.

1e DMG: "This book ... is your primary tool in constructing your own "world", or milieu. It contains a wealth of material."

Well, that is true, there is a wealth of information in the DMG. The three core books are enough rules to play. But the most important rule is, the DM needs to make stuff up. And with that rule the rules are merely a resource for the DM to peruse. Nobody claimed to be "cohesive" or "perfect".



In any case, notice what the official setting of 1e is: "constructing your own world". That really happens in 1e. Each table develops its own universe, its own cosmology, its own world.

 

[James Gasik]

Not to be cynical, but just because they say that doesn't mean it's actually what their intent was. A lot of that sounds like sales jargon to get you to buy the book!

 

[Yaarel]

Not to be cynical, but just because they say that doesn't mean it's actually what their intent was. A lot of that sounds like sales jargon to get you to buy the book!

Yeah. The number of people I have met who learned to play 1e from reading the books is: one. But even then I am suspicious because at some point he met up with other 1e groups and could "compare notes" sotospeak. He did get a game going in any case.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Unfortunately, the books contradict you, as do many of the interview notes from historians of the games when they've interviewed those designers.

I appreciate your feedback, but as I often have to say ... it is great when people read the post before committing to making an argumentative comment. I know that I use words - lots of words. Some of them are big. And there are jokes, too. But it really pays off sometimes to read the whole thing!

Here is a little further into the OP-
And then there was 1e (AD&D). By 1979, with the publication of the DMG, the core three books of 1e were complete. Now, looking back it's very hard to understand the intent of 1e just by reading what Gygax wrote in the core books and his columns in Dragon Magazine. One reason for the difficulty is that Gygax contained multitudes, and would often contradict himself by the end of any given paragraph. More importantly, however, you have to understand the internal battles that he was going through; we all have the struggle between the angels of our better nature and the demons that drive us, and Gygax was no different. Specifically, he came from a hobbyist background, where rules and ideas were exchanged freely, and people were expected and encouraged to tinker. But by the time of 1e, he had interests to defend; he had a product, and he didn't want competition riding on his coattails. It was a strange dichotomy, and one you can see playing out- he both encourages people to tinker with the game and make it their own, while claiming that 1e is a complete system.

Anyway, Gygax (and others) have repeatedly said that they never ran AD&D, and never expected anyone to run it as a complete system.

But sure, your critique sounds interesting, considering it relies on source material I've never seen (sorry, that's sarcastic).

I do love to learn more and will incorporate it into future posts. If you add some of the source interviews that I haven't seen yet, please feel free to post them, although note that it would go against the great weight of current authority as I understand it.

Thanks.


ETA- just to be clear, when I write that I didn't have my books handy, I didn't mean the PHB or DMG. I mean the books I look at when I am researching more in-depth posts- books like Playing at the World and The Elusive Shift. The information about Gygax's shift w/r/t AD&D can also be gleaned by Game Wizards. You are welcome to look through my past posts on those topics.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

That's because it wasn't a thing for most of the game's history. Consider- in early D&D, the thing Fighters had (strong hit points, good chance to hit, high AC) was a thing other classes didn't have. A Fighter had the best chance to survive without support of any character (barring the Dwarf and maybe the Halfling, since they were just Fighters with racial bonuses, I think?).

The OP (which was rushed because I was heading out at the time) was more of the "big picture" perspective of why looking at design principles of TSR-era D&D (especially pre-2e) is necessarily different than looking at more modern D&D games- mostly because the games were more hobbyist, more toolkit, and the systems and subsystems were usually designed to respond to specific situations.

That said, I think that there are some overarching principles that are worth discussing specifically that people can see reoccurring, but that's probably a different post. That would be principles along the lines of niche protection, balance achieved over time, and gatekeeping via rarity.

 

[James Gasik]

You're right of course, but it's hard to look back at the early days and not think about where we are now, and how we got here. Disassociating how we think of the game in the moment and trying to put ourselves in the headspace of someone in that era is going to be difficult.

Even if you were there, you can have some different ideas about what was going on. D&D in general in the early days was seen as strange and arcane, and the DM's were few in number and seemed to possess knowledge beyond what was in the rulebooks.

In his book, "The Dungeon Master: The Disappearance of James Dallas Egbert", William Dear writes of a (almost assuredly apocryphal, given the source) attempt to play Dungeons and Dragons.

He has to hire a Dungeon Master, and the guy oozes charisma and seems to be the only one who really understands how the game works.

Again, he probably made this up to sell his sensationalist documentary about a completely botched "Gonzo investigation" (his methods make Dirk Gently's seem straightforward), but this is kind of how people who weren't there look at the early days.

The novelization of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial has an extended look at the D&D scene, and it's utter gibberish. In response to seeing an enemy, a player says "I try to befriend them". Like that's...just a thing one does?

(But then you think about crazy nonsense like later Diplomancer builds and you're like, well....)

I know myself, when I sat down with the 1e books (having gotten them in a garage sale in the 80's), I was amazed at all the STUFF packed in there. Still am, to be honest.

But I couldn't figure out how to play the game for the life of me, until I finally saw other people doing it. And I've heard a lot of similar stories.

Which really makes me wonder how anyone who didn't play with Dave Arneson or Gary Gygax (and company) figured it out to tell everyone else!

(Or maybe they didn't, and just made it up, and that's part of why early D&D seems so mysterious...)

 

[jgsugden]

I appreciate your feedback, but as I often have to say ... it is great when people read the post before committing to making an argumentative comment. I know that I use words - lots of words. Some of them are big. And there are jokes, too. But it really pays off sometimes to read the whole thing! ...

Dude.

In 2 years you've written 5000+ posts, most of which are a dozen (or sometimes far more) paragraphs long. You CONSTANTLY attack people for not reading every word you've written, despite not really knowing if they have read the entire post. I make sure I do.

What you seem to fail to realize is that people will not often spend 30 minutes doing a point by point dissection of everything you've said in the thread in question to tear aparat each and every sentence you post on. This is especially true if there is a flaw with the basic premise that can be addressed by going back to your core statement and offering evidence as to how it is incorrect.

Further, you often pull the trick of referencing your other threads as evidence in support of your surrent position as if people have a duty to have read and absorbed everything you've ever written. They do not.

Regardless, your FUNDAMENTAL point, as you label it, is directly contradicted by the EXPRESS INTENT of the authors, as stated in the very books in question. It is insanely rare for intent to be spelled out so clearly -and yet it was here - twice. They wanted these books to be all you needed to play D&D. They did not say, "Hey, we wrote these books with the intent that you'll need a bunch of magazine articles to figure out what we mean here." They wrote these as the standalone books you'd need to run a game.

Obvisouly they intended to sell books that added onto it by adding Deities, or providing adventures - but they had the intent, when writing these books, as they expressly state, that they would be all of the rules you needed for the game. THEY FAILED IN THAT EFFORT. However, what they realized after they wrote the books does not change what they intended when they wrote the books.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Dude.
.

I’m not your dude.

Thanks!

 

[bloodtide]

My two coppers...

The BIG thing to remember is that D&D was not just a New game.....it was a whole new activity. A new, unique activity that no one had ever seen before.

Take nearly any board game released in the whole 20th century: you open the box, read and follow the rules and play the game. Except D&D is not like that.....it's not even close. D&D, as most RPGs, are a unique activity.

Gary and the rest were breaking new ground, in uncharted waters and saling beyond the farthest star. And they were alone. They did not have 50 years of RPG lore and information: They had nothing. They had to make EVERYTHING from scratch. Things like Hit Points, that most five year olds today know about and understand, were a new thing that nobody knew about at all back in the day.

There is no way that any new complex thing like a RPG would not be "rough" around the edges at first. Things refine over time.

They very much so tossed D&D out there to see what other people would make of it. And HUGE vast parts of 1E came from fan suggestions, if not outright things made by gamers. When the folks at TSR saw something fan created that they liked, they grabbed it up and added it to the game.