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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6728911" data-attributes="member: 4937">howandwhy99 has left me no evidence based approach to proving points, since he's elsewhere asserted that neither Gygax, nor the specifics of the Blackmoor and Greyhawk, nor the rules of the game can be appealed to to prove that D&D is not what he says it is.  Since none of those things define D&D in his mind, there isn't any evidence based approach that can conflict with his internal definition.  Thus, when he says that it's obviously wrong that a DM is any more than a referee and doesn't participate in the game, I can't appeal to quoting the 1e DMG, since apparently that rules he appeals to so often as the source of the pattern are obviously wrong as well.  Nor can I appeal to a scholarly work like Peterson's 'Playing at the World' (on my bookshelf at home) which is based off the notes of the Blackmoor and Greyhawk campaigns.But consider the usual circumstance the DM may find himself in.In one room, there is a band of kobolds.  Operating very much like a board game, limited to propositions only available to a player in Nethack and with no concern for fictional position but heavy concern for tactical positioning, the party enters into the room, conducts a tactical fight with the kobolds in full accordance with the rules and finishes the kobolds off quickly with a horn of blasting.  All of this is the sort of game H&W claims is 'real D&D' and requires no improvisation.  Well and good, but...This later circumstance being very noisy, the DM examines the game board to see whether it has any side effects.   He notes that a mere 150' away down a corridor is a black dragon and by die roll it is sleeping.  He now wonders whether the horn of blasting might have wakened the dragon.  Further, he wonders what upon waking the dragon will do.   Will it hide and seek to ambush whatever has disturbed it?  Will it cast its darkness spell to cover its lair.  Will it cautiously and stealthily investigate the source of the noise?  Will it bellow its anger in a trumpet blast and lash its tail with such fury that causes the very walls to shake?  Upon engaging the PC's, will it rush forward to bite and claw, or will it hold back and apply its breath weapon?  Will it instead cast sleep to try to disrupt the party?What mechanical pattern exists to answer these questions regarding the dragon's behavior?   Is the DM now even playing D&D to wonder whether the dragon is now awake?  Since the DM has not anticipated a loud noise nearby and not written the percentage chance a horn of blasting has to wake a dragon at 50 paces, does he cease to play D&D if the dragon wakes?  And if the dragon wakes, does he cease to play D&D if he decides to cast a spell, use melee attacks, cast a breath weapon, or try to bully the PC's into relinquishing their treasure?  In other words, is it only D&D if the DM is omnipotent and omniscient, as this is the only circumstances where D&D could be played and meet H&Y's definition.  While it's perfectly valid to imagine the DM having full understanding of a game board as limited as Mastermind - how much is there to it - it's ludicrous to imagine any DM being in full possession of D&D's game board at all times, or to imagine that DM's simply crank the handle of a game engine the way a piece of software does, or that any DM in the entire history of the game has every truly done so.The game cannot remotely be played without improvisation.  For all his ranting, no attempt to show such a comprehensive game engine external to a DM ever existed has been made.  One thing is clear, the 1977 rules set didn't contain such an engine.   H&W has us believe that the real D&D is obviously one that exists only in his head.  How exactly this situation came about, I'm not sure, but I'm willing to guess that it came about through improvisation.  I'm willing to bet that H&W began play of D&D sometime between 1975 and 1980, or else was accepted into a table that began in that period and had its roots in war gaming - and that this table had no direct connection to the Wisconsin group.  This is roughly the time my cousin began play in central Arkansas, having met an old school punch card computer programmer who had ran into the game some years before while in college.  At the time, the rules of D&D were very incomplete, were badly written, badly organized, sometimes contradictory, contained numerous errors, and cross referenced other TSR rule sets that were hard to come by.  If you wanted to play at all during this period, you had to improvise heavily to create a functioning set of house rules based on what you assumed that the designers were doing when playing.  Remember, how you prepare to play and how you think about playing an RPG is more important than the rules.   Apparently at H&W's table, the improvised version of D&D was one of many early forks off D&D that moved the game in a somewhat odd direction (Peterson records several contemporary and predecessors to D&D that were occurring at wargaming conventions, most of which do not in fact meet H&W's definition of game as some had no rules engine at all beyond referee improvisation).  In this version of D&D the DM's purpose was merely mechanical.  A limited number of game pieces were defined, and they had no fictional positioning as we'd understand the term.  The boards of this game were pregenerated and prepopulated, and the game was played as purely an open ended tactical wargame with apparently even less meta-story than Nethack.  While the PC's could propose anything they wanted, it was the DM's job to continue to refine the player proposition down until it was a simple defineable tactical move - "go 3" closer to the orc and attack".  Any interaction with the setting was meaningless unless predefined, and players acting under these constraints soon adopted very straight forward propositions.And while I'd argue that even under those constraints, there is a significant amount of improvisation going on and nothing much like "code breaking" (which I agree with pemerton is a term that apparently only means decision making), the goal of this play was clearly to reduce the DM's role as much as possible to neutral arbiter of a wargaming scenario.  Despite the illusionism of pretending that the DM wasn't making arbitrary choices and therefore couldn't possibly be an unbiased rules engine, H&W's group was happy with this and enjoyed it.  So you can imagine his dismay no doubt when TSR steadily produced materials that didn't conform to his groups definition of D&D.  You can also see why H&W repeatedly refers to the need to convert the official published materials of D&D in order to first play the game.  Because the official published materials don't limit themselves to this neat tightly confined little world, and have to first be converted into something more resembling Nethack before they can be played.  The 'real D&D' - by which he means merely what he was used to at the time - was being killed by... real D&D.UPDATE: After closely reading the thread, I realize I've erred in giving H&W too much benefit of the doubt.  He now claims that he was introduced to D&D post 1985.  By this point, TSR has published works like 'Dragonlance', and had gone as far as producing chapters of novels based on the text of adventure modules.  The idea that story isn't part of an RPG, to the extent it ever existed anyway since it's easy to prove that Blackmoor started with story first and added rules later, is well and dead.</blockquote>

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