Snarf Zagyg
Notorious Liquefactionist
As per usual, I saw something in another thread that captured my attention. Specifically, it was the issue of game design- and how early D&D (OD&D and AD&D, aka 0e and 1e) were designed, and the ways in which they differed greatly from the design principles that we are more familiar with today.
I think that the conversation is useful, but I wanted to do a slightly deeper dive into why TSR-era D&D, and especially 0e and 1e, can be so inscrutable to modern players. I think this can be for three reasons- first, the rules themselves are difficult to parse, especially in comparison to modern rules. Second, the people who tell you who the game was played back in the day lie ... they lie like rugs. Not knowingly, of course- but if you ask three different grognards how games used to be, you'll get four different answers. Finally, the gestalt is completely different- in effect, the surrounding culture is different enough that it can be hard to comprehend some of the decisions that are implicit in those games; after all, it's not just that the games were designed in the 70s, it's that the people who made those games grew up in the decades before that - Gygax (for example) was 36 by the time the LBBs for OD&D was released in 1974.
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.
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.
A. RAW as Applied to Early D&D
I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me. -Pat Boone, assuredly.
One thing we often see here is continual debates about RAW (rules as written) and RAI (rules as intended). But ... here's the thing .... OD&D ... the LBBs ... they don't work RAW. They just don't. Even something like combat (whether you're using the "Chainmail" rules or the alternative combat system ... aka, the combat system that we would end up using) is a total mess, because values are inconsistent. Famously, D&D only began to take root after people saw other people playing the game. It wasn't completely impossible to teach yourself just using the LBBs and a vivid imagination, but ... nearly so.
And why was this? Well, arguably it's because of the way the game was invented. Arneson was running a very ad hoc, black box game (with rulings being determined and written on the fly) and Gygax attempting to make the game into a set of rules to be printed up and promulgated. It was kind of a mishmash- a little bit of Chainmail, a little bit of Arneson's notes, and a little bit of Gygax's attempts to make it more of a game (such as the emphasis on the leveling) and more systematized (from his wargaming roots).
For that reason, you couldn't view the original D&D as a way to play the game- you had to get exposed to even more material. You needed to read The Strategic Review (later renamed Dragon), you needed to check out the supplements as they came out, there were prominent hobbyist clubs and 'zines, and there was 3PP (such as Judge's Guild, who realized before TSR did that people might want such quaint things as "adventures" or "campaign settings"). But to use a common example, the second issue of The Strategic Review published a column that had to explain things like what initiative was, explaining that dice are rolled and "dice scores are adjusted for dexterity and so on."
For this reason, modern players looking to play OD&D will often look to Holmes Basic (a cleaned up version of OD&D) or will look to other streamlined or edited rules. Importantly, though, at the time .... the idea that you would be playing completely "RAW" was not just unlikely- it was laughable. Having scores of pages of notes and modifications was so common that many of the early TTRPGs were simply house-ruled versions of D&D- in fact, one of my favorite bits of trivia is that the first superhero TTRPG (Superhero: 2044) was just the published houserules of an OD&D game that went to to a parallel world with superheroes.
B. The Modular Approach to 1e
Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously. -Daniel Day Lewis, assumedly.
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.
Ahem. It's not. Instead, 1e is exactly what the title suggests it is - Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. It's Dungeons & Dragons (the original LBBs), plus the supplements, plus some material from TSR's house magazines, plus some additional stuff thrown in. It's a cornucopia overflowing with ideas. It is amazing, and inspires awe, and I love every bit of it.
...but as a cohesive whole, it doesn't work. Not exactly. Let me explain- a modern system, like 5e, is designed from the beginning to have things work together. To have general systems to resolve situations (DC etc.). But that's not what 1e was. Instead, 1e was, for the most part, a system that organically evolved.
Think of it this way- start with OD&D and the most basic of rules. Now, every time something new comes up, you make a new rule. Do you want a class to play Aragorn? Okay, make the Ranger. Feel like doing some mental powers? How about throwing in a psionics subsystem? Want to make weapons more realistic - how about give them speed factors? Not realistic enough? How about adjusting their properties against different armors!
....and so on. Instead of starting with design principles and working from those, the game simply made additional bespoke subsystems as needed. Which can be very cool- after all, the systems were bespoke. But ... as you make more and more and more awesome bespoke systems, you quickly realize that these systems don't work well together.
One example of this is the A.D.D.I.C.T. sheet, which shows you how encounters and initiative is supposed to work in AD&D. There's a copy of it here. But it just goes to show- things are complicated. Real complicated. And this isn't even taking into account some of the weird non-weapon rules, or targeting of the head.
The point of all of this is that no one, and I mean no one, and I include Gygax, played the RAW- both because it's absolutely impossible, and because that was never the real intention of AD&D. Instead, it is best viewed as a modular system. As a tool kit. You take the parts you want, modify what you need to, and leave the rest.
C. Modern Game Design is a Different Beast Entirely
Yesterday’s weirdness is tomorrow’s reason why. -John Wayne, indubitably.
I've seen people repeatedly mention some variation of, "Rules should work without using Rule 0." To a certain extent, I agree with that- no one like broken products. Nevertheless, the idea that we are buying product to be used as-is as opposed to a product to be modified extensively, is different than the past ethos.
Not worse, but different.
And I think it's important, when discussing the early versions of the game, to try and keep that in mind.
I would write more, but I have things to do. So I'm throwing this out for general comments. Have fun!
I think that the conversation is useful, but I wanted to do a slightly deeper dive into why TSR-era D&D, and especially 0e and 1e, can be so inscrutable to modern players. I think this can be for three reasons- first, the rules themselves are difficult to parse, especially in comparison to modern rules. Second, the people who tell you who the game was played back in the day lie ... they lie like rugs. Not knowingly, of course- but if you ask three different grognards how games used to be, you'll get four different answers. Finally, the gestalt is completely different- in effect, the surrounding culture is different enough that it can be hard to comprehend some of the decisions that are implicit in those games; after all, it's not just that the games were designed in the 70s, it's that the people who made those games grew up in the decades before that - Gygax (for example) was 36 by the time the LBBs for OD&D was released in 1974.
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.
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.
A. RAW as Applied to Early D&D
I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me. -Pat Boone, assuredly.
One thing we often see here is continual debates about RAW (rules as written) and RAI (rules as intended). But ... here's the thing .... OD&D ... the LBBs ... they don't work RAW. They just don't. Even something like combat (whether you're using the "Chainmail" rules or the alternative combat system ... aka, the combat system that we would end up using) is a total mess, because values are inconsistent. Famously, D&D only began to take root after people saw other people playing the game. It wasn't completely impossible to teach yourself just using the LBBs and a vivid imagination, but ... nearly so.
And why was this? Well, arguably it's because of the way the game was invented. Arneson was running a very ad hoc, black box game (with rulings being determined and written on the fly) and Gygax attempting to make the game into a set of rules to be printed up and promulgated. It was kind of a mishmash- a little bit of Chainmail, a little bit of Arneson's notes, and a little bit of Gygax's attempts to make it more of a game (such as the emphasis on the leveling) and more systematized (from his wargaming roots).
For that reason, you couldn't view the original D&D as a way to play the game- you had to get exposed to even more material. You needed to read The Strategic Review (later renamed Dragon), you needed to check out the supplements as they came out, there were prominent hobbyist clubs and 'zines, and there was 3PP (such as Judge's Guild, who realized before TSR did that people might want such quaint things as "adventures" or "campaign settings"). But to use a common example, the second issue of The Strategic Review published a column that had to explain things like what initiative was, explaining that dice are rolled and "dice scores are adjusted for dexterity and so on."
For this reason, modern players looking to play OD&D will often look to Holmes Basic (a cleaned up version of OD&D) or will look to other streamlined or edited rules. Importantly, though, at the time .... the idea that you would be playing completely "RAW" was not just unlikely- it was laughable. Having scores of pages of notes and modifications was so common that many of the early TTRPGs were simply house-ruled versions of D&D- in fact, one of my favorite bits of trivia is that the first superhero TTRPG (Superhero: 2044) was just the published houserules of an OD&D game that went to to a parallel world with superheroes.
B. The Modular Approach to 1e
Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously. -Daniel Day Lewis, assumedly.
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.
Ahem. It's not. Instead, 1e is exactly what the title suggests it is - Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. It's Dungeons & Dragons (the original LBBs), plus the supplements, plus some material from TSR's house magazines, plus some additional stuff thrown in. It's a cornucopia overflowing with ideas. It is amazing, and inspires awe, and I love every bit of it.
...but as a cohesive whole, it doesn't work. Not exactly. Let me explain- a modern system, like 5e, is designed from the beginning to have things work together. To have general systems to resolve situations (DC etc.). But that's not what 1e was. Instead, 1e was, for the most part, a system that organically evolved.
Think of it this way- start with OD&D and the most basic of rules. Now, every time something new comes up, you make a new rule. Do you want a class to play Aragorn? Okay, make the Ranger. Feel like doing some mental powers? How about throwing in a psionics subsystem? Want to make weapons more realistic - how about give them speed factors? Not realistic enough? How about adjusting their properties against different armors!
....and so on. Instead of starting with design principles and working from those, the game simply made additional bespoke subsystems as needed. Which can be very cool- after all, the systems were bespoke. But ... as you make more and more and more awesome bespoke systems, you quickly realize that these systems don't work well together.
One example of this is the A.D.D.I.C.T. sheet, which shows you how encounters and initiative is supposed to work in AD&D. There's a copy of it here. But it just goes to show- things are complicated. Real complicated. And this isn't even taking into account some of the weird non-weapon rules, or targeting of the head.
The point of all of this is that no one, and I mean no one, and I include Gygax, played the RAW- both because it's absolutely impossible, and because that was never the real intention of AD&D. Instead, it is best viewed as a modular system. As a tool kit. You take the parts you want, modify what you need to, and leave the rest.
C. Modern Game Design is a Different Beast Entirely
Yesterday’s weirdness is tomorrow’s reason why. -John Wayne, indubitably.
I've seen people repeatedly mention some variation of, "Rules should work without using Rule 0." To a certain extent, I agree with that- no one like broken products. Nevertheless, the idea that we are buying product to be used as-is as opposed to a product to be modified extensively, is different than the past ethos.
Not worse, but different.
And I think it's important, when discussing the early versions of the game, to try and keep that in mind.
I would write more, but I have things to do. So I'm throwing this out for general comments. Have fun!
