I just finished reading Jon Peterson's
Playing at the World 2E, Volume 1, and I'm a bit surprised at my own blasé reaction to it.
I purchased this book, along with
the aforementioned Fifty Years of Dungeons & Dragons, at Gen Con 2024, largely because I'd been on a years-long endeavor of reading nonfiction about tabletop RPGs, and those seemed like worthwhile books to peruse in that regard. But both titles have left me cold now, albeit for completely different reasons.
It's those "different reasons" that are most salient here. While I need not rehash my issues with
Fifty Years, I'll say that my problems with that book were based on the book itself; here, things are entirely different, simply because this is an excellent book which simply had little to offer to me personally.
In recent years, much ink has been spent chronicling the history of our hobby, with Peterson himself being perhaps the most eminent of all authors in that regard. Notwithstanding his entries in the
Heroes' Feast cookbook, which has so little to do with history that I can't help but be cynical about Peterson's name being on there, I've read almost everything he's written, and I can wholeheartedly say that he sets the standard for scholarly research on tabletop role-playing games in general and D&D in particular. No one can compare to him, though admittedly some come closer than others.
My problem here is that I can't help but compare PatW 2E to its original incarnation, and to my own surprise, I found this one...less than impressive. That surprised me, simply because this one has more to recommend it: Peterson's writing style is less dry here, though no less erudite for it. The text is more readable, with shorter chapters and a less-eyestraining font. There's bits of history here which were overlooked before (e.g. the reference to Mike Mornard's pre-publication copy of D&D, which I recall Peterson lamenting in the pages of
Gygax Magazine #1 that he'd only found after publishing PatW 1E). And of course, the entire book has a greater clarity of focus, focusing on the immediate circumstances that led to the creation of D&D, saving the more esoteric explorations of what made such an evolution possible for its second volume. So why did this leave me cold?
In all honesty, I think it's because pretty much none of this was new to me.
A common point of historical note in the early years of D&D is that the original Little Brown Booklets (which I think merit capitalization) were hard for a lot of people to understand, and that J. Eric Holmes'
Basic Set was a much simpler and easier take on the same material. While it's far from a perfect analogy, that's very similar to how I feel about
Playing at the World's two editions. The first one is a lengthy tome of intimidating complexity and which is very hard for most people to get through, whereas the second is far more inviting in its genial presentation.
But at the risk of sounding self-aggrandizing, I read through PatW 1E in its entirety, and so had no need for a "basic set" version of it. Particularly given that I've also read
The Elusive Shift,
The Game Wizards, and several of Peterson's other writings (e.g.
his blog), along with D&D histories by numerous other authors. While I certainly can't recall all of the various details with crystal-clear precision, I remember them well enough that none of PatW 2E felt particularly new or revolutionary to me.
All of which is to say that this left me cold simply because it was ground that my reading habits over the last few years have thoroughly covered by this point. I suppose one can only read so many histories about the same topic before jadedness begins to set in, at least without some fresh new take on things (or an alternative area of focus, such as the history of a TTRPG company that
isn't TSR).
I honestly didn't mean to make this post more about me than Peterson's book when I sat down to write it, but in hindsight I think I needed to vent a bit. I suspect that my enthusiasm for reading about the history of tabletop role-playing games is...not gone, but permanently sated. While I still plan on reading major new releases about less-well charted areas of our hobby (e.g. Ben Riggs' forthcoming history about the development and release of 5E), I feel comfortable moving on from this area in favor of other topics.
Though I suppose that begs the question of whether or not I should put in the effort to read PatW 2E Volume 2.
