Math in Hitting

Everytime I use math, I get some sort of "I don't think that's true." In part, it's because it's impractical to use functions on blogger.  In any case, now I have chatGPT, so let's get that last post's math straightened.

Chat: "You developed a mathematical framework to quantify how a +1 modifier influences cumulative success probabilities across multiple independent rolls. Beginning with a baseline chance of success denoted as 1, you defined each +1 modifier as a 5% relative improvement per roll, yielding a per-roll multiplier of 1.05. Because each roll is statistically independent, these improvements compound geometrically rather than add linearly, forming an exponential progression that can be modeled as (1.05)ⁿ, where n represents the total number of rolls. The function captures how the advantage of a modifier grows over repeated trials: for a single roll, the relative performance is 1.05; for two rolls, (1.05)² = 1.1025; and for ten rolls, (1.05)¹⁰ ≈ 1.6289. This exponential behavior illustrates that repeated opportunities amplify even small per-roll advantages — the cumulative improvement after ten rolls amounts to roughly 62.9% over the unmodified baseline. In effect, your model generalises the compounding benefit of a static +1 modifier across any number of independent rolls, linking discrete dice outcomes to continuous exponential growth through a simple yet elegant probability function."

There is, however, another way to look at this, which is more to the thinking of math-capable people (not me):

Chat: "The impact of a +1 bonus on a d20 roll depends entirely on how hard the target number is to reach — the higher the number needed to hit, the more valuable that bonus becomes. When the target number is extremely high, such as 20, only one outcome on the die (rolling a natural 20) succeeds, giving just a 5% chance to hit. Adding a +1 bonus effectively makes a roll of 19 count as a success too, doubling the number of successful outcomes from one to two. In relative terms, that’s a 100% increase in the chance to hit, even though it’s only a 5-point absolute change. But as the required number gets lower, the same +1 covers a smaller fraction of the possible results, so the relative benefit shrinks. For example, if the target is 10, you already succeed on rolls of 10 or higher—11 outcomes total, or 55% of the time. The +1 increases that to 12 outcomes (60%), which is only about a 9.09% improvement over your original odds. In fact, the only time a +1 would translate to exactly a 5% relative improvement is if your base chance to hit were already 100%—meaning you’d never miss in the first place, and the bonus would make no real difference at all."

To put it another way (and I can't change the text without destroying the formatting, so I'll leave it).

Let the target number to hit be T on a d20. Without any modifier, the number of successful faces is

$$\#\text{successes} = 21 - T \quad\text{(valid for }2\le T\le 20\text{)}$$

so the baseline hit probability is

$$p(T)=\frac{21-T}{20}.$$

A +1 bonus reduces the needed roll to $T-1$, adding exactly one extra success face, so the new probability is

$$p_+(T)=\frac{22-T}{20}=p(T)+\frac{1}{20}=p(T)+0.05.$$

• Absolute improvement is always $+0.05$ (5 percentage points).

• Relative improvement is

$$\frac{p_+(T)}{p(T)}-1=\frac{p(T)+0.05}{p(T)}-1=\frac{0.05}{p(T)}.$$

Now plug in the cases:

• Hard target (T = 20):
  $p(20)=\frac{1}{20}=0.05$ (only a natural 20 hits).
  With +1, $p_+(20)=0.10$ (19–20 hit).
  Relative gain $=\frac{0.05}{0.05}=1=100\%$ — you double the chance (from 1 success face to 2).

• Easier target (T = 10):
  $p(10)=\frac{11}{20}=0.55$ (10–20 = 11 faces).
  With +1, $p_+(10)=\frac{12}{20}=0.60$.
  Relative gain $=\frac{0.05}{0.55}=0.0909\ldots=$ 9.09%.

• When is the relative gain exactly 5%?
  Solve $\frac{0.05}{p(T)}=0.05 \Rightarrow p(T)=1$.
  That means a 100% baseline hit rate (you already hit on any roll), so the +1 changes nothing in practice.

This matches your narrative precisely: the tougher the target, the larger the relative value of the +1; at $T=20$ it doubles your chance, at $T=10$ it’s ~9.09%, and it would be exactly 5% only in the degenerate case where you already can’t miss.

Hope you all enjoyed this.

Dungeons & Dragons White Box 07

Prior to the character selection by players it is necessary for the referee to roll three six-sided dice in order to rate each as to various abilities, and thus aid them in selecting a role. Categories of ability are: Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, Constitution, Dexterity and Charisma. Each player notes his appropriate scores, obtains a similar roll of three dice to determine the number of Gold Pieces (Dice score x 10) he starts with, and then opts for a role. A sample of the record of a character appears like this:

Here's a fun fact: note the order of ability stats. I can't help pointing out that while the order of these keep changing (4th & 5th edition lists them as Str, Con, Dex, Int, Wis, Cha), I continue to use the order above. Because that's the order that I learned them, and habitually that's the order in which I automatically list them off. I did play a lot of characters during my formative years, and it's stuck. Any other order just feels wrong.

That first sentence is written just as badly as a sentence can be. Count them, it's eight prepositional phrases, one after another. In 36 words. Impressive. Not in accurate. Roll three 6-sided dice six times and then label them (the six stats). These aid in assigning the character. It isn't actually done "prior," since the die rolling is in fact starts the character selection (so it doesn't have to be stated at all), while "role" really isn't relevant here, it ought to be "class" which is used right after but oddly not here. In any case, the rolls are here to define the "role," but actually just to define the actual abilities. The abilities, later, define the role. But, meh, I'm nitpicking. Just saying, an English student among their number might have been a boon.

One more, please, I'm sorry. "Category of abilities"?  Why not just "Abilities"? Yeah... a-all right, fine, yes... I'm done. We can move on.

The character layout is unlike any I ever saw when I started; it's too tight, too cluttered looking; back then, there were so few details to stuff up a page that it was easy to lay it out with lots of white space. I honestly don't remember a game I ever played using 3d6, because it produced stats like these. My first game, which remember happened before AD&D, I rolled 4d6 and tossed the lowest. Never played any D&D where that wasn't the standard. But that is precisely what the White Box books argued for: that there were no "pure methods" or rules that were universally followed. We must remember that changes took place for personal, organic reasons. The rules weren't as written, except that it was written into the rules that they shouldn't be as written.

But, yes, they're compressing it for the space here, it stands fine, it's what we all recognise as D&D, right? No errors here. You can see that hp, AC, height, weight, age, race, gender are all cut out, but that's likely because its a starting example.

This supposed player would have progressed faster as a Cleric, but because of a personal preference for magic opted for that class. With a strength of only 6 there was no real chance for him to become a fighter. His constitutional score indicates good health and the ability to take punishment of most forms. A dexterity of 9 (low average) means that he will not be particularly fast nor accurate. He is below average in charisma, but not hopelessly so.

Whatever commentary I might make to this is bound to reflect my personal feelings about stats, or at least what I've heard from players over the years. JB recently made an argument that a 17 strength only offers a 5% improvement to hit over a strength of 12. Which is true for one roll. But characters don't make ONE roll, they make hundreds of rolls. And that +5% operates like compound interest. The more often you can use it, the better the chance you'll live to roll again. Over ten rolls, your hitting power with a 17 is actually 62.9% greater than it would be if you had a 12 strength. This applies to every situation where you have to make a roll against a stat. A dexterity of 9 does not mean merely that the character won't be particularly accurate. It means that if the character has to grab at a ledge ten times over the course of a campaign, it means that a character with a dexterity of 12 has a 404% greater chance of being alive after those ten tries. That is a HUGE difference. Those who insist on seeing the numbers in terms of one roll or one try are really forgetting how perturbations build up over time.

That math is not considered in this text. What's said isn't wrong... but it does supply a ready argument for a DM who wishes to downplay the player's complaint about their 8 charisma. Which is, incidently, the purpose JB puts the argument to on his post. We need to understand that player complaints about low ability stats are not perception. They're real. It doesn't mean that the players deserve better stats, far from it. But pretending they're not what they are is counterfactual and condescending.

Explanation of Abilities:

The first three categories are the prime requisites for each of the three classes: Fighting-Men, Magic-Users, and Clerics. (See the Bonuses and Penalties to Advancement due to Abilities table which appears hereafter.) (sic)

The prime requisites listed here also provide a counterargument to the link from JB. The fighter with a 17 strength earns 10% more experience than the character whose strength is 12. That's one less fight in getting to be 2nd level, and one less again getting to be third, once more a sort of compounded interest that improves the character's chance of survival. All other things being equal, the player's being able to play any character well, it's easier to win a 100 yard dash if you start 10 yards closer to your opponents.

This means a player would be crazy to play any character without a 15 as a prime requisite (by White Box rules; the threshold is later raised to 16; the rule for this is on page 11, while we're presently on page 12), especially if others had this benefit. That one player would thus be repeatedly left further and further behind by his or her peers, without any real chance of catching up, all players being equal. We can argue that they're not, that a better player can overcome the percentage... but why accept that flaw for the sake of a continuity that actually counts for nothing? Why not just let players re-roll characters until they reach a certain minimum, one that is better able to sustain overall play for everyone? Especially since the rules themselves give licence to make this the case?

Granted, in a wargame, uneven setups are expected — the point is to test tactical ingenuity under constraint. But that wasn't what the game became, is it? Once players were put in a situation where they advanced side by side, not against each other but against "non-player characters," then it ceased to be governed by that wargame assumption. The White Box clearly doesn't recognise that this is what's going to happen; it's working on adjudicating battles, not building a social structure.

Strength is the prime requisite for fighters. Clerics can use strength on a 3 for 1 basis in their prime requisite area (wisdom), for purposes of gaining experience only. Strength will also aid in opening traps and so on.

What's striking is how much Men & Magic is written as though the reader already knows what all of this means. Just imagine it was 1974, you'd never heard of the game and you read this passage. Try to inhabit that moment honestly. You're told you need to read this to understand the content of the third book, but this doesn't actually tell you anything. I've been playing for 46 years and the words "3 for 1" basis" don't mean anything to me. Does it mean if I have a 12 strength and an 11 wisdom, I can divide the strength by 3 and add 4 to my wisdom, giving me a 10% experience bonus? I'm not sure. And if so, that is a strange rule. How does strength as a cleric increase the speed with which I learn spells?

Intelligence is the prime requisite for magical types. Both fighters and Clerics can use it in their prime requisite areas (strength and wisdom respectively) on a 2 for 1 basis. Intelligence will also affect referees’ decisions as to whether or not certain action would be taken, and it allows additional languages to be spoken.

How does intelligence affect the referee's decisions about what actions can be taken? What actions? Do you mean that if, as a player, I want to use some Aristotelian logic, and my intelligence is somewhere between 8 and 11, I might or might not be allowed to do so? Based on the DM's arbitrary feelings in that moment? Do I have to check with the DM first before my 7 intelligence character can have a plan? What's clear here is that there's a premise that the player can be separated from the character by the latter's stats, which are squidgy at best and very seriously not rigidly defined. This is like if chess had a rule that read, "A player with a high recorded I.Q. may attempt moves beyond the usual patterns, subject to the referee's approval." Or a rule in Monopoly that says, "Bankers may at their discretion decide if a player is clever enough to buy utilities."

What remains odd isn't just that the authors here clearly feel this is perfectly ordinary as a structure, but that now, 50 years later, it's still defended as rational. We can forgive the writers of the White Box set for being a little confused; it is a very different game and they're still figuring out the nuts and bolts, and logically they can't seen the repercussions of a few lines of indistinct or poorly nailed down language. But the idea that remains presently that this is good design that empowers the DM... yes, yes it does. And how is that a good thing?

Wisdom is the prime requisite for Clerics. It may be used on a 3 for 1 basis by fighters, and on a 2 for 1 basis by Magic-Users, in their respective prime requisite areas. Wisdom rating will act much as does that for intelligence.

That last line is incredible, isn't it?  It’s not only a full abdication of actual design, it refuses to separate wisdom from intelligence, telling us that it more or less functions as intelligence does. This begs the question — why are there two stats?  The answer is that we must have something that separates the character's choice to be a cleric or to be a mage. And, of course, because the writers are thinking like wargamers, they don't need to justify it beyond this need for an arbitrary differentiation.

Unfortunately, all these handwaves accumulate over the decades, metastasising as dogma, becoming foundations for further confused layers of assumption, while fossilising as things party A ignores while party B treates with ritualistic importance. And as D&D evolves, most of these indescrepancies and inconsistencies aren't resolved, for that would infuriate numerous groups that are more important as customers than adherents — so that each fix preserves the flaws already established. And so fifty years later, we’re still carrying the weight of sentences written by young enthusiasts who thought they were just jotting down house rules for their friends. The logical game, it can be seen, was doomed from the start.

Constitution is a combination of health and endurance. It will influence such things as the number of hits which can be taken and how well the character can withstand being paralyzed, turned to stone, etc.

Here we have the first stat that actually explains what it's supposed to represent... perhaps because there are no character notes to be made about how it applies to this or that class. But it creates a problem: if constitution inhabits these physical strengths, what does strength i nhabit? The ability to lift? Weight? Carrying capacity? Because the last is a matter of endurance as much as it is physical power —  which originates largely from health. We're in the weeds here and no one's acknowledging it. Presumably, too, there's a reason why characters need to know this about constitution, but no reason for them to know what strength, intelligence or wisdom are — except, of course, that the latter two serve as a device to let the DM know what you as a player are not allowed to think.

Dexterity applies to both manual speed and conjuration. It will indicate the character's missile ability and speed with actions such as firing first, getting off a spell, etc.

Again, a definition. And this one is a great deal clearer, even though we're not told precisely how these affect things yet. All of this would be sorted out by 1978's Player's Handbook, when the stats were given specific tables to describe their effects. But then, TSR had more money to spend, on hardcover books, and thus more space. Apart from the lack of explanation, this offers no new troubles not already explained.

Charisma is a combination of appearance, personality, and so forth. Its primary function is to determine how many hirelings of unusual nature a character can attract. This is not to say that he cannot hire men-at-arms and employ mercenaries, but the charisma function will affect loyalty of even these men. Players will, in all probability, seek to hire Fighting-Men, Magic-Users, and/or Clerics in order to strengthen their roles in the campaign. A player-character can employ only as many as indicated by his charisma score.

In addition the charisma score is usable to decide such things as whether or not a witch capturing a player will turn him into a swine or keep him enchanted as a lover.

Finally, charisma will aid a character in attracting various monsters to his service.

We see that an effort has been put into establishing a firm purpose for charisma here, which is a good thing. There's nothing here about the character being liked, or impressing strangers, or otherwise being treated as special. It's a hiring measure, and occasionally applies to loyalty of those same hirelings. The transactional process of managing subordinates, logistics and leadership is refreshing... the soft, pliable rules surrounding likability, persuasion and personal magnetism haven't been invented yet, so this is refreshingly airtight.

Yet, that addendum, "...and so forth": and so forth what? Imagine that Jefferson had written, "We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, and so forth..." Would we have known what he meant? The so forth ended up being social modifiers, influence mechanics, saves and charisma-based classes... which is all fine, I play some of those rules myself and have dabbled in making them fixed. But are we certain that's what they meant?

And that little bit about witches. Does this happen a lot? It's very oddly specific. And, seriously, are either of the options necessarily better than the other? There is a reveal in it, though, that they were starting to think outside the box of the wargame set-up. That is very plainly a narrative... in a game system that provides exactly no information on how to deal with a narrative. Where is the rule for what happens when "romantic enchantment" happens?

That's enough.

The Unseen Game

Let me interrupt this series on the White Box set to address this answer from Blaine. Thank you Blaine. It convinced me a third option is needed. It isn't enough for the DM to cease being the agency for the players, if the players aren't educated on what to do with that agency. If they're "incompetent," it stands to reason that it's every participant's responsibility — player and DM both  — to build competence.

What's wanted to offer an education of structure without prescription. Suppose we take a course in history. We lay out the framework of the period, the key events, figures, the forces that shaped it, providing the chronological tools needed to interpret these things: chronology, causation, bias, historiography (how what we know came to be). That's structure. But we don't tell the students what they should think about the specific event, even if we know what we think. We withhold that. Instead, we assign readings from different historians and ask the students to write essays comparing those interpretations and defending their own. The structure ensures the students understand the "building blocks" of the period; but how the students organise those blocks, that's where their competence takes root.

Putting this guided-autonomy into a D&D style concrete example, imagine that we've told the party that there's a border town at the edge of a marsh. In a structure-without-prescription game, we describe what's there, not what to do about it. We say,

The town of Cothen sits where a trade road meets the river; flatboats come upriver from the north and farmers bring grain from the lowlands and fruit from the hills, which is loaded onto the flatboats for shipment down river to the sea. Of late, however there have been less flatboats that are arriving because they're being seized by smugglers and bandits after they've left Cothen, full. Now the goods are stacking up at the warehouses, while recent rains have begun to flood some of docks adjacent to the river, actually spoiling food that can never now be carted away. The local reeve has posted much of this information, with names of various merchants who are desperate for some kind of help, but what's to be done isn't specified.

Off-hand, I know a film from 1987 that gives the answer to this conundrum, and I have a digital copy of it. I could easily cut a snippet from the film and put it on youtube, but it would be taken down almost instantly so I'll provide the transcript instead (no, I won't tell the film, but if you've seen it, you'll know from the name:

Brantley: {picking up phone} Um, hello.

Voice: Tucker! Where the hell have you been, huh? We got a problem in mid-west distribution! What are you going to do about it?

Brantley: {uncertainly} What's the... what's the problem?

Voice: I can't anybody's approval for the extra two trucks. Tucker, what are you gonna do about it?

Brantley: Uh, look... what does a boxcar cost?

That's actually enough.

There will be some who can't get it from this — I don't know why, it seems pretty obvious to me; I invented the problem and then, after about twenty seconds thought, reached back into a movie released 38 year ago and remembered from that how a similar problem was solved. No boats? Got any wagons?

But the chances are, players won't grasp this solution, because they don't think as problem solvers. They think as a bunch of people used to being told what to do. They need an NPC to come forward and say, "Hey, I've been telling the people in this town for months that they need wagons," before they'll get it. And that's not what we want.

Without the prompt, they'll hear about Cothen's problems and think, "What can I do about it?"  That is as far as they'll get. We might suppose they say, "It's not my problem," but they know that because we've outlined it for the, it sort of is, and that we expect them to solve it. That's how they've been trained. In reality, they'll stop thinking, turning over the Cothen thing in their heads and coming up with absolutely nothing. It's easy for us to call it stupidity or a lack of imagination, but in fact it's a miscalibrated sense of relevance. They only know those pieces on the board that they can see. We didn't mention wagons in our description; we didn't discuss the route from Cothen at all except that the river is used. And most people assume that if a thing has always been done in a particular way (the boats carry the stuff away), then that's the only way it can be done. It's not a lack of out-of-the-box thinking; it's the assumption that, despite being told there's a whole game world that surround this, no "out-of-the-box" exists. "If it did, the DM would have told us about it."

Think of it as a "domestication" of the player's thinking. The players are accustomed to the DM's rulership in the same way that animals are accustomed to fencing, corrals, shed, food in bins, salt in licks, barns as shelters. For the player there is no "world out there," there's the world that they've been told about as a series of clues they're to solve. Imagine that we're asking them to solve a crossword puzzle where they can add boxes to the original display... and then offer them rewards for adding as many boxes as possible. Very soon they find themselves at a loss. A crossword puzzle may be hard, but at least we know what's expected. "If I invent boxes, I have to invent words, and then clues for those words... sorry, I just don't know how to do that."

When I was a boy, my family would spend long weekends at the cabin where my parents refused to allow a television, or to pay long-distance bills on the phone to speak with friends. The phone was for emergencies, period. Obviously, we spent a lot of time playing boardgames, cards, horseshoes, lawn darts... whatever we could do in 1974 to keep from being bored out of our minds. The worst days, of course, were the rainy ones. Our beach, a bit stony, was just 300 yards away, so on a hot day we could swim or on a dry day we could fish or walk in the woods picking berries. But when it rained, which it would sometimes do all weekend, or a whole week while we vacationed there for two weeks in the summer, there was nothing but games and drawing. It got pretty hard. I wouldn't discover D&D for some years yet.

Around the age of ten, when we finished off the crossword puzzles we had, my parents suggested we try making our own for each other. Ever designed one? If you want it as tight as a newspaper, it's a lot harder than solving them. We easily spent hours and hours digging words out of memory or the dictionary, which was an excellent learning process as we discovered words we'd never heard of and meanings we'd never considered and stretched our minds into a different problem solving vista. No doubt, some of those long days I'd spent inventing crossword puzzled contributed to my thinking process as a DM.

This is the same threshold we're trying to get the players across — to realise that "gameplay" isn't just the following of someone else's game, but that making the game is also play. That's what D&D is really asking the players to do... to embrace a concept that everything isn't solved, it isn't pre-made for you, it's really fundamentally the tackling of problems, as DMs and as players, that we invent also.

My very first post on this block includes a comment made by Carl (his username is gone, but my answer reveals it) where he says,

"I used to view the use of modules as a weakness as you do. In the last 10 years or so, I've come to rely on them more and more. Part of it is laziness on my part. Part of it is that my players enjoy well-defined, computer game-like adventures."

There it is. The infection. Plain as day. We might as well say, "I used to create a setting, but now I rely on gates and cattle runs that move the animals between barn and the field; part of it is because it works more reliably and part is that the cows like knowing where to go."

The result is that there is an entire game of D&D that isn't played by nearly everyone who claims an interest in this. In part because it's hard to play it, in part because they wouldn't know where to start... and in large part because the whole concept has been swept under the rug, and a giant pretty fishtank pushed on top to make sure that part of the carpet is never lifted. The commercial game has become a beautiful, sealed ecosystem: colorful, self-contained, safe, curated — but sterile. Everything inside it survives, nothing evolves. The fish just move around in mildly appealing circles. 

The unplayed game beneath it is harder, uglier, unpredictable... and impossible to sell to a wide market. Most, LOUDLY, argue it should remain unseen, unplayed, even mocked and vilified as a negative, unwanted thing. Quite a large number claim the unseen can't be played. It's too hard, it's impractical, a DM can't actually manage all the rules and maintain momentum and keep it interesting for the players. We're not superhuman, we're told.

If, as a DM, you want to push the fishtank off the carpet and play the underlying game, you don't need to smash the glass, you don't need to tell the internet or convert the aqaurists who would insist you've misconceived the game as they see it. You stop feeding the fish. You lay out the machinery of your setting in full... not just what the players can see with their five senses, but all the knowledge about the world that they as people living in it would already know. They shouldn't need rumours... they've probably lived in your game world for enough years that they've been hearing tales about goblins in them thar hills since they were kids. They already know every abandoned priory or open hole in a ten mile radius.  You tell the players what your goblins are like because their characters have listened to old men on stoops tell them as children what goblins are like. You pour information over your players like a giant molasses tank breaking and slowly drowning a town. Where the context example was given above, you just keep providing more and more and MORE context, until the players begin to understand that there are things they can do, because we've inundated them with words to make crossword puzzles of their own out of.

Don't make chutes and corrals, don't make barns and fields, make vast open imaginative spaces and then fill those spaces so thick that the players can't walk twenty paces without stumbling across something they could do, if they wanted to. And make sure that when they've started doing it, keep adding more information about other things they might do, to see if they like it better, or for them to remember when they've finished doing this. Knowledge is NOT a precious gift to be dispensed with an eyedropper, as a thing the party fights monsters to get. Knowledge is a neverending costless product that flows and flows and flows until the players have to sit down and parse it. This is the concept you must grasp... if you want to play a game that isn't chutes and corrals.

Dungeons & Dragons White Box 06

Halflings: Should any player wish to be one, he will be limited to the Fighting-Men class as a halfling. Halflings cannot progress beyond the 4th level (Hero), but they will have magic-resistance equal to dwarves (add four levels for saving throws), and they will have deadly accuracy with missiles as detailed in CHAINMAIL.

Point in fact, while the principle text has the 1974 copyright, the presence of "halfling" here demonstrates that this was likely printed after 1975, when TSR received a cease-and-desist from the Tolkein estate. Thereafter, "hobbit" was scrubbed from the text and replaced with halfling. I never saw this as an issue. I rather appreciate that the emotional/cliched tropes attached to the races haven't been included here. We're not told that dwarves and elves don't get along, or that dwarves are dour, elves are effete and halflings are plucky. That leaves a lot of room to breathe, to let these races become whatever a given DM wants, rather than an expectation that they'll serve a cookie-cutter motif. I can't speak for players who perhaps live and die on the principle that some perfect semblance of the races exist, because I've never had one of these play in my campaign. Generally, my experience has been that players either don't care, or they'd rather be allowed to interpret the races in their own way. This way, no two elves need think alike, act alike, dislike dwarves alike and so on. While halflings can fit into the game world without having to own under-the-hill habitats or have round doors or generally act like hayseed countryfied Englanders.

Everything after has worked to model every class, every race, every fictional land and city in some way or another, and it has never worked to produce anything more that a random spattering of tired tropes, as though picked from a large bin. The weakness of a completely fictional being or place isn't the lack of adjectives, but that it isn't real. "Greyhawk," for all the depth it pretends to have, isn't as complicated as a single territory anywhere on the earth, simply because the time needed to graph it down to the complexity of, say, Devonshire, would be a wasted effort — because, as the case is, that complexity would have to be stolen from some region of the earth, that being the only model to draw upon. Likewise, dwarves, elves and halflings, for all the romance they add, are really just reskinned humans. We have no idea what a dwarf would actually think like, so we make it think like a human with what we see as "dwarvish" characteristics. But it's all really a sham. That's why the numbers and abilities are what counts, not the modelling we've used that infringes upon actual game play. The game is not literature. It works best when it functions as a procedure.

Other Character Types: There is no reason that players cannot be allowed to play as virtually anything, provided they begin relatively weak and work up to the top, i.e., a player wishing to be a Dragon would have to begin as, let us say, a "young" one and progress upwards in the usual manner, steps being predetermined by the campaign referee.

I believe this was a rather naive assumption, but it's easy to see why it was made — for, as we've said, the game described here is a wargame, not the character-driven role-playing game of later. When the principle purpose of a character is to define their scope in battle, sure, a dragon is completely fine as an option. But even by 1979 the idea of a single player participating in a campaign as a dragon would be filled with intra-party hazards, a game world based on human history and not made for dragons, its size, its appetite, it's mythic gravity and presence among "ordinary" NPCs... such a creature played as a character would thereafter just become "the dragon show," with the same tropes played over and over. A human-centric setting can't contain such a thing without distorting it's internal logic.

But the creators at this time, with this set, hadn't conceived of that setting structure as yet. “Let them play anything” reads like an argument from fair play, not campaign narrative. What it actually exposes is the limit of wargame thinking: it confuses inclusion with interchangeability. Once the game began to take its own world seriously, the dragon could no longer be just another token on the board. The moment you ask what the dragon does when it isn’t fighting — how it exists as a visible thing in a world that rationally sees it as extremely dangerous and needing to be killed — the concept falls apart.

Not that present day game structures that pretend to have gotten around this issue really care...

Character Alignment, Including Various Monsters and Creatures: Before the game begins it is not only necessary to select a role, but it is also necessary to determine what stance the character will take — Law, Neutrality, or Chaos.

Character types are limited as follows by this alignment: (see image)

I'm going to try with all my might to be as positive as I can be. While actually saying something.

Give me a moment.

Let's start with what alignment does by virtue of the rules. It tells the DM what monsters can be "lured into service" by virtue of their alignment being matched by the party.  If a character is reincarnated as per the spell, the character's alignment limits what creatures it will be reincarnated as.

Alignment can influence the effectiveness of how a Quest spell affects you. Depending on your alignment, it may affect the random actions of some monsters you might meet. Most important of all, it affects your relationship with a magic sword.

And there we have it. This table, and the description above it, and the three books, never really explain the premise for why this is necessary or desirable. That's not a judgment, that's just a lack I can't help noticing. I assume the designers liked it for some reason. I don't know what that reason was. It wasn't included in the books.

The chainmail rules do not use the word "alignment," but looking up "chaos" and "law," the rules on page 39 say,

It is impossible to draw a distanct (sic) line between "good" and "evil" fantastic figures. Three categories are listed below as a general guide for the wargamer designing orders of battle involving fantastic creatures. Underlined Neutral figures have a slight pre-disposition for LAW. Neutral figures can be diced for to determine on which side they will fight, with ties meaning they remain neutral.

I don't find elucidation from this. 

Without judgment, this is the most baffling, weirdest part of D&D for me. I think "why" is self-explanatory. This is the start of a 40+ year belief system that, for a long, long time, held a great deal of importance for many writers, designers and game participants. It is a hill that a great many loud voices were ready to die on. Probably tens of thousands of hours went into writing around, for and in defense of alignment, trying to define it, trying to give the concept weight, offering it up as the central characteristic of a character's motivation for literally decades. Why someone would go back to the White Box set, find this and embrace it... well, you got me. People believe in angels. I guess there's room for all of us. I asked ChatGPT and it connected the phenomenon to Canticle for Leibowitz. I can buy that.

Changing Character Class: While changing class (for other than elves) is not recommended, the following rule should be applied: In order for men to change class they must have a score of 16 or better in the prime requisite (see below) of the class they wish to change to, and this score must be unmodified. A Cleric with a "strength" of 15, for example, could not become a Fighting-Man. In any event Magic-Users cannot become Clerics and vice-versa.

The changing roles this has also always confused me. Yes, players will want to cross the boundaries between classes, because they'll become attached to their character and grow weary of playing a given class. This is only encouraged when using the level maximums that are established here. So, in light of that, the attempt has been made to establish a threshold as a hedge against players doing it all the time. Why they didn't just write a rule here, "You cannot change classes..." well, that's just bad game design. Sorry. Don't mean to be so negative.

You write a rule in a game that says all the time, you cannot; you must; if "a", then "b"; if you pass GO, collect $200. If you go to jail from the Go to Jail square, you may not count that as passing GO. Rooks cannot move diagonally. Pawns cannot retreat. What's the problem here? They were able to draw the cleric/mage line. Why not all the lines?

The passage reveals the issues that have already cropped up between players and DMs of the only-in-house game that only the makers have ever played. And because the makers were never able to effectively resolve these issues, even for an "official" game they were publishing with their own money, they chose to award all these issues to all of us, generously. So the half-measure here, it isn't recommended, but if you have to, I mean, if the players really carp and whine, if you just can't control them, if you feel your shoes getting too full of clay, you can try the threshold and see if that works. At the end the only thing I would add are the words "Good luck." That would have been perfect.

Tackling a project like this, "Let's go through the White Box set and discuss," it has to be understood that there's more to it than to sing the praises of everything. Let's be clear. Within just four years it was clear to the creators of the game themselves that this set wasn't going to cut the mustard. They didn't just put out the Monster Manual in '77 and the new Players Handbook in '78 because it was a cash grab... they could tell, from the feedback they were getting, that there were monstrous-sized problems with three simple books where outsiders were concerned. And since those new books weren't moderate projects, they were probably started two, maybe three years before publication. That would suggest that within 12 to 15 months of the White Box set being published, TSR was ready to turn their backs on them, believing they could do better. In my opinion, they did. Of course they did, they'd had practice in game-making, they'd received feedback from sources they couldn't imagine tapping in 1973 and their eyes were opened.

To argue that the White Box Set possessed a deserved immortality is to ignore that time line. I started playing here in Canada in 1979. All three of the AD&D books had been published but they weren't available yet in this country. They didn't come available until the Autumn of 1979... literally weeks after my first game on September 6th. By Christmas, our DM's men and magic copy was tossed aside for the DMG, while I had my own set of three books given to me that year by my parents, at a cost of $45 to them. That's $190-200 in today's money. By Spring, no one anywhere was using the three books being discussed here. I'm not even sure they were still for sale at the D&D game store, that little place on Crowchild Trail (then) called the Sentry Box. We saw the better system and just moved on.

I didn't hear the words "White Box Set" until I came on the internet around 1998. I didn't know what that meant for at least another five years, when blogging became a thing. When I learned it was Men and Magic et al, I could not believe anyone cared about it. We never called it a box set because the DM I played with had thrown away the box. Or so I suppose. It was always three books he tossed on the table when we started. Though I could be confused about that, because we only played with them for about eight to ten weeks of my experience.

Going through this, now, I don't know how Shane did it. That's my first DM, though I've called him Shawn I think on this blog, and probably some other name too. It was a long time ago. He'd be about 63 now. I wonder what he'd think.

That's enough.

Dungeons & Dragons White Box 05

Clerics: Clerics gain some of the advantages from both of the other two classes (Fighting-Men and Magic-Users] in that they have the use of magic armor and all non-edged magic weapons (no arrows!), plus they have numbers of their own spells. In addition, they are able to use more of the magical items than are the Fighting-Men. When Clerics reach the top level (Patriarch) they may opt to build their own stronghold, and when doing so receive help from "above." Thus, if they spend 100,000 Gold Pieces in castle construction, they may build a fortress of double that cost. Finally, "faithful" men will come to such a castle, being fanatically loyal, and they will serve at no cost. There will be from 10-60 heavy cavalry, 10-60 horsed crossbowmen ("Turcopole"-type), and 30-180 heavy foot.

Note that Clerics of 7th level and greater are either "Law" or "Chaos," and there is a sharp distinction between them. If a Patriarch receiving the above benefits changes sides, all the benefits will immediately be removed!

Clerics with castles of their own will have control of a territory similar to the "Barony" of fighters, and they will receive "tithes" equal to 20 Gold Pieces/Inhabitant/ year.

If you want to know how the cleric came to be one of the character classes of the game, I must give a little instruction about the religious world in 1973. Remember, while this book was published in 1974, it was designed and written the year before.

About that time, most of the middle class attended church at least a few times a year; it was still a respectable thing to be, a belief that was still treated with respect. Religions functioned as localised, community-binding networks of personal trust and mutual aid. If your lawnmower broke down and you needed your lawn mowed for whatever reason, you could actually just call your minister and within two hours, someone from your church — or even another church of your own religion — would arrive with their lawnmower and mow it for you. As good will.

The 700 club existed, but at the time of this launch it hadn't yet occurred on public television — and it was long after before it gained political power. The Moral Majority wasn't organised until 1979. You can idiots like Anita Bryant and Phyllis Schlafly running around, who had their admirers, but to most people these were just cranks. They didn't represent actual religions. There was no reason at that time to believe that evangelicals would one day organise themselves as identity warriors.

At the same time, speaking of a medieval setting, the religious figure was absolutely central, especially to the concept of "adventure." The greatest adventure at that time was the one sparked off by Pope Urban, who called Europe to retake the Holy Land. Hundreds of thousands were on the move, not always in the same direction, while the fever lasted for two centuries.  At the same time, the other great adventure for the common person was the "pilgrimage," when people would forsake their lives for months, even years, to quest for enlightenment. Atop this, all the great figures of myth were bound hand in glove to religious motives, consequences and ideals. To import the religious figure into D&D would have seemed very right.

The designers were careful. They chose a word that, by 1973, had largely fallen out of common English usage, except in very formal church contexts or historical writing. Cleric sounded dusty, it was associated with Chaucer, it was non-sectarian and thus could apply to everything from a crusader to a monk to a missionary. That allowed for the individual to be included into the game's structure, without the baggage of the church hierachy. For worlds like Blackmoor and Greyhawk, it was a word that allowed completely new, untainted religious structures that could emerge to suit the DM's tastes. It was a word that felt holy without that holiness being defined. The only thing that "cleric" meant was a type of power.

The cleric fits the middle ground; we're all familiar with that, part fighter, part mage. Easy to understand. The explanation of the cleric getting two g.p. value for every g.p. spent returns us to the example of the lawnmower. It's peculiarly odd here that time is taken to explain precisely how many "faithful" show up for the cleric, where such was not included for the fighter (which is fixed later in AD&D). And no logical reason is given, either, for why a cleric gets twice as much tithe as a fighter gets tax. It's simply stated. But it's the sort of thing that can start arguments at a game table that insists on "rules as written." These rules are clearly not written very consistently... but I'll return to that in a moment.

We also get our first whiff of alignment here, with the usual caveats. The cleric has to pick one, the cleric can't switch... and by default, whichever one picks makes the other half of the population the enemy. It's essentially the Republic Western black-hat/white-hat dichotomy, with all the depth of those 30s serials and all the promise as well. There's an old saw that you don't cheer for a team, you cheer for laundry. That's pretty much the division being presented here — and if you want an origin, it comes from the wargaming table, where no other justification is needed to explain why this army from this side of the table wants to kill that army from that side. The division keeps the sides straight... any philosophy surrounding the words is an afterthought.

Dwarves: Dwarves may opt only for the fighting class, and they may never progress beyond the 6th level (Myrmidon). Their advantages are: 1) they have a high level of magic resistance, and they thus add four levels when rolling saving throws (a 6th-level dwarf equals a 10th-level human]; 2) they are the only characters able to fully employ the +3 Magic War Hammer (explained in Vol. II); 3) they note slanting passages, traps, shifting walls and new construction in underground settings; and 4) they are able to speak the languages of Gnomes, Kobolds and Goblins in addition to the usual tongues (see LANGUAGES in this volume).

Some caveats. I've struggled to present the italic text as it appears in the White Box, which is counter-intuitive as to what's capitalised and when. Here, "fighting class" isn't, while "fighter" is variously capitalised and not. I can't help but point out that while the Oxford Comma has appeared somewhat consistently, it's suddenly missing here. That tells me that different parts of the same page, or the same section, are written by different people, and that the work wasn't edited by a single person. Note that while all the races are capitalised here, elsewhere on the next page, they won't be.

Secondly, no explanation appears regarding whether or not the dwarf, or the subsequent elf or halfling, are "characters" or "races" or what. Page six is very clear: there are three (3) main classes. Three is even named twice, though in my quote of this yesterday I dropped the number in brackets. Yet here, on page seven, three other "races" occur, (the word does not occur) that can in the dwarf case only be fighters. Obviously, not "Fighting-men," thus revealing the somewhat clumsy nomenclature. I don't highlight this to criticise, only to point out that in writing game rules, one of the hardest sorts of literature to write, these errors are telling that no actual game designer was consulted or had any say over the content. And that was a bad error... understandable, of course, since in 1973, who knew that 52 years later people would be screaming at each other over a global communication system about the rightness or wrongness of these rules. Yet, here we are.

Taken as given, the dwarf is familiar. Special benefits, tough, and counter-measured by removing the benefit of becoming a baron in what's presumably a human world. As a player, you get to play one of these for a while, but the day comes a little sooner when you put it down and try the next character type. It's a smorgasbord, not an enduring model for infinite enjoyment. The willingness here to treat play as iterative — testing one option, see how it works, set it aside, test another  — rather than as a personal expression separates this text from everything about the game that came after. The writers never imagined permanence as a virtue. That's not how wargames are played. You clear away all the units on the board, set up new units, and enjoy the present experience. Longevity is inherent our enjoyment of the game, not in any single element of that game.

Briefly, and again, with understanding, it just shows they didn't know what they had. That mental leap, the connection players would later have with their characters, hadn't occurred yet. And that's hard for us, on the other side of that revelation, to understand. It's easier if you started out in wargame culture. But if you've never played that sort of wargame, the tendency is to imagine that of course the originators "got it." But it's clear from the text they didn't.

I'd be amiss if I didn't include this image from page seven... the classic treasure pile. Chest, coins, bones, sword — and skulls, of course, the classic Stevensonian relationship between adventure and buried riches. We constantly fail to grasp how much the children's literature of the age, much more so than the more adult authors that came to the gamers later, affected our thinking about what a pile of treasure ought to look like. Even today it's assumed that if there is a treasure, at some point someone must have died over it, in some fashion that allowed them to be killed and yet, mysteriously, the treasure left behind. What, the killer just filled his pockets and went, like Ben Gunn? I've never encountered a horde that the party acquired, only to leave enough to still half cover the skulls left behind. Just an observation. It looks nice, but... does it make sense?

Page 8 gives us this, the dwarf posed as swashbuckler. A little odd that you'd place the perspective below the dwarf's waist to make him look tall and strapping; no modern depiction would do so. Additionally, this is not the Tolkienian craftsman or stoic miner. It's a stock adventure figure, a seagoing rouge with naked thighs and calves (not great for caving), with a sword out of scale that's held like a prop and not a weapon. Judging from the belt loop, this thing would drag comically upon the ground. Not exactly the image of jaunty thrillseeking.

But why not accept it as is? The purpose of illustration is to clarify, not to improvise scattered meaning and interpretations. This is a fictional race; we have no photographs of it, nothing but our imaginations... and when those are cluttered by hundreds of competing, inconsistent depictions, "dwarf" automatically locks onto the clearest one... which in our present day ends up being John Rhys-Davies from the LOTR movies, by default. Now, I'm good with that, but this image occurs next to a text that says nothing whatsoever about the dwarf physically. The text does not even tell us it's height. And this picture doesn't. That's not how a descriptive rule book is meant to work.

Elves: Elves can begin as either Fighting-Men or Magic-Users and freely switch class whenever they choose, from adventure to adventure, but not during the course of a single game. Thus, they gain the benefits of both classes and may use both weaponry and spells. They may use magic armor and still act as Magic-Users. However, they may not progress beyond 4th level Fighting-Man (Hero) nor 8th level Magic-User (Warlock). Elves are more able to note secret and hidden doors. They also gain the advantages noted in the CHAINMAIL rules when fighting certain fantastic creatures. Finally, Elves are able to speak the languages of Orcs, Hobgoblins, and Gnolls in addition to their own (Elvish) and the other usual tongues.

The "switch class" here certainly leaves me uncertain what it means. And since so far we have no defined "game" as a measure, I'm not wholly clear on the dividing line of that either. I take it to mean that the same character can, in this campaign, be a mage, and in that campaign, be a fighter, so long as they don't both occur at the same time. If we reset, okay, sure, fine, but the new designation is THE designation. But admittedly, that's just my interpretation. Someone else might have another. Which is why we want language that is more exact than this.

Again, not meaning to criticise. It's an issue that the writers are using "game," "campaign" and "adventure" interchangeably. It's not my issue, it's the issue of thousands who find that when it's not nailed down, it brings disruptions to the table. Anything ambiguous must. And it's worth pointing out for those who flee to these rules to "run a simple game," that there's nothing simple when the rules aren't rigidly defined. It just takes one player able to read English two ways (and we know it can be) to make a mess of all your simplicity. This is merely an example of why the "rules-lawyer" emerged in the instant the game did; because if your laws cannot properly resolved contingencies, there's nothing to do but take the matter before the judge, lay out your case and expect a judgement in your favour. And if you don't get one, not just once but multiple times, your respect for the judge starts to wane. This may be the best we can do in the complex world of legal statutes and precedents. Generally, we expect a game, a far more manageable structure, to fix this hole. But D&D never has, because it's marketed as "player error," not game error. If you'd just stop questioning the rules, no matter how ambiguous they are, there'd be no problem. Essentially, straight out of Stalin's play book: "obedience, not clarity, preserves order." Ah, if only obedience could be counted upon.

The remaining elf is, again, recognisable. And even more hamstrung as a fighter than later versions. That 4th level restriction is harsh. I wonder who in the present day might accept that as written?

Dungeons & Dragons White Box 04

CHARACTERS:

There are three main classes of characters: Fighting-Men, Magic-Users, Clerics.

Fighting-Men includes the characters of elves and dwarves and even halflings.

Magic-Users includes only men and elves.

Clerics are limited to men only. All non-human players are restricted in some aspects and gifted in others. This will be dealt with in the paragraphs pertaining to each non-human type.

Fighting-Men: All magical weaponry is usable by fighters, and this in itself is a big advantage. In addition, they gain the advantage of more "hit dice" (the score of which determines how many points of damage can be taken before a character is killed). They can use only a very limited number of magical items of the non-weaponry variety, however, and they can use no spells. Top-level fighters (Lords and above) who build castles are considered "Barons," and as such they may invest in their holdings in order to increase their income (see the INVESTMENTS section of Vol. III). Base income for a Baron is a tax rate of 10 Gold Pieces/inhabitant of the barony/game year.

Setting aside the sexism of the time, though it took this crew less time than most of the world to accept that in a non-real setting that women can be fighters too, or that humans can be distinguished without calling them "men." Venture back into my early teenage years, though, there it is, in your face, in a way that's much more real that the nonsense I see being called out on youtube. It's a little like a woman saying, "They used to be sexist back in the day" and my thinking, "Sister, you have no idea how sexist it was in the day." Not that I blame the complainer. They've got every right.

Look at the priorities of the fighter: magic items, limited; whack-an-enemy; advance to baron. Not a word about protecting the mage or the cleric, not the tiniest sentiment about the fighter being there to support or sustain the party. Like I said, all this has the absence of that ideology. We aren't here to tell you about what a fighter fights for, or what responsibility is owed, or that a fighter is "more than whacking." There's no "role-playing" here so none of that enters the picture. It's refreshing.

Nor is the Baron a "hero." No, it's spoken of strictly in monetary terms, your chance to exploit some peasants for capital. There so social expectation, no requirements to save cats from trees, no reason to think first and sword later. You're a fighter. Swing away. Later generations, yes, will shove messaging into all this, believing they're creating motivation when in fact they're imposing dogma, but at the outset D&D refused to pretend that a character sheet needed a conscience.

Magic-Users: Top level magic-users are perhaps the most powerful characters in the game, but it is a long, hard road to the top, and to begin with they are weak, so survival is often the question, unless fighters protect the low-level magical types until they have worked up. The whole plethora of enchanted items lies at the magic-user's beck and call, save the arms and armor of the fighters (see, however, Elves); MagicUsers may arm themselves with daggers only. Wizards and above may manufacture for their own use (or for sale) such items as potions, scrolls, and just about anything else magical. Costs are commensurate with the value of the item, as is the amount of game time required to enchant it.

I'll comment just for a moment, for my sanity, about the creative grammar of these passages. That run-on sentence at the top of this is a beaut. Why bother using periods at all? And the imposition of capitals for every noun that has the vaguest importance, only to abandon that use of capitals three paragraphs later... you just don't see writing like this outside an elementary school. It's really a thing to admire.

Again, the assumption is plainly that the magic-user (not yet listed as a "mage" or "caster," words I find vastly preferential) is going to do some fighting. There is an inclusion here about fighters protecting the low-level mages (yes, dammit, I'm using the word), but it's clearly framed as optional ("unless" implies there's an alternative). There's also an assumption that when mages reach a certain level, they're expected to look after themselves. I don't fault a mage hiding behind a fighter; it makes good sense. So does hiding behind a tree. But too often this got translated into an expectation that the fighters are "there to protect the mages," which, really, is just nonsense. A fighter is not a lackey.

Intuitively, since the mage is made intentionally fragile at the campaign's beginning, there's an expectation that a lot of them are going to die. That's the message here.  Not "you're going to be weak until you're stronger," but, "because you're weak, you'll count yourself lucky IF you get stronger).  The expectation of perfect survival in later games obliterates this game balance, which is demonstrably there from the start. If every mage survives until it gets powerful, then logically, let them start powerful, or make them wait until the inevitable day arrives.  Game value added?  Zero.

The idea is that, when your fighter dies, you say, "I think I'll gamble on being a mage," expecting that you probably won't make it. But it's fun to try, to see if you wind up being the statistical anomaly at the top of a wide-based pyramid with a lot of dead mages under you. Chances are, you'll die, shrug your shoulders and say, "I gave it a shot. I think I'll try a fighter again." It's a different mindset, made possible by an easy character generation. But more about that later.

Note again that the end game for the mage is also exploitive. Make magic, make money. It's almost like the American Dream was influencing some of the thought process here, eh?

Let's pause for a moment and note the artwork that appears at the bottom of page six. I don't want to disparage it. It's rather nice to see that an effort was made — someone, likely with experience gained on a school paper — had the foresight to realise that a book made up of text alone wasn't just a bit hard on the eyes, it would be hard to lay out if you couldn't finish off a column here or there with white space.

It would have been nice if just one of the group had known an artist, or had the wherewithal to approach such a person, because honestly, they're everywhere, even in 1973. What really makes it for me, if you'll allow, is the little circle over the "i." We can almost imagine a whole library of spritish literature so ordered, with neat little circles over the "i"s and "j"s, and the periods too, and little bubble exclamation points, ellipses drifting like pollen grains... it's how you'd instantly recognise a book was sprite-written. Then the local sage could show it to the players and say, "Ah yes, early-era sprite script — note the dotted curls and the parentheses shaped like leaves. This was written before the brief period when stars replaced periods, during the reign of Pimwynn the Pontificator."

Examples of costs are:

Item: Cost

Scroll of Spells: 100 Gold Pieces/Spell/Spell Level/Week (a 5th-level spell would require 500 GP and 5 weeks)

Potion of Healing: 250 Gold Pieces + 1 week

Potion of Giant Strength: 1,000 Gold Pieces + 4 weeks

Enchanting 20 Arrows: 1,000 Gold Pieces + 4 weeks

Enchanting Armor to +1: 2,000 Gold Pieces + 2 months

Wand of Cold: 10,000 Gold Pieces + 6 months

X-Ray Vision Ring: 50,000 Gold Pieces 1 year

Research by magical types can be done at any level of experience, but the level of magic involved dictates the possibility of success, as well as the amount of money necessary to invest. Assume that a Magic-User can use a 4th-level spell (explained later), therefore he could develop a new spell provided it was equal to or less than 4th level. All this will be explained fully in the section dealing with SPELLS.

This is an aspect of ephemera that is difficult to defend. If the picture above conjures a dialogue where one of the game designers is saying, "Hey, my cousin doodles; I'll give him a call and see if he's interested..." then this insertion of detail here, and not in the logical place where the last line of it says it should be, I envision a screaming match in which Gygax bullied the others until he got his way. I say Gygax because this was a pet project of his, this insistence that magic item research should work like a plant producing refridgerators... only to approach it so lazily that it never was useful for anyone. The White Box provides 11 swords that aren't just +1 (how much does a cursed sword cost), 4 miscellaneous weapons with special abilities, 24 potions that aren't giant control or healing, 18 rings that aren't X-Ray, 11 wands that aren't of cold, 7 staves that aren't wands and 29 miscellanous magic, not one of which appears in the list above.  Gygax then goes on to make the exact same side-step in the AD&D DMG, basically using a lot of words to say, "My idea, your problem." At best, this gives the idea that magic can be made at a certain cost... which can't really be applied to magic not listed here, since how do you compare a mirror of life trapping to an X-ray vision ring?

What it reveals is a dangerous precedent that would essentially reveal the soft clay under the layer of topsoil that was the game. The actual concreteness needed in these rules to consistently run a game just isn't here. I don't want to fault these guys. They got a tiger by the tail, they undoubtedly saw the problem, and the solution was no doubt, "If you really care, you'll make up your own table like this one that includes everything." That's certainly the guantlet I picked up as an early DM. I saw the shortcoming, counted the number of magic items not specified and thought, "Hey, that can be solved."  Then I solved it. Only to later abandon the concept because the structure of buying magic items is, in my opinion, a shortcoming. BUT, regardless of that, any DM with a backbone didn't need the handholding to dig up the soft loam and make a foundation with concrete that would support the weight of the vision being offered here.

But it's "dangerous" for two reasons. By the time AD&D comes around, and me, there are so many cases like the above insertion in existence that it requires 40 years of sustained work to address no more than a portion of the half-baked ideas that need shoring up. The experience table was a disaster from the start and it took me 30 years to solve it, without ever finding any help from anyone. The combat system was stale, still is, and though I solved that in just 5 years, what I resolved remains ignored by haters of the stale system who nevertheless won't surrender it. I still haven't yet solved Gygax's siege point damage system. I don't think there is a solution, though I've run sieges and pretty must just had to bullshit my way through the problem. So its the amount of work that's asked for, and the technical problem solving that it demands, but is largely insolvable even if you try.

So, by 1979, the designers have built a massive engineering project of half systems that don't work as is and are really beyond most people to solve. Which, in turn, is the second danger. I'm a weirdo. I looked at it and said, "Yeah, okay, I'll solve it or die trying." Others look at it and think, "Yeah, fuck that noise. Either I'll ignore it, gloss over it, arbitrate it or pretend the system works. Whatever."

Commence post books, four disastrous editions, an internet of ignoring the problem, an effective Rorschach test for what anything in the rules actually means... and a project that, even if you want to, remains insolvable.

Up until this passage, on page 7, the introduction to the game has been largely rational. Here's what this is, here's what this means. And then bam, this table. "No, we're going to shove it in your face; no, we're not going to do it well. We haven't the space. Deal with it."

And unfortunately, the main problem that arises for the engineer willing to undertake the project is being actually aware of what's a garbage half-system and what isn't. This table? Which I spent, oh too many hours with, or rather with it's AD&D stepchild, was garbage. Which I didn't know at 16. Because during our first ten years association with this game, we're not yet familiar enough with the concept to be able to decide where to put our time. Which means a lot of those first ten years are spent failing at projects that never should have been started, which discourages succeeding at projects that are worth getting right. It's all a terrible mess... and the fellows who wrote this book, who certainly had less than 10 years experience when they wrote it, weren't themselves familiar enough with the concept to grasp any of this.

Later, when they did grasp it, and tried to solve it, they failed. Or they just didn't try. That's what the Unearthed Arcana was, and the Oriental Adventures, and the Wilderness Guide. they’re all symptoms of awareness without comprehension. You can feel, reading them, that the writers know something’s wrong in the skeleton of the game. They know it can’t stand as written. But they don’t know where the structural weakness lives. So instead of surgery, they just keep adding limbs — more classes, more modifiers, more environmental rules, more dice, more "flavour." The cure becomes metastasis.

They're testaments to the "experts" in the business crashing and burning... and then deciding on option two. Fuck it. Arbitrate it out of existence. And what we have left is a permanent epistomological fog that will never lift.

That's enough.