Flags

First, from Gus L on B/X Blackrazor's blog:

"AD&D is a mess.  The DMG is a mostly random set of poorly collated notes and sometimes conflicting mechanics.  The majority of AD&D's decent aspects are found in the first three LBBs. Sure the extra spells are nice but the combat is a broken mire of Gygax's obsessive maximalism and his strange ahistorical weapons obsessions (e.g. spears are bad because primitives used them, but every type of polearm must have a distinct statline). OD&D (The first 3 only - again Gygax ruins stuff with his weird house rules).  It's precisely because it's not a compleationist mess that OD&D functions -- yes it has voids, but voids are unavoidable, and at least OD&D has a solid simple base set of rules to help referee's fill them. AD&D requires at least as much work to function ..."

Then from Jomo Rising on my own blog.

"What would happen if these questions were on a post introduction page of the DMG? Would have been nice to read a useful examination of human attitudes in that tome."

Not going to deconstruct these comments.  Jomo's, from earlier today, made a connection in my head between the two; I'm going to talk about that.

We're very familiar with these.  The endless argument between this vs. that, expressed with great personal feeling but little hard evidence.  The proverbial sentiment that this or that thing should have be covered in the original books, and maybe will, someday.  These things speak of a kind of dependency: the need to associate ourselves with one thing versus another, the need to belong, to adopt a flag for a position with which we choose to identify, that gives us the emotional support of believing that while we are alone in running our independent games, we're still a member of a collective that we care about, that we feel passion for ... and that we feel duty-bound to defend, because what it says speaks for what we believe.

The idiocy of this is hard to see, even when the light is shining in our face.  To shake readers out of their groove, I'll link this bit from Mitchell and Webb, and write out most of the dialogue, as I think it applies here.

Colin: well, I'm going to let you off after what we did to you last week.

Ray:  I'm sorry?

Colin: I said, I'll forget that you're a Spurs fan after what we did to you.

Ray: What-what you did to me?  You didn't do anything to me.

Colin: We're a man down, you blew the penalty, but we wopped you in extra time.  That 90-second minute mate, oh you had it coming.

Ray: Perhaps you've mistaken me for a profession goalkeeper or something, but I wasn't actually on the pitch, you know.

Colin: We're gonna troll you in the lead ...

Ray: We?  WE?  You weren't on the pitch either.  As far as I know, you were in the back bar of the Red Line, watching the game on the television with your mother.

Colin: ... I'm telling you Ray, the way we're playing these days, we're gonna be unstoppable this season.

Ray:  For God's sake, shut up!

Colin: Twelve points ahead with a game in hand, you don't stand a chance.  We've got it in us to go all the way.

Ray:  Can I ask you a question, Colin?  Do you remember when we were chasing the Germans, and we were punched through the windscreen, but then we fell under that lorry ... but climbed back onto it and beat the driver up?

Colin: What?

Ray:  When we were chasing the Nazis.  They'd stolen the Ark of the Covenant and we were trying to get it back.

Colin: You've lost me.

Ray: In Raiders of the Lost Ark.  It's a film I like, so I've decided that myself and anyone else who likes it was in it.  Taking part.  Do you like Raiders of the Lost Ark?

Colin: Not particularly.

Ray: Oh, you're not one of us.  Right.  Well, at the end, we're tied to a stake stuck in the ground, and then you lot open up the Ark of the Covenant and the wrath of God melts your face!

Colin: No.  You can't do that.

Ray: Yes I can.  I really like that film, so I'm in it.

Colin: It's not the same.

Ray: It's exactly the same!  I've as much claim to be personally involved in Raiders of the Lost Ark as you've got to be in whatever it was your football team did last week.

Colin: You don't understand football.

Ray: Well, I'll admit, I don't quite follow how you, a man who lives over 200 miles away from the Home Ground of your chosen team and claims some deep attachment to a bunch of overpaid hired hands from all four corners of the globe, who temporarily wear the same coloured shirt as you're currently wearing.  But then, maybe I'm a bit slow.  It must be brain damage from all that boxing I did in Raging Bull.

People who had no part of creating individual versions of D&D, who weren't there, who have no ideas what decisions were made in the room, or what the agendas were, except in the words of singular individuals who "recall" what happened there, doing so with all the same "truthiness" of any person who's part of a group yet wants to sing their personal praises and importance to that group, or the importance of people they like ... these people who invest in all that nonetheless, unknowing, as a FLAG they carry into fight after fight of this version of D&D vs. that ... confound the shit out of me.  I, too, must have been hit too often in Rocky IV.  I am the Russian, after all.  Likewise, people who WISH, fervently, that more had been covered in the books, that more of this or that detail had been sorted out, who can't for the life of them figure out that perhaps adding that content WAS included, perhaps brilliantly, perhaps insipidly, but the battleground of publishing, editors, money-men and market research gutted it out of the final product.

In the end, why, WHY, give a shit?  Anchoring yourself to one system, no matter what the reason, when six or seven hundred mainstream systems have been built and marketed — and ten times, hell a hundred times that as a number of off-mainstream content — is a recipe for ignorant, stubborn, dissonant mulish stupidity.  Any soul who's run any version of D&D for more than a few years ought to recognize that EVERY system is trash, as written.  EVERY system is insufficient.  EVERY system sucks.  Why give a shit?  Why continue to fight and troll and quibble about one pile of fecular material over another.

Get rid of your goddamned flag.  Run the game of D&D.  A version of the game that you make, that you've rewritten, that works the way you think it ought to ... and steal from every other system that offers you something you can use.  What the hell are you fighting for, when you stick your head up hoping to sell your version over someone else's?  What the hell are you thinking anyone else is ever going to do for you?  Why don't you put all of that crap aside, stop identifying yourself by someone else's shit game, and start identifying yourself by YOUR game.

I run the Alexis D. Smolensk version of D&D.  It is a Frankenstein's assembly of parts that were never intended to function as a single body, and I don't care.  Nor do I care about your version of D&D, or your version, or the version of that dude over there.  I'm not waiting for some doofus working for some company paying minimum wage to tell me how to answer a question about what a DM ought to do, or how weapons in the game ought to work, or how important this or that part of the game ought to be.  I'm free.  I am a one-DM revolution.

And you're a fucking moron if you don't start thinking for yourself.