Addressing the primer that's called for, that we'll write without pathos, including all the bits, how in blazes do we "focus on the process"? What in creation is that, assuming whatever we suggest has a snowball's chance in hell of being agreed upon. Putting it in terms of how hard this would be, how do we prove that someone fucked the Virgin Mary?
Me, I take that on faith.
Look. Forget the hokum about D&D being a game of adventure, action, fantasy, magic, character, story or even role-playing. These things get incorporated into the way we play, but none of them are strictly necessary in the game's play. We do not need to run an "adventure"; any series of events will do. Action need not occur. We can easily throw out the fantasy and the magic and set the thing on a 14th century farm. The "character sheets" are a set of statistics ... play doesn't require these things be augmented by a personality. Whatever series of events we want can occur; in play, they may produce a history, but there's no reason to think they will make a "story." The last ten days of my life haven't. And finally, describing the physical actions of a fictional stick figure, while rolling dice to determine success at attempts being made, does not constitute "role-playing."
We incorporate these things as part of our behaviour ... but these things are not structurally part of the game. It is folly to argue that we should adjust the game to suit our behaviour, when in fact we have adjusted our behaviour to suit the game. It's the failure to understand the nature of this cause and effect that keeps us going round and round. Without knowing what causes what, and what results from what, we're hopelessly unable to start an a priori position on anything. It's all posteriori with us, which is to say, straight out of our ass.
Which is why I keep going back to game theory, wresting my focus back to basics, not just in relation to one game or one human activity, but in how D&D relates to all games, all human activity. There I find that D&D is a simultaneous game with elements of turn-based strategy; a game built around imperfect information, and extensive form game with infinite action space. It is many other things besides, but we don't need to go into all that. The point I'm making here is that D&D is an absurdly, incomprehensibly complicated game ... which is why, the first thing that most players want to do with it, is get rid of the complexity and reduce it to a measure their brains can handle.
The complexity is why a "beginner primer" for D&D is a terrifically STUPID idea. I've been asked repeatedly to write one and I've repeatedly refused. It's flagrantly impossible to explain in words how a player has an infinite number of possible actions from which to choose at a given moment, especially when the perameters of the given moment change fluidly as multiple humans engage emotionally, existentially, triggered by the trajectory of their thoughts, their play and whatever they've witnessed on the fly.
The only rational means of learning D&D well is through demonstration ... throw the baby in, hope it swims. It's how I learned. I recognize it's not how most people learned — though in the beginning, it was. I understand that a great many people learned through obtaining the books and then trying to understand the material, cold, without the benefit of demonstration. Many received their education in groups that played puerile or stripped down versions of the game. More learned from workshops that were more interested in finding children something to do than caring at all about the game's quality. A vast number today are learning through Adventurer's League, or through copying the babblings of Critical Role and other Youtube products. Of course this is a ghastly mess. If you happen to be someone whose initial introduction to the game included half the bullshit encountered online, your chances of pulling out of that tailspin are commensurate with your chances of finding a normal life after being raised by religious fanatics. I wish you luck. But understand, I'm not the one that fucked you up.
Of course, a great many don't believe they're "fucked up." They believe they're "doing their thing" — which is fine. I can't do anything about it. It's fairly obvious, however, that when they attempt to write anything about the game, or how it's played, or what purpose it serves, they universally descend into sentimentalism, nostalgia, egoism and multiple paragraphs of "filler words" like fun and story, which are never defined but are dogmatically absolutist.
If we cannot describe what we do better than this, then we don't deserve respect.
I don't worry about persons in my direct orbit — those I play with — because I know they're going to play a game I'm familiar with, on the level I like to play. And with regards to "what is D&D?" or "Are people forgetting how to play?", I never need to worry. D&D will exist, as it is, at least until the day of my death ... and since I have zero reliance on the wherewithal of others to produce the materials I need to play and expand my campaign, then every other DM in the world can die of a terrible disease and I'll still be here, playing, building, advancing my ideal of the game. Teaching it nose-to-nose to other people. Doing the good work. Hammering the hammer, ringing the bell, singing the song.
Go ahead, try and write your primer if you want. Write it any way you want. It might make you a buck; I don't doubt it. But as something useful? C'mon.
Still out of charity, I'll give you another clue. D&D is about constraint. It is all constraint.
Now go write your book.
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