The Game Made By Incompetents

Shown here is the front page of Hasbro's rules for Monopoly.  Hasbro is incidentally the owner of the WOTC, and therefore of D&D.  The full rules run four pages, this being all that's necessary to explain and understand the game.

In the rules, you will NOT find a discussion of why people play, what immersive qualities the game offers, whether or not one should be a bastard, additional comments suggesting means by which individuals can surreptitiously rob the bank or recommendations that if you do not like the rules, you should just go ahead and change them.  We will also not find advice on how to get along better with other players, the personalities of players, what sort of people like the game, that monopoly is a game intended to teach you the evils of money or anything else pertaining to the mindset of the participants.

Those things are, absolutely a part of the game: but they have NO place of any kind in writing the rules of the game.  In writing the RULES of anything, one follows the advice of Aristotle:

The law is reason, free from pathos.

The Greek word, "πάθος" is often translated as "passion," but English has spectacularly warped the meaning of passion into something that's unremittingly positive and desperately necessary.  This was not Aristotle's intent.  Aristotle meant that the law was free of suffering, feeling, emotion, grief, sorrow, etcetera ... all things that the law causes, but which the law, in order to function effectively, must ignore.  Failure to ignore this principle by allowing pathos to intervene with reason brings about catastrophe and blood in the streets — as history lucidly demonstrates.  Yet we will always have those who believe, in their hearts, that everyone that encounters justice should approve of what's decided.  If they do not, they will say, then "justice" must, by their definition, be wrong.

Aristotle made the statement in answer to precisely such people.

A game follows the same principle.  The participants may have feelings of general sorts, but because the game is a social activity, the rules of the game MUST function without mercy or sympathy.  It does not matter if you personally like the results!  You have chosen to play the game.

Adjusting the game's rules, whether it's done in game or premeditatively, is an acceptable practice, just as changing the law.  Most games through history are the result of a "shaking out period" in which the rules of the game are adapted from problems that arise during play.  Altering D&D so that it is less focused on resource management and more focused on interactivity or dungeoneering does not in itself break with the precedent that everyone is equally subject to the rules, which are equally dispassionate towards all.

Some will think now that I'll go next down the rabbit-hole of how the game's been diluted past being a game, but truly the Gentle Reader could write this post for me.  I choose instead to reflect upon the decision by the makers of D&D to invest their original creation with excessive, destructive and mostly useless personal observation ... useless in terms of game play.  I am well aware of the reader's likely worship of these persons, and how dearly more such pithy, personal interjections on the game's value and purpose are fervently wished for.  Many readers imagine that if more phrases and words direct from the inventors' mouths were available, somehow we'd understand better how we're supposed to play.

This is idiocy of the first order.

One reason that pathos is a disastrous means of building a functional interpersonal framework is that the more we say, the greater the opportunity for random phrases and thoughts that smash any hope of continuity.  Gygax wrote mountains of material — none of it with the least comprehension that it would be picked apart forty years after the fact by internet content makers.  Let me take a example:  the other night, deciding after a comment I made on JB's blog about the Dragon Magazine, I selected a random issue, no. 22, and went looking for letters to the editor.  Instead I found an article written by Gygax on page 29, presciently titled, "Dungeons & Dragons, What it Is and Where it is Going."  Given JB's theme of late, I found this rather serendipitous.

Late in the article, on page 30, after chattering away about things that Gygax and crew are doing, he writes,

"Does this mean that D&D will be at a dead end when the last of AD&D® is published? Hardly! Modules and similar material will continue to be released so as to make the DM’s task easier and his or her campaign better.  Quite frankly, the appeal of D&D rests principally upon the broad shoulders of the hard-working Dungeon Masters.  The rules never need improvement if the DM is doing a proper job, but of course he or she can do so only if the rules are sufficient to allow this. With refined rules and modular additions, all aspects of a long lived and exciting campaign will unquestionably be there for the DM to employ.  Will D&D dead end when its novelty dies?  That is impossible to answer.  It is my personal opinion that the game form is a classic which is of the same stamp as chess and MONOPOLY®; time will be the judge.  No doubt that there is a limit to the appeal of the game in any of its current forms.  If tens of millions play a relatively simple, social sort of a game such as MONOPOLY, it is a sure thing that a far more difficult game such as D&D will have a much more limited audience.  As the game cannot be simplified beyond a certain point, we look to another means of popularizing it."

Getting past Gygax as crystal ball gazer, whether or not you think he's right or wrong, do you feel enlightened?  Is your understanding of the game's future enhanced?  Do you see clearly what responsibilities you have to help the game along?  Of course not.  Gygax is doing no more there than tooting wind from his ass, like any politician or sales marketer, bent on filling a page with drivel that sounds good but says nothing he can be held accountable for.  And why shouldn't he?  The magazine's purpose was to sell advertising while massaging the reader's interest ... the article isn't a serious, deeply contemplated answer to the title questions.  It's an eyeball-grabbing title that encourages the reader to dive in, and at least feel like Gygax has his finger on the pulse of the industry.  Even if he doesn't actually say anything about the industry.  Hell, it's not like he thought anyone would be reading this 43 years later.

The problem with D&D from the beginning was that it never believed anything it's inventors said in an absolute sense.  No fixed, firm, concrete set of rules were ever put forth.  The makers admitted, frankly, that the game needed DMs to fill in the gaps, to fix what they couldn't do, or didn't think of ... even to the point of flat-out arguing they had no ultimate responsibility to do better, "if the DM is doing a proper job."  What a flatulent, ducking statement that is!  This is the inventor of the fucking game, and his best answer to the problem of making the DM's task easier is to argue that the game's appeal — HIS game's appeal — rests on the shoulders of total strangers pucking out money for HIS game.  What a spineless, negligent, candy-ass little coward he is, as he takes the gamer's money with one hand while callously dumping his responsibility upon others.  There's a fraudster for you ... dumps his load on you and then praises you for carrying it, while taking your money for the privilege.  And this is the man who got endless praise when he died.

The fuckedupedness of D&D has nothing to do with what the players did to get out from under rules they didn't enjoy, or couldn't make sense of, or didn't work well in game practice.  Never forget that the "broad shoulders" of those "hardworking DMs" more often than not belonged to children, 25-30 years younger than Gygax was when he wrote the words above (I was 26 years younger when he wrote this, starting to play D&D in the same year this article was published).  The phrasing clearly proves that he didn't know or he didn't care that his game was being dumped on such persons.  His take on the game was stuffed chock full of pathos while agonizingly lacking in reason ... and we are still the victims of his and his cronies' attitude regarding the game's inception.

Covering that up has been Job #1 for the D&Dites from the beginning, who were so grateful that the game came into being at all that any factual discussion of the clumsy, amateurish, rash, neglectful and predatory way the game came into being is utterly set aside so we can endlessly argue over the nuances of one early game issue vs. another.  Such pedantry firmly and blindly ignores the fuck-you practice of the makers, who were more concerned with going to print than with responsibly taking the necessary time to set up a functional game that had a chance of lasting as long as Monopoly.  Instead, we got an inconsistent mess.  Which high-sounding members of the community explain with handwaving gestures, while inventing creative endlessly positive excuses for early D&D constructive failures, like desert herdmen willingly swallowing an argument from a hobo that his mother never had sex.

All in all, it's a little sickening.

This is why yesterday, when I explained what a proper primer for D&D should sound like, I asked that personal sentiment be left out, concentrating upon that which can be practically described.  Because when we teach things we want people to learn, we scrub out the pathos.  We reason that they will think of their own pathos when the time comes; investing students with our prejudice is not teaching.