"I AM content with the game I'm playing. I'm not dithering about rule changes and shit anymore."
This is fine and I've no trouble with this position and won't try to dissuade you from it. But you've made clear with writings on your own blog that the materials provided by AD&D (and by extension, other materials of the period) are sufficient for play. You're not alone in making statements towards that as a "goal" in play. I don't disagree; sufficient is what they are. But sufficient isn't really a positive. It isn't worth aspiring to and it definitely isn't praiseworthy.
I ask you, and others, to consider the following.
When the first three books of Advanced D&D were published, TSR and the "original" version of the game were all of five years old. If you credit the idea of player characters and sequenced adventures existing in the minds of the writers before the actual publication of OD&D, surely it's implausible that those things could have manifested before 1971 ... given this is the year Chainmail became available. From the writings of that game's creators, we can reasonably argue that the IDEA of D&D had to formulate past the formation of the IDEA of Chainmail. All told, at best, Gygax's experience at the moment when AD&D was published was all of 8 years. Given that it probably took at least two years to produce the work, a normal amount for material of this scope, his initial experience was no more than 6 or 7 years.
Unless you're prepared to make the argument that GOD came and gave the words to Gygax, who then inscribed the holy writ into the passages we recognize today, we must assume that these were ideas and writings ARE fallible. In other words, they are not the rules that Gygax would have written had he chosen to write the books three years later than he did, or six years later, or ten years later. It is, therefore, ridiculous to give them any special merit as THE baseline to build upon. It happens to be the baseline we have. That is all.
You may be personally incapable of further dithering with rule changes, perhaps from experience. But it is ignorant, irresponsible and deliberately obstructionist not to ASK others to take up that effort ... in fact, not to INSIST that those efforts should be taken. Because, dammit, the effort serves the betterment of the game and everyone who plays it.
The static production of a simplistic game such as Monopoly might be all very well, but more intrinsically satisfying and complex games, like chess, golf or baseball, pass through dozens of iterations ... and in the case of some games, are still changing. D&D is vastly more complicated and full of potential than any other game in human existence: it stands to reason that the iterations of this game would smash through the ceiling set by any previous game form. Just because the attempts so far have been materialistic, stupid and short-sighted doesn't mean the "changed" game is an idea to be abandoned.
For all your equivocating, and justification of position, there's no way to see your phrasing as plainly narrow-minded, slow to understand and unhelpful in directing ANYONE, the innocent and the savvy alike, to an altar of any value except one built on the bones of dogma and charlatanism. You have put a stuffed figure on a throne, called it "Oz" ... and chosen to hide behind a curtain as if you're not responsible for this half effort.
Not enough. I want you to think harder.
Even Monopoly went through a long gestation period. It began as a political gimmick, was played for years in Midwest colleges, where rules were added and amended, and became popular at publication for a number of reasons, including the time it was released (during the Great Depression, when people wanted escapism) and the fact that it used Atlantic City street names (the place to which a lot of people wished to escape).
ReplyDelete