Coming to My Senses

"The common thread here, applying across editions of D&D, is people try to learn the game from the instructional text (i.e. the rule books) and CAN'T. Those who want to pursue the hobby (or who want their kids to pursue the hobby) then find an existing, active group to join who can teach them (or their kids or both) how to play the game."

"And I'd guess that there are more than a few folks in (more-or-less) the same shoes as myself who've walked down a similar path: bitched-and-moaned about the "state of gaming," complained someone should 'do something,' considered (briefly) doing something yourself, before (finally) deciding you'd rather just work on your own game/world/campaign."

— JB, B/X Blackrazor

This describes me exactly upon reading the above.  Briefly, very briefly, I considered "doing something."  Then I came to my senses.

Then I spent two days puzzling over why exactly I felt compelled to "come to my senses."  So let's look at this thing.

On first reading JB's words, I thought, "Well, hell, I could probably knock off 25, 30 thousand words on the subject.  Why don't I?"  Then I thought, "I could teach how to play AD&D."  And then, "Hm, I suppose I'd have to stick to the original rules as written."  Then I felt an unpleasant lurch in my stomach, followed by a wave of revulsion, whereupon, as I said, I came to my senses.

A few times since I've thought, "Okay, how would you do it if you weren't writing specifically for a given edition, or even genre?"  After all, I wrote How to Run without hinging the advice on a genre.  I thought, "I'll write a beginner's guide without concern for the rules."

I have no idea how I'd do that.

Naturally, the thing to do is see how others did it ... and so I dug up three attempts the company made to address the subject back in the day, the disaster areas that would later become the backbone of the OSR movement.  I'll stick to the factual details:

Published, 1981.

By Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson.

Edited by Tom Moldvay.

Previous edition edited by J. Eric Holmes.

Foreward: "I was busy rescuing the captured maiden when the dragon showed up.  Fifty feet of scaled terror glared down at us with smoldering red eyes.  Tendrils of smoke drifted out from between fangs larger than daggers.  The dragon blocked the only exit from the cave ..."

Introduction: "DUNGEONS & DRAGONS® Fantasy Adventure Game ("D&D® Game" for short) is a role playing adventure game for persons 10 years and older.  In the D&D rules, individuals play the role of characters in a fantasy world where magic is real and heroes venture out on dangerous quests in search of fame and forture ..."

Published: 1983.

By Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson.

Revised by Frank Mentzer.

Preface: "This is a game that is fun.  It helps you imagine.  'As you whirl around, your sword ready, the huge, red, fire-breathing dragon swoops toward you with ROAR!'  See?  Your imagination woke up already ..."

Dedication: "This game has undergone a startling metamorphosis from its earliest forms, written for hobbyists, to the current revision, usable and understandable by nearly anyone.  The original flavor and intent has been carefully preserved ..."

Learning how to play DUNGEONS & DRAGONS® games: "Start here.  A dungeon is a group of rooms and corridors in which monsters and treasure can be found.  And you will find them, as you play the role of a character in a fantasy world ...

Published: 1984.

By Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson.

By Frank Mentzer.

Editing: Anne C. Gray.

Preface: "Throughout the revisions of the BASIC and Expert Sets, and now in creating this one, my work has been guided by three simple rules.  First, the game must be fun — else why play the game?  Second, it must be playable.  Many historically accurate details of medieval times are complex and disorganised — generally all too human to use in a game ..."

Introduction: "The Changing Game.  Your characters have visited dungeons, defeated many strange and evil creatures, and found great and wondrous treasures.  But games for higher level characters are often different — as new as when the characters first braved the unknown wilderness ..."

Got all this?  Feel free to follow the links to the pdfs, so you can read the volumes individually, especially the first few pages.  Examined, it's not hard to see why very early in the game's history, the groundwork was laid for the most confusing collection of rules for a game, ever.  The White Box set that's available in pdf form online "is a modified version" of the original 1974 publication.  (I raffled my set off to help pay for my flight to the Toronto fan expo in 2014, so I don't know what the unmodified version says).  The AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide was released in 1979.  I'd been playing for two years when the "basic rulebook" was published, and four years by the time the above "players manual" was published.

Take any game ... say, Monopoly.  Monopoly was published in 1935.  Now imagine that another version of Monopoly was published in 1940, then a "basic" version in 1942, and then a different basic version in 1944.  Following that, new versions were published in 1950, 1961, with a sub-version in 1964, followed by a remake in 1968, and finally all over again in 1975.  Let's be clear about this ... every version of Monopoly exists out there, and while the most recent version is the one you'll find at the swankest game store, any game store boutique might sell between three and nine versions.

Now, you are a ten year old.  You've never played Monopoly, but your friend has dad's old boxed game in the basement.  So you go to it, you pull it out, read the rules and play it.  You like it so much, you go online to talk about your experience ... and let the shit storm begin.

Monopoly is a simple game.  D&D is not.

So you've been playing Monopoly for 43 years and you read a blog post by a respected fellow bewailing the fact that while there are a lot of things that have been written about Monopoly, no one's ever written a really good book that teaches new people and kids how to play.  And you think, well hell, I've read every version of Monopoly that's out there, though I haven't played them all, and I write professionally for a living ... why don't I write that book?  I'm sure I'm experienced enough.

Okay.  How?

What do you do .... do you ignore that there are nine versions and sub-versions of the game, not to mention hundreds of copycat games, of which there are at least a dozen that have reached main stream at one time or another?  Do you pick one version — say, the most popular, recent version, that's stolen virtually every aspect of Monopoly to the point where the players just go round and round the board, no one going bankrupt until everyone agrees to exchange game pieces and start again?  Do you try to highlight some earlier version, arguing that's the one that actually made the game popular in the first place?  How do you explain this choice?  And how relevant is it, anyway, to adults and children who have never played the game?  Who, in fact, think it's just one game — they have no idea, yet, that there are nine versions of Monopoly.  How do you address that?

Part of the problem with people who have no "Elder player" to guide them is this: the more you know, the less certain you are about the game you're playing.  Even if I could write a "perfect book" that exactly explained the game cold, it would necessarily disagree with some twenty other bofunk's notion of the game, which makes anything that's first learned seem suspect, even when it's not.  Unless you have the Elder, who is right there to guide you though the shoals and whirlpools of the game's play and preparation, you will end up scratching your head, wondering who's right and who's wrong.  And there's a very good reason for that, one that reaches past the game's multiple versions and multiplicity of disagreeing pundits.

Allow me to give you a brief primer on marketing.

Rule no. 1 is that the product doesn't matter.  If the product is garbage, that doesn't matter, because it's your job to demonstrate the product in a way that makes it look (a) amazing! ... (b) worth every dime ... and (c) amazing.

[I'm starting to sound like John Oliver]

How you do that depends on your sense of right and wrong, your ingenuity, how the camera operator points the camera and so on ... but the point is that you must find some way of getting across the product's awesomeness in a way that convinces people to buy the product.

THEN — and this part gets overlooked by young entrepreneurs — you must work doubly hard to convince your garbage-buying public that they're glad to have bought the garbage you're selling, because you need them to convince their friends and ultimately themselves all over again that what they bought is (a) amazing ... and (b) amazing.  

This is why every version of the game includes functionally useless sentences about imagination, fantasy, fire-breathing dragons and "adventure," even though next-to-none of these sentences have any chance of telling the new reader how the game is played.  In actual fact, this "fuzzy" text seeps into nearly every page of the rulebook ... because it's really, really important to the writers that you LIKE this game, A LOT.  So the trick is to make the game sound so amazing that you become certain that the reason you don't understand it must be due to how amazing the game is.

Consider.  A 10-year-old, for whom game would ultimately be written, hasn't the experience as a reader to tell the difference between vitally important details about the rules and utterly unnecessary fluff.  He or she probably has no idea a previous version of the game exists, yet Mentzer is in like a dirty shirt, being sure to tell us right off that this is different from earlier versions.  How exactly?  Not really important.  In any case, the old rules aren't provided in this book so you can compare them with these new rules ... so why mention them at all?  Why, to fluff the author's feathers, that's why.  Which in no way helps a young boy — or an adult — learn how to play the game.

Many present day players look back on their old rule books with big frothy mugs of nostalgia, going all soft and purple inside at those first words about the captured maiden and the dragon.  Sure they do.  They understand perfectly now how that works in actual game play (that is, it usually doesn't at all, but it could I guess), so they automatically fill in the details with their experienced role-playing brains without any trouble.  What does a young kid do?  Why, reads the text, goes "wow," has no idea what it means or how that happens, or what rules make it possible, but heck, that doesn't matter, because we've marketed the game successfully!  It's "amazing."

If the kid finds a good Elder, then he or she will ultimately become the mug-guzzling nostalgia drinker who enjoys the text today ... but if the kid doesn't, and never does figure out what in hell any of these rules did have to do with the maiden and the dragon, and is plagued by other rules that are everywhere, everytime the kid goes online, then the kid will drop this game and fume miserably about how that whole maiden/dragon thing was a fucking rip-off they weren't entitled to enjoy.

So, what's to do about that?  We've certainly got ourselves in a box.  We can't "Elder" every kid and adult in the world.  We can't shut up a hundred thousand ignorant voices on the internet bent on slamming down every part of the book we'd write.  We can't make everyone play the same game, the same edition or even the same rules inside that edition.  So what?  What do we do?

Okay.  I have a proposal.  And it's unexpected.

Let's say your ten-year-old cousin, Pei, has never played the game but wants to.  Let's say Pei has a group of friends, that have elected Pei as the dungeon master, if he can learn how to play.  And finally, let's say that Pei lives on another continent, but you still want to help him.

The idea of the 1981 basic rulebook was to provide a simpler version of the game that could be more easily learned.  Let's embrace that.  Only, let's scour the book clean of every part that isn't absolutely essential for learning how to play the game.  We don't care about marketing, we don't need Pei to "like" the game ... we're helping Pei DM it, not get off on it.  So let's ditch the scaled terror, let's ditch the comments about how the rules came about, let's burn most of the introduction (which isn't actually relevant until the rules are discussed).  Let's get rid of definitions about what a "scenario" is (p.B51), since Pei and his friends are going to experience them, so we don't need the description.  Pei's not writing a dissertation later on game design, so what do we care what a scenario is supposed accomplish?  For the love of gawd, don't list a bunch of them for someone who can't possibly understand what the hell what the are!

Break every sentence, every part, down to it's absolute critical parts.  When do you roll a die?  What does the roll mean, exactly.  Grasp that the DM has never seen a table before.  Assume NOTHING.  Rewrite the whole book, page by page, doing this with zero tolerance for anything that isn't instantly comprehensible.

Then, when Pei has read the new version, and has started to grasp it ... have him read the original.

I doubt very much that most of my readers can even grasp this "simplication" for what I'm suggesting.  I hear all the time how simple the above-linked books were ... yet when I read them, and put myself in the place of a reader who has none of my knowledge, it makes perfect sense to me why they don't understand.

Take this bit on P55.  Try to imagine that you have no friends, no sources, no one at all who can tell you what any of it means.  And that you're 10, you've never read a history book in your life, you have next to no solid education in any of this:

"A keep is a kind of castle.  The Haunted Keep has two towers connected by a gatehouse.  The upper stories have collapsed, and the buildings now have only one floor.  The rest of the castle is totally in ruins.  The insides of the two towers should be similar, though not exactly the same.  The gatehouse is split into two sections, divided by what was once a main road.  The interior of the gatehouse will be similar to the towers, though there will be fewer rooms."

And then we're given this map:

Okay, the above looks nothing like any "castle" I've ever seen on a postcard or in a movie.  How are these "towers"?  They're just squares.  I know nothing whatsoever about maps — when have I ever had reason to study one?  What is a gatehouse?  It just looks like two black squares.  What makes it a "house"?  Why does it say the rest of the castle is in ruins.  It said that the keep was "like" a castle.  Is there a separate castle?  Or does this mean the rest of the keep?

I looked up ruins and it says "crumbled, falling apart" ... why are the walls of this map perfectly smooth?  What's on the left and the right side of the road?  Where is "the rest of the castle"?  What does the text mean that they're the same, but different.  How different?  How am I supposed to present that?  What do I say when the player asks, how are these things different?  Why does the text say it was "once a main road" when the road is still there?  If the gate house is divided into two "sections," why do I just see black squares?  HELP!

This may sound like I'm pushing the point, but seriously, you're new to this.  Sure, eventually you'll figure out most of this, but are you really ready to push yourself hard, hour after hour, peering through all this text — every inch of which makes reference to something you don't understand — until finally you figure out what's meant by "should be similar, though not exactly the same"?  In fact, probably not.

Why start with this big, clumsy castle at all?  Do we need a multi-room set-up to explain how combat works?  How player characters ready their attacks?  How to run characters?  Wouldn't a simpler set up, like a house with two rooms, suffice better?  Who are we assuaging here?  Moldvay's ego, proving he can make a simple one-off dungeon, or helping new players learn how to play?

Do you, Gentle Reader, get where I'm going with this?  Do you understand why trying to read this stuff straight out of the gate without prior experience playing the game gets out of hand awfully fast?

In the film Blast from the Past, Adam's father tries to explain baseball to Adam unsuccessfully ... and that's how it sits for 35 years until Adam actually sees the game played:

"I get it!  I FINALLY GET IT!  You have to see it to understand it!  Because he must."

And baseball is way, way easier to understand than D&D.