Tablets from God

"Regardless of how we're running the game, when you're doing all original material with your friends, there's something called 'convergence' that happens.  And that is, you'll do kind of a mediocre session one day that introduces something to the game, and there'll be another kind of mediocre the next day, next week, and the week after and the week after ... and you'll feel like this isn't going anywhere.  And then there'll be some sort of impetus; something will happen, and the players will be particularly inspired.  And you know you, you as a DM may have put something in front of them that you thought would challenge them or entertain them or, and excite them, or engage them ... but then something magical happens.  Some kind of synergy happens — and then everything that has been put into the game or that has emerged from the game, week to week, over usually about six to eight weeks or so — all of it becomes suddenly weirdly relevant.  Things you didn't know were important, in retrospect ... and then you have this scenario that happens ... all these things ... they all come together and produce a scenario that is better than anything you could have."

 — Jeffro Johnson, BROSR

I had to cut and shorten this quote at several points, as it waffles quite a lot while Johnson does his best to express the concept.  Following the quote, he drifts into war story examples of what he means, but he never comes around to explaining why this moment of "magic" occurs.  The best he does is ascribe it to something in the game's design, which Gygax and Arneson inserted on account of their previous experience with wargaming, but even that is a vague collection of sentences that make little sense when quoted.  Feel free to listen and see what you can make out of it.

I agree.  It definitely happens.  As discussed in this treatise by Zittoun and Brinkmann, it's a factor of "studies in situated learning" and "cultural approaches to apprenticeship in thinking."  I plunged into this hardcore back in 2018 when I discussed meaning making, game consensus and situated learning ... concepts that go right over the heads of most.  In each case, I tried to dumb it down as far as I could while retaining the core research, but these are not easy subjects.  If you have no experience reading psychology, you might want to keep sharp instruments well out of reach.

In brief, the bros approach to rules-as-written D&D works because they're compelling everyone to coordinate the trajectory of their learning process in the same direction ... sorry.  Everyone is thinking the same.  By nullifying the "metagaming," the effort players commit to get around the rules — by saying "NO, you cannot get around these rules," player commitment falls in line with the game intention.  You can't kill the orcs by out-inventing them, you can't simply blast them away with your twenty fireballs ... you have to beat them with random die rolls and scant resources.

The result is that every choice and every die roll dramatically increases in importance.  More game hinges on that which the players cannot directly control — so when the die falls the right way at the critical moment, everyone is overjoyed.  Effectively, D&D is tranformed from role-play pissing for distance into a ring of people playing roulette ... which as anyone whose seen hard core players around a roulette wheel know, things can get loud.

This has zip to do with Gygax and Arneson as game designers.  It has zip to do with the players being especially "inspired," though it can certainly look that way if one is casting around for explanations.  And of course it takes weeks and weeks before the experience "emerges" ... these are players who have been trained since their inception to see D&D's eternal metagame.  It takes time to break their will with the rules and force them to put their chips on the table for REAL.

As I wrote in 2018:

"We focus on the words, accept each rule as written, with some assumption that it will become clear later. We view the individual rules as separate bits of data, having little to do with one another. We give considerable credence to the rule source; we interpret the rules as the meaning, bestowing innate, inviolable knowledge to the writer of the rules, presuming that the writer cannot possibly have failed to make the meaning clear when wrestling with the language."

This is, in essence, the argument that Johnson makes.  He's accepted the rules as written, he expected results, the results have happened.  He has no idea why, but he assigns the "why" to the rule source, to Gygax; Johnson bestows innate, inviolable knowledge on Gygax and presumes Gygax must have known what he was going.

It's really rare when I get to smash someone's argument four years before they make it.

As my post goes on, Johnson's understanding is "surface knowledge."  Real knowledge begins with a wholistic understanding of what the rules set out to accomplish ... which is the path the bros are on, evidenced by the rest of the podcast.  Further along, understanding pushes past the rules-as-written and into the realm of rules-as-intention.  Why does a rule exist, what does it accomplish ... and does this rule, in the way it's written, accomplish the goal it should?

This is the reason I don't play other people's rules-as-written.  I try very hard to play MY rules-as-written, or as I prefer to think of it in game, OUR rules-as-written, but I don't play AD&D's because AD&D's rules were a good try, but they missed the mark.

Take a rule I've replaced very successfully.  AD&D's experience award system is based upon the monster's attack die (determined by HD), hit points and some very fuzzy logic for a monster's special abilities.  The idea is clearly that more powerful monsters, those with more hit dice and hit points, which have powerful special abilities, should provide more experience than weaker monsters.  Agreed.  The question is, does the rule-as-written really do that?

If an orc with 1 hit point gets lucky with a d20 and causes 27 hit points of damage against the party before it gets killed, that orc gives less experience than an orc with 8 hit points that missed every swing.  If a monster with a special ability fails to use that ability during the fight, it gives the same experience as a monster that got to use that ability once, five times or twenty times before it died.  The only answer the book gives to this kind of inflation/devaluation of monster experience given is for the DM to make an ad hoc judgement call on what the experience for that monster "ought" to be ... which is a pretty damned fuzzy fix for a rule that clearly fails in its function universally.

Think of it this way.  Your camper has a black water reservoir with a listed capacity of nine gallons.  Only, you've found that in fact, although the actual tank does have this capacity, the way it fits in your camper causes some of that capacity to be wasted, since the outflow valve stops working when the tank is only 8 gallons full — whereupon, the extra black water overflows into your camper ... and worse, it does this when the outside meter reads somewhere inconsistently between 7.5 and 8.5 gallons.  Now.  Do you put up with this, acknowledging that it's up to you to make guesses as to where the actual blackwater limit is, and accept that you have to empty it more often than the camper designer rated, even when the gauge reads nowhere near full, or do you fucking fix it?

The goal of the original experience award rules did not include "it gives the DM one more bit of contentious decision-making to worry about," although that's what AD&D's rules amount to.  The goal is, harder monsters ought to give more experience.  Well, we can measure that.  Everything has hit points.  The orc that hits nothing, gets no experience for hitting, period, while the one that hits everything gets lots.  The monster that never uses its special ability might just as well not have had one, while the one that gets to use its ability is measured on how well that ability was used, not the fact that it has one.  Design a new system.  Play it AS WRITTEN.  Fuck Gygax.

The AD&D rules are not an inviolable system that produces magic.  The bros have several features relating to AD&D — their highly questionable interpretation of time, for example — that come off like someone explaining how their "totem" keeps elephants away.  "See?" they say.  "No elephants."  Somehow they've convinced themselves that several game elements, such as training, patron players, reaction rolls and yes, time, are essential to this business of solving all your problems and keeping away elephants.

Plumbing my own memories, unquestionably I had my own totems and talismans of this kind, which I gripped tightly for decades before recognising the underlying value, or lack of value, that some of these things had.  I said with the last post, and with this one above, what the bros are going through is a process.  It's evident from their dialogue that they have zero understanding of anything they're saying.  Their schtick is to repeat, "IT WORKS!" as loudly and arrogantly as possible.  Which is does.  But they don't know why it works.  It works because it does.  It works because Gygax was a genius.  It works because gods came down to Wisconsin in 1975 and handed over two tablets full of rules.  We don't need to know why it works.  Put your faith in it; that's what matters.

Which is, really, awfully pathetic.  Things don't "just work."  They work for sound, rational reasons.  Cars go faster and burn fuel more efficiently because we invented fuel injection, transmissions, coolants and ten thousand other items.  AD&D is not the end of the game's evolution, no matter what it's done for the bros.  They're assumption that it is, and their further assumption that "no one" has thought about any of this since 1980, is ignorance on a spectacular level.

We can do better.