Systemic, Widespread Failure

Before the rise of widespread public schooling in the 19th century, education was largely a private affair. Tutoring was the dominant mode, whether it was a governess for the children of the wealthy, a village priest for rural families, or itinerant teachers who moved from home to home. The learning experience was highly individualised. Instruction could be adapted to the student's pace, interests and abilities. The relationship between student and teacher was often personal and long-term. Education was not standardised. It was not age-graded. There were no bureaucracies enforcing curriculum. The subjects taught reflected the values and goals of the family or the immediate community rather than those of a centralized institution.

Tutoring in this time period did not support the model, "Let students make their own mistakes." The model was built on correction and mastery. A tutor's role was to intervene immediately when a mistake was made. Mistakes were not opportunities for discovery. They were treated as failures of attention or discipline. The student was to be shaped and improved, not merely left to explore.

Naturally, when public education was imposed, the original model was borrowed from that of the tutor... which led to egregious abuse of students when something that was designed for individual guidance was instead imposed in a factory atmosphere. Putting that aside, our point here is that mistakes as opportunities for discovery were not a principle of early schooling. The model demanded imitation, recitation and memorisation, which didn't work as well as the tutoring model and were clearly a problem almost at once, as adddressed by John Dewey in the 1910s and 1920s, especially in the United States. However, the two wars, the Spanish influenza and the Great Depression interrupted the continuity, clarity and instituional coherence of new ideas, so that it appears to us, a century later, that these issues weren't "addressed" until the 1950s and 60s, when Dewey and especially Maria Montessori, a contemporary of Dewey, suddenly became the rage.

Long prior to that, however, Dewey had stressed the process of learning by doing — and in that framework, mistakes were reinterpreted as signs of engagement. It wasn't the mistake that mattered, but the process of struggling through it, guided by reflection and self-correction. But then, as decades passed, this subtlety was gradually lost. Over the course of the 20th century, as education systems expanded and bureaucratised, these pedagogical ideas were distilled into slogans — like "we learn from our mistakes" — which became detached from the conditions under which that learning might actually occur.

The result is that today, the idea of learning from mistakes is promoted as a kind of motivational shield against failure, not as a structured methodology for learning. It functions more as a cultural reassurance than a teaching principle. It is therapeutic, NOT pedagogical, that is, "related to teaching." Thus the phrasing we often hear, where a teacher says of the children, "We like to arrange things so that children have an opportunity to make their own mistakes," is a modern creation, not rooted in traditional education and not rooted in proper educational science.

Something important to note here is that education obviates the need for us to make our OWN mistakes. We already have a history of others humans before us making mistakes, which we can learn from just as ably and completely as our own — and more rapidly as well, since we can jump right to the conclusion. No one says to themselves, "I'm thinking about making my own bazooka, but since I believe we learn best from making our own mistakes, I've decided to do it that way." Likewise, numerous STEM fields do not give students a chance to make their own mistakes because the consequences would be disasterous, not just for the student but potentially for society as a whole. In fact, these things make it obvious that the right path is not to make our own mistakes and start from scratch, but to learn the right way the first time, from the get-go, and move forward.

The theatre of making mistakes is reserved for low-accountability environments, especially soft or poorly evaluated subjects — say, for example, Dungeons and Dragons — where failure carries no immediate cost and the teacher can retreat into ambiguity. Proper education, on the other hand, is fundamentally a preventative structure; it's designed to save time, to avoid the need to learn everything the hard way, to spare the student from making the same blunders their predecessors did. The humanities show us the failures of culture. Science teaches us not to re-invent the wheel, or misapply a method. Mathematics is a set of distilled truths we don't need to rediscover through trial and error. Coaching sports teaches the athlete how to move and direct their body. All of this is the inheritance of mistake — already processed, already learned from, and ready to be taught.

To replace this with "personal discovery" through unstructured failure is to destroy the core function of education. It's anti-civilisational. It romanticizes ignorance and reinvents hardship. Yet the reason for this mistake-as-positive myth persists is partly emotional — it makes students feel safe. It removes the threat of judgment. It's egalitarian. But it also flourishes because modern schooling is no longer trusted to teach the right path clearly. If institutions aren't transmitting mastery, then students are left thinking they must find their own way. And thus the mistake becomes the teacher, not because it is good, but because it is the only thing left doing the job.

This exposes the structural deflection of responsibility within modern education, which explains in large part why many would-be dungeon masters don't have the wherewithal to comprehend or manage the game books, even when they are studied, simply because the tools aren't there to jump ahead and comprehend without having to start from an educational scratch. This is further worsened by those self-same students having been programmed to believe that the "right way to do it" is precisely the way they cannot. They've been taught to learn from their mistakes, but they can't see the mistake even when they've made it, because they don't know what a mistake looks like. At the same time, having not been taught to accept principles and truths as a matter of trust, they automatically don't trust what they're told. This disaster of an educational approach has crippled nearly every D&D player, so that their own option is to play hard into their handicap, discarding the rules (which they don't understand) and the functional game (which they don't understand) for the principles of social exchange (which they've learned through trial and error) in order to create a game system that is essentially a mystery to them.

Let me state that again as clearly as I can, for those in the back not listening. For most players and dungeon masters, the game's mechanic's are opaque, avoided or discarded not out of rebellion but out of illiteracy — not knowing how to learn, not knowing how to trust what’s taught, not knowing how to correct themselves because they’ve never been shown what correction looks like. They play into their own limitations, not because it's ideal, but because it's familiar. And they compensate with social performance, because that’s where feedback is still legible.

That final paragraph nails something few are willing to say: that this modern educational mindset has crippled not just content knowledge, but the very ability to recognise structure, accept authority or pursue mastery — not just in formal disciplines, but even in games.

I don't need to prove this. This series of posts, in which JB of B/X Blackrazor excoriates letter after letter from individuals who clearly don't comprehend and cannot express what's wrong with their game play, demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that these are people for whom traditional D&D is an utter, unfathomable, incomprehensible mystery. While JB does an excellent job of pointing out how a mixture of responsibility, self-improvement and messaging would enormously help, it's impossible to see these letters and believe, even remotely, that this advice could possibly be accepted as true. In short, though the letters were not written to JB personally but were, rather, sampled from the internet, we can see that a lot of people exist who are asking for advice, who at the same time are evidently not able to take it at face value.

We are articulating a problem that deserves to be repeated in every space where the integrity of learning, systems and self-improvement is taken seriously. This isn't just illiteracy in the narrow sense of rules comprehension. It's a meta-literacy — an inability to recognise that one doesn’t know, and worse, an inability to accept knowledge even when it's offered plainly. It's not rebellion. It's not defiance. It's not a choice being made by people who prefer this system to that, or this standard of play to that, or role-playing vs. roll-playing. It's something sadder and more dangerous — a learned helplessness masked by confidence, a posture shaped by years of vague instruction, shallow encouragement and the complete absence of epistemic accountability.

Those in these letters do not come from people who are stupid, but from those so deeply embedded in an unstructured, unschooled, emotionally therapeutic version of play that the very concept of D&D as a designed system with external logic is alien to them. The points that JB makes would be automatically rejected because the framework in which those points would make sense no longer exists for these people.

What we're looking at is the educational failure of the hobby space laid bare.

D&D landed in a culture that was far more traditionally educated than the present day's. Moreover, having learned to read standard board game rules starting from the age of 8 or younger, most of those who first came to role-playing table-top arrived from the culture of complex wargames, where parsing out rules like these had become second-nature, though we were just 12 or 13. It was therefore relatively easy, first of all, for three or four kids to figure out the rules of early edition D&D, and other game systems besides, with the added culture of knowing one could trust the elder generations because they're diligence with regards to rules was tightly established.

Reading and internalising dense, technical rulebooks wasn't just possible — it was expected. We did it for FUN. We nitpicked and argued and parsed out each and every rule not from the standpoint of "should it exist," but what was it accurately and precisely trying to say. This was the original meaning of the "rules lawyer" — not an individual seeking to redefine words to rid the game of the rule, but those ready to demand fundamental obedience to a rule "as the designer intended it."

This was possible because the rulebook was written like a contract or a constitution — not a soft, scurrilous, emotionally gratuitous document designed to make the reader feel better about the purchase they've just made, but a thing with internal logic and deliberate authorship that demanded respect, interpretation and rigorous application. The original DMG was a very strange animal, in that many of the rules didn't make sense, weren't well-crafted, weren't formally explained, lacked an internal logic and were quite obviously representative of the feeling of the writer and the company that supported that writer. Still, it was close enough to logical, the writer having been bred in the formalisation of games, so that a person — even someone new to the game — could try, test, fill in the blanks and produce a working model despite those designer shortcomings.

Moreover, the culture at that time, faced with this flawed document, saw the problem of interpretation as coming nearly as possible to the intentions within, which were — and are still, for many people who have moved back to AD&D and similar period games — interpretable through discussion, debate, reason and a deeper understanding of what games were and how they were supposed to work. Video games at that time were present, but weren't seen to overlap the board-game structure. They tended to be puzzle-based or sports-based, having more in common with the structures of jigsaw puzzles and competitions, than with intellectual examination. This is also largely still true; both competition-games and logistical styled games are still essentially related to sports and puzzles. Online RPGs are guessing games, or best choice options, solved through mental cognition but not through a strategical approach not already baked into the game.

Those coming to D&D presently, with the mindset of a video game, naturally seek immediately to see what the game will allow — this being the fundamental truth of video games. The boundary is simply, can I move here or not; can this thing be picked up or not. Nothing that can be done in the game is against "the rules." If it can be done, it can only be done because the program meant it to be done. Approaching role-playing with this attitude is logically, "If the DM can be convinced to let it happen, then that's fair, because if it was wrong, the DM could not be convinced." Of course, human DMs are far more manipulable than graphics.

This has trained a generation with a kind of "mechanical permissiveness," where the only test is, "can this happen." This strengthens the "learn by one's own mistakes" approach, since most game players start by trying to figure out what can be done, to get the most from the game. It's always possible, of course, to go learn from someone else's mistakes, to see how G-27rSexy Ranger solved the problem in a youtube video, but somehow this approach is less about "how do I learn to play" as opposed to "how do I learn to play like others do." It is a copycat approach, not a learning approach.

This learning process can't be applied to real world mechanics. A great many things that can be done shouldn't be done, for reasons having nothing to do with permissiveness. A game world has no consequences, except the requirement to start again. The real world has consequences that make starting again impossible.

Early D&D and other RPGs embraced the "What should be done?" model from the outset — not because the consequences of doing something that shouldn't be done were in themselves harmful, but because D&D, unlike video games, begins in a space where others are not merely engaged, but are directly adjacent to one's person. An individual player who develops a mindset of killing things in the game a bit too gleefully, though not necessarily against the rules, tends to cause others to question their physical proximity to the individual. Likewise, individuals who bully, who speak loudly, who fail to bathe, who talk out of turn, who don't show up or who commit a vast array of other unsociable behaviours tend to be removed both quietly or dramatically, as necessary.

This contributed to early tabletop becoming a self-correcting space rooted in real world consequence, where agreeing upon what the rules meant, why are we here, what kind of experience do we want and how to obtain consistency were placed front and centre in those discourses seeking to interpret and understand the rules, just as they were interpreted in Monopoly, RISK and a host of other games. We were used to this; we did not perceive a time when we would not continue to play boardgames in tandem with D&D... but it was becoming evident, as the end of the 80s approached, that there were new breeds of players emerging that did not share these priorities.

The cultural deterioration of the game table did reflect, to some degree, those points about video games already made. But the larger factor, I would argue, would be those coming to tabletop without any background in other games whatsoever, or interest in playing such games. These would not be the majority, not by any stretch. But it was a small but vocal element that seemed to find a value in game play that resisted or disregarded the rules of the game itself. This doesn't need to be thoroughly examined. We may simply refer to this as the "story people" and leave it at that. Tabletop permitted an outlet to a behaviour that needed a stage, and those with that behaviour began to make themselves known. Rules were not important, because a stage does not need rules.

It was, however, a loud minority, often charismatic, often admired for their creativity or "immersion," and increasingly elevated in published materials, actual play media and designer rhetoric. Their influence was disproportionate to their number, because what they offered was a new way to play — or more accurately, a way to use D&D as a scaffold for something else entirely.

This deviation was exacerbated by the arrival of a new "official" set of rules, 2e, which began the long splinterisation of game rules that were never universally settled. We're well aware of how this has turned out. Notably, 2e utterly ignored the efforts and structural analysis of those individual DMs who had spent the years after AD&D attempting to make sense of the game. Like each smaller splash that was made by writers like Moldvay and Mentzer, plus those crude splatbooks that grew from the published literature rather than the personalised game experience that was identifiable at the very small game cons that were in existence, the publisher's failure to interpret was shoved out in front. Progressively afterwards, D&D became less interpretable, by those less able to interpret, contributed to by an educational system which, as expressed, has moved increasingly to a hands-off approach.

So here we are... with a game more popular than ever, but less cognitively playable than it's ever been, approached by those without the educational tools needed to interpret a game never designed to be sensible. A game that, for many, is not even a game any more, but a genre and a mood. Something to be enacted, not mastered.

For a fellow like me, this leaves nothing.

Explaining how the game can be played, or should be played, requires an audience capable to accepting things on faith, as judged through long experience of recognising good from bad. Yet universally the sentiment is automatically distrustful, both because the industry itself had destroyed trust, so that every reader looks at a new idea or system with jaundiced eye; and because trust is something taught, in a present-world where every moment of trust means humiliation at the hands of a grifter or a phishing scheme. We're purporting in rhetoric to teach people "how to learn" but we're not in fact doing this. We're telling people to make your own mistakes, but we're not giving them the capacity to deconstruct a mistake sufficiently to recognise one.

I cannot teach if my audience cannot accept, even after a vast stream of effort, that I might know something they don't. This leaves very little.

We talk about "learning how to learn" as though it's a lightbulb moment — but what's actually being taught is a sort of non-discriminatory sludge, where all answers are valid, where the test considers the willingness to show up and mark the page as the only entry exam, regardless of what multiple choice is marked. Failure is not something to be eschewed, but a thing to be stamped onto a badge and worn as evidence, as though this itself was the proof, that something was learned. "I tried" has replaced the "participation ribbon." But we can't say what this learned thing is. We only have the badge. And those with similar badges band together and form cliques that praise the value of the badge, assuring that its meaning need never be fully understood. Because the praise of our fellows is enough.

Not only is it a club to which I do not want to belong, it is a club to which I cannot. I am unable to be "performative." I cannot replace fact with validation, or success with shared struggle. I automatically question the value of the badge because I was taught to question. And to demand an answer... that I might pass it on to the next person, without concern for their feelings about it.

And so, I drift. I feel a pang of fury, scream into the void, then immediately perceive it as a humiliating, stupid reaction. I write out long deconstructions like this one knowing they'll be read, misinterpreted, forgotten and the point not undertaken. If I'm honest with myself, there's no point left in my being here.

Those who may read this, and wish for me not to go away, should ask, if you have not adjusted your game world to fit the advice that's been given here for 18 years, what are you learning? If you feel you haven't been able to accept that's been said here, because you know better, then very plainly you're not learning ANYTHING. Because learning is not seeing and judging, then discarding. It's seeing and trying. With the comprehension that if someone takes the time to make a sound argument that can't be dismissed without handwaving, then it's time to think, "Hm, maybe he knows something I don't know."

If you cannot do that. If you cannot accept this about yourself, or your judgment, after reading this space and all that's here for 18 years, then I'm not your teacher, I'm the enabler of your complacency. And I don't want to be that. I have no participation ribbons for you.

(Continued)