Arrange a series of events with which the players can engage in order to experience a verisimilitude with place and time. Provide a remuneration for effort that encourages more effort and less hedging or deviation from the game's functional aspect. Downplay participation behaviour that clutters up either the verisimilitude or the game's progressive design. Discourage the attendance of persons who resist the design.
As I look at this, questioning why my perception of D&D remains so radically different from that of others, I must return again and again to my wargaming as a youth, when scenes like this represented the most profound games I'd ever played.
I'd grown up on boardgames, from Life to Scrabble, in a home where my parents thrived on them, having acquired their taste in the boardgame rush of the 1960s. Board games, before my time, were suddenly everywhere, in department stores, TV commercials and family living rooms. Companies were releasing new titles at a steady clip, and the sheer presence of games in American culture had surged compared to previous decades. The expansion of suburbia all created a perfect storm for domestic entertainment like board games to thrive. My parents must have purchased at least 30 games between their marriage in 1958 and my having reached self-awareness around 1971. Many of those same games are still in my daughter's possession, in good condition and still brought down and played by her and her friends.
But a game like Squad Leader was simply out of my parent's reach. I can't say why. On the surface, they did not see the point; it was overly complicated; the goal itself, to "kill" enemies was inappropriate. The strategy did not fit their view of strategy games, which is how my father would have described Bridge or Cribbage. So I could not bring out my wargames on Friday nights when we used to play, not even for my older brother (five years older and utterly distant from me) and definitely not for my sister (who was not an intellectual). A game that simulated combat could not be termed, "light-hearted family entertainment," and that was very much the reason my parents liked games: because of how the random element shifted one's luck.
For those much younger than me, I don't suppose it makes sense that landing on the square labelled, "Strike It Rich! Find Oil – Collect $200,000" could be something that would produce cheers, laughter or an "oh no!" from someone else who thought they'd won the game — which brought no tangible benefit — not only once, but a dozen times over the course of ten years' game play. It seems absurd now that a simply chance of landing on the right place could produce strong, resonant emotions... yet I plainly remember that they did. Unquestionably, this element is crucial in understanding in how I see D&D, it's precepts and purpose, in a manner different from those who grew up in the 1980s, when a very different sort of board game came to the fore.
Which is not to say that I didn't become hopelessly jaded about simple randomness, to where I cannot now find an iota of enthusiasm about playing the Game of Life — except in watching my grandson play it, when he's old enough. Tactical and strategic games like Squad Leader and Panzerblitz drastically reduce the random element; a player might get lucky on a single roll, but the tactical element is so powerful that even a long string of good rolls won't save a player who can't place or move their units effectively. This characteristic absolutely took hold in my consciousness between 1976 and 1979, in those years when D&D did not exist for me. We would spend whole Saturdays, and then Sunday afternoon too, after church, fighting one long brutal incremental battle, most of which never ended because halfway through the wave for or against would make the winner clear. Unlike cribbage, which has to be played until the last hole is pegged, dense strategy games never need to be played to the last dead unit. Like with chess, the loser tips the "king" and the new battle is set up.
These games were serious. Again as with chess, the participant did not bump a stack of chits, did not walk by the table in loose clothing that might disrupt the delicacy of the layout. A battle required patience, concentration, a sense of knowing that one's value as a tactician was being challenged, not just a sense of "seeing who would win." Our reputations rested on each contest. These games conditioned my expectations, my thresholds, my core sense of what a meaningful game was, at an age when I was discovering my imagined desire to someday write professionally, my understanding of "becoming a man" and the onset of many, many influences — from drug use to politics to musical influences — that I began to also take very seriously.
This mindset — that a game is a serious thing — is what makes me a "grognard"... intemperate, declarative, indifferent to other points of view and impossibly expectant about why any player expects they have a right to sit down at my table and receive any of my time.
But a game like Squad Leader was simply out of my parent's reach. I can't say why. On the surface, they did not see the point; it was overly complicated; the goal itself, to "kill" enemies was inappropriate. The strategy did not fit their view of strategy games, which is how my father would have described Bridge or Cribbage. So I could not bring out my wargames on Friday nights when we used to play, not even for my older brother (five years older and utterly distant from me) and definitely not for my sister (who was not an intellectual). A game that simulated combat could not be termed, "light-hearted family entertainment," and that was very much the reason my parents liked games: because of how the random element shifted one's luck.
For those much younger than me, I don't suppose it makes sense that landing on the square labelled, "Strike It Rich! Find Oil – Collect $200,000" could be something that would produce cheers, laughter or an "oh no!" from someone else who thought they'd won the game — which brought no tangible benefit — not only once, but a dozen times over the course of ten years' game play. It seems absurd now that a simply chance of landing on the right place could produce strong, resonant emotions... yet I plainly remember that they did. Unquestionably, this element is crucial in understanding in how I see D&D, it's precepts and purpose, in a manner different from those who grew up in the 1980s, when a very different sort of board game came to the fore.
Which is not to say that I didn't become hopelessly jaded about simple randomness, to where I cannot now find an iota of enthusiasm about playing the Game of Life — except in watching my grandson play it, when he's old enough. Tactical and strategic games like Squad Leader and Panzerblitz drastically reduce the random element; a player might get lucky on a single roll, but the tactical element is so powerful that even a long string of good rolls won't save a player who can't place or move their units effectively. This characteristic absolutely took hold in my consciousness between 1976 and 1979, in those years when D&D did not exist for me. We would spend whole Saturdays, and then Sunday afternoon too, after church, fighting one long brutal incremental battle, most of which never ended because halfway through the wave for or against would make the winner clear. Unlike cribbage, which has to be played until the last hole is pegged, dense strategy games never need to be played to the last dead unit. Like with chess, the loser tips the "king" and the new battle is set up.
These games were serious. Again as with chess, the participant did not bump a stack of chits, did not walk by the table in loose clothing that might disrupt the delicacy of the layout. A battle required patience, concentration, a sense of knowing that one's value as a tactician was being challenged, not just a sense of "seeing who would win." Our reputations rested on each contest. These games conditioned my expectations, my thresholds, my core sense of what a meaningful game was, at an age when I was discovering my imagined desire to someday write professionally, my understanding of "becoming a man" and the onset of many, many influences — from drug use to politics to musical influences — that I began to also take very seriously.
This mindset — that a game is a serious thing — is what makes me a "grognard"... intemperate, declarative, indifferent to other points of view and impossibly expectant about why any player expects they have a right to sit down at my table and receive any of my time.
I certainly appreciate how out of line that is with nearly everyone, even those my own age, who discuss or debate the parameters of D&D. But if we had been saddled with a player at those wargame contests who did not take it seriously, and if they had tried to argue that we shouldn't, the result would not have been a discussion, but an immediate exile, followed by five minutes of "Can you fucking believe that...?" before immediately returning to game play.
What amazes me is how thoroughly this attitude pervades throughout human activity that is not role-playing. Sports events are not known for players who take loss well, either at a professional or non-professional level. A charitable housebuilding venture is not populated with those who would be patient regarding poor attitudes towards safety, disrespect of anothers' space, laziness or lack of focus. Jacking around at a walk-a-thon would not be seen as acceptable. But reprimanding a timewasting, derailing, bullying, rule-nitpicking player is NOT ACCEPTABLE, because we must all get along... not in the sense that the acting-out player needs to go or change, but in the sense that everyone else MUST accept that player as being justifiably themselves.
The explanation is inevitably the invocation of "fun." Which only puzzles me further. However seriously we took those war games, we did them because they were fun. When I participated in sports between the ages of 8 and 15, it was for fun, though winning was deadly serious and much of the activities were made unpleasant by overly provocative coaches and parents. Still, it was fun to win the city-wide championship in baseball as I did in 1979, mere weeks before discovering D&D. It was fun to come in fourth in the 800 meters when I competed in track in grade 9 that same year. I've always thought it was fun to win on my merits, or even on the throw of a die, because at least somebody succeeded with the same chance I had.
But I don't see the fun in performative exhibitions designed to fluff ego. I don't see the fun in public displays of wish fulfillment. Or in throwing out all the rules so that the reason for us to be here is to pretend to play a game that means nothing. I get nothing out of this. I'm not going to work on building a world so that others can "pretend" to play.
I'm damaged goods because when I began to have fun on my terms, not those of my parents or teachers, fun came from something substantial: hitting a ball that was hard to hit, catching a ball that was hard to catch, hitting a goal that was small and defended, overcoming odds, defeating a competitor, implementing a strategy that worked. Fun wasn't performative. Self-indulgence mattered only when we had done something that earned that indulgence. Indulgence for it's own sake, just because I want to feel it now, from a sense of entitlement and not accomplishment, feels hollow, empty, performative... like patting oneself on the back for having used the toilet.
And again its funny because my measurement still holds in the real world. People are proud of the families they raise, the houses they upkeep, the resilience they show, the service they give, the sacrifices they make, their commitment... and these are, in fact, the things adults find "fun." A game is fine, but concrete pleasure begins with taking a delapidated, abandoned yard of a house that's received too little care and spending five difficult and costly years clearing, cutting, shaping, investing and growing a yard that glistens with such beauty that our friends would rather come spend the evening in our back yard than they're own — and tell us so. Fun begins for me with sinking my teeth into a problem that is in no way going to be solved in the next few months, then solving it. For my father, fun began with building a cabin from scratch, using the knowledge he'd gained as an engineer, so that he could do that with a minimum of errors (there was a corner of the cabin he just couldn't align right, but I'd have had to walk you over and show it; sadly, the cabin is gone now).
A good life is found in the pleasure and fun of a lifelong engagement with the world. Coaching a volleyball team, acquiring skills and then using those for the benefit of others, seeing physical labour, care, creation and disappointment not as crippling, unpleasant things, but merely the price paid to earn love of thing through effort given. This isn't fun as fleeting pleasure but the glow that comes from purpose and pride.
For me, this is what D&D is. Not an excuse for fucking around on a game night, not a mode of enablement for losers so bereft of purpose that they can't bear up having a fictional character die. Not a cheap, tacky plugged in adventure bought at the grifting game store, slapped together by a grifting company, so that I need not put more than 20 minutes into reading the thing. I'm not half-assing my way through the process of being a Dungeon Master and I'm not encouraging others to do so — because the price of laziness is not failing to get things done; it's not the implementation of slopware in place of a game worth playing... it's the eventual personal poison one acquires about oneself, as slowly, steadily, we watch the rest of the world just move on and leave us behind... when at last we realise that we're not worth anything to anybody, not even ourselves... and we never will be.
That is the real penalty. It's ignored, but we see the consequence everywhere. That guy who used to play... he was so funny... what happened to him? Oh, well, when I had to end the game to focus on my kids he just sort of kicked around for a while. I heard he was playing in a few campaigns at the game store. Remember how he wanted so bad to be a DM? He bought the books and he ran us that one time... and it was just awful, but we praised him and yet, somehow, he never ran again. Anyway, yeah. He never did get an education. Never did get married or have kids. Never could keep a job. I guess... well, I don't know. I haven't thought about him in years.
Films and television, magazine articles and books, used to warn about this; they used to explain it, demonstrate it, deconstruct it... but there was never any money in that so they stopped. Self-help books aren't about helping, they're about making us feel good without earning it. There's way, way more money in fostering laziness, taking a cut from it, exploiting it, because lazy people, those who want to have fun on their terms, are easy prey. They're desperate and needy. They have a larger disposable income because they're not supporting anyone and they're not making or improving anything. They're alone. They're circling the drain... so heck, why not tell them, as they're going down, that "circling" is fun, just like a carnival ride, so pay us a little to tell you so.
Because the problem hasn't gone away. It's not like the "great new game version" of D&D is self-sustainable. It's not like any of those people have a website. All the websites related to that version belong to the grifters, taking their little bit as their audience comes round this side of the drain again. And when those grifters run out of D&D players to grift, they'll find other versions of the same weakness, the same poison, the same crowd who considers shared experience to be more important than success. "Success" is, after all, a consequence of effort... and the last thing that any one who wants to show in performative D&D, or story-telling D&D, or rule-of-cool D&D, is effort.
That's the infrastructure we can see everywhere we look. People tell me they come to read this blog "because there aren't any others like it." That's because the support for what now passes as D&D isn't being built by gamers who sweat over mechanics, build campaigns from scratch, or care whether a system holds up under pressure. It's all opportunists, wrapping intellectual entropy into bright packaging and calling it inclusion, creativity, collaborative or a community. It's the industry of avoiding responsibility, the hollowness of self-gratification, the slipping into passive identity. That's where the money is. It permeates every nook and crack, from the company selling the big, brassy slopwear to the internet pundit scraping their tiny fraction from pageviews, clicks and a cheaper, cruddier slopware. I am hounded day and night by Patreon to sell product, because this is where the exploiter is in turn exploited, by the frog sitting atop the frog that sits atop the frog.
All this to simply make it clear that, in 1979, when I did find D&D, this is not what I expected from it. As recent as last year, I was still wrapped in a delusion that hid all of this, as I planned books I was going to publish and awareness I was going to provide, to an audience that's split between those who know well enough to move the fuck on, ditch D&D and get on with their real lives, and those who what the slop because it's easier to eat.
I'm a dinosaur. And I'm in the wrong Land before Time. There is no Great Valley.
What amazes me is how thoroughly this attitude pervades throughout human activity that is not role-playing. Sports events are not known for players who take loss well, either at a professional or non-professional level. A charitable housebuilding venture is not populated with those who would be patient regarding poor attitudes towards safety, disrespect of anothers' space, laziness or lack of focus. Jacking around at a walk-a-thon would not be seen as acceptable. But reprimanding a timewasting, derailing, bullying, rule-nitpicking player is NOT ACCEPTABLE, because we must all get along... not in the sense that the acting-out player needs to go or change, but in the sense that everyone else MUST accept that player as being justifiably themselves.
The explanation is inevitably the invocation of "fun." Which only puzzles me further. However seriously we took those war games, we did them because they were fun. When I participated in sports between the ages of 8 and 15, it was for fun, though winning was deadly serious and much of the activities were made unpleasant by overly provocative coaches and parents. Still, it was fun to win the city-wide championship in baseball as I did in 1979, mere weeks before discovering D&D. It was fun to come in fourth in the 800 meters when I competed in track in grade 9 that same year. I've always thought it was fun to win on my merits, or even on the throw of a die, because at least somebody succeeded with the same chance I had.
But I don't see the fun in performative exhibitions designed to fluff ego. I don't see the fun in public displays of wish fulfillment. Or in throwing out all the rules so that the reason for us to be here is to pretend to play a game that means nothing. I get nothing out of this. I'm not going to work on building a world so that others can "pretend" to play.
I'm damaged goods because when I began to have fun on my terms, not those of my parents or teachers, fun came from something substantial: hitting a ball that was hard to hit, catching a ball that was hard to catch, hitting a goal that was small and defended, overcoming odds, defeating a competitor, implementing a strategy that worked. Fun wasn't performative. Self-indulgence mattered only when we had done something that earned that indulgence. Indulgence for it's own sake, just because I want to feel it now, from a sense of entitlement and not accomplishment, feels hollow, empty, performative... like patting oneself on the back for having used the toilet.
And again its funny because my measurement still holds in the real world. People are proud of the families they raise, the houses they upkeep, the resilience they show, the service they give, the sacrifices they make, their commitment... and these are, in fact, the things adults find "fun." A game is fine, but concrete pleasure begins with taking a delapidated, abandoned yard of a house that's received too little care and spending five difficult and costly years clearing, cutting, shaping, investing and growing a yard that glistens with such beauty that our friends would rather come spend the evening in our back yard than they're own — and tell us so. Fun begins for me with sinking my teeth into a problem that is in no way going to be solved in the next few months, then solving it. For my father, fun began with building a cabin from scratch, using the knowledge he'd gained as an engineer, so that he could do that with a minimum of errors (there was a corner of the cabin he just couldn't align right, but I'd have had to walk you over and show it; sadly, the cabin is gone now).
A good life is found in the pleasure and fun of a lifelong engagement with the world. Coaching a volleyball team, acquiring skills and then using those for the benefit of others, seeing physical labour, care, creation and disappointment not as crippling, unpleasant things, but merely the price paid to earn love of thing through effort given. This isn't fun as fleeting pleasure but the glow that comes from purpose and pride.
For me, this is what D&D is. Not an excuse for fucking around on a game night, not a mode of enablement for losers so bereft of purpose that they can't bear up having a fictional character die. Not a cheap, tacky plugged in adventure bought at the grifting game store, slapped together by a grifting company, so that I need not put more than 20 minutes into reading the thing. I'm not half-assing my way through the process of being a Dungeon Master and I'm not encouraging others to do so — because the price of laziness is not failing to get things done; it's not the implementation of slopware in place of a game worth playing... it's the eventual personal poison one acquires about oneself, as slowly, steadily, we watch the rest of the world just move on and leave us behind... when at last we realise that we're not worth anything to anybody, not even ourselves... and we never will be.
That is the real penalty. It's ignored, but we see the consequence everywhere. That guy who used to play... he was so funny... what happened to him? Oh, well, when I had to end the game to focus on my kids he just sort of kicked around for a while. I heard he was playing in a few campaigns at the game store. Remember how he wanted so bad to be a DM? He bought the books and he ran us that one time... and it was just awful, but we praised him and yet, somehow, he never ran again. Anyway, yeah. He never did get an education. Never did get married or have kids. Never could keep a job. I guess... well, I don't know. I haven't thought about him in years.
Films and television, magazine articles and books, used to warn about this; they used to explain it, demonstrate it, deconstruct it... but there was never any money in that so they stopped. Self-help books aren't about helping, they're about making us feel good without earning it. There's way, way more money in fostering laziness, taking a cut from it, exploiting it, because lazy people, those who want to have fun on their terms, are easy prey. They're desperate and needy. They have a larger disposable income because they're not supporting anyone and they're not making or improving anything. They're alone. They're circling the drain... so heck, why not tell them, as they're going down, that "circling" is fun, just like a carnival ride, so pay us a little to tell you so.
Because the problem hasn't gone away. It's not like the "great new game version" of D&D is self-sustainable. It's not like any of those people have a website. All the websites related to that version belong to the grifters, taking their little bit as their audience comes round this side of the drain again. And when those grifters run out of D&D players to grift, they'll find other versions of the same weakness, the same poison, the same crowd who considers shared experience to be more important than success. "Success" is, after all, a consequence of effort... and the last thing that any one who wants to show in performative D&D, or story-telling D&D, or rule-of-cool D&D, is effort.
That's the infrastructure we can see everywhere we look. People tell me they come to read this blog "because there aren't any others like it." That's because the support for what now passes as D&D isn't being built by gamers who sweat over mechanics, build campaigns from scratch, or care whether a system holds up under pressure. It's all opportunists, wrapping intellectual entropy into bright packaging and calling it inclusion, creativity, collaborative or a community. It's the industry of avoiding responsibility, the hollowness of self-gratification, the slipping into passive identity. That's where the money is. It permeates every nook and crack, from the company selling the big, brassy slopwear to the internet pundit scraping their tiny fraction from pageviews, clicks and a cheaper, cruddier slopware. I am hounded day and night by Patreon to sell product, because this is where the exploiter is in turn exploited, by the frog sitting atop the frog that sits atop the frog.
All this to simply make it clear that, in 1979, when I did find D&D, this is not what I expected from it. As recent as last year, I was still wrapped in a delusion that hid all of this, as I planned books I was going to publish and awareness I was going to provide, to an audience that's split between those who know well enough to move the fuck on, ditch D&D and get on with their real lives, and those who what the slop because it's easier to eat.
I'm a dinosaur. And I'm in the wrong Land before Time. There is no Great Valley.
Wonderfully written and the sad truth as I also experience it. We may be a dying species of old dinosaurs but I hold up the flag as long as I stand and show younger ones my way to play TTRPGs. Who knows perhaps there is the one amongst them who gets it.
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