Dungeons & Dragons White Box 02

If you are a player purchasing the DUNGEONS & DRAGONS rules in order to improve your situation in an existing campaign, you will find that there is a great advantage in knowing what is herein. If your referee has made changes in the rules and/or tables, simply note them in pencil (for who knows when some flux of the cosmos will make things shift once again!), and keep the rules nearby as you play. A quick check of some rule or table may bring hidden treasure or save your game "life."

There's tremendous foresight here: the understanding that the book itself will spawn campaigns... which, predictably, should create a sufficiently sized background of people who, playing in those campaigns, will want to get their own copy for that purpose. Sufficient, that is, that we'll address specifically those people in our introduction. That, my readers, is confidence. At the initial publication of this, there is no community. Of course, I might have a later edition... though there is no evidence of this in the title or the copyright page. 

And again, what does it say? That you'll need to change your booklet to fit your table. And it says that knowing the rules provides you with opportunity, control, a better grasp of the game... so long as you check. Don't want to die? Read these rules. It's two lessons the present generation of players have turned their back upon. Rules, we're told, are of no importance; and at the same time, there's no need to shift if the rules change. Within the present day players' head, rules are superfluous and static at the same time, and thus divorced from their consciousness. What shall we imagine produced such a dichotomy?

Once D&D became a product line rather than a past-time, rules could no longer be presented as mutable. That would imply the consumer was entitled to think, to improvies, to take ownership. Such options would make for poor customer retention. So the company pushed the illusion of stability: hard covers, glossy codices, "official" rulings, and the poisonous idea that deviation required permission.

But at the same time, the need to sell the product as approachable meant stripping rules of their authority as well — "the rules are only a framework," "the story matters most." Thus, they became simultaneously sacred and irrelevant, fixed in publication but fluid in practice.

And then, when the game was reframed again as an instrument of emotional expression and community-building, the function of rules shifted from structure to support. The dice no longer governed consequence; they became props for self-actualization. In that logic, a rigid rule threatens the player’s inner journey, and a mutable one threatens the DM’s control — so both are discarded in favour of "feel."

The end result is an irrational mess that says nothing, stands for nothing, allows nothing and provides nothing... except for those dumb enough to run after fireflies believing they are glittering, fluttering pieces of gold. And how exciting the chase is.

As an aside, I adore the underlining of pencil, to remind the reader not to use a pen. Ah, the world we lived in once.

Men & Magic (Vol. I) details what characters can be played, potentials, limitations, and various magical spells. Monsters & Treasure (Vol. II) describes the beasts and creatures which will be encountered, as well as the kind and amount of treasure they are likely to guard, including magical items. Finally, The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures (Vol. III) tells how to set up and actually play the campaign. It is presented last in order to allow the reader to gain the perspective necessary — the understanding of the two preceding booklets. Read through the entire work in the order presented before you attempt to play.

Unquestionably, the work had be split into three books due to the production costs and publishing logistics of 1973. Even small print runs of a bound volume could be ruinously expensive, while three stapled booklets meant they could be run on smaller presses and collated by hand. The "White Box" was a brilliantly shrewd marketing approach for its time. It helped provide competition with the slick, big house wargame publishing house like Avalon Hill, whose thick cardboard boxes were stood on end, setting them apart from the standard Parker Bros. style boardgame. The colour white, I'd propose, was inspired by the White Album, the aesthetic of which, released 5 years before, had made an unprecedented avant-garde splash (a refusal to "advertise") on the public consciousness.  A white plain box gives an aura of mystery, while it escapes the cluttering aspect of three easily scattered books, any one of which could be lost and thus wreck the game's value. The books weren't options, they were functional parts, all of which had to be located when needed. A box kept that in order, along with the dice which were sometimes, sometimes not included.

In fact, the first thousand sets, often called the "woodgrain box," included a small set of polyhedral dice: a d4, d6, d8, d12, and d20. These were imported from a California educational supplier called Creative Publications, which sold "Platonic solids" for teaching geometry. TSR literally bought them in bulk, bagged them and tossed them in. The later White Box was supposed to include dice, but supply was inconsistent. They were expensive and hard to get, so in some runs TSR substituted "chits" — numbered cardboard counters the players could cut out and draw from a cup to simulate rolls. I vaguely remember games when such were used, but not D&D, as I came to the game after the time that "first edition" was released.

The books essentially work as a DM/Players Guide, a Monster Manual and a DM supplement. All the character creation, the spell lists and player interface is in Men & Magic, but combat tables, and NPC supplements also appear. Monsters and Treasure is essentially the MM, with the two linked intentionally: you meet one, you earn the other. That was, more or less the game's only incentive structure. Underworld and Wilderness discussed how to structure adventures, how to build dungeons, how to manage the outdoors. It introduces the idea of a campaign as a persistent "world."

SCOPE:

With the various equipage listed in the following section, DUNGEONS & DRAGONS will provide a basically complete, nearly endless campaign of all levels of fantastic-medieval wargame play. Actually, the scope need not be restricted to the medieval; it can stretch from the prehistoric to the imagined future, but such expansion is recommended only at such time as the possibilities in the medieval aspect have been thoroughly explored. The use of paper, pencil and map boards are standard. Miniature figures can be added if the players have them available and so desire, but miniatures are not required, only esthetically pleasing; similarly, unit counters can be employed — with or without figures — although by themselves the bits of cardboard lack the eye-appeal of the varied and brightly painted miniature figures.

As we have discussed widescale campaigns already, and can leave this off until the books get into it, let's begin with that telling duality: "fantastic-medieval."  It is quite evident, from the context of miniatures, from what has been said before, that the game is not about "living a fantasy."  The word "fantastic" here, though doing a lot of heavy lifting, is not describing "imaginative self-expression" or "immersive storytelling."  It is speaking of magical exceptions within a period-specific military frame. The "fantasy" element was an expansion of tactical realism, not a replacement of it. The dragons, balrogs, and spells were to the wargame what air power or artillery was to a historical simulation — new vectors of capability, governed by the same logic of positioning, supply, and attrition.

The word "medieval" grounds that exception. It tells what tactical assumptions apply: melee weapons, personal combat, hierarchical orders, logistics measured in feet and yards. It's a period constraint, NOT an aesthetic.

Thus, the proposal that "D&D" could be made prehistoric is a reference to what incorporated technology might apply. The makers here are saying, "we did the work to manage the weapons of this time period..." if you want to set D&D in the future, the Old West, the Roman Era, or 40,000 B.C., your problem isn't rewriting a whole new game, it's figuring out the approximate effectiveness, ranges, weights, spoilage or whatever that would apply to whatever time period YOU want to play in.
Those who felt that a Boot Hill, Traveller, GammaWorld or Rolemaster required the change of every rule and every structure were merely reinventing the wheel for ownership reasons, not because those changes necessarily created a better game. It was a proprietary reflex, a drive to stake ownership through differentiation. Each re-implemented the same basic chassis — randomisation, spatial movement, resource tracking, combat resolution — but with new dice, new tables and new terminology because commercial distinction demanded it.

It was there, when the copycats rushed forward, the legitimacy of the original model having proved itself, that the continuity of the game was lost — a full decade before the 2nd edition was launched. Most of these come-latelys failed, largely because they were rushed into production, barely game tested, and because ultimately they depended upon stealing an existing market from someone else. Those that have survived did so because humans are unusually sympathetic to difference, while certain folk are always able to find a specific element in something that appeals to them personally. But for myself, though I've played a number of these other games, they remain essentially D&D to my mind. The landscape remains, however, a series of shrines which each camp has built to sustain their personal fetish: realism, narrative, gear, skill trees, dice systems. What they call identity is mostly preference dressed up as philosophy.

The use of pencil, paper and mapboard were the standard because it was 1973; and it still made sense into the late 1990s. It only remains as a testament to how many DMs truly aren't computer savvy... and, without my having personally tried the plug-and-play graphic systems that exist, how poorly they've succeeded in winning over the majority. They reproduce the look of the mapboard but not the authority of it. They assume automation equals ease, when in fact it often erases the DM’s fluency. Without the ability to move every depicted element, or change every visual aspect, such designed shortcuts cannot replace a simple pencil mark on a cheap stretch of paper. The simple act of drawing a door, sketching a corridor, or writing "pit trap" by hand establishes a kind of sovereignty that no automation can replicate.

I had a collection of miniatures once. And yes, of course, they appeal in every way just as the text says. I'm glad I'm free of them. For all their benefit, they're based on a wargame combat table, where every detail about the piece was self-evident in the piece. A table-top RPG requires paper, pencils, books, laptops... and because the participants are sitting, drinks and snacks beside. This leaves little room in the tables centre for the tableaux of combat... which is why I prefer a top down representation on a wall-mounted computer screen, this being 2025.

Age Level: 12 years and up.

Number of Players: At least one referee and from four to fifty players can be handled in any single campaign, but the referee to player ratio should be about 1:20 or thereabouts.

That has to be respected. Who here would argue that a ref-to-player ratio ought to be yourself and twenty? That is not a cozy night at a table; that needs a board room, a game store, the kind of space that universities provide for small events. For awhile, my crew and I used to play at a small recessed lounge located in Science B at the University of Calgary; we'd just fetch a table from one of the open classrooms and sit on the plush chairs in a space 30 feet wide and literally 18 feet or so high. Like playing in a palace, with all the vending machines one could want. Universities were "open" 24 hours then. We had no "right" to play there, never had to sign a book to get the space; it was ours by default because we played Saturday nights and the university was a ghost town... just the typical few score of hardcore studiers scattered throughout the building. If anyone asked, we could prove we were students... but no one ever asked. Was chilled, though. Temperature never got above 65. I moved to a new place and my games returned to civilisation.

As for age 12... well, I was 15 in 1979, so I never experienced that.  My daughter's first game, not mine, happened when she was 9 or 10. Most around seem to identify an age around that range. But then, that might be because they're still around. The "dabblers," as I defined the term in the previous post, they probably all start a lot later. I've never introduced anyone to the game younger than 14. And that was when I was 15.

That's enough.