Dungeons & Dragons White Box 03

RECOMMENDED EQUIPMENT:

Dungeons & Dragons (you have it)

Dice — 1 pair 4-sided dice, 1 pair 8-sided dice, 4 to 20 pairs 6-sided dice, 1 pair 20-sided dice, 1 pair 12-sided dice

Chainmail miniature rules, latest edition

1 3-ring Notebook (referee and each player)

Graph Paper (6 lines per inch is best)

Sheet Protectors (heaviest possible)

3-Ring Lined Paper

Drafting Equipment and Colored Pencils

Scratch Paper and Pencils

Imagination

1 Patient Referee

Players

I had to question if it was worthwhile including this list and commenting upon it. It follows the rules of every game, the assumption that the users have not the first idea of what they'll need or how to go about readying themselves. The time period dictated that it should all be tactile, the basic requirements for a university student per class, since in effect it's the act of keeping records, preserving the notes, making updates and possibly filing it or expanding it into other larger models of data collection. It's an equipment list for the mock Paper and Paycheques role-playing game suggested in the later DMG.

The deciding factor, I thought, was the impulse to be coy. "Imagination" as equipment, which now strikes me odd having conceded recently that not everyone has it. Of course, the pretense of reticent humour later ends up being a pounding drumbeat of the proselytisation that would strangle 5e, when it mutates into a commandment. In 1974, the little flourish of the "patient" DM is playful. In 2014, the expection of X-cards and impotencification of the DM carries a rather different message. To put it most bitterly, the DM has become "caregiver facilitator" while the players have been replaced as "emotionally validated participants."

But that's not the message here, and I don't mean to suggest it is. I'm merely discussing the warping of the model, since we have the benefit of hindsight. The designers of the White Box sincerely wished to invite, not instruct. Their tone is collegial, not evangelical. They wrote for equals — wargamers, hobbyists, sharp-minded tinkerers who already possessed the temperament to build things from incomplete instructions. The list reads as a gesture of inclusion: Here’s what you’ll need if you want to play like us. The humour about "imagination" and a "patient referee" assumes the reader gets the joke, because we could actually do that with jokes. No one ever expected them to be taken with such dire seriousness.

It was a time of trust, a certainty that it was safe to place irony on the page without the need of footnotes. Those who go back to these books want that... the same way they want the first three Star Wars films before The Phantom Cash Grab came and ruined it all. A credibility, a thing that treated the audience as adults, who could decide for themselves what needed restraint and what was implied, without being told what to think. Here are the books, it says. You don't need supervision.

PREPARATION FOR THE CAMPAIGN:

The referee bears the entire burden here, but if care and thought are used, the reward will more than repay him. First, the referee must draw out a minimum of half a dozen maps of the levels of his "underworld," people them with monsters of various horrid aspect, distribute treasures accordingly, and note the location of the latter two on keys, each corresponding to the appropriate level. This operation will be more fully described in the third volume of these rules. When this task is completed the participants can then be allowed to make their first descent into the dungeons beneath the "huge ruined pile, a vast castle built by generations of mad wizards and insane geniuses.” Before they begin, players must decide what role they will play in the campaign, human or otherwise, fighter, cleric, or magic-user. Thereafter they will work upwards — if they survive — as they gain "experience." First, however, it is necessary to describe fully the roles possible.

Lots to unpack. I'll start by explaining that "keys" refers to the DM's notes explaining what's found in a specific room or area, as we've all seen. I'll add that because I'm not criticising, it was assumed that players were here with the expectation that entering the dungeon was defacto expected — not because the dungeon master wanted it, not because the players wanted it, but merely because this was the game. To the time period, it meant no more than the words, "Start all the players on GO."  Entering the dungeon wasn't an act of choice, it wasn't a story space, it was the board.  Motivation was no more needed here than it would be in Monopoly, while the goal was inherent: explore, survive, accumulate, advance in levels. Note the total absence of being asked to generate NPCs.

Since the details about player choice of class/race makes up the next section, I'll merely offer that, again, were talking board pieces. The word used is "roles." Character does appear as the heading of the next section, but I wish to stress that the word here is being used in its most general sense: not "the mental and moral qualities distinctive to an individual," the first definition you'll find in a dictionary, but the OTHER definition: "a person in a novel, play or movie." That eventually gets into muddy water also, since it includes "the part played by an actor," which ends up leading to a performance model that obliterates the game piece model. Be that as it may, what it means here is that your piece is a fighter, cleric or magic user. That does not mean you are. The dungeon doesn't care who you think you are — it only responds to what you do.

If it helps, trying thinking of it as choosing whether or not you want to be a rook, a bishop or a knight... but with a more options all having equal weight. There are no kings and queens and no one has to be a pawn.

This leaves two things. The "pile" and "the referee must..." Sigh. Okay, the pile first.

With the game played on this level, the goal was more or less to create an ongoing game board that would sustain itself through multiple nights of play. Because nearly everyone was new to the game, which made learning to play the primary goal, what in the pile happened to be adjacent to what else was in the pile did not matter.  Fight some pirates, open the door and find yourself facing skeletons? No big deal. Who cares. Matters as much as New York Avenue lying next to Free Parking. Not relevant to game play.

The continuity that was later fetishised (my hand is up, yes) wasn't here yet. The goal wasn't to craft coherence but to maintain activity. The dungeon wasn’t a narrative space, it was a machine for repetition — a geography of perpetual engagement. What mattered was that you could keep playing. The adjacency of pirates to skeletons wasn’t absurd; it was functional. The pieces were shuffled to ensure encounter density, not internal logic. The dungeon’s topology worked like a board: a sequence of discrete, consequence-bearing zones, their juxtaposition producing variety rather than verisimilitude. You didn’t ask why a troll lived three doors down from a gelatinous cube. Who cares? The system’s thrill, it's popularity, arose out of its procedures. "We're fighting zombies! Can you believe we're fighting zombies?" That's about as deep as it got.

We're so jaded now, it's hard to imagine this. But if most people who can't run D&D were to throw out the stories and the collaboration models and the garbage surrounding character enrichment and player validation, and just ran others in worlds where they had to fight interesting creatures in complicated environments (moving floors, ice, while climbing the side of a cliff, through tunnels that have to be crawled through)... they'd find the game a lot easier to run and they'd find players who were less interested in self-aggrandisement. It is, after all, the reason the game became popular in the first place. The appeal was in facing something uncertain, not in being applauded for how you felt about it.

Now, the minimum of half a dozen maps does not arise from needing half a dozen on any particular game night. It's not there to say, "If you're world hasn't reach this size, its insufficient as a world for you characters." The minimum is imposed because they expect that you, the new DM, will fail at this task if you haven't got the resolve to map at least six levels. It's saying that if you're ready to quit at four, you're not the DM of this party. It's even saying that if it's that hard for you to do this much, which really isn't anything when measured against how much work you'll do in a year, then this self as DM fantasy that you have? Put that on a shelf.

There are two kinds of people who are going to read those words, "...must draw out a minimum...", and react to them. The first is pretty much anyone you'll see right now on Reddit: "Oh my gawd, six? You're kidding me."

The other is me. The fellow who is right now writing his eighth post for this blog in two days: "Just six? Are you sure you don't mean sixteen? Is that a typo?"

It's a line of temperment, and you've encountered it all your life, beginning in grade school. When you were told in grade six that you had to right a 500-word essay, you either groaned or you thought, "Sure, I can do that." That's the line between player and DM. I truly wish that the "players" would get that, and stay on their side of that, and stop thinking that a few hours of preparation is "preparation."  The DM is the one who comes home, eats, showers and then thinks, "Oh good, I can work on my world now." There's no sense of how much there is to do, no sense that there's a point where they're "done," no inclination to stop working because it's getting boring or otherwise just not retaining their attention. Stopping work happens when it's time to sleep. Which you put off because, well, just another half hour, that's all we ask. If a DM tells you, "I have to go home and put some work in on my campaign," quit running in that DM's game. The words "have to" tell you everything. Those words should be, "want to." You want to run in a good game? Have some standards.

The maps, the tables, the redesign of things, the development of systems, these aren't chores, they're not make-work... they're the reflexive response to a thought that never shuts itself off. It's working on level three of the orc dungeon until sleep demands its due, then laying in bed before sleep shuts off the lights thinking about the third level, then thinking about the third level while brushing teeth and scraping the snow off the car and getting to work and then doing work, when you sneak in writing a note or two while at work, then writing those notes during lunch, after apologising to your coworkers that you've made an appointment so you can't join then... and then another long afternoon of thinking about it while waiting for quitting time, then getting anxious about getting to do it when we get home... and then telling our spouse, "You mind if I put dinner off for a half-hour, I just want to get down a few ideas that came to me in the day, before I lose them." And if she, or he, loves you, they'll say yes, because while they'd rather you make dinner right now, the glow of happiness in your face is something that makes it hard for them to say no. That's dungeon mastering. It's not whatever the hell it is those people on Reddit do.

It's not really "prep time." I describe it as that here, but I don't think about it that way. It's just the practice of a mind that wants to stay with it. And when I have a crash, as I do, it happens because the thread of thought abandons me for a time. But it comes again. It always comes again.