Dungeons & Dragons White Box 06

Halflings: Should any player wish to be one, he will be limited to the Fighting-Men class as a halfling. Halflings cannot progress beyond the 4th level (Hero), but they will have magic-resistance equal to dwarves (add four levels for saving throws), and they will have deadly accuracy with missiles as detailed in CHAINMAIL.

Point in fact, while the principle text has the 1974 copyright, the presence of "halfling" here demonstrates that this was likely printed after 1975, when TSR received a cease-and-desist from the Tolkein estate. Thereafter, "hobbit" was scrubbed from the text and replaced with halfling. I never saw this as an issue. I rather appreciate that the emotional/cliched tropes attached to the races haven't been included here. We're not told that dwarves and elves don't get along, or that dwarves are dour, elves are effete and halflings are plucky. That leaves a lot of room to breathe, to let these races become whatever a given DM wants, rather than an expectation that they'll serve a cookie-cutter motif. I can't speak for players who perhaps live and die on the principle that some perfect semblance of the races exist, because I've never had one of these play in my campaign. Generally, my experience has been that players either don't care, or they'd rather be allowed to interpret the races in their own way. This way, no two elves need think alike, act alike, dislike dwarves alike and so on. While halflings can fit into the game world without having to own under-the-hill habitats or have round doors or generally act like hayseed countryfied Englanders.

Everything after has worked to model every class, every race, every fictional land and city in some way or another, and it has never worked to produce anything more that a random spattering of tired tropes, as though picked from a large bin. The weakness of a completely fictional being or place isn't the lack of adjectives, but that it isn't real. "Greyhawk," for all the depth it pretends to have, isn't as complicated as a single territory anywhere on the earth, simply because the time needed to graph it down to the complexity of, say, Devonshire, would be a wasted effort — because, as the case is, that complexity would have to be stolen from some region of the earth, that being the only model to draw upon. Likewise, dwarves, elves and halflings, for all the romance they add, are really just reskinned humans. We have no idea what a dwarf would actually think like, so we make it think like a human with what we see as "dwarvish" characteristics. But it's all really a sham. That's why the numbers and abilities are what counts, not the modelling we've used that infringes upon actual game play. The game is not literature. It works best when it functions as a procedure.

Other Character Types: There is no reason that players cannot be allowed to play as virtually anything, provided they begin relatively weak and work up to the top, i.e., a player wishing to be a Dragon would have to begin as, let us say, a "young" one and progress upwards in the usual manner, steps being predetermined by the campaign referee.

I believe this was a rather naive assumption, but it's easy to see why it was made — for, as we've said, the game described here is a wargame, not the character-driven role-playing game of later. When the principle purpose of a character is to define their scope in battle, sure, a dragon is completely fine as an option. But even by 1979 the idea of a single player participating in a campaign as a dragon would be filled with intra-party hazards, a game world based on human history and not made for dragons, its size, its appetite, it's mythic gravity and presence among "ordinary" NPCs... such a creature played as a character would thereafter just become "the dragon show," with the same tropes played over and over. A human-centric setting can't contain such a thing without distorting it's internal logic.

But the creators at this time, with this set, hadn't conceived of that setting structure as yet. “Let them play anything” reads like an argument from fair play, not campaign narrative. What it actually exposes is the limit of wargame thinking: it confuses inclusion with interchangeability. Once the game began to take its own world seriously, the dragon could no longer be just another token on the board. The moment you ask what the dragon does when it isn’t fighting — how it exists as a visible thing in a world that rationally sees it as extremely dangerous and needing to be killed — the concept falls apart.

Not that present day game structures that pretend to have gotten around this issue really care...

Character Alignment, Including Various Monsters and Creatures: Before the game begins it is not only necessary to select a role, but it is also necessary to determine what stance the character will take — Law, Neutrality, or Chaos.

Character types are limited as follows by this alignment: (see image)

I'm going to try with all my might to be as positive as I can be. While actually saying something.

Give me a moment.

Let's start with what alignment does by virtue of the rules. It tells the DM what monsters can be "lured into service" by virtue of their alignment being matched by the party.  If a character is reincarnated as per the spell, the character's alignment limits what creatures it will be reincarnated as.

Alignment can influence the effectiveness of how a Quest spell affects you. Depending on your alignment, it may affect the random actions of some monsters you might meet. Most important of all, it affects your relationship with a magic sword.

And there we have it. This table, and the description above it, and the three books, never really explain the premise for why this is necessary or desirable. That's not a judgment, that's just a lack I can't help noticing. I assume the designers liked it for some reason. I don't know what that reason was. It wasn't included in the books.

The chainmail rules do not use the word "alignment," but looking up "chaos" and "law," the rules on page 39 say,

It is impossible to draw a distanct (sic) line between "good" and "evil" fantastic figures. Three categories are listed below as a general guide for the wargamer designing orders of battle involving fantastic creatures. Underlined Neutral figures have a slight pre-disposition for LAW. Neutral figures can be diced for to determine on which side they will fight, with ties meaning they remain neutral.

I don't find elucidation from this. 

Without judgment, this is the most baffling, weirdest part of D&D for me. I think "why" is self-explanatory. This is the start of a 40+ year belief system that, for a long, long time, held a great deal of importance for many writers, designers and game participants. It is a hill that a great many loud voices were ready to die on. Probably tens of thousands of hours went into writing around, for and in defense of alignment, trying to define it, trying to give the concept weight, offering it up as the central characteristic of a character's motivation for literally decades. Why someone would go back to the White Box set, find this and embrace it... well, you got me. People believe in angels. I guess there's room for all of us. I asked ChatGPT and it connected the phenomenon to Canticle for Leibowitz. I can buy that.

Changing Character Class: While changing class (for other than elves) is not recommended, the following rule should be applied: In order for men to change class they must have a score of 16 or better in the prime requisite (see below) of the class they wish to change to, and this score must be unmodified. A Cleric with a "strength" of 15, for example, could not become a Fighting-Man. In any event Magic-Users cannot become Clerics and vice-versa.

The changing roles this has also always confused me. Yes, players will want to cross the boundaries between classes, because they'll become attached to their character and grow weary of playing a given class. This is only encouraged when using the level maximums that are established here. So, in light of that, the attempt has been made to establish a threshold as a hedge against players doing it all the time. Why they didn't just write a rule here, "You cannot change classes..." well, that's just bad game design. Sorry. Don't mean to be so negative.

You write a rule in a game that says all the time, you cannot; you must; if "a", then "b"; if you pass GO, collect $200. If you go to jail from the Go to Jail square, you may not count that as passing GO. Rooks cannot move diagonally. Pawns cannot retreat. What's the problem here? They were able to draw the cleric/mage line. Why not all the lines?

The passage reveals the issues that have already cropped up between players and DMs of the only-in-house game that only the makers have ever played. And because the makers were never able to effectively resolve these issues, even for an "official" game they were publishing with their own money, they chose to award all these issues to all of us, generously. So the half-measure here, it isn't recommended, but if you have to, I mean, if the players really carp and whine, if you just can't control them, if you feel your shoes getting too full of clay, you can try the threshold and see if that works. At the end the only thing I would add are the words "Good luck." That would have been perfect.

Tackling a project like this, "Let's go through the White Box set and discuss," it has to be understood that there's more to it than to sing the praises of everything. Let's be clear. Within just four years it was clear to the creators of the game themselves that this set wasn't going to cut the mustard. They didn't just put out the Monster Manual in '77 and the new Players Handbook in '78 because it was a cash grab... they could tell, from the feedback they were getting, that there were monstrous-sized problems with three simple books where outsiders were concerned. And since those new books weren't moderate projects, they were probably started two, maybe three years before publication. That would suggest that within 12 to 15 months of the White Box set being published, TSR was ready to turn their backs on them, believing they could do better. In my opinion, they did. Of course they did, they'd had practice in game-making, they'd received feedback from sources they couldn't imagine tapping in 1973 and their eyes were opened.

To argue that the White Box Set possessed a deserved immortality is to ignore that time line. I started playing here in Canada in 1979. All three of the AD&D books had been published but they weren't available yet in this country. They didn't come available until the Autumn of 1979... literally weeks after my first game on September 6th. By Christmas, our DM's men and magic copy was tossed aside for the DMG, while I had my own set of three books given to me that year by my parents, at a cost of $45 to them. That's $190-200 in today's money. By Spring, no one anywhere was using the three books being discussed here. I'm not even sure they were still for sale at the D&D game store, that little place on Crowchild Trail (then) called the Sentry Box. We saw the better system and just moved on.

I didn't hear the words "White Box Set" until I came on the internet around 1998. I didn't know what that meant for at least another five years, when blogging became a thing. When I learned it was Men and Magic et al, I could not believe anyone cared about it. We never called it a box set because the DM I played with had thrown away the box. Or so I suppose. It was always three books he tossed on the table when we started. Though I could be confused about that, because we only played with them for about eight to ten weeks of my experience.

Going through this, now, I don't know how Shane did it. That's my first DM, though I've called him Shawn I think on this blog, and probably some other name too. It was a long time ago. He'd be about 63 now. I wonder what he'd think.

That's enough.