Dungeons & Dragons White Box 12

Levels: There is no theoretical limit to how high a character may progress, i.e. 20th-level Lord, 20th-level Wizard, etc. Distinct names have only been included for the base levels, but this does not influence progression.

I guess it's fascinating. Here this is, yet no acknowledgement that effort explaining how gain experience past the name level isn't given. As though assuming it has been explained, somewhere, and so it doesn't here, where it belongs. One thing's for certain. Confidence is very high.

Dice for Accumulative Hits (Hit Dice): This indicates the number of dice which are rolled in order to determine how many hit points a character can take. Pluses are merely the number of pips to add to the total of all dice rolled not to each die. Thus a Superhero gets 8 dice + 2; they are rolled and score 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 5, 6/totals 26 + 2 = 28, 28 being the number of points of damage the character could sustain before death. Whether sustaining accumulative hits will otherwise affect a character is left to the discretion of the referee.

Interesting language here. We're talking about generating hit points,  so normally the verb would describe how many hit points the character "gets," but here it's how many the character "takes." True enough, it's the number a character can "take" before dying, but when that's explained, the word used isn't "take," it's "sustain"... again, an interesting word choice, since the latter means in this context, "to undergo or suffer," as an ongoing thing. So as I "sustain" damage, i.e. suffer, I remove the hit points I "took" when I generated my character. Meanwhile, damage "sustained" is also "accumulated," which means gather together or acquire an increasing number... so strictly in a language sense, I'm acquiring suffering against a thing I take as a characteristic of my character.

Thank heaven I had a DM at the time to explain it to me. Without him to tell me that hit points were a thing I got and damage meant losing those hit points, I've have been in hot water trying to figure this out with my grade 10 vocabulary.

That's not the only one, either. Why "pips"? I know what a pip is, it's the dot on a die. When the die reads 5, there are 5 pips showing. But here the word is used to describe the modifier to the die, not the actual dots on the die. The "number of pips" referred to here are things added to the pips that we add together from the various dice.

'Course, I'd be amiss if I failed to point out that in D&D, "pips" only appear on the d6. There are no pips on a d8 or a d4, both of which are used to roll hit points. At least I think they are. It's funny, I went searching, and the entirety of the books include the words "eight-sided" just once, on page 29 of The Underworld and Wilderness Adventures. To determine wind direction. No other instance occurs, except to say that the eight-sided die is included in the game. Several of the monsters, as well as treasure, uses a range of 1-8. That's a cursory search, of course; I may have missed something.

So... even when we have a rule that's perfectly fine, that's still used, that's ordinary and practical, that anyone can understand when it's explained to them... the language in the book not only gets hyper-creative explaining it, it does so while folding that same language into other language that also doesn't make sense. The effort is so elaborate it deserves recognition as an achievement.

Fighting Capability: This is a key to use in conjunction with the CHAINMAIL fantasy rule, as modified in various places herein. An alternative system will be given later for those who prefer a different method.

This is found at the bottom of page 18. It has nothing to do with what begins page 19, and it does not refer to hit points. I understand what it's saying, but we already knew the combat system for these books could be found in chainmail, and at any rate, this is the Men & Magic book, not the Adventures book. So apart from what it means, why is it here? Why mention this at all? Because they had three blank lines at the end of the page? Which could have been used to better explain hit point acquisition?

The writers may have very well BELIEVED they were telling us something important here. I just don't know what that could have been.

Spells & Levels: The number above each column is the spell level (complexity, a somewhat subjective determination on the part of your authors). The number in each column opposite each applicable character indicates the number of spells of each level that can be used (remembered during any single adventure) by that character. Spells are listed and explained later. A spell used once may not be reused in the same day.

There, simple enough. There's a list of spells in the book, they're rated a certain level, you can pick whichever you can cast so long as you don't pick it twice the same day. No memorisation, so for those who dislike that later rule, excellent. No personalised spellbook either. None of this using the same spell over and over. Essentially, a good, solid reason why someone wanting a more direct, simpler system for spellcasters would come to this version of the game. Yay, it happened.

From this comment from Nathan P. Mahney, this is too coherent to be from someone with a tenuous grasp of English, so it's apparently not Arneson. I find it hard to believe that Gygax would admit to the "subjectivity" of what spell goes on what level. I could be wrong, but that feels... too humble for Gygax.

Levels Above those Listed: Progressions of Dice for Accumulative Hits, Fighting Capability, and Spells & Levels may not be evident. An 11th-level Lord would get 10 + 3 dice and fight as he did at the 10th level; but at 12th level, he could get 11 + 1 dice and fight at Superhero + 2. At 13th level dice would be 11 + 3 with Fighting Capability at Superhero + 2. A 17th-level Wizard would get 9 + 3 dice and fight as at 16th level, just as an 18th-level Wizard would get dice of 10 + 1 with no change in Fighting Capabilities — the change coming at the 19th level, fighting then being done at Wizard + 3. An 11th-level Patriarch would get dice of 7 + 3 with Fighting Capability unchanged; at 12th level dice would be 8 + 1 with no change in fighting; and at 13th level the Patriarch would get 8 + 2 and fight as a Superhero — the next change in Fighting Capability coming at the 17th level.

Why isn't 11th level +2? If it goes up by +1/+3 over two levels as it seems to, why is it 11+3 at 13th and then 12+3 at 17th, a four-level gap?

Honest, sorry, I just don't want to untangle this. Here and there a pattern seems to emerge, and then the next line breaks it. If the fighting capability for the Cleric changes every third level, then if it changes at 13th it ought to change again at 16th. Here it says 17th. It's all ridiculous. Why didn't they just write better and include the whole table instead of some crappy pictures earlier?

I suppose that if the printed tables were already set, and someone thought, "Oh, wait, what if they go above name level?" someone said, "If we make it a table we have to go back to the start and do the typesetting all over again, blah blah, lazy lazy, blah blah."  And the next person said, "Right, well write something" and Gygax said, "I'll use my notes, they'll be fine."

There, explained. As well as I possibly can.

Nathan wrote (link above), "Gygax rushed this out the door because he was worried someone else might beat them to the punch." I can accept that on the face of it, but it raises questions. Who else was "racing" them? Has anybody got a name? And if so, why didn't they do what forty other copycats would start doing in 1976... just invent their own version?

A rushed print deadline would explain why so much of this text feels like it was lifted from someone's notes scrawled on yellow foolscap notepaper, but it's not like there was a corporate deadline, right? And people keep telling me, the creators didn't know it was going to be this successful. That they were just throwing it together on a lark, not because they thought it was really going to sell. So then, why rush? We live in the world of self-made creative products, thrown out in the form of millions of daily products thrown onto various websites and product movers like Amazon and Etsy. Are any of those products (counting only the ones that cost a fair bit to make) anywhere nearly as badly put together as this? 

Wikipedia gives a price of about $2,000 that these guys had to lay out to make this thing happen in 1974. In today's money, that's about 12,305. Now, without thinking of what that would buy in terms of game design in the present day (not much if you want to make a splatbook), just think of that in terms of your money coming out of your bank account to make your project. Nothing else. They were out $2,000, you're out $12,305. Would you pay out the equivalent of $12,000 in the year 1974 to make this thing happen, and then not make sure the language was fine? Would you treat it as a dumping ground for illogical paragraph note inclusion?  Is this how you would value an amount of money which for them was what $12,305 would today cost you?

Spending $2,000 to launch a product in 1974 was a serious commitment, and for that investment one would expect a finished, polished product. At the time, that amount of money could have paid for proper typesetting, editing, and consistent design even at a small printer in 1974. So the poor quality wasn’t inevitable. It really suggests these makers had the money to blow, that it didn't come out of their own pockets. This thing reads like someone's daddy paid for it. If so, we wouldn't know it. We know that Don Kaye and Gygax each put up a thousand dollars. But if that came from an aunt, an inheritance or drug money, the internet wouldn't acknowledge it because the last source was the two partners.

The real question is, where did these two incompetents (based on the product's quality), these two hobbyists in their thirties, get that money in 1973? Neither was sitting on wealth. Gygax was barely scraping by, working odd jobs, raising a family; Kaye was a friend with a steady income but not deep pockets. If the money didn’t come from their own disposable income, it almost certainly came through family support or quiet personal backing. The product matches that profile perfectly: it feels like money that wasn't earned through personal risk or sweat equity. If it had been — if either of these guys had been gambling rent money — the book would've been tightened, edited, typeset properly and proofed. People who risk their savings don’t casually publish incoherence. The whole project reeks of people who could affort not to care. That would explain the slapdash text, the missing tables, the laissez-faire approach to editing. I suggest that its probable that these guys thought they had nothing to lose because it wasn't their money.

And let's face it. Gygax was never good with money.