Dungeons & Dragons White Box 13

Ah, memories.

This chart is worth the price of admission. The concept is wholly sound, playable — if simplistic, which is entirely forgivable, since it's the prototype of a lot that was to follow. The argument that the later DMG overdid this is fair... I'm not included in that number, but I can understand that the straightforwardness of this is a breath of fresh air, given all that was to follow.

The need to balance clerics and mages, too, makes sense, since fighters have to be given something that puts them ahead of the other two classes. That all attacks cause the same damage has been embraced by a large number, though I think it tosses out a significant game choice in testing one weapon's power against the space required, it's weight, it's durability if dropped and the number of hands it needs. But all that doesn't really need to be a part of the game, if the DM feels a need to cut the detail somewhere.

The accompanying page 20, too, is straightforward... and heck, this is the centrepiece of the game. So long as this was constructed well, the remaining inconsistencies and mess of introductory content could be ignored. I played hundreds of hours of D&D that consisted of just fighting one group of monsters against another, or one party against another, because the feel for not knowing how it would come out was enough to seize my imagination at the time.

My first post talks about how my 1st level fighter, needing a 14 on this table to keep from being turned to stone, failed. I only know I needed a 14 because now I can look at the table... hell if I could remember it otherwise. I didn't complain when it happened. I was hopelessly confused and I didn't know what a basilisk was, but once the concept was explained, I was ready to roll with it. My personal character's success was not what mattered to me; what mattered was the concept of this game, and how that blew my mind. It really did change my perception of what a game could be, and as is self-evident, effectively my life as well. I wound up giving myself completely to this. While others went off to be other things, I stayed and did other things so they could support this. A fair evaluation of that would be to say I was, and am, obsessed.

But that doesn't blind me to the problems here, which I don't need to dig into again just now. I repeat, these guys were not geniuses. For all the cleverness of the above tables, and the pleasure I've found in implementing them and offspring they spawned, nothing in the above is more complicated than might have appeared in any of a hundred wargames that were actively being played at the time. Just as the comment I made about repulping car ad content in a post yesterday, the same goes for the familiarity we all had with tables that designated hitting, movement, interdictory fire, retreat, enfilade and half a hundred other things that made straight up box tables. Good on these guys that they knew how to copy well. Good on them that they understood how to adapt the concept to this particular ideal. But don't miss that the above is quite simple. It's not rocket science. It did not take a "genius" to make.  Calling these guys geniuses just because they succeeded is not a defacto truth. It's absolutely possible to pull a Homer. Rich business folk do it all the time.

Which brings us to a completely different discussion regarding the White Box. There's little value to be found in debating the existence and coordination of spell-use. Obviously it worked. I'd argue that this, better than the combat table, provided real value to the game as a whole, since it solved the esoteric, hard to visualise problem that magic creates.

Consider. A boardgame assumed a bounded reality: movement rates, attack ranges, line of sight, terrain effects and so on. Every rule depends on stable physics: what can you see, how fast can you move, what are the dictates of ballistics, a simple understanding of what can and cannot happen. The concept of magic — and here, think of it before D&D solved this — obliterates the framework. The very idea supposes that effects can be created out of thin air, in an unbounded fashion that ignores physics. Line of sight may not be necessary, range is a movable feast, movement isn't even necessary for the caster — or its achieved by teleporting or levitating in ways that typical wargame combatants cannot.

Even the visual represention of magic is a huge challenge. Your figure, your friend's figures are represented on the board; but the moment that magic happens, it is both physical and not; a blast is assumed to take out this number of enemy, or damage them somehow, but the actual representation of the magic isn't necessary, since it happens in a blip of time. Thus, all of that, like a flying arrow, doesn't get represented... it has to be imagined, which necessarily tests the participants to keep up with that. So all of that magic, once created, has to be memorable enough so that when I say "protection from evil" or "hold person," you must know what I'm talking about. In fact, everyone at the table does. Think of it as consensus hallucination. We say the fireball happens in this circle, and every player appreciates what that means, together. Habitually.

This abstraction is an enormous hurdle to overcome. And for a lot of us here, thinking about trying to explain spells to some players, it's still a hurdle that exists.

Suppose you're going to fashion a group of spells from scratch, and you don't have the above to work with. Some of this was made for Chainmail, so assume you don't have that either. It's 1969, you've got the moon landing in the background and you're thinking, hey, "What if I wanted to create a list of spells that a warlock or witch could conceivably cast in a wargame. What would I start with?"

You see the issue. Even the decision to do that is an enormous connection that needs to be made. The idea of people casting spells has been around for about 15 centuries and yet, aside from Alistair Crowley, who's ever tried to codify them? And let me tell you, what Crowley codified is not D&D worthy.

Magic in literature and myth is story-motivated, not strategic. It obeyed the emotional logic a writer needed, not the qualitative framework of a board game. The game needs range, duration, something that challenges the magic's automatic effectiveness... and none of this exists as a concept as the crew of the Eagle are nearly crashing on the moon. So where do you start?

To begin with, the range concept comes first. Magic is a sort of ordnance. That gets us out of the myth and folklore story stranglehold. If we see magic as a tank shell, that presupposes that it isn't cast by virtue of imagination. You can only cast your magic "bomb" so far, and otherwise according to fixed principles: line-of-sight again, with area of effect.  The duration of that effect matches other game elements such as dropping smoke upon an enemy position, which is established logically by real world combat simulations. The amount of effect, the number it affects, that gives a graded scale of how dangerous the magic bomb is... and that permits a heirarchy of scale. This magic is a 1st level "bomb," that's a 5th level "bomb" and so on.

The limitations of the bombs becomes self-evident. Just as a tank hasn't infinite shells, the mage can't have infinite bombs. In fact, we can reason that a lot of them, like fireball, are so dangerous that if the mage can manage then more than once a mass combat, it overloads the mage's power... so we imagine the mage's "magazine" being loaded with a group of individualised shells, none of them the same, so that there are enough shells to be fired to keep the mage in the game, but not all of a type that overtips the balance.

This concept of battlefield mechanics is what keeps the magic system from getting out of control, giving it a sensible, internally consistent and quantifiable structure. The scarcity of shots is absolutely necessary — otherwise, the combat balance of the mage is shattered and the overall system as well. This system has endured, despite later iterations, because the magazine structure was respected. Later game editions ignored it. The result has been the necessity to turn the fighter into ordnance as well, which as completely flattened the game into a boring, meaningless broth. Except for the words used, every class is essentially the same gun.

But the temptation has been to presume that spells in the game are, well, "magical."   But the magic system was never about the fanciful beauty of showy imagination. It's about importing the language of artillery tables into the imagination, and calling the resultant physics "magic."

The real nuance is in how the "magazine" was able to include ordance that had nothing to do with battlefield mechanics. Read languages, light, locate object, wizard lock, clairvoyance and -audience, water breathing... these were problem-solving ordnance, designed specifically to allow the players to overcome specific game obstacles outside the combat system. This is where the system truly shines, because it excuses the game from the endless combat treadmill without presupposing the only exit is role-playing. Such spells proliferate for the mage in later systems, as it became clearer what the game could be about.

With this in mind, look at the cleric spells. More than a "healer," the character is an enabler, one that helps avoid traps, acquire knowledge from animals, identify powers outside the ken of others, even force the will of others to pursue solutions. While the mage really is the tank of the party, the cleric is the intelligence office, running the M*A*S*H unit as well.

Looked at this way, we can see the cleric isn't a "weak mage" and it's just the party medic either. It's an interlocking system that permits the party to attack, prevent, repair, recon and maintain morale, while generating the ongoing process of game narration, both inside and outside the active adventuring itself.

That's the brilliance hidden in the simplicity of the early spell charts. They define not just what a character can do but what role they play in the team’s operational structure. The cleric is command and control, the mage is fire support, the fighter is the line unit, and the thief (once introduced) becomes reconnaissance and infiltration.

And then the later game, after AD&D, fucked all that up, partly by treating every character as though they could "do it all," and then pretty much steamrolling over the game so that there was no game to play. The interplay between these classes has been so overwritten now it's rarely understood how well they worked together.