At some point, questions about why D&D was structured the way that it was, why the players were expected to kill monsters to achieve victory points (er, ah, experience), why it used dice, why did gold allow level increase, why combat was given so much space, why the DM had the final say, why was randomness built into play, why did good and evil exist — and a great many other questions — became more important than how the game was played.
This seemed inoculous at first... just spitballing around parts of the game to question their efficacy and perhaps find where improvements could be made. Or, perhaps, just to have fun with the concept, "Isn't it funny that we're all murder hobos." Words said in jest, the enjoyed talk about a game that had seized our imagination. We alike the game enough to ask questions. That was all.
But then, an ideology inserted itself. A very small number of people began to ask questions like, "If we're enjoying a game about murdering these creatures without cause, what does it say about us?" "Isn't wanting treasure in the game essentially a sort of greed?" "Are alignments even ethical?" "And who says the DM ought to have the final say?"
These are normal questions. In a strange way, however, they reflect the suppositions that outsiders, specifically religious outsiders, were also imposing on the game's logic. Only in the 1990s, after the S.P. had passed, other social changes were infringing on the game's licence. "Isn't killing monsters a little violent?" "What about orcs — why are they the bad guys?" And then this was paired with the dissatisfaction that emerged in the 1990s. "I'm tired of rolling up characters." "I want my characters to be able to do more." "I want characters that are more powerful." And of course, that's precisely when the next system was designed to provide — at the price of character generation being made more difficult, more time consuming, making it less practical to kill characters. That tax was, in fact, disastrous when more organisation in more public spaces brought more people to the game for two and three hour session play... far less than the five or six hour periods that were more common in private homes in the 1980s. Hell, on one occasion, our group, about seven people, decided we'd have a 24-hour game session, from noon-to-noon, over the Easter holiday. Didn't work, of course. By five a.m., seventeen hours into the game, we were all bleary and struggling to add numbers on our character sheets. People began to crash on sofas and the floor so that by nine a.m., there were just two of us left. We woke everyone up and closed the game.
Not that it matters, but I've always been able to give players time to generate characters because my games never ran from 7 'til 9... yet I've known many such persons who've never played more than three hours of D&D at a go. That changes one's perspective.
To bring this home, however, I want to stress that the moral questioning that began to surface in the 90s — the concern over violence, the anxiety over representation — wasn't malicious; it was the cultural air that we had begun to breathe, not just while playing but all the time. Every venue, from campus to the workplace, were wrestling with the same questions: not how to do a thing, but what was the morally right way to do it. D&D was inevitably folded into that conversation.
The trouble is, a game doesn’t hold up well under that kind of scrutiny. It wasn’t built to provide ideology. "Orcs" were bad because that was the Tolkein shorthand. "Death" was okay because the game grew out of little chits played in a wargame atmosphere. "Alignment" was invented because it was perceived that non-creative minded people would need something upon which to structure character and motivation. Logic didn't count, because no one in 1975 could have guessed that any of these things would matter in 1995. And because 1995 had come to treat the originators as "creative gods," it was impossible for true believers to accept that these were just college guys with no more foresight about the future than anyone else. No, no, what had to be true was that Arneson, Gygax and the rest had a plan, an ideal, a hidden message in the concept that explained precisely why orcs had to be bad... while treating any contrary perspective as heresy.
This was all part of the "internal meaning" that was being grafted onto a game that had none. The mechanics, the tropes, the tone... these were there to make the game run, not to justify or formalise an "ideal" of D&D. Perhaps the best reason for returning to an earlier version of the game isn't because it's simpler or less repleted with detritus, but because the books themselves don't make any attempt to describe the game in ideological terms.
I've always despised the phrase, "It's just a game," because I've always interpreted it at "it's a bit of fluff, not worth getting excited about." I am excited by the game and I resent any suggestion that D&D is no better than, say, Settlers of Catan or any boardgame for that matter.
But perhaps there's an argument to be made, one I hadn't considered until now, that "It's just a game" ought to be a sort of compact against all this nebbish moralistic bullshit that has arisen these last two decades. The orcs don't represent "black people," it's just a game you nit. No, your character does not have a wheelchair, it's the 14th century and it's just a game. It doesn't have to be a shrug, it can be a line in the sand, a moment of reason and reproval, saying that "Hey, I like this soup and I don't want you to stop pouring your shit into my pot."
A line in the sand is what many players had to do in the 1980s, against hatemongers, against school principles, sometimes against parents. "I'm playing this game, and if you won't let me play it here, I'll play it somewhere else." When we were kids, and parents tried to dictate what we ought to like, we paid them lip service and then we kept doing it anyway. We need a little of that. A little less concern for what other people think, a little less willingness to bend just because they think the game is about something else. The game doesn't need an ideology. It isn't played with a million other people. It is played with only a few, who happen to play a game that shares some characteristics of what others are doing. But that doesn't make us a "community," it doesn't make us a "culture," it doesn't convey any responsibility or reason to cater just because we also happen to do this thing.
Mostly, we think when we grow up, that we were foolish wanting to do what we liked when we were teenagers. For myself, yeah. I should have done less stupid things. But I don't count D&D as one of those. And nobody, not my parents, who are passed on now, not my high school principle (who I convinced in his office that we weren't harming anybody — he was actually a pretty good guy), not my peers, and not the fucking WOTC, is going to stop me from playing this game the way I want to.
We could use more of that.
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