I want to start by saying that I have empathy for those readers who have felt their perception of the White Box set somewhat challenged of late. It's understandable that they'd want to push back, at least a little, so that while sure, ten criticisms I've said have merit, I really ought to reconsider this one example, "...which can be understood if only we..." and so on. That's fair. If the house is shifting and about to slide into the canyon, why not grab that snow globe from the Grand Canyon on your way out the door. It's only natural.
I'm a little surprised that people haven't seen, plain as day, that these problems have always been there. I've been trashing this set off and on for 17 years and I've always assumed it was nostalgia... but apparently, users have been grafting onto the books materials learned somewhere else, published later, presuming without looking that these things originated in Men & Magic and so on. It's a splash of cold water to find out that, no, in fact, the books were a complete mess.
So, I sincerely apologise for the popped balloons. I'm not here to trash D&D as an idea. I've dedicated my life to this game, I love this game, I've written extensively about it, I've defended the ability of any reader to get better at being a DM by fundamentally understanding the game and its principles better. The failing of this game, if there is one, isn't how poorly the White Box was written, or how any of the books were written, but rather in the resistance against learning how to play that was instituted from the start by some bad actors, and has since been perpetrated and insisted upon throughout every generation since.
A chessboard consists of sixty-four squares and six piece types. There are just 32 pieces altogether. Yet the total scholarship that has been applied to chess in just the last 50 years dwarfs the total written output of D&D by far, despite the latter being a game without any board, solely in the imagination, that has hundreds of potential combat variations, hundreds of monsters, scores of game play options and unimaginable variance with regards to things players might do in game. There is so much written about how to play chess that the game has its own section in most any large book store (where those still exist). Yet the total scholarship on D&D extends to about 40 recognisable books, the authors of which are so concerned about their names being attached to what they've written that they're more likely to be known by a pseudonym than their real names. And most players of the game don't know their names. While chess players who play above 1600 in chess can often discuss, at length, the works of half a dozen authors they've read.
I'm a little surprised that people haven't seen, plain as day, that these problems have always been there. I've been trashing this set off and on for 17 years and I've always assumed it was nostalgia... but apparently, users have been grafting onto the books materials learned somewhere else, published later, presuming without looking that these things originated in Men & Magic and so on. It's a splash of cold water to find out that, no, in fact, the books were a complete mess.
So, I sincerely apologise for the popped balloons. I'm not here to trash D&D as an idea. I've dedicated my life to this game, I love this game, I've written extensively about it, I've defended the ability of any reader to get better at being a DM by fundamentally understanding the game and its principles better. The failing of this game, if there is one, isn't how poorly the White Box was written, or how any of the books were written, but rather in the resistance against learning how to play that was instituted from the start by some bad actors, and has since been perpetrated and insisted upon throughout every generation since.
A chessboard consists of sixty-four squares and six piece types. There are just 32 pieces altogether. Yet the total scholarship that has been applied to chess in just the last 50 years dwarfs the total written output of D&D by far, despite the latter being a game without any board, solely in the imagination, that has hundreds of potential combat variations, hundreds of monsters, scores of game play options and unimaginable variance with regards to things players might do in game. There is so much written about how to play chess that the game has its own section in most any large book store (where those still exist). Yet the total scholarship on D&D extends to about 40 recognisable books, the authors of which are so concerned about their names being attached to what they've written that they're more likely to be known by a pseudonym than their real names. And most players of the game don't know their names. While chess players who play above 1600 in chess can often discuss, at length, the works of half a dozen authors they've read.
D&D players refer to trade works only in so far as to say, "Yeah, it was good" or "It just said the same old things." There's no discussion, no extrapolation of the material, no context where it is visibly applied in game and no learning that takes place. D&D players and DMs, from their behaviour, from the amount of effort they put into themselves to improve what they do, measures on the same scale as players of Candyland. For all the magnificence and capacity of this game to reproduce a live, human experience, we can't begin to understand why chess players care so much about how a knight's movement on the game board matters so much.
Chess demands improvement. Sitting down to play a game of chess against a stranger carries a threat of embarrassment. It's inherent in a competitive game. Just as a junior league team whose baseball coach won't get serious about practice condemns a bunch of kids to the experience of losing 27 to 0, by the third inning, by which time civilised people will call the game on account of a bad contest, you can have your ass handed to you by an everyday player in just four moves. And, assuming you don't walk right into that, you may still find, to your chagrin, that you've just been brutally outmatched by a five-year-old. You can't hide your mistakes behind a narrative or improvise grace. You lose material, you wallow, you have no idea what you're doing and then you've lost. For those who love the game anyway, there's a motive to get better. To learn what it feels like to win instead of lose. To fix your game and improve, which in turn sets a pattern for everything else in your life. We teach chess to children because it helps them understand that application produces tangible, measurable results. If you can get better at chess, it follows that you can get better at anything.
D&D doesn't have that. There's no reason to teach it to children, because it's just play. It has no cachet of improvement; rather than grace, it encourages self-indulgence and performative attention grabbing. The rules are treated with disdain. Even if we count those who believe in the rules, they quote only those that fit their worldview. There's no effort to deconstruct what's going on and seek to understand why it happened that way. No one who plays chess says, "It's just a game." In my day, when we had to scare the dinosaurs off the field so we could play, if you said to the coach, "It's just a game," he'd either bench you or ask you not to come back. Today, if you said it in earshot of the team, the coach wouldn't climb on your ass, but he/she would probably have to get between you and the rest of the team, who would not appreciate your lack of engagement (to put it politely).
But D&D? Sure. Sure, why not. It's just a game. The participants in the game act in as lackidaisical manner as possible, nowadays expecting the game to bend to their weaknesses. And it does. D&D accomodates, it protects egos. A table can run for ten years without a single participant ever receiving the neutral, external correction that a chessboard delivers in seconds. And because the culture evolved around that softness, people mistake the absence of humiliation for the presence of mastery. Long-time D&D players pat themselves on the back because they've played a long time. But they have no other metric. The internet is replete with people who have been participating in role-playing games for forty years, who regularly say things of such unrelenting, abiding stupidity about game play that it's hard to believe they've ever actually sat at a table. I can think of half a dozen such people off the top of my head. They don't have any respect, and they don't care. Because this game isn't about getting better, its about getting your badge that declares you play. After that, you've accomplished the only threshold that anyone in this community cares about. You've identified yourself as a D&D player. Congratulations, you're in the club. Automatically.
It's what allows players to assume they're "really good at role-playing," because this game gives them every reason to believe it. Its why the vagueness of the White Box is a feature: the variation in which it can be interpreted creates an ambience where no one is ever wrong, no one ever has to question... and ultimately, no one ever has to feel humiliated because their opinion was stupid.
The phenomenon arises out from the detritus-like community that came to embrace it. Those not good at sports, those not good at relationship-checkers, those not committed enough to excel in grades, those not interested in the chess club or the visual media club, those without artistic leanings... and yet who had some sense of aesthetic or imagination, who were smart enough to at least read the occasional low-brow fantasy novel, who liked games, who had pretensions to act but not the balls to actually stand in front of judging audience, they found their way here. To this game. Where they could be safe from having to measure themselves against anything except to warm a chair and roll a die when told to.
Hell, even a spelling bee has a level of public humiliation D&D doesn't have. That's how low the bar is for this game.
I have to assume I'm not like everyone else for the things D&D didn't teach me. I was an actor before I was a D&D player, granted though it was in school parts. I was in track and field, I played hockey and baseball competitively, with people who were deadly serious about it, before D&D. I was a social outcast, but I was one because I was angry and spiteful and willing to fight, not because I was a wallflower terrified of speaking to a girl. I wanted to write and knew I was a bad writer before I played D&D. And I was a chess player, a very serious one, starting when I was 10.
So I don't really fit into this crowd. I don't think that pretending to be a character in front of five people is "acting." I don't think winning a fight against a bunch of orcs, knowing that if my character dies I can roll a new one, is "competitive." I don't think that making a DM reinterpret a game rule is "winning." I have different definitions for those things. And when I look at the White Box, I don't see a game I love. The game I love exists in spite of that document. The game I love is in the time I've personally spent reworking, rebuilding, redesigning, clarifying, detailing and improving D&D, not in what some non-specific writer 52 years ago meant when they totally failed to explain the haste spell. None of my ego (which is formidable), none of my thinking, none of my game play, none of my interest or love for the game, none of the impetus I feel to write these posts, none of the defense I'll put up to try to help others be better at this game, is invested in those 96 pages of trash that I'm deconstructing.
Which is why I don't care about pointing out the stupidity of this line, or how this could be conflated into something ridiculous, or that I might be hurting someone's feelings by pissing on this sacred document. If your feelings are hurt... that's just evidence of how rarely you've allowed your feelings to be hurt — or perhaps, more precisely, how unwilling to you are to have yourself measured against any viewpoint but your own.
I'm not insulting the White Box. I'm measuring it. And measurement always feels like an attack to people who have never voluntarily stepped onto a field where measurement happens. If someone's feelings or emotional attachment is threatened because I've pointed out that some writing is incoherent, poorly designed or laughable in its pretense, that shows only that the person's identity has been overbuilt around an object that can't withstand pressure. They're defending the fragility of their nostalgia, not the integrity of the work itself.
I've been getting pushback from people on a level I'd expect from the authors themselves, who, being actually responsible for the work, might rightly be hurt at the way I'm deconstructing it (which humour and such). When a person not specifically responsible for this work acts like this, it's evidence of something much more problematic than the White Box as a thing. It's dependency. And really, what a thing to be dependent upon, for a game that demands more of the individual than this set can remotely hope to provide.
Really. For the love of the game, learn to at least depend on something that is worthy of you. Or be worthy enough not to have to depend on this trash.
If there is any value in D&D, it comes from recognising its early flaws, it's failed efforts, both then and now, and improving what we know. Only a fool would think otherwise.
Chess demands improvement. Sitting down to play a game of chess against a stranger carries a threat of embarrassment. It's inherent in a competitive game. Just as a junior league team whose baseball coach won't get serious about practice condemns a bunch of kids to the experience of losing 27 to 0, by the third inning, by which time civilised people will call the game on account of a bad contest, you can have your ass handed to you by an everyday player in just four moves. And, assuming you don't walk right into that, you may still find, to your chagrin, that you've just been brutally outmatched by a five-year-old. You can't hide your mistakes behind a narrative or improvise grace. You lose material, you wallow, you have no idea what you're doing and then you've lost. For those who love the game anyway, there's a motive to get better. To learn what it feels like to win instead of lose. To fix your game and improve, which in turn sets a pattern for everything else in your life. We teach chess to children because it helps them understand that application produces tangible, measurable results. If you can get better at chess, it follows that you can get better at anything.
D&D doesn't have that. There's no reason to teach it to children, because it's just play. It has no cachet of improvement; rather than grace, it encourages self-indulgence and performative attention grabbing. The rules are treated with disdain. Even if we count those who believe in the rules, they quote only those that fit their worldview. There's no effort to deconstruct what's going on and seek to understand why it happened that way. No one who plays chess says, "It's just a game." In my day, when we had to scare the dinosaurs off the field so we could play, if you said to the coach, "It's just a game," he'd either bench you or ask you not to come back. Today, if you said it in earshot of the team, the coach wouldn't climb on your ass, but he/she would probably have to get between you and the rest of the team, who would not appreciate your lack of engagement (to put it politely).
But D&D? Sure. Sure, why not. It's just a game. The participants in the game act in as lackidaisical manner as possible, nowadays expecting the game to bend to their weaknesses. And it does. D&D accomodates, it protects egos. A table can run for ten years without a single participant ever receiving the neutral, external correction that a chessboard delivers in seconds. And because the culture evolved around that softness, people mistake the absence of humiliation for the presence of mastery. Long-time D&D players pat themselves on the back because they've played a long time. But they have no other metric. The internet is replete with people who have been participating in role-playing games for forty years, who regularly say things of such unrelenting, abiding stupidity about game play that it's hard to believe they've ever actually sat at a table. I can think of half a dozen such people off the top of my head. They don't have any respect, and they don't care. Because this game isn't about getting better, its about getting your badge that declares you play. After that, you've accomplished the only threshold that anyone in this community cares about. You've identified yourself as a D&D player. Congratulations, you're in the club. Automatically.
It's what allows players to assume they're "really good at role-playing," because this game gives them every reason to believe it. Its why the vagueness of the White Box is a feature: the variation in which it can be interpreted creates an ambience where no one is ever wrong, no one ever has to question... and ultimately, no one ever has to feel humiliated because their opinion was stupid.
The phenomenon arises out from the detritus-like community that came to embrace it. Those not good at sports, those not good at relationship-checkers, those not committed enough to excel in grades, those not interested in the chess club or the visual media club, those without artistic leanings... and yet who had some sense of aesthetic or imagination, who were smart enough to at least read the occasional low-brow fantasy novel, who liked games, who had pretensions to act but not the balls to actually stand in front of judging audience, they found their way here. To this game. Where they could be safe from having to measure themselves against anything except to warm a chair and roll a die when told to.
Hell, even a spelling bee has a level of public humiliation D&D doesn't have. That's how low the bar is for this game.
I have to assume I'm not like everyone else for the things D&D didn't teach me. I was an actor before I was a D&D player, granted though it was in school parts. I was in track and field, I played hockey and baseball competitively, with people who were deadly serious about it, before D&D. I was a social outcast, but I was one because I was angry and spiteful and willing to fight, not because I was a wallflower terrified of speaking to a girl. I wanted to write and knew I was a bad writer before I played D&D. And I was a chess player, a very serious one, starting when I was 10.
So I don't really fit into this crowd. I don't think that pretending to be a character in front of five people is "acting." I don't think winning a fight against a bunch of orcs, knowing that if my character dies I can roll a new one, is "competitive." I don't think that making a DM reinterpret a game rule is "winning." I have different definitions for those things. And when I look at the White Box, I don't see a game I love. The game I love exists in spite of that document. The game I love is in the time I've personally spent reworking, rebuilding, redesigning, clarifying, detailing and improving D&D, not in what some non-specific writer 52 years ago meant when they totally failed to explain the haste spell. None of my ego (which is formidable), none of my thinking, none of my game play, none of my interest or love for the game, none of the impetus I feel to write these posts, none of the defense I'll put up to try to help others be better at this game, is invested in those 96 pages of trash that I'm deconstructing.
Which is why I don't care about pointing out the stupidity of this line, or how this could be conflated into something ridiculous, or that I might be hurting someone's feelings by pissing on this sacred document. If your feelings are hurt... that's just evidence of how rarely you've allowed your feelings to be hurt — or perhaps, more precisely, how unwilling to you are to have yourself measured against any viewpoint but your own.
I'm not insulting the White Box. I'm measuring it. And measurement always feels like an attack to people who have never voluntarily stepped onto a field where measurement happens. If someone's feelings or emotional attachment is threatened because I've pointed out that some writing is incoherent, poorly designed or laughable in its pretense, that shows only that the person's identity has been overbuilt around an object that can't withstand pressure. They're defending the fragility of their nostalgia, not the integrity of the work itself.
I've been getting pushback from people on a level I'd expect from the authors themselves, who, being actually responsible for the work, might rightly be hurt at the way I'm deconstructing it (which humour and such). When a person not specifically responsible for this work acts like this, it's evidence of something much more problematic than the White Box as a thing. It's dependency. And really, what a thing to be dependent upon, for a game that demands more of the individual than this set can remotely hope to provide.
Really. For the love of the game, learn to at least depend on something that is worthy of you. Or be worthy enough not to have to depend on this trash.
If there is any value in D&D, it comes from recognising its early flaws, it's failed efforts, both then and now, and improving what we know. Only a fool would think otherwise.
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