AD&D Should Be Ashamed of Itself

As I wade into the thief and search the DMG for details about traps, I ran across this:

"Assume that your players are continually wasting time (thus making the so-called adventure drag out into a boring session of dice rolling and delay) if they are checking endlessly for traps and listening at every door. If this persists, despite the obvious displeasure you express, the requirement that helmets be doffed and mail coifs removed to listen at a door, and then be carefully replaced, the warnings about ear seekers, and frequent checking for wandering monsters (q.v.), then you will have to take more direct part in things. Mocking their over-cautious behavior as near cowardice, rolling huge handfuls of dice and then telling them the results are negative, and statements to the effect that: "You detect nothing, and nothing has detected YOU so far—", might suffice. If the problem should continue, then rooms full with silent monsters will turn the tide, but that is the stuff of later adventures."

I read the DMG straight through several times during the 1980s when I was still running most of the book; and through the '90s, when I wanted to find something new to work on, I would glance through the DMG to see what might trouble me that I could start as a project. So of course I remember this passage above as one of the great Gygaxian moments. When I was 15, this made sense to me; by age 20, not so much. Around the time I started this blog, I'd have been so incensed by the above I'd have written three rants about it. Now, it is merely evidence of a much larger problem, the toxic DM who felt he — and no, never a woman — was in his rights to decide that game play that had been forced by the rules, the aforementioned "checking" from the last post, was itself bad, presumably because it limited how many "gotchas" the DM could impose. After all, if they are daring to actually listen at doors, something the rules expressly allow them to do, then absolutely invent a plot-earseeker to stop that. Absolutely mock the players. Absolutely be a dick about the players playing the game. That's how you get to be the greatest DM in the world, as many thought, and still think, Gygax to be.

Where last week I found myself corralled by a rush of arbitrary rules imposed to manage the paladin, now as I undertake the thief is it all opportunities for gotcha. The flat percentage to pick pockets, not a very beneficial skill for the thief for reasons I outline in the text, must be twisted by an additional adjustment for the level of the target, so that the DM can invent a 12th level whom the thief has "randomly" (because 12th levels are just laying about the streets all the time) try to filch — oh look, gotcha! Oh, and of course there's a chance if the thief succeeds but the target recognises it, so that the thief can be tracked home and attacked — gotcha!

The treasure chest or the door that has to be smashed open because the thief's one chance to open the lock fails, bringing monsters and such — gotcha! Try to move silently and fail, but to have the DMG expressly say, "Do NOT inform the thief that his or her dice score indicated a lack of success at this attempted stealth, if that is the case. He or she thinks the movement is silent, and the monster or other victim will inform the character of his or her misapprehension soon enough."

Gotcha.

It's not that I didn't know about these lines, as I said; I remember the one about move silently too, though I haven't read it in decades. It's that, first, I didn't have the power to speed search the DMG and Players for terms back then, because they were books, not pdfs. And second, I'm doing something unusual for me; I'm not randomly reading text to just read about the game, I'm assembling paragraphs and notes from multiple places and putting them side-by-side. As a result, I'm finding multiple cases of discontinuity in the rules, between books, sometimes in the same book, which despite these books being constantly open on my table while I worked on my work with pencil and paper in the 1980s and 90s, I never noticed. And neither did my players.

As such, until now, I hadn't realise just how many gotchas are specifically associated with the thief rules, or really, how ridiculous some of the rules are. Did you know the wand of secret door and trap location (I never had any reason to give one of these to a party, ever, even randomly) does not allow you to expend a charge and find both? You need to expend a charge if you're trying to find a secret door, and then another charge to find a trap. And if there are no traps or secret doors? There are no words said about that, but it's implied you've wasted the charge on an empty room. Two charges, in fact. How miserly is that?

It all reveals a kind of systematic methodology that's designed to TEACH the DM to literally mindfuck the people at the table, without constraint. The DM doesn't have to roll to see if there's a 12th level on the street. The DM doesn't have to roll to see if we've run into someone ready to punish our success in picking a pocket. The DM can just decide, ad hoc, that a thief that's practiced at moving silently can't possibly know they're not succeeding, because obviously the thief's own ears, attuned to the ability hear noise, cannot hear the noise of their own feet. It's all absurdly empowering for the DM, and then that power is deliberately messaged toward a persecutorial framework, to weaponise the game world against the PC, and encourage the DM to pat himself on the back while doing so.  "Who's a good DM? You are... yes you... what a good DM you are..."

The paladin, who has no power, must walk a tightrope of perfectly good and lawful behaviour... but the DM, who has all the power in the world, is encouraged to be chaotic (without governance) and evil (vindictive and gloating) at every opportunity. Not just "firm," but mocking. Not just "mysterious," but deceptive. Not just "challenging," but punitive. And the advice is framed as craft, as professionalism, as what separates a "good" DM from a weak one. The DM is given permission to lie by omission, to invent consequences ad hoc, to punish caution, to punish competence, and to enjoy the punishment.

Together, this makes the book's text something that one could argue deserved the satanic panic. If someone wanted to argue that D&D teaches something unhealthy, this is the material that would support the argument. It teaches the DM that they are above others, that their role is to control and correct and that the players' attempts to protect themselves are moral failures. It teaches the paladin's player that virtue is a trap and that the punishment for error is humiliation and dispossession. If you were a parent, a pastor or a moral entrepreneur looking for evidence of corrupting influence, the real indictment would be this adversarial pedagogy. 

I read these passages and I must tell you, I  feel honestly ashamed to be a DM... though I never did any of this. What I feel is shame by association.

Which is now why I think that anyone running around shouting that AD&D is a great system, without immediately and in depth addressing these serious concerns about DM behaviour and rule design, risks encouraging people toward committing further abuses such as the ones found here. It would be like telling people to see 1915's Birth of a Nation by saying only, "It was a great early film, one of the first that really employed a full-length story as filmmaking! Everyone should see it!" Such, nowadays, would read to anyone outside as "I'm listening to a racist." When I read the texts I'm reading and think about people preaching AD&D as a system, especially "as written," I'm going to be thinking going forward, wow, toxic masculinity.

The quotes (and there are many more) above show that I'm not overstating this. AD&D has a lack of shame problem.

Praising AD&D without acknowledging these things is tantamount to endorsing, or at least laundering, a DM posture that is openly adversarial, socially coercive and proud of itself. If someone refuses to discuss that, in depth, they are not being neutral. They are choosing to keep the praise clean by leaving the filth unmentioned, which is exactly how harmful legacies persist.

I know that going forward I'll be more careful when I refer to the game. I know that I'm going to try and keep my discourse through this text I'm writing carefully framed around the flaws in the text's logic and not the egregious morality it's preaching, but that's already been hard with respect to the paladin... I can see it's not going to get easier with the thief.

What's a little ironic is that I don't care about the thief's purported badness as a character class. I don't care about stealing fictional objects, or killing fictional creatures or persons — I do care about the meta-framing of the DM as a living person abusing other living persons in a game setting. The two have nothing to do with each other in my mind.