Criticism by Submarine

Because I could, I reformatted the content I've been putting up on the wiki into PDF format, similar to my Lantern, as a gift to those who already support my writing and this blog.  If you donate $7 or more monthly, thank you!  I know that it's easier to read a PDF than is a wiki, while it also gives me a chance to play around and create a few images to go with the content.  The present content created this week managed to reach 24 pages of the PDF. Quite impressive.

The PDF can be found on my patreon page. I will continue to create the version that's on the wiki, but for those who want a little more, I'll make the effort and keep up the PDF file as well. It's a little more bothersome than cut and paste, took me about three hours today to reformat, but it also looks so nice I think it's worth it. 

I have been thinking about other things. The March issue for the Lantern is due the end of this month as an advance copy, so I'll be putting more time to that. Maxwell asked with the last post why I was doing this for AD&D and not for my own version — I gave an answer in a comment, but I felt I should do a better job of it, so let's wade in.

For a year I've been listening to JB of B/X Blackrazor (and others, but mostly JB) pitching hard for AD&D over other game systems. I fully support his agenda; he wants to send the message that in fact the game's only gotten worse since 1983 — and I'll throw in, without let-up — and he feels it best that others know this. "Just try it," he's saying, which is fair so far as it goes.

When I tried AD&D back in 1979,  how could I have known there was ever going to be another version? I didn't even know there was going to be an Unearthed Arcana, or that people would get excessively frustrated about clerics that weren't allowed to use bludgeoning weapons. I didn't know "fantasy" was going to get redefined, or that "role-playing" would be, or that the crummy little modules, which none of the DMs I played with at the time used, because they all felt they could do better — and so did we players — would one day become "classics" that people would be willing to play over and over? No, I didn't predict any of that. I assumed these were the books we had, that this was more than enough D&D for anyone, and that where there were problems, well, a little thought could fix that.

Sure, I noticed back in 1980, after I got my copy of the DMG, that the halfling druid didn't have an age roll. I saw that the gnome and the half-elf had no bonuses or penalties to their ability stats, which I thought was stupid given that they were non-humans just like the other four races. I could see with my teenage eyes that there was all kinds of stupid with AD&D. And I don't mean the clerical/mage weapon limitations! A child could recognise those characters had spells, why should they be given all the weapons too? Fighters didn't have spells! They deserved to rule over their section, right? Was obvious.

So in 1981 and '82, once I'd gotten my feet wet as a DM for more than a year, I began "fixing" stuff. I didn't wait for permission — the DMG made it perfectly clear it was already given. I talked over what I wanted to change with the players and we pooled ideas. When we tried the changes, they worked. We did not think someone else was going to come along and fix this stuff! That was crazy! Who would have? Someone else had already invented the GAME... how do you reinvent something that's already been invented?

With lots and lots of stupid, it turns out.

Forty-five years later, my game is still recognisable as AD&D, but obviously it isn't. AD&D is like the property that still faces the street, while I've bought all the back country behind the house and rebuilt this entire living space that only a few have seen. And when they do see it, like JB, they muse, they observe, they say, "Sure, you could do it that way," and then they go back to playing their crappy, shitty, ancient version of the broken game it always was and pat themselves on the back for not player a worse game. Which is, admittedly, a step up.

So why, as Maxwell asks, am I deliberately choosing to teach AD&D and not my game? It depends on how we look at it.

Yesterday I presented Chat's opinion of my approach to Introducing Gameplay without the editorial mode. How about we try it with:

"Where the writing wobbles is less about grammar than about consistency of register and the degree of commentary. You have two voices braided together: the instructor voice that is careful about sequencing, and the polemic voice that wants to settle scores with designers, nostalgia, and bad pedagogy. The polemic voice is not a problem in itself; it gives the book identity. The issue is that it sometimes expands inside a section that is otherwise doing careful, incremental work, and it can feel like a lateral digression just when the reader expects forward motion. For instance, “amateurs throwing soup at a wall” is vivid and memorable, but it also changes the temperature of the paragraph from explanatory to prosecutorial. If that is the intended effect, it should land at structural joints (openings, transitions, or brief asides) rather than midstream, so it reads as deliberate punctuation rather than loss of focus."

Translated, this is Chat saying, "You're making this personal," while in essence arguing that I should be unemotional all the time, if I want to be taken seriously.

That might carry some weight if it didn't smack of the High School teacher that says, "Criticism and sarcasm is fine for Mark Twain, but you're not him, so mind your p's and q's, mister." 

In wondering what I'm doing with these lateral digressions and temperature changes, one might consider how a book that purports to explain "how to play golf" works. Instructional books about golf, and a host of other past-times, are full of polemical rhetoric, calling out bad habits, bad teachers, bad traditions and bad advice constantly. The golf pro that writes a book always starts from the premise, "Everyone else is a fucking idiot," then they tone that position down until they're merely polemical and sarcastic. That is all I'm doing here. I could be much darker about AD&D, just as I am being with the White Box set. I'm holding back.

Just look at the fog that everyone who participates in this hobby has to breathe constantly. The culture is screaming with background noise, in the form of what the company writes, in what the company drops next, in the rules that local gameclubs impose, in jacktards like Brennan Lee Mulligan and his Madison Square Garden performance, in what Sly Flourish writes, in what Colville writes, in what spews forth from the business that is Critical Role, in hundreds of thousands of "I just don't get it" commentors on Reddit, in whatever DnD Beyond is churning out this week, to the people spending $25,000 in a weekend renting out castles to play D&D in... the absurdity of the nonsense is so loud, the air is so crammed with mediocrity and blaring nonsense, it's a wonder that anyone can actually play D&D. My tiny little comment about throwing soup at a wall is one sentence of tone-change; yet for the AD&D worshipper, who prays at the altar of White Plume Mountain, it's sacrilege.

This is a way to express the criticism under the radar. See, I'm explaining every weapon used in detail, but I'm also stating why this collection of polearms in fact makes no sense. I'm highlighting those things that AD&D deliberately sidestepped, like what does a character actually look like, or the illogic of age rolls. If a human cleric can cast the same spells with the same skill and power as an elven cleric, why does it take the human cleric only four years longer than the human fighter to emerge, but 400 years longer for an elf? What are they doing all that time? Not being fighters... or else every Elven cleric would have had six human lifetimes to amass enough points to be 20th level. Humans do it in one life-time. What, are elves just stupider than other beings? Hell, look at the Half-orc. What takes a minimum of 510 years for an elf takes them only 21.

So yes, I'm explaining AD&D. But I'm also showing where all the flaw are... where the rule does not exist, where the rule does not make sense, where the designers have plainly not thought it through, where the game needs attention and so on. Essentially, all the things I noticed the first time when I was 16... and began to fix. And haven't thought about since, because I moved on.

And gawd, there are so many flaws. Flaws that any player has to turn a blind eye to over and over. Assumptions about things that were never explained, that just are, that have to leave any newcomer to AD&D scratching their head. Why does a long sword do 1-12 damage against a giant opponent? Doesn't that just undermine the number of hit dice that the giant's been given? Where's the game value in that? How does having more meat make the mastodon more affected by the same sword swung by the same arm? Is it ever explained? No, you're just supposed to take it on face value. However you swing the rule, it makes no sense. If hit points are meat, then more meat should make it resistant to sword damage. If hit points are fatigue or luck, then how does size affect anything? If hit points are a combat abstraction, then why abstract it in this way for these weapons, but not all the weapons and not all to the same amount?

The minute I took the large-damage model away from my players in what, 1983, the long sword's dominance evaporated. It became just another weapon. Weapons no one would take before suddenly got interesting. The erasure of the rule improved the game overnight, all my players said so at the time.

Anyway, addressing the large-damage column was what I was supposed to write about next today, and I didn't have the energy. So I worked on the PDF instead.