I grew up in a house that was built the year when I was born, 1964, and was occupied by my parents within the year. They paid $51,000 for a 2,400 square foot bungalow, counting the basement and main floor. I became conscious enough later to understand that most of the residents on the street were making around $25,000 on a single person income, with that number steadily rising through the 1970s and 80s. It was my only residence as a kid and after I moved out, my parents continued to live there until my mother died in 2012, and my father was forced to move out for health reasons in 2017.
As such, I watched the same neighbourhood change and flow over the first 53 years of my life... less, if we don't count the first four years. I watched trees planted, grow old and die. I saw lawns landscaped and then re-landscaped again to restore the grass. I knew childhood friends and acquaintances who inherited their parents' houses and raised their own kids there. Feuds came and went, neighbours came and went... and there were a lot of fences that were built, then rebuilt, then rebuilt again. Quite a lot of them were fences I hopped when I was young.
And because everyone on the street went from house poor to comfortable to high middle class, I saw attitudes towards yardwork change and adjust from the bare minimum to excess demonstration of homecare to paying someone else to do it.
All this is to set up a metaphor that I hope lands. Where it came to building a fence when I was about ten, it was possible to identify three kinds of resident. There was, first, someone like my father. He grew up in tiny village-towns in Alberta's backcountry, where he learned how to build fences as a boy because it was a way to make a quarter. He went on from there to build firebreaks as a novice firefighter, to building oilrigs in Colorado and Nebraska while he was in university, where he studied to be an engineer. When my father built a fence, he dug fencepoles down nine feet, because damn it, not only is this fence not going to lean, it's going to defy soil creep.
The second group are those who knew it was their responsibility to build their own fence, because it was needed and they didn't have the money to pay someone. So... they did the best they knew how. They knew it wasn't that great a fence, they knew it wasn't going to hold up forever... but thankfully, those who kept their jobs and did not move onto other things also lived long enough to reach they day when they could pay for a profession to come and remake their fence. Which is what they did. They didn't pretend they were fence-makers. They did the best they could until they found someone who could do better.
Then there's the third sort. And on our street, and most like streets, this is one fucking guy, and thankfully only one. This is the guy who has no idea how to build a fence, who does a piss poor job of it... but when it's built, they think it's beautiful. They think it's the Mona Lisa of fences. And the person on the other side of that property, that has to live with this junky row of haphazard lumber until, finally, a hailstorm blows it down, they daren't say one thing about that fence. Because this fence-builder is prepared to stand on his side and scream loud enough for the whole neighbourhood to hear about how great his fence is.
That one guy? That's Gary Gygax.
If the White Box set had found an editor, some one who could have looked at the project and identified the problems that I've seen — mostly issues of writing, continuity, explanation of terms and inconsistencies — the work would right now be vastly better. It's understandable, given that it was published with just $2,000, that an editor was out of the question. But suppose, when the money did come rolling in... and it did, because the new company TSR had the money to publish the hardcover Monster Manual in 1977, just three years later. But suppose that instead of rushing into that book, holding it off for another year, the designers of the White Box had just upgraded that work with the help of an editor and a better printing press? Suppose they had used the artists they had for the Monster Manual and respectfully illustrated it. Just suppose that when someone outside the mindset had said to one of the writers,
"This passage here? Could you rewrite it and make it make sense? Oh, and I notice you haven't explained this rule you refer to fifteen times through the work. We can figure out a way to lay out the book to fit that rule in. If you haven't the time, explain the rule to me, and I'll have one of my copyreaders write it. You can sign off on it. What d'ya say about that?"
Sure, we'd still have that old original White Box, it would be a cute reminder that things don't always start well. But we'd have this hard cover straight-forward book describing those original rules in a way that made sense, that had structure, that were able to defend what they meant... and all it would have cost was to recognise that for all their idealism and game play experience, in reality none of these guys actually knew how to build a fence... er, knew how to actually publish something competently. I wouldn't now be able to kick the thing around nearly as much as I do. I think, honestly, it could have been quite an awesome, rational, really game beneficial piece of work.
Except, well... Gygax.
We know the record: editor-hostile correspondence, his public statements about rules authority, his reactions to criticism, the way AD&D was positioned rhetorically as both definitive and yet immune to correction...
An editor could have fixed everything. AD&D is only "flawed" because it's half-complete. Half-explained. Badly explained. The system, for what it does, is fine. But its so chock-full of badly organised mis-matched content, in some places scattered weirdly between the DMG and the Players Handbook (er, ahem, armour), in some places lacking the sentence that defines the term or the paragraph that explains why these other three paragraphs are being included... mixed in with declarations by a man who thought his fence was the bestest, most perfectest fence that's ever been built... that AD&D only looks like garbage.
Everyone knows the story about how George Lucas was seriously fucking up as the director of Star Wars. It was way beyond his ability as a director, the technical issues were way outside his ken, the coverage shots weren't consistently living up to the needs of the production... and frankly, it really did look like the film was going to crash and burn. The production itself was troubled. The shoot in Tunisia was plagued by weather problems, equipment failures, and logistical chaos. The special effects work was far behind schedule and had to be reinvented almost from scratch, which is why Industrial Light & Magic effectively came into existence during the film rather than before it. Early footage coming back to the studio did not inspire confidence. Studio executives believed they might be looking at an expensive failure, and Lucas himself was reportedly physically ill from stress during post-production.
The decisive intervention came when professional editors, most notably Marcia Lucas, along with Richard Chew and Paul Hirsch, restructured the film aggressively. Entire scenes were removed or reordered. The opening was tightened dramatically. Redundant exposition was cut. Cross-cutting was introduced to build momentum and emotional stakes, particularly in the Death Star trench run, which in early cuts was inert. Crucially, Lucas did not fight this intervention. He allowed the editors to do their job. The final structure of Star Wars—its pace, clarity, and emotional coherence—is largely a product of that editorial work.
It was only later, after having smoke blown up his ass for two decades, that Lucas became impossible to work with. And we know what happened.
That could have been Gygax's trajectory. He could have realised his limitations, he could have stepped aside and let wiser heads prevail. But by the release of the DMG, there were few editors who would work with him. Then he, like Lucas, could have taken all the credit for what the editor did... because publishing editors, like film editors, are used to that. No one is ever going to remember the ten best editors in Hollywood outside the cadre. Hell, most people don't even know a film is edited by someone else... they assume the director is doing it.
Yeah, I know! It's incredible.
But no, not Gygax. He wasn't going to listen to anyone. This was his fence, damn it, and it was perfect. And this is how we got here.
Yes, AD&D has problems. And yes, my last post was about my willingness to take it apart like the bones of a chicken. But if anyone here actually wants to read the account I'm writing, apart from the failings in the rules, there are rules that exist and are perfectly fine. The base structure is there; it's just that everyone whose looked at AD&D these last forty years and found a problem with it have thought, "That's got to go, so I build my own damned fence!"
Only, none of these guys are fence builders either. And like Gygax, they also seem to have no fucking idea.
Now... and I'm not happy to say this, but... I'm my father. I'm digging the posts nine feet deep to make this fence stand, and you'll see that when I'm done, yes, in fact it will. And then you'll have to admit, in the end, that AD&D's not such a bad system after all. Like Charlie Brown's tree, it just needs a little of the right kind of love.
As such, I watched the same neighbourhood change and flow over the first 53 years of my life... less, if we don't count the first four years. I watched trees planted, grow old and die. I saw lawns landscaped and then re-landscaped again to restore the grass. I knew childhood friends and acquaintances who inherited their parents' houses and raised their own kids there. Feuds came and went, neighbours came and went... and there were a lot of fences that were built, then rebuilt, then rebuilt again. Quite a lot of them were fences I hopped when I was young.
And because everyone on the street went from house poor to comfortable to high middle class, I saw attitudes towards yardwork change and adjust from the bare minimum to excess demonstration of homecare to paying someone else to do it.
All this is to set up a metaphor that I hope lands. Where it came to building a fence when I was about ten, it was possible to identify three kinds of resident. There was, first, someone like my father. He grew up in tiny village-towns in Alberta's backcountry, where he learned how to build fences as a boy because it was a way to make a quarter. He went on from there to build firebreaks as a novice firefighter, to building oilrigs in Colorado and Nebraska while he was in university, where he studied to be an engineer. When my father built a fence, he dug fencepoles down nine feet, because damn it, not only is this fence not going to lean, it's going to defy soil creep.
The second group are those who knew it was their responsibility to build their own fence, because it was needed and they didn't have the money to pay someone. So... they did the best they knew how. They knew it wasn't that great a fence, they knew it wasn't going to hold up forever... but thankfully, those who kept their jobs and did not move onto other things also lived long enough to reach they day when they could pay for a profession to come and remake their fence. Which is what they did. They didn't pretend they were fence-makers. They did the best they could until they found someone who could do better.
Then there's the third sort. And on our street, and most like streets, this is one fucking guy, and thankfully only one. This is the guy who has no idea how to build a fence, who does a piss poor job of it... but when it's built, they think it's beautiful. They think it's the Mona Lisa of fences. And the person on the other side of that property, that has to live with this junky row of haphazard lumber until, finally, a hailstorm blows it down, they daren't say one thing about that fence. Because this fence-builder is prepared to stand on his side and scream loud enough for the whole neighbourhood to hear about how great his fence is.
That one guy? That's Gary Gygax.
If the White Box set had found an editor, some one who could have looked at the project and identified the problems that I've seen — mostly issues of writing, continuity, explanation of terms and inconsistencies — the work would right now be vastly better. It's understandable, given that it was published with just $2,000, that an editor was out of the question. But suppose, when the money did come rolling in... and it did, because the new company TSR had the money to publish the hardcover Monster Manual in 1977, just three years later. But suppose that instead of rushing into that book, holding it off for another year, the designers of the White Box had just upgraded that work with the help of an editor and a better printing press? Suppose they had used the artists they had for the Monster Manual and respectfully illustrated it. Just suppose that when someone outside the mindset had said to one of the writers,
"This passage here? Could you rewrite it and make it make sense? Oh, and I notice you haven't explained this rule you refer to fifteen times through the work. We can figure out a way to lay out the book to fit that rule in. If you haven't the time, explain the rule to me, and I'll have one of my copyreaders write it. You can sign off on it. What d'ya say about that?"
Sure, we'd still have that old original White Box, it would be a cute reminder that things don't always start well. But we'd have this hard cover straight-forward book describing those original rules in a way that made sense, that had structure, that were able to defend what they meant... and all it would have cost was to recognise that for all their idealism and game play experience, in reality none of these guys actually knew how to build a fence... er, knew how to actually publish something competently. I wouldn't now be able to kick the thing around nearly as much as I do. I think, honestly, it could have been quite an awesome, rational, really game beneficial piece of work.
Except, well... Gygax.
We know the record: editor-hostile correspondence, his public statements about rules authority, his reactions to criticism, the way AD&D was positioned rhetorically as both definitive and yet immune to correction...
An editor could have fixed everything. AD&D is only "flawed" because it's half-complete. Half-explained. Badly explained. The system, for what it does, is fine. But its so chock-full of badly organised mis-matched content, in some places scattered weirdly between the DMG and the Players Handbook (er, ahem, armour), in some places lacking the sentence that defines the term or the paragraph that explains why these other three paragraphs are being included... mixed in with declarations by a man who thought his fence was the bestest, most perfectest fence that's ever been built... that AD&D only looks like garbage.
Everyone knows the story about how George Lucas was seriously fucking up as the director of Star Wars. It was way beyond his ability as a director, the technical issues were way outside his ken, the coverage shots weren't consistently living up to the needs of the production... and frankly, it really did look like the film was going to crash and burn. The production itself was troubled. The shoot in Tunisia was plagued by weather problems, equipment failures, and logistical chaos. The special effects work was far behind schedule and had to be reinvented almost from scratch, which is why Industrial Light & Magic effectively came into existence during the film rather than before it. Early footage coming back to the studio did not inspire confidence. Studio executives believed they might be looking at an expensive failure, and Lucas himself was reportedly physically ill from stress during post-production.
The decisive intervention came when professional editors, most notably Marcia Lucas, along with Richard Chew and Paul Hirsch, restructured the film aggressively. Entire scenes were removed or reordered. The opening was tightened dramatically. Redundant exposition was cut. Cross-cutting was introduced to build momentum and emotional stakes, particularly in the Death Star trench run, which in early cuts was inert. Crucially, Lucas did not fight this intervention. He allowed the editors to do their job. The final structure of Star Wars—its pace, clarity, and emotional coherence—is largely a product of that editorial work.
It was only later, after having smoke blown up his ass for two decades, that Lucas became impossible to work with. And we know what happened.
That could have been Gygax's trajectory. He could have realised his limitations, he could have stepped aside and let wiser heads prevail. But by the release of the DMG, there were few editors who would work with him. Then he, like Lucas, could have taken all the credit for what the editor did... because publishing editors, like film editors, are used to that. No one is ever going to remember the ten best editors in Hollywood outside the cadre. Hell, most people don't even know a film is edited by someone else... they assume the director is doing it.
Yeah, I know! It's incredible.
But no, not Gygax. He wasn't going to listen to anyone. This was his fence, damn it, and it was perfect. And this is how we got here.
Yes, AD&D has problems. And yes, my last post was about my willingness to take it apart like the bones of a chicken. But if anyone here actually wants to read the account I'm writing, apart from the failings in the rules, there are rules that exist and are perfectly fine. The base structure is there; it's just that everyone whose looked at AD&D these last forty years and found a problem with it have thought, "That's got to go, so I build my own damned fence!"
Only, none of these guys are fence builders either. And like Gygax, they also seem to have no fucking idea.
Now... and I'm not happy to say this, but... I'm my father. I'm digging the posts nine feet deep to make this fence stand, and you'll see that when I'm done, yes, in fact it will. And then you'll have to admit, in the end, that AD&D's not such a bad system after all. Like Charlie Brown's tree, it just needs a little of the right kind of love.
No comments:
Post a Comment