Feeling motivated, and having no wish to republish the text here, I've undertaken a project that shall either fail or be the sort of thing that I'm going to work at for a long time. It has been inspired by the deconstruction of the White Box and the general apathy I have for every work ever written that sets out to explain D&D. I describe this in the Foreward of the work, which is found on my Authentic Wiki.
The purpose, though generally stated on the linked page, is to describe the game of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in a manner that is linear, to those who have never heard of the game or at least have exactly no understanding of how to play it. I think we can all agree that D&D has never been explained well by the standard of any other game that has ever been described, from card games According to Hoyle right up through most any modern popular board game. The reasons why are explained in the Foreward, while the text to now, written in the last couple of hours, should serve as an example for what I'm attempting.
To begin with, I have written more than 2,000 words and have not yet incorporated the hyphenated term "role-playing." Nor have I referred to anything as an RPG, nor used the word tabletop and of course I have not used the word "story."
Let's see how that plays.
Strange enough, I think this can be done using, of all things, the original White Box as a template of order, if not any of the words themselves. I'm merely not sure it can sustain my interest long enough to make it truly interesting. Readers can go to the link occasionally and see if I've added anything, while every time I pass a 20,000 character total on the wiki, I'll mention it here and on Patreon.
That makes three posts today. I'm ready for bed.
I like what you've got so far in that introduction. I'll be looking forward to updates.
ReplyDelete"The character is, essentially, the player's game piece". I really like this. Interestingly, for as simple and straightforward as this definition is, I don't know that I've ever heard it put in those terms before. It puts emphasis on this being a game with defined rules and "pieces" like other games the reader is familiar with.
ReplyDeleteIt would be really cool if you could find some "test subjects" (people who have never played D&D or know much about it) to read your introduction once a first draft is done to see if it makes sense. It is so difficult for me, as someone who has played for over 40 years, to assess how this would resonate with a "noob".
Great work so far - looking forward to watching your progress!
Looking forward to this project.
ReplyDeleteI'll be keeping an eye on this; very interesting! I've been thinking about a similar project, also inspired by your White Box series funnily enough, that asks the question "what might D&D look like if it was written like the instructions to a board game like Monopoly or Cluedo?" Less a teaching tool than what you're doing, and definitely far less rigorous in its approach... but I'm still turning over how to explain the game in the simplest terms possible. Obviously it's never going to fit on the inside of a game box, but maybe a short booklet, with monsters, spells, magic items, and other game elements shunted off into a separate booklet... A difficult task regardless.
ReplyDeleteI like what you're doing: painstakingly explaining each element of the game with a minimum of jargon, while also heading off some of the problems that we know can arise. I especially liked your descriptions of the classes, and which attributes work best for them. I do wonder about why you're introducing new jargon, such as "affordances" - but I can see that maybe there's a difficulty in introducing terms without getting into game-speak, and when the game-speak has already cornered some of the more natural-sounding words fit for the task.
"Affordance" carries two benefits: (a) not being D&D jargon, it has no baggage attached, and (b) it is a pre-existing word that's already used to describe game design, not just for D&D, but for any game that exists. In fact, it's the correct word, which would have been used originally, if the early designers of D&D knew anything (or had even opened a book once).
DeleteI've read enough of your writing to know that it would indeed be the correct word. My main concern was how it might be received by someone trying to learn the game, and unfamiliar with your usage here (as I was, with what I'd like to believe is a better-than-average vocab). But checking back, you did call it out as an unfamiliar word and define it as soon as it's introduced, so mea culpa on that.
ReplyDeleteI was also struck by you lumping Charisma in with the physical stats - it's usually not done so. Even though there's no doubt a physical aspect to the stat, it's almost always grouped with Intelligence and Wisdom, and attributed more to force of personality than physical looks. I'm interested in how you got there.
I considered that problem thusly. Charisma is partly "physical" and partly performative. It is not at all "mental." I was not going to make a category for itself, it did not belong in the mental category, so by default, it's physical.
DeleteThose with no comprehension whatsoever about charisma would simply take it on faith and have no reason to quibble, as they have no baggage with how charisma is used in the game. As such, they would recognise this passage is merely grouping attibutes together loosely, and that the category "physical" is in fact not limiting the attribute in any real way. Your being "struck" by the categorisation is an example of your giving way too much thought to aspects of charisma that in fact do not matter in game terms, but only in meta-game terms, so you "flinched" at the unfamiliar meta-game description of it.
Thanks - always interested in your thought processes. "Struck" was a slight exaggeration of my reaction... but it was still the reaction of someone who's absorbed a lot of (probably too much) D&D related content. I'm tempted now to read some Hoyle to get a better grasp on what you're going for.
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