Rules, Cards & Dice

As I wade deeper into the narrowness of D&D thinking, I find myself forced to contend, as was inevitable, with the difficulties of "by the book" rule application. For anyone with sense, AD&D as written is an ungawdly mess of attempts to moralise play, dictate opinion, arbitrary rule-making and player abuse. And because with this latest project I've decided introduce players to D&D and not to my own system, I'm responsible to more than conveniences I myself might use when expressing details like "race."  Further, I'm beholden to frame things I do not tolerate in my own game, such as the assumption on page 18 of the Players Handbook that elves and dwarves have antipathy for one another, or that half-orcs actively hate dwarves and vice-versa. This manner of mapping out the emotional expectations for players and DMs makes my blood boil, even when the frame is then qualified by, "people don't have to conform to this."

If we don't have to fucking conform to this, then why don't you shut the fuck up and not include publish it in your book?

I swear to express the level of my ire.

AD&D is chock full of this nonsense. One particularly galling example also occurs in the White Box set, discussed here. Gygax's assumption that it was defacto the DM's right to arbitrarily set a multiplier on the players' earned experience based on "how hard" the fight went carries right into AD&D. I don't intend to support that... which puts me in a position where I have to explain why I'm not supporting these parts of AD&D while supporting those, without being arbitrary myself.

I'm therefore adopting this structure: A "rule" is something that can be applied consistently and predictably by anyone regardless of their background. Therefore, the experience multiplier based on "how hard" the fight cannot be a rule, because there is no way to implicitly define this. It is a demand from Gygax that the DM retroactively moralise play. It asks the DM to translate a subjective impression into a quantitative reward, without criteria, without calibration and without any possibility of independent verification. There is no consistent procedure by which two different DMs could arrive at the same result, and there is no way for players to know what behaviours are being rewarded until after the fact. By virtue of this, the proposition is a capricious arbitration, based upon no requirement, need or virtue except the DM erratically acting as a self-righteous jack-ass. Conclusion: not a rule.

To take a different example, one that's bound to come up, is class level limitations. I don't like them. I don't use them in my game. But, sorry to say, they are not arbitrary. Every DM playing the game by these rules would play by them the same... so whatever my personal feelings about AD&D, if I'm teaching someone how to play AD&D, they count as rules I'd explain.

This was not going to be my post today, but it came up as I started writing the "choose your race" section of my guide. I didn't want to discuss it at length there, so I chose to do so here. What I was going to talk about, however, is related, because it is a game rule that does not exist, so far as I know, in AD&D or any other D&D system, so I'd like to know why.

Nathan and I briefly spoke about Hoyle yesterday, and I provided a link. Edmond Hoyle was an English writer best known for codifying the rules and proper play of card games in the eighteenth century, most notably whist. His 1742 book A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist was not merely a set of casual suggestions but a systematic attempt to define correct play, etiquette, and judgement in a game that was widely played but inconsistently understood.

I grew up with a copy of Hoyle in the house, which my parents used to hand my sister and I whenever we said we were tired of the game we were playing. It was possible then to learn how to play a card game never heard of from Hoyle's text, because of the way it was written. I learned how to play euchre this way, though I've long since forgotten. My early experiences with Hoyle probably had something to do with re-engineering my brain to write rules well. That and a lot of practice writing rules.

Anyway, I was flipping through Hoyle after linking the pdf and came across this simple and obvious rule at the bottom of page 17 and top of page 18, which every card player knows instinctively, though of course it has to be included in any proper rule book:

The cards must be shuffled above the table. [This is absolute in order to prevent any sleight-of-hand in shuffling below or on the table. By the latter plan, which used to be very common, the position of certain cards might be shown.]

Simple, straightforward and no one would disagree with the principle of the rule. But it makes me ask, why did dungeons & dragons never include this rule?

Why did it not state plainly that the dice must be rolled in clear view of other persons, and that the rule applies as much to the DM as to any other participant of the game? I know the wargamer culture that D&D came out of — those guys were grizzled hard-bitten grognards who would cut off your fucking hand if you tried to hide a die roll or snap the die up from the table before it could be read, so how did D&D become the only die rolling game in existence where one participant is expressly allowed to hide the dice from the players?

My theory is that DM screens were as lucrative a product as the rules themselves. That, per unit, they provided the profit that allowed TSR to survive as long as it did, and that TSR only found itself on the ropes when the DM screen market was saturated. I remember the days in the early eighties when an attempt was made to encourage DMs that they needed more than one screen. I wonder if that's just a false memory, or if there was something going on there.

In any case, like shuffling cards, a rule set ought to include a clear, inflexible statement about how dice are rolled, and all rolled dice should be viewed by at least two other persons when play is taking place. Further, it should also be a game rule that a die that's thrown in game must be left untouched for a period of five seconds before it can be picked up again. Nothing is more annoying than the player who throws the die and snaps it up even as it's still settling into place.