I agree with Blaine that the "what if" game really doesn't get us anywhere... but then, I must confess I am not playing fair where it comes to my own story within yesterday's post. So, I'll come clean, though I don't expect the unfamiliar reader to much like it. Those familiar with me and my game won't be surprised... so, really, this is going to be nothing more than my indulging my enormous, bloated ego. Thank gawd I never became the head of a game company, huh?
I own copies of Keep on the Borderlands, the Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, The Village of Hommlet and the first two parts of Against the Giants... with the except of KotB, I've run none of them as modules in my game. I've only run a few rooms of KotB, the last time in 2004, when I ran my daughter and her boyfriend in it on the spur of the moment, nothing prepared. I only own these modules because another DM I knew in '82 quit D&D entirely and shoved them at me with, "Want them?" I told them I'd take them, expecting I'd get around to looking through them someday. It might shock some people, but I've never actually taken the time to read a few pages of any of these at a time — when I try, I find them so boring, I just can't be bothered.
The Harndex was more interesting... but only in the sense of looking at someone else's invented wheel still having square corners and my thinking, "Hm, I bet that would work better if the corners were rounded off." I never used the Harndex. It didn't have anything to use. An ordinary real world encyclopedia has more usable information in it.
I have had a relationship with the local principal gamestore owner here in Calgary that reaches so far back that he and I can talk jokingly about his first store front back in 1979, as he remembers my being a customer then... only, I wasn't actually a customer of D&D for him. I bought a few war games, I think I bought my copy of Axis and Allies from him (now in my daughter's possession, as I haven't played it literally since this century started), and some dice and miniatures. I would go around and look at the enormous collection of books he had... more than enough to fill a good sized public library before the internet happened... but I'd leaf through the books, see what the designers were doing and think, "Oh, that's a wrong direction," or, "Yeah, did that, did it better"... or worse, "What the fuck is that supposed to acccomplish?" And then not buy the book.
"Dear Dragon... According to the author of the article, seeing is believing, about 2' is how far the invisibility extends. If the invisibility extends in all directions, the floor below him would be invisible for two feet down and over at an upward slope. Isn't there a special ruling that he, the author, should have made about this? If not, invisibility is useless because when a moving patch of invisibility saunters into a room, it would take a really dumbass monster not to know something was amiss."
See? The internet existed before the internet existed.
This kind of appeal to authority demonstrates just how stupid the average reader of The Dragon was, which the Dragon catered to because, hey, it wasn't making any money from me. I'd say "guys like me," but there were no guys like me, not then, not now. Back about ten years ago, I got so tired hearing from other bloggers about the amazing Dragon magazine that I made a plan to burn one of my copies on youtube in spite. My daughter put her foot down and I didn't. Raised my own petard, there.
I did not need a staff member from The Dragon to tell me that bad rule design (even joke bad rule design, which was what deliberately happened here) did not need an authority to clarify, it needed a will to step up. I, more than anyone, ought to hate "rule lawyers," because those are the first and foremost to call out descriptions like the joke one here as if God Handed Them Down to Gygax on Sinai... but I don't have that knee-jerk hatred because even in 1986 I could have out-argued any of these halfwits writing on the page above. I didn't care to because I'd already rebuilt the problems in the game The Dragon magazine was bent on, with it's virtually Holy Quest, making less clear, less practical or just plain worse, for the sake of having something to assemble words together in as so-called articles.
If anyone wants to do a Communications Thesis about the destruction of a popular hobby through inept or deliberately obtuse journalism, there it is. The Dragon's approach directly contributed to the need to replace every passage in the original game with a NEW VERSION, essentially by finding it's own personal way to exploit the reader's attention by nit-picking and derailing rules to death.
A good carpenter can tell you... for every tool that's really nifty and useful invented by someone, there are hundreds that are junk. But it's okay, because once a carpenter has done that for a few years, they get to recognise the difference... in fact, it's a reflex one develops habitually, looking for any part that's made of plastic or some other material that's bound to give within a day or two of use. Roleplaying games are not different from other things in the way that opportunists rush pell-mell to make things that are essentially useless but which look good for people who just don't know anything.
The difference with D&D is simple: there are no good products, aside from the dice. Every product, from the White Set on, arrived on the shelf broken as fuck. This is a fact that is deliberately overlooked by nostalgists who insist, instead, that "Sure, there are a few problems with AD&D..."
With regards to this aspect of RPGs, the cognitive dissonance is staggering. If anyone ever wants to put together a list of seven cognitive dissonance wonders of the world, I vote for D&D... though I suppose the U.S. Constitution deserves the number 1 spot.
The problem is not merely that D&D is old now, or that the substance of the game has changed, it is the stubborn conception that any of the original works served to create a playable game in their own time, never mind in ours... and that those who claim as much simply ignore decades of published arguments, replacement systems occurring long before 2nd edition, a wash of alternate RPG versions each trying to steal customers even before 1982, not to mention the flat out evidence of both self-conceit and ad hoc declarations by the self-righteous author that spawned all this... well, it's just breathtaking. I've said this before but it bears repeating... and repeating and repeating, I suppose.
We at the age of 15, playing in a world without an internet, without cable television, without at home video games, without telephones that were not still connected by wires to walls, looked at AD&D in the 1970s and recognised that large parts of it were not only badly written, but were the worst kind of game design compared to the games we already knew. We were trained game designers. We weren't journalists. Fuck, we hadn't even completed grade 10. But we knew. And not only was it utterly obvious that the rules that attempted to outline alignment, weapon speed, encumbrance, combat movement, the design of a believable medieval culture or pretty much everything in the book that wasn't entirely self-contained, wasn't up to snuff intellectually. We didn't argue about it. We didn't write to The Dragon. We dumped the shit that didn't work and decided, you know what, the game worked fine. Just fine.
All that shit from people who just couldn't get it, they weren't like us. We were early adopters. And like early adopters, we were curious, we wanted to look at how things worked, we wanted to test things, we were experienced with other sorts of complicated games, we knew already how to work around defects, fix or ignore beta-level documentation, expect the product to have limitations, criticise a design early... in large part because we had done all this before with other complicated systems.
Early adopters do not expect a new and complicated system to arrive complete. They tolerate crude documentation, test every component against actual use, distinguish the underlying possibility from the defective implementation and assume that repair is part of adoption. A later customer expects a finished product. Early adopters don't.
Those that come after early adopters are called "early majority." These are people who wait to see if there are reliable reviews about the product before moving forward. They are people who wait to assure themselves that a visible success has occurred. They want to see someone else demonstrate success. They count on technical support to fix problems. They wait for others to create usable instructions that will help them understand. They want to be sure the product will remain available and supported before they buy in.
When the early majority started to see the groundswell around D&D growing in '82 and '83, they started to climb on board the train. They detected that D&D had been validated, that it was popular enough to be considered viable to explore... but they came at expecting the rules to be explained to them, the rulings to be made clear by those in the know, the modules to be produced "officially"... and they are those who ran to publications like The Dragon to get those clarifications and desperately looked-for support.
There are always far more early majority that early adopters. Some people rushed to Android products in 2008 and 2009, when the Blackberry still dominated the market and Apple was trying to corner MP3 access. But Android products, initially, were quite hard to manage. Those that wanted to try, though, were those who consider Linux their go-to platform. They like complexity, because they view complexity as flexible, designable and more interesting. Android smashed Apple's market because it was able to describe itself more practically and usefully to the early majority when that sort came along in 2010 and 2011. But unlike Android, when TSR was faced with it's early majority, it had its pants down around its ankles because it had fucked up its business plan and was being turned over the money makers. So, explanation and technical support just never happened. And it hasn't happened since. It's never going to happen.
The OSR movement failed in large part because the groundswell engaged participants who were old-school chronologically, but weren't early adopters psychologically. By the 2000s, they came into a D&D product that had been validated by decades of survival, reputation, nostalgia and accumulated commentary (and then controversy, through the internet). These early and "late adopters" were not approaching an unknown system and asking what could be made from it. They were approaching a canon and asking how faithfully it could be recovered.
Except their perception of what was to be recovered matched that exact disaster which came into being as D&D failed as a business and began to excel as an exploitative product. While the earlier products by Gygax and Arneson, and the persons themselves, were revered, that reverence made it impossible for these "renaissance" folk to actually LOOK at the product directly and make up their own minds. In the actual Renaissance, architects like Filippo Brunelleschi studied and designed classical architectural ideas — or else they wouldn't have been able to achieve what they did — but then they set out to surpass the classicists. The structure of the Great Dome in Florence, Santa Maria del Fiore, had never existed in human history before. The OSR went back to the origins of D&D and then did not surpass them at all. Instead, they turned D&D into a "religion," not a "renaissance." But thank gawd, the anachronym doesn't need to be changed.
To restate: with the OSR, the participants recovered the texts, terminology, visual presentation, modules and remembered procedures, but the recovered material had acquired authority through age. The defects became "authentic" features. Ambiguities became invitations to "rulings." Missing systems became proof of openness. Crude mechanics became evidence of elegant simplicity. Instead of asking what the original designers had failed to accomplish, the movement spent enormous energy explaining why those failures were virtues.
This is what a religion does. It preserves a founding revelation, develops commentary around contradictions, venerates founding personalities, treats departure from the sacred text as corruption and then, individually, the individual DM's themselves invent mantras as supportive evidence that their way is the only way that makes sense. The OSR did not produce a single product that surpassed old D&D... which is why it has proven to be thoroughly irrelevant within the progress of the game. It was a momentary period of zealotry, not enlightenment... and though it has created a sort of community in its wake, that community in turn has done nothing more than continue to churn out the same products that old D&D turned out to exploit an old player base... only now the so-called Old School Religion exploits a "new" player base.
And so, in the middle of all this, there's me.
I didn't quit like all the early adopters I once new. I didn't buy into the product train. If you'd asked me who Gary Gygax was in 1980 I'd have been unable to give you an answer. I did not care who made D&D any more than I cared who made Squad Leader or RISK or Cribbage. I loved the game as I played it... not as the books presented it, gawd no, but as my friends and I redesigned it for ourselves in the 1980s, without concern for what the company might have done or what Gygax's money woes were when he went down in flames. I didn't even know about any of that until the internet happened, because Gygax's life trajectory simply wasn't relevant to my deciding how much treasure to hand to a party. I make changes to AD&D because all the other versions of the game, to me, started deeper in the hole than AD&D had, while I'd already had ten years of fixing that system before 2nd came out and proved itself to be worse. I had 21 years of work behind me before 3rd, and 28 years behind me before 4th, and gawd help me, 35 years behind me by the time 5th made its appearance. Jeebus... what are you supposed to do when someone comes along and tells you to pull your thirty-five year old renovated house down because they've invented a new way to hammer nails?
That's right. You ignore them.
Now I write lengthy posts about how nuts all this is, not because I think I'll change anyone's mind, and not because I'm "obsessed" with being proved right, but because, well, damn, it's interesting. I said to my players on Friday that this is a slow running freight crashing into a wall, that I've more or less been around what feels, for me, like forever. I'm fascinated to reflect on this failure for this reason, on these misunderstandings or justifications, on this collective mess that grew and grew simply because there was no Cassandra around to tell Priam, "You're gonna lose, Dad." 'Course, that didn't work out for Cassandra.
D&D has lost. It's a joke. Not among the players, but... just consider. It's had fifty years to convince the world that it isn't a joke. It has acquired millions of nominal admirers while remaining something people expect to outgrow, apologise for or present with a smirk. Hell, they made a movie with the game as its title... as a comedy. Doesn't that sting... just a little? Hm?
Maybe it's just me.
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