Dungeons & Dragons White Box 06

Halflings: Should any player wish to be one, he will be limited to the Fighting-Men class as a halfling. Halflings cannot progress beyond the 4th level (Hero), but they will have magic-resistance equal to dwarves (add four levels for saving throws), and they will have deadly accuracy with missiles as detailed in CHAINMAIL.

Point in fact, while the principle text has the 1974 copyright, the presence of "halfling" here demonstrates that this was likely printed after 1975, when TSR received a cease-and-desist from the Tolkein estate. Thereafter, "hobbit" was scrubbed from the text and replaced with halfling. I never saw this as an issue. I rather appreciate that the emotional/cliched tropes attached to the races haven't been included here. We're not told that dwarves and elves don't get along, or that dwarves are dour, elves are effete and halflings are plucky. That leaves a lot of room to breathe, to let these races become whatever a given DM wants, rather than an expectation that they'll serve a cookie-cutter motif. I can't speak for players who perhaps live and die on the principle that some perfect semblance of the races exist, because I've never had one of these play in my campaign. Generally, my experience has been that players either don't care, or they'd rather be allowed to interpret the races in their own way. This way, no two elves need think alike, act alike, dislike dwarves alike and so on. While halflings can fit into the game world without having to own under-the-hill habitats or have round doors or generally act like hayseed countryfied Englanders.

Everything after has worked to model every class, every race, every fictional land and city in some way or another, and it has never worked to produce anything more that a random spattering of tired tropes, as though picked from a large bin. The weakness of a completely fictional being or place isn't the lack of adjectives, but that it isn't real. "Greyhawk," for all the depth it pretends to have, isn't as complicated as a single territory anywhere on the earth, simply because the time needed to graph it down to the complexity of, say, Devonshire, would be a wasted effort — because, as the case is, that complexity would have to be stolen from some region of the earth, that being the only model to draw upon. Likewise, dwarves, elves and halflings, for all the romance they add, are really just reskinned humans. We have no idea what a dwarf would actually think like, so we make it think like a human with what we see as "dwarvish" characteristics. But it's all really a sham. That's why the numbers and abilities are what counts, not the modelling we've used that infringes upon actual game play. The game is not literature. It works best when it functions as a procedure.

Other Character Types: There is no reason that players cannot be allowed to play as virtually anything, provided they begin relatively weak and work up to the top, i.e., a player wishing to be a Dragon would have to begin as, let us say, a "young" one and progress upwards in the usual manner, steps being predetermined by the campaign referee.

I believe this was a rather naive assumption, but it's easy to see why it was made — for, as we've said, the game described here is a wargame, not the character-driven role-playing game of later. When the principle purpose of a character is to define their scope in battle, sure, a dragon is completely fine as an option. But even by 1979 the idea of a single player participating in a campaign as a dragon would be filled with intra-party hazards, a game world based on human history and not made for dragons, its size, its appetite, it's mythic gravity and presence among "ordinary" NPCs... such a creature played as a character would thereafter just become "the dragon show," with the same tropes played over and over. A human-centric setting can't contain such a thing without distorting it's internal logic.

But the creators at this time, with this set, hadn't conceived of that setting structure as yet. “Let them play anything” reads like an argument from fair play, not campaign narrative. What it actually exposes is the limit of wargame thinking: it confuses inclusion with interchangeability. Once the game began to take its own world seriously, the dragon could no longer be just another token on the board. The moment you ask what the dragon does when it isn’t fighting — how it exists as a visible thing in a world that rationally sees it as extremely dangerous and needing to be killed — the concept falls apart.

Not that present day game structures that pretend to have gotten around this issue really care...

Character Alignment, Including Various Monsters and Creatures: Before the game begins it is not only necessary to select a role, but it is also necessary to determine what stance the character will take — Law, Neutrality, or Chaos.

Character types are limited as follows by this alignment: (see image)

I'm going to try with all my might to be as positive as I can be. While actually saying something.

Give me a moment.

Let's start with what alignment does by virtue of the rules. It tells the DM what monsters can be "lured into service" by virtue of their alignment being matched by the party.  If a character is reincarnated as per the spell, the character's alignment limits what creatures it will be reincarnated as.

Alignment can influence the effectiveness of how a Quest spell affects you. Depending on your alignment, it may affect the random actions of some monsters you might meet. Most important of all, it affects your relationship with a magic sword.

And there we have it. This table, and the description above it, and the three books, never really explain the premise for why this is necessary or desirable. That's not a judgment, that's just a lack I can't help noticing. I assume the designers liked it for some reason. I don't know what that reason was. It wasn't included in the books.

The chainmail rules do not use the word "alignment," but looking up "chaos" and "law," the rules on page 39 say,

It is impossible to draw a distanct (sic) line between "good" and "evil" fantastic figures. Three categories are listed below as a general guide for the wargamer designing orders of battle involving fantastic creatures. Underlined Neutral figures have a slight pre-disposition for LAW. Neutral figures can be diced for to determine on which side they will fight, with ties meaning they remain neutral.

I don't find elucidation from this. 

Without judgment, this is the most baffling, weirdest part of D&D for me. I think "why" is self-explanatory. This is the start of a 40+ year belief system that, for a long, long time, held a great deal of importance for many writers, designers and game participants. It is a hill that a great many loud voices were ready to die on. Probably tens of thousands of hours went into writing around, for and in defense of alignment, trying to define it, trying to give the concept weight, offering it up as the central characteristic of a character's motivation for literally decades. Why someone would go back to the White Box set, find this and embrace it... well, you got me. People believe in angels. I guess there's room for all of us. I asked ChatGPT and it connected the phenomenon to Canticle for Leibowitz. I can buy that.

Changing Character Class: While changing class (for other than elves) is not recommended, the following rule should be applied: In order for men to change class they must have a score of 16 or better in the prime requisite (see below) of the class they wish to change to, and this score must be unmodified. A Cleric with a "strength" of 15, for example, could not become a Fighting-Man. In any event Magic-Users cannot become Clerics and vice-versa.

The changing roles this has also always confused me. Yes, players will want to cross the boundaries between classes, because they'll become attached to their character and grow weary of playing a given class. This is only encouraged when using the level maximums that are established here. So, in light of that, the attempt has been made to establish a threshold as a hedge against players doing it all the time. Why they didn't just write a rule here, "You cannot change classes..." well, that's just bad game design. Sorry. Don't mean to be so negative.

You write a rule in a game that says all the time, you cannot; you must; if "a", then "b"; if you pass GO, collect $200. If you go to jail from the Go to Jail square, you may not count that as passing GO. Rooks cannot move diagonally. Pawns cannot retreat. What's the problem here? They were able to draw the cleric/mage line. Why not all the lines?

The passage reveals the issues that have already cropped up between players and DMs of the only-in-house game that only the makers have ever played. And because the makers were never able to effectively resolve these issues, even for an "official" game they were publishing with their own money, they chose to award all these issues to all of us, generously. So the half-measure here, it isn't recommended, but if you have to, I mean, if the players really carp and whine, if you just can't control them, if you feel your shoes getting too full of clay, you can try the threshold and see if that works. At the end the only thing I would add are the words "Good luck." That would have been perfect.

Tackling a project like this, "Let's go through the White Box set and discuss," it has to be understood that there's more to it than to sing the praises of everything. Let's be clear. Within just four years it was clear to the creators of the game themselves that this set wasn't going to cut the mustard. They didn't just put out the Monster Manual in '77 and the new Players Handbook in '78 because it was a cash grab... they could tell, from the feedback they were getting, that there were monstrous-sized problems with three simple books where outsiders were concerned. And since those new books weren't moderate projects, they were probably started two, maybe three years before publication. That would suggest that within 12 to 15 months of the White Box set being published, TSR was ready to turn their backs on them, believing they could do better. In my opinion, they did. Of course they did, they'd had practice in game-making, they'd received feedback from sources they couldn't imagine tapping in 1973 and their eyes were opened.

To argue that the White Box Set possessed a deserved immortality is to ignore that time line. I started playing here in Canada in 1979. All three of the AD&D books had been published but they weren't available yet in this country. They didn't come available until the Autumn of 1979... literally weeks after my first game on September 6th. By Christmas, our DM's men and magic copy was tossed aside for the DMG, while I had my own set of three books given to me that year by my parents, at a cost of $45 to them. That's $190-200 in today's money. By Spring, no one anywhere was using the three books being discussed here. I'm not even sure they were still for sale at the D&D game store, that little place on Crowchild Trail (then) called the Sentry Box. We saw the better system and just moved on.

I didn't hear the words "White Box Set" until I came on the internet around 1998. I didn't know what that meant for at least another five years, when blogging became a thing. When I learned it was Men and Magic et al, I could not believe anyone cared about it. We never called it a box set because the DM I played with had thrown away the box. Or so I suppose. It was always three books he tossed on the table when we started. Though I could be confused about that, because we only played with them for about eight to ten weeks of my experience.

Going through this, now, I don't know how Shane did it. That's my first DM, though I've called him Shawn I think on this blog, and probably some other name too. It was a long time ago. He'd be about 63 now. I wonder what he'd think.

That's enough.

Dungeons & Dragons White Box 05

Clerics: Clerics gain some of the advantages from both of the other two classes (Fighting-Men and Magic-Users] in that they have the use of magic armor and all non-edged magic weapons (no arrows!), plus they have numbers of their own spells. In addition, they are able to use more of the magical items than are the Fighting-Men. When Clerics reach the top level (Patriarch) they may opt to build their own stronghold, and when doing so receive help from "above." Thus, if they spend 100,000 Gold Pieces in castle construction, they may build a fortress of double that cost. Finally, "faithful" men will come to such a castle, being fanatically loyal, and they will serve at no cost. There will be from 10-60 heavy cavalry, 10-60 horsed crossbowmen ("Turcopole"-type), and 30-180 heavy foot.

Note that Clerics of 7th level and greater are either "Law" or "Chaos," and there is a sharp distinction between them. If a Patriarch receiving the above benefits changes sides, all the benefits will immediately be removed!

Clerics with castles of their own will have control of a territory similar to the "Barony" of fighters, and they will receive "tithes" equal to 20 Gold Pieces/Inhabitant/ year.

If you want to know how the cleric came to be one of the character classes of the game, I must give a little instruction about the religious world in 1973. Remember, while this book was published in 1974, it was designed and written the year before.

About that time, most of the middle class attended church at least a few times a year; it was still a respectable thing to be, a belief that was still treated with respect. Religions functioned as localised, community-binding networks of personal trust and mutual aid. If your lawnmower broke down and you needed your lawn mowed for whatever reason, you could actually just call your minister and within two hours, someone from your church — or even another church of your own religion — would arrive with their lawnmower and mow it for you. As good will.

The 700 club existed, but at the time of this launch it hadn't yet occurred on public television — and it was long after before it gained political power. The Moral Majority wasn't organised until 1979. You can idiots like Anita Bryant and Phyllis Schlafly running around, who had their admirers, but to most people these were just cranks. They didn't represent actual religions. There was no reason at that time to believe that evangelicals would one day organise themselves as identity warriors.

At the same time, speaking of a medieval setting, the religious figure was absolutely central, especially to the concept of "adventure." The greatest adventure at that time was the one sparked off by Pope Urban, who called Europe to retake the Holy Land. Hundreds of thousands were on the move, not always in the same direction, while the fever lasted for two centuries.  At the same time, the other great adventure for the common person was the "pilgrimage," when people would forsake their lives for months, even years, to quest for enlightenment. Atop this, all the great figures of myth were bound hand in glove to religious motives, consequences and ideals. To import the religious figure into D&D would have seemed very right.

The designers were careful. They chose a word that, by 1973, had largely fallen out of common English usage, except in very formal church contexts or historical writing. Cleric sounded dusty, it was associated with Chaucer, it was non-sectarian and thus could apply to everything from a crusader to a monk to a missionary. That allowed for the individual to be included into the game's structure, without the baggage of the church hierachy. For worlds like Blackmoor and Greyhawk, it was a word that allowed completely new, untainted religious structures that could emerge to suit the DM's tastes. It was a word that felt holy without that holiness being defined. The only thing that "cleric" meant was a type of power.

The cleric fits the middle ground; we're all familiar with that, part fighter, part mage. Easy to understand. The explanation of the cleric getting two g.p. value for every g.p. spent returns us to the example of the lawnmower. It's peculiarly odd here that time is taken to explain precisely how many "faithful" show up for the cleric, where such was not included for the fighter (which is fixed later in AD&D). And no logical reason is given, either, for why a cleric gets twice as much tithe as a fighter gets tax. It's simply stated. But it's the sort of thing that can start arguments at a game table that insists on "rules as written." These rules are clearly not written very consistently... but I'll return to that in a moment.

We also get our first whiff of alignment here, with the usual caveats. The cleric has to pick one, the cleric can't switch... and by default, whichever one picks makes the other half of the population the enemy. It's essentially the Republic Western black-hat/white-hat dichotomy, with all the depth of those 30s serials and all the promise as well. There's an old saw that you don't cheer for a team, you cheer for laundry. That's pretty much the division being presented here — and if you want an origin, it comes from the wargaming table, where no other justification is needed to explain why this army from this side of the table wants to kill that army from that side. The division keeps the sides straight... any philosophy surrounding the words is an afterthought.

Dwarves: Dwarves may opt only for the fighting class, and they may never progress beyond the 6th level (Myrmidon). Their advantages are: 1) they have a high level of magic resistance, and they thus add four levels when rolling saving throws (a 6th-level dwarf equals a 10th-level human]; 2) they are the only characters able to fully employ the +3 Magic War Hammer (explained in Vol. II); 3) they note slanting passages, traps, shifting walls and new construction in underground settings; and 4) they are able to speak the languages of Gnomes, Kobolds and Goblins in addition to the usual tongues (see LANGUAGES in this volume).

Some caveats. I've struggled to present the italic text as it appears in the White Box, which is counter-intuitive as to what's capitalised and when. Here, "fighting class" isn't, while "fighter" is variously capitalised and not. I can't help but point out that while the Oxford Comma has appeared somewhat consistently, it's suddenly missing here. That tells me that different parts of the same page, or the same section, are written by different people, and that the work wasn't edited by a single person. Note that while all the races are capitalised here, elsewhere on the next page, they won't be.

Secondly, no explanation appears regarding whether or not the dwarf, or the subsequent elf or halfling, are "characters" or "races" or what. Page six is very clear: there are three (3) main classes. Three is even named twice, though in my quote of this yesterday I dropped the number in brackets. Yet here, on page seven, three other "races" occur, (the word does not occur) that can in the dwarf case only be fighters. Obviously, not "Fighting-men," thus revealing the somewhat clumsy nomenclature. I don't highlight this to criticise, only to point out that in writing game rules, one of the hardest sorts of literature to write, these errors are telling that no actual game designer was consulted or had any say over the content. And that was a bad error... understandable, of course, since in 1973, who knew that 52 years later people would be screaming at each other over a global communication system about the rightness or wrongness of these rules. Yet, here we are.

Taken as given, the dwarf is familiar. Special benefits, tough, and counter-measured by removing the benefit of becoming a baron in what's presumably a human world. As a player, you get to play one of these for a while, but the day comes a little sooner when you put it down and try the next character type. It's a smorgasbord, not an enduring model for infinite enjoyment. The willingness here to treat play as iterative — testing one option, see how it works, set it aside, test another  — rather than as a personal expression separates this text from everything about the game that came after. The writers never imagined permanence as a virtue. That's not how wargames are played. You clear away all the units on the board, set up new units, and enjoy the present experience. Longevity is inherent our enjoyment of the game, not in any single element of that game.

Briefly, and again, with understanding, it just shows they didn't know what they had. That mental leap, the connection players would later have with their characters, hadn't occurred yet. And that's hard for us, on the other side of that revelation, to understand. It's easier if you started out in wargame culture. But if you've never played that sort of wargame, the tendency is to imagine that of course the originators "got it." But it's clear from the text they didn't.

I'd be amiss if I didn't include this image from page seven... the classic treasure pile. Chest, coins, bones, sword — and skulls, of course, the classic Stevensonian relationship between adventure and buried riches. We constantly fail to grasp how much the children's literature of the age, much more so than the more adult authors that came to the gamers later, affected our thinking about what a pile of treasure ought to look like. Even today it's assumed that if there is a treasure, at some point someone must have died over it, in some fashion that allowed them to be killed and yet, mysteriously, the treasure left behind. What, the killer just filled his pockets and went, like Ben Gunn? I've never encountered a horde that the party acquired, only to leave enough to still half cover the skulls left behind. Just an observation. It looks nice, but... does it make sense?

Page 8 gives us this, the dwarf posed as swashbuckler. A little odd that you'd place the perspective below the dwarf's waist to make him look tall and strapping; no modern depiction would do so. Additionally, this is not the Tolkienian craftsman or stoic miner. It's a stock adventure figure, a seagoing rouge with naked thighs and calves (not great for caving), with a sword out of scale that's held like a prop and not a weapon. Judging from the belt loop, this thing would drag comically upon the ground. Not exactly the image of jaunty thrillseeking.

But why not accept it as is? The purpose of illustration is to clarify, not to improvise scattered meaning and interpretations. This is a fictional race; we have no photographs of it, nothing but our imaginations... and when those are cluttered by hundreds of competing, inconsistent depictions, "dwarf" automatically locks onto the clearest one... which in our present day ends up being John Rhys-Davies from the LOTR movies, by default. Now, I'm good with that, but this image occurs next to a text that says nothing whatsoever about the dwarf physically. The text does not even tell us it's height. And this picture doesn't. That's not how a descriptive rule book is meant to work.

Elves: Elves can begin as either Fighting-Men or Magic-Users and freely switch class whenever they choose, from adventure to adventure, but not during the course of a single game. Thus, they gain the benefits of both classes and may use both weaponry and spells. They may use magic armor and still act as Magic-Users. However, they may not progress beyond 4th level Fighting-Man (Hero) nor 8th level Magic-User (Warlock). Elves are more able to note secret and hidden doors. They also gain the advantages noted in the CHAINMAIL rules when fighting certain fantastic creatures. Finally, Elves are able to speak the languages of Orcs, Hobgoblins, and Gnolls in addition to their own (Elvish) and the other usual tongues.

The "switch class" here certainly leaves me uncertain what it means. And since so far we have no defined "game" as a measure, I'm not wholly clear on the dividing line of that either. I take it to mean that the same character can, in this campaign, be a mage, and in that campaign, be a fighter, so long as they don't both occur at the same time. If we reset, okay, sure, fine, but the new designation is THE designation. But admittedly, that's just my interpretation. Someone else might have another. Which is why we want language that is more exact than this.

Again, not meaning to criticise. It's an issue that the writers are using "game," "campaign" and "adventure" interchangeably. It's not my issue, it's the issue of thousands who find that when it's not nailed down, it brings disruptions to the table. Anything ambiguous must. And it's worth pointing out for those who flee to these rules to "run a simple game," that there's nothing simple when the rules aren't rigidly defined. It just takes one player able to read English two ways (and we know it can be) to make a mess of all your simplicity. This is merely an example of why the "rules-lawyer" emerged in the instant the game did; because if your laws cannot properly resolved contingencies, there's nothing to do but take the matter before the judge, lay out your case and expect a judgement in your favour. And if you don't get one, not just once but multiple times, your respect for the judge starts to wane. This may be the best we can do in the complex world of legal statutes and precedents. Generally, we expect a game, a far more manageable structure, to fix this hole. But D&D never has, because it's marketed as "player error," not game error. If you'd just stop questioning the rules, no matter how ambiguous they are, there'd be no problem. Essentially, straight out of Stalin's play book: "obedience, not clarity, preserves order." Ah, if only obedience could be counted upon.

The remaining elf is, again, recognisable. And even more hamstrung as a fighter than later versions. That 4th level restriction is harsh. I wonder who in the present day might accept that as written?

Dungeons & Dragons White Box 04

CHARACTERS:

There are three main classes of characters: Fighting-Men, Magic-Users, Clerics.

Fighting-Men includes the characters of elves and dwarves and even halflings.

Magic-Users includes only men and elves.

Clerics are limited to men only. All non-human players are restricted in some aspects and gifted in others. This will be dealt with in the paragraphs pertaining to each non-human type.

Fighting-Men: All magical weaponry is usable by fighters, and this in itself is a big advantage. In addition, they gain the advantage of more "hit dice" (the score of which determines how many points of damage can be taken before a character is killed). They can use only a very limited number of magical items of the non-weaponry variety, however, and they can use no spells. Top-level fighters (Lords and above) who build castles are considered "Barons," and as such they may invest in their holdings in order to increase their income (see the INVESTMENTS section of Vol. III). Base income for a Baron is a tax rate of 10 Gold Pieces/inhabitant of the barony/game year.

Setting aside the sexism of the time, though it took this crew less time than most of the world to accept that in a non-real setting that women can be fighters too, or that humans can be distinguished without calling them "men." Venture back into my early teenage years, though, there it is, in your face, in a way that's much more real that the nonsense I see being called out on youtube. It's a little like a woman saying, "They used to be sexist back in the day" and my thinking, "Sister, you have no idea how sexist it was in the day." Not that I blame the complainer. They've got every right.

Look at the priorities of the fighter: magic items, limited; whack-an-enemy; advance to baron. Not a word about protecting the mage or the cleric, not the tiniest sentiment about the fighter being there to support or sustain the party. Like I said, all this has the absence of that ideology. We aren't here to tell you about what a fighter fights for, or what responsibility is owed, or that a fighter is "more than whacking." There's no "role-playing" here so none of that enters the picture. It's refreshing.

Nor is the Baron a "hero." No, it's spoken of strictly in monetary terms, your chance to exploit some peasants for capital. There so social expectation, no requirements to save cats from trees, no reason to think first and sword later. You're a fighter. Swing away. Later generations, yes, will shove messaging into all this, believing they're creating motivation when in fact they're imposing dogma, but at the outset D&D refused to pretend that a character sheet needed a conscience.

Magic-Users: Top level magic-users are perhaps the most powerful characters in the game, but it is a long, hard road to the top, and to begin with they are weak, so survival is often the question, unless fighters protect the low-level magical types until they have worked up. The whole plethora of enchanted items lies at the magic-user's beck and call, save the arms and armor of the fighters (see, however, Elves); MagicUsers may arm themselves with daggers only. Wizards and above may manufacture for their own use (or for sale) such items as potions, scrolls, and just about anything else magical. Costs are commensurate with the value of the item, as is the amount of game time required to enchant it.

I'll comment just for a moment, for my sanity, about the creative grammar of these passages. That run-on sentence at the top of this is a beaut. Why bother using periods at all? And the imposition of capitals for every noun that has the vaguest importance, only to abandon that use of capitals three paragraphs later... you just don't see writing like this outside an elementary school. It's really a thing to admire.

Again, the assumption is plainly that the magic-user (not yet listed as a "mage" or "caster," words I find vastly preferential) is going to do some fighting. There is an inclusion here about fighters protecting the low-level mages (yes, dammit, I'm using the word), but it's clearly framed as optional ("unless" implies there's an alternative). There's also an assumption that when mages reach a certain level, they're expected to look after themselves. I don't fault a mage hiding behind a fighter; it makes good sense. So does hiding behind a tree. But too often this got translated into an expectation that the fighters are "there to protect the mages," which, really, is just nonsense. A fighter is not a lackey.

Intuitively, since the mage is made intentionally fragile at the campaign's beginning, there's an expectation that a lot of them are going to die. That's the message here.  Not "you're going to be weak until you're stronger," but, "because you're weak, you'll count yourself lucky IF you get stronger).  The expectation of perfect survival in later games obliterates this game balance, which is demonstrably there from the start. If every mage survives until it gets powerful, then logically, let them start powerful, or make them wait until the inevitable day arrives.  Game value added?  Zero.

The idea is that, when your fighter dies, you say, "I think I'll gamble on being a mage," expecting that you probably won't make it. But it's fun to try, to see if you wind up being the statistical anomaly at the top of a wide-based pyramid with a lot of dead mages under you. Chances are, you'll die, shrug your shoulders and say, "I gave it a shot. I think I'll try a fighter again." It's a different mindset, made possible by an easy character generation. But more about that later.

Note again that the end game for the mage is also exploitive. Make magic, make money. It's almost like the American Dream was influencing some of the thought process here, eh?

Let's pause for a moment and note the artwork that appears at the bottom of page six. I don't want to disparage it. It's rather nice to see that an effort was made — someone, likely with experience gained on a school paper — had the foresight to realise that a book made up of text alone wasn't just a bit hard on the eyes, it would be hard to lay out if you couldn't finish off a column here or there with white space.

It would have been nice if just one of the group had known an artist, or had the wherewithal to approach such a person, because honestly, they're everywhere, even in 1973. What really makes it for me, if you'll allow, is the little circle over the "i." We can almost imagine a whole library of spritish literature so ordered, with neat little circles over the "i"s and "j"s, and the periods too, and little bubble exclamation points, ellipses drifting like pollen grains... it's how you'd instantly recognise a book was sprite-written. Then the local sage could show it to the players and say, "Ah yes, early-era sprite script — note the dotted curls and the parentheses shaped like leaves. This was written before the brief period when stars replaced periods, during the reign of Pimwynn the Pontificator."

Examples of costs are:

Item: Cost

Scroll of Spells: 100 Gold Pieces/Spell/Spell Level/Week (a 5th-level spell would require 500 GP and 5 weeks)

Potion of Healing: 250 Gold Pieces + 1 week

Potion of Giant Strength: 1,000 Gold Pieces + 4 weeks

Enchanting 20 Arrows: 1,000 Gold Pieces + 4 weeks

Enchanting Armor to +1: 2,000 Gold Pieces + 2 months

Wand of Cold: 10,000 Gold Pieces + 6 months

X-Ray Vision Ring: 50,000 Gold Pieces 1 year

Research by magical types can be done at any level of experience, but the level of magic involved dictates the possibility of success, as well as the amount of money necessary to invest. Assume that a Magic-User can use a 4th-level spell (explained later), therefore he could develop a new spell provided it was equal to or less than 4th level. All this will be explained fully in the section dealing with SPELLS.

This is an aspect of ephemera that is difficult to defend. If the picture above conjures a dialogue where one of the game designers is saying, "Hey, my cousin doodles; I'll give him a call and see if he's interested..." then this insertion of detail here, and not in the logical place where the last line of it says it should be, I envision a screaming match in which Gygax bullied the others until he got his way. I say Gygax because this was a pet project of his, this insistence that magic item research should work like a plant producing refridgerators... only to approach it so lazily that it never was useful for anyone. The White Box provides 11 swords that aren't just +1 (how much does a cursed sword cost), 4 miscellaneous weapons with special abilities, 24 potions that aren't giant control or healing, 18 rings that aren't X-Ray, 11 wands that aren't of cold, 7 staves that aren't wands and 29 miscellanous magic, not one of which appears in the list above.  Gygax then goes on to make the exact same side-step in the AD&D DMG, basically using a lot of words to say, "My idea, your problem." At best, this gives the idea that magic can be made at a certain cost... which can't really be applied to magic not listed here, since how do you compare a mirror of life trapping to an X-ray vision ring?

What it reveals is a dangerous precedent that would essentially reveal the soft clay under the layer of topsoil that was the game. The actual concreteness needed in these rules to consistently run a game just isn't here. I don't want to fault these guys. They got a tiger by the tail, they undoubtedly saw the problem, and the solution was no doubt, "If you really care, you'll make up your own table like this one that includes everything." That's certainly the guantlet I picked up as an early DM. I saw the shortcoming, counted the number of magic items not specified and thought, "Hey, that can be solved."  Then I solved it. Only to later abandon the concept because the structure of buying magic items is, in my opinion, a shortcoming. BUT, regardless of that, any DM with a backbone didn't need the handholding to dig up the soft loam and make a foundation with concrete that would support the weight of the vision being offered here.

But it's "dangerous" for two reasons. By the time AD&D comes around, and me, there are so many cases like the above insertion in existence that it requires 40 years of sustained work to address no more than a portion of the half-baked ideas that need shoring up. The experience table was a disaster from the start and it took me 30 years to solve it, without ever finding any help from anyone. The combat system was stale, still is, and though I solved that in just 5 years, what I resolved remains ignored by haters of the stale system who nevertheless won't surrender it. I still haven't yet solved Gygax's siege point damage system. I don't think there is a solution, though I've run sieges and pretty must just had to bullshit my way through the problem. So its the amount of work that's asked for, and the technical problem solving that it demands, but is largely insolvable even if you try.

So, by 1979, the designers have built a massive engineering project of half systems that don't work as is and are really beyond most people to solve. Which, in turn, is the second danger. I'm a weirdo. I looked at it and said, "Yeah, okay, I'll solve it or die trying." Others look at it and think, "Yeah, fuck that noise. Either I'll ignore it, gloss over it, arbitrate it or pretend the system works. Whatever."

Commence post books, four disastrous editions, an internet of ignoring the problem, an effective Rorschach test for what anything in the rules actually means... and a project that, even if you want to, remains insolvable.

Up until this passage, on page 7, the introduction to the game has been largely rational. Here's what this is, here's what this means. And then bam, this table. "No, we're going to shove it in your face; no, we're not going to do it well. We haven't the space. Deal with it."

And unfortunately, the main problem that arises for the engineer willing to undertake the project is being actually aware of what's a garbage half-system and what isn't. This table? Which I spent, oh too many hours with, or rather with it's AD&D stepchild, was garbage. Which I didn't know at 16. Because during our first ten years association with this game, we're not yet familiar enough with the concept to be able to decide where to put our time. Which means a lot of those first ten years are spent failing at projects that never should have been started, which discourages succeeding at projects that are worth getting right. It's all a terrible mess... and the fellows who wrote this book, who certainly had less than 10 years experience when they wrote it, weren't themselves familiar enough with the concept to grasp any of this.

Later, when they did grasp it, and tried to solve it, they failed. Or they just didn't try. That's what the Unearthed Arcana was, and the Oriental Adventures, and the Wilderness Guide. they’re all symptoms of awareness without comprehension. You can feel, reading them, that the writers know something’s wrong in the skeleton of the game. They know it can’t stand as written. But they don’t know where the structural weakness lives. So instead of surgery, they just keep adding limbs — more classes, more modifiers, more environmental rules, more dice, more "flavour." The cure becomes metastasis.

They're testaments to the "experts" in the business crashing and burning... and then deciding on option two. Fuck it. Arbitrate it out of existence. And what we have left is a permanent epistomological fog that will never lift.

That's enough.

Dungeons & Dragons White Box 03

RECOMMENDED EQUIPMENT:

Dungeons & Dragons (you have it)

Dice — 1 pair 4-sided dice, 1 pair 8-sided dice, 4 to 20 pairs 6-sided dice, 1 pair 20-sided dice, 1 pair 12-sided dice

Chainmail miniature rules, latest edition

1 3-ring Notebook (referee and each player)

Graph Paper (6 lines per inch is best)

Sheet Protectors (heaviest possible)

3-Ring Lined Paper

Drafting Equipment and Colored Pencils

Scratch Paper and Pencils

Imagination

1 Patient Referee

Players

I had to question if it was worthwhile including this list and commenting upon it. It follows the rules of every game, the assumption that the users have not the first idea of what they'll need or how to go about readying themselves. The time period dictated that it should all be tactile, the basic requirements for a university student per class, since in effect it's the act of keeping records, preserving the notes, making updates and possibly filing it or expanding it into other larger models of data collection. It's an equipment list for the mock Paper and Paycheques role-playing game suggested in the later DMG.

The deciding factor, I thought, was the impulse to be coy. "Imagination" as equipment, which now strikes me odd having conceded recently that not everyone has it. Of course, the pretense of reticent humour later ends up being a pounding drumbeat of the proselytisation that would strangle 5e, when it mutates into a commandment. In 1974, the little flourish of the "patient" DM is playful. In 2014, the expection of X-cards and impotencification of the DM carries a rather different message. To put it most bitterly, the DM has become "caregiver facilitator" while the players have been replaced as "emotionally validated participants."

But that's not the message here, and I don't mean to suggest it is. I'm merely discussing the warping of the model, since we have the benefit of hindsight. The designers of the White Box sincerely wished to invite, not instruct. Their tone is collegial, not evangelical. They wrote for equals — wargamers, hobbyists, sharp-minded tinkerers who already possessed the temperament to build things from incomplete instructions. The list reads as a gesture of inclusion: Here’s what you’ll need if you want to play like us. The humour about "imagination" and a "patient referee" assumes the reader gets the joke, because we could actually do that with jokes. No one ever expected them to be taken with such dire seriousness.

It was a time of trust, a certainty that it was safe to place irony on the page without the need of footnotes. Those who go back to these books want that... the same way they want the first three Star Wars films before The Phantom Cash Grab came and ruined it all. A credibility, a thing that treated the audience as adults, who could decide for themselves what needed restraint and what was implied, without being told what to think. Here are the books, it says. You don't need supervision.

PREPARATION FOR THE CAMPAIGN:

The referee bears the entire burden here, but if care and thought are used, the reward will more than repay him. First, the referee must draw out a minimum of half a dozen maps of the levels of his "underworld," people them with monsters of various horrid aspect, distribute treasures accordingly, and note the location of the latter two on keys, each corresponding to the appropriate level. This operation will be more fully described in the third volume of these rules. When this task is completed the participants can then be allowed to make their first descent into the dungeons beneath the "huge ruined pile, a vast castle built by generations of mad wizards and insane geniuses.” Before they begin, players must decide what role they will play in the campaign, human or otherwise, fighter, cleric, or magic-user. Thereafter they will work upwards — if they survive — as they gain "experience." First, however, it is necessary to describe fully the roles possible.

Lots to unpack. I'll start by explaining that "keys" refers to the DM's notes explaining what's found in a specific room or area, as we've all seen. I'll add that because I'm not criticising, it was assumed that players were here with the expectation that entering the dungeon was defacto expected — not because the dungeon master wanted it, not because the players wanted it, but merely because this was the game. To the time period, it meant no more than the words, "Start all the players on GO."  Entering the dungeon wasn't an act of choice, it wasn't a story space, it was the board.  Motivation was no more needed here than it would be in Monopoly, while the goal was inherent: explore, survive, accumulate, advance in levels. Note the total absence of being asked to generate NPCs.

Since the details about player choice of class/race makes up the next section, I'll merely offer that, again, were talking board pieces. The word used is "roles." Character does appear as the heading of the next section, but I wish to stress that the word here is being used in its most general sense: not "the mental and moral qualities distinctive to an individual," the first definition you'll find in a dictionary, but the OTHER definition: "a person in a novel, play or movie." That eventually gets into muddy water also, since it includes "the part played by an actor," which ends up leading to a performance model that obliterates the game piece model. Be that as it may, what it means here is that your piece is a fighter, cleric or magic user. That does not mean you are. The dungeon doesn't care who you think you are — it only responds to what you do.

If it helps, trying thinking of it as choosing whether or not you want to be a rook, a bishop or a knight... but with a more options all having equal weight. There are no kings and queens and no one has to be a pawn.

This leaves two things. The "pile" and "the referee must..." Sigh. Okay, the pile first.

With the game played on this level, the goal was more or less to create an ongoing game board that would sustain itself through multiple nights of play. Because nearly everyone was new to the game, which made learning to play the primary goal, what in the pile happened to be adjacent to what else was in the pile did not matter.  Fight some pirates, open the door and find yourself facing skeletons? No big deal. Who cares. Matters as much as New York Avenue lying next to Free Parking. Not relevant to game play.

The continuity that was later fetishised (my hand is up, yes) wasn't here yet. The goal wasn't to craft coherence but to maintain activity. The dungeon wasn’t a narrative space, it was a machine for repetition — a geography of perpetual engagement. What mattered was that you could keep playing. The adjacency of pirates to skeletons wasn’t absurd; it was functional. The pieces were shuffled to ensure encounter density, not internal logic. The dungeon’s topology worked like a board: a sequence of discrete, consequence-bearing zones, their juxtaposition producing variety rather than verisimilitude. You didn’t ask why a troll lived three doors down from a gelatinous cube. Who cares? The system’s thrill, it's popularity, arose out of its procedures. "We're fighting zombies! Can you believe we're fighting zombies?" That's about as deep as it got.

We're so jaded now, it's hard to imagine this. But if most people who can't run D&D were to throw out the stories and the collaboration models and the garbage surrounding character enrichment and player validation, and just ran others in worlds where they had to fight interesting creatures in complicated environments (moving floors, ice, while climbing the side of a cliff, through tunnels that have to be crawled through)... they'd find the game a lot easier to run and they'd find players who were less interested in self-aggrandisement. It is, after all, the reason the game became popular in the first place. The appeal was in facing something uncertain, not in being applauded for how you felt about it.

Now, the minimum of half a dozen maps does not arise from needing half a dozen on any particular game night. It's not there to say, "If you're world hasn't reach this size, its insufficient as a world for you characters." The minimum is imposed because they expect that you, the new DM, will fail at this task if you haven't got the resolve to map at least six levels. It's saying that if you're ready to quit at four, you're not the DM of this party. It's even saying that if it's that hard for you to do this much, which really isn't anything when measured against how much work you'll do in a year, then this self as DM fantasy that you have? Put that on a shelf.

There are two kinds of people who are going to read those words, "...must draw out a minimum...", and react to them. The first is pretty much anyone you'll see right now on Reddit: "Oh my gawd, six? You're kidding me."

The other is me. The fellow who is right now writing his eighth post for this blog in two days: "Just six? Are you sure you don't mean sixteen? Is that a typo?"

It's a line of temperment, and you've encountered it all your life, beginning in grade school. When you were told in grade six that you had to right a 500-word essay, you either groaned or you thought, "Sure, I can do that." That's the line between player and DM. I truly wish that the "players" would get that, and stay on their side of that, and stop thinking that a few hours of preparation is "preparation."  The DM is the one who comes home, eats, showers and then thinks, "Oh good, I can work on my world now." There's no sense of how much there is to do, no sense that there's a point where they're "done," no inclination to stop working because it's getting boring or otherwise just not retaining their attention. Stopping work happens when it's time to sleep. Which you put off because, well, just another half hour, that's all we ask. If a DM tells you, "I have to go home and put some work in on my campaign," quit running in that DM's game. The words "have to" tell you everything. Those words should be, "want to." You want to run in a good game? Have some standards.

The maps, the tables, the redesign of things, the development of systems, these aren't chores, they're not make-work... they're the reflexive response to a thought that never shuts itself off. It's working on level three of the orc dungeon until sleep demands its due, then laying in bed before sleep shuts off the lights thinking about the third level, then thinking about the third level while brushing teeth and scraping the snow off the car and getting to work and then doing work, when you sneak in writing a note or two while at work, then writing those notes during lunch, after apologising to your coworkers that you've made an appointment so you can't join then... and then another long afternoon of thinking about it while waiting for quitting time, then getting anxious about getting to do it when we get home... and then telling our spouse, "You mind if I put dinner off for a half-hour, I just want to get down a few ideas that came to me in the day, before I lose them." And if she, or he, loves you, they'll say yes, because while they'd rather you make dinner right now, the glow of happiness in your face is something that makes it hard for them to say no. That's dungeon mastering. It's not whatever the hell it is those people on Reddit do.

It's not really "prep time." I describe it as that here, but I don't think about it that way. It's just the practice of a mind that wants to stay with it. And when I have a crash, as I do, it happens because the thread of thought abandons me for a time. But it comes again. It always comes again.

Dungeons & Dragons White Box 02

If you are a player purchasing the DUNGEONS & DRAGONS rules in order to improve your situation in an existing campaign, you will find that there is a great advantage in knowing what is herein. If your referee has made changes in the rules and/or tables, simply note them in pencil (for who knows when some flux of the cosmos will make things shift once again!), and keep the rules nearby as you play. A quick check of some rule or table may bring hidden treasure or save your game "life."

There's tremendous foresight here: the understanding that the book itself will spawn campaigns... which, predictably, should create a sufficiently sized background of people who, playing in those campaigns, will want to get their own copy for that purpose. Sufficient, that is, that we'll address specifically those people in our introduction. That, my readers, is confidence. At the initial publication of this, there is no community. Of course, I might have a later edition... though there is no evidence of this in the title or the copyright page. 

And again, what does it say? That you'll need to change your booklet to fit your table. And it says that knowing the rules provides you with opportunity, control, a better grasp of the game... so long as you check. Don't want to die? Read these rules. It's two lessons the present generation of players have turned their back upon. Rules, we're told, are of no importance; and at the same time, there's no need to shift if the rules change. Within the present day players' head, rules are superfluous and static at the same time, and thus divorced from their consciousness. What shall we imagine produced such a dichotomy?

Once D&D became a product line rather than a past-time, rules could no longer be presented as mutable. That would imply the consumer was entitled to think, to improvies, to take ownership. Such options would make for poor customer retention. So the company pushed the illusion of stability: hard covers, glossy codices, "official" rulings, and the poisonous idea that deviation required permission.

But at the same time, the need to sell the product as approachable meant stripping rules of their authority as well — "the rules are only a framework," "the story matters most." Thus, they became simultaneously sacred and irrelevant, fixed in publication but fluid in practice.

And then, when the game was reframed again as an instrument of emotional expression and community-building, the function of rules shifted from structure to support. The dice no longer governed consequence; they became props for self-actualization. In that logic, a rigid rule threatens the player’s inner journey, and a mutable one threatens the DM’s control — so both are discarded in favour of "feel."

The end result is an irrational mess that says nothing, stands for nothing, allows nothing and provides nothing... except for those dumb enough to run after fireflies believing they are glittering, fluttering pieces of gold. And how exciting the chase is.

As an aside, I adore the underlining of pencil, to remind the reader not to use a pen. Ah, the world we lived in once.

Men & Magic (Vol. I) details what characters can be played, potentials, limitations, and various magical spells. Monsters & Treasure (Vol. II) describes the beasts and creatures which will be encountered, as well as the kind and amount of treasure they are likely to guard, including magical items. Finally, The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures (Vol. III) tells how to set up and actually play the campaign. It is presented last in order to allow the reader to gain the perspective necessary — the understanding of the two preceding booklets. Read through the entire work in the order presented before you attempt to play.

Unquestionably, the work had be split into three books due to the production costs and publishing logistics of 1973. Even small print runs of a bound volume could be ruinously expensive, while three stapled booklets meant they could be run on smaller presses and collated by hand. The "White Box" was a brilliantly shrewd marketing approach for its time. It helped provide competition with the slick, big house wargame publishing house like Avalon Hill, whose thick cardboard boxes were stood on end, setting them apart from the standard Parker Bros. style boardgame. The colour white, I'd propose, was inspired by the White Album, the aesthetic of which, released 5 years before, had made an unprecedented avant-garde splash (a refusal to "advertise") on the public consciousness.  A white plain box gives an aura of mystery, while it escapes the cluttering aspect of three easily scattered books, any one of which could be lost and thus wreck the game's value. The books weren't options, they were functional parts, all of which had to be located when needed. A box kept that in order, along with the dice which were sometimes, sometimes not included.

In fact, the first thousand sets, often called the "woodgrain box," included a small set of polyhedral dice: a d4, d6, d8, d12, and d20. These were imported from a California educational supplier called Creative Publications, which sold "Platonic solids" for teaching geometry. TSR literally bought them in bulk, bagged them and tossed them in. The later White Box was supposed to include dice, but supply was inconsistent. They were expensive and hard to get, so in some runs TSR substituted "chits" — numbered cardboard counters the players could cut out and draw from a cup to simulate rolls. I vaguely remember games when such were used, but not D&D, as I came to the game after the time that "first edition" was released.

The books essentially work as a DM/Players Guide, a Monster Manual and a DM supplement. All the character creation, the spell lists and player interface is in Men & Magic, but combat tables, and NPC supplements also appear. Monsters and Treasure is essentially the MM, with the two linked intentionally: you meet one, you earn the other. That was, more or less the game's only incentive structure. Underworld and Wilderness discussed how to structure adventures, how to build dungeons, how to manage the outdoors. It introduces the idea of a campaign as a persistent "world."

SCOPE:

With the various equipage listed in the following section, DUNGEONS & DRAGONS will provide a basically complete, nearly endless campaign of all levels of fantastic-medieval wargame play. Actually, the scope need not be restricted to the medieval; it can stretch from the prehistoric to the imagined future, but such expansion is recommended only at such time as the possibilities in the medieval aspect have been thoroughly explored. The use of paper, pencil and map boards are standard. Miniature figures can be added if the players have them available and so desire, but miniatures are not required, only esthetically pleasing; similarly, unit counters can be employed — with or without figures — although by themselves the bits of cardboard lack the eye-appeal of the varied and brightly painted miniature figures.

As we have discussed widescale campaigns already, and can leave this off until the books get into it, let's begin with that telling duality: "fantastic-medieval."  It is quite evident, from the context of miniatures, from what has been said before, that the game is not about "living a fantasy."  The word "fantastic" here, though doing a lot of heavy lifting, is not describing "imaginative self-expression" or "immersive storytelling."  It is speaking of magical exceptions within a period-specific military frame. The "fantasy" element was an expansion of tactical realism, not a replacement of it. The dragons, balrogs, and spells were to the wargame what air power or artillery was to a historical simulation — new vectors of capability, governed by the same logic of positioning, supply, and attrition.

The word "medieval" grounds that exception. It tells what tactical assumptions apply: melee weapons, personal combat, hierarchical orders, logistics measured in feet and yards. It's a period constraint, NOT an aesthetic.

Thus, the proposal that "D&D" could be made prehistoric is a reference to what incorporated technology might apply. The makers here are saying, "we did the work to manage the weapons of this time period..." if you want to set D&D in the future, the Old West, the Roman Era, or 40,000 B.C., your problem isn't rewriting a whole new game, it's figuring out the approximate effectiveness, ranges, weights, spoilage or whatever that would apply to whatever time period YOU want to play in.
Those who felt that a Boot Hill, Traveller, GammaWorld or Rolemaster required the change of every rule and every structure were merely reinventing the wheel for ownership reasons, not because those changes necessarily created a better game. It was a proprietary reflex, a drive to stake ownership through differentiation. Each re-implemented the same basic chassis — randomisation, spatial movement, resource tracking, combat resolution — but with new dice, new tables and new terminology because commercial distinction demanded it.

It was there, when the copycats rushed forward, the legitimacy of the original model having proved itself, that the continuity of the game was lost — a full decade before the 2nd edition was launched. Most of these come-latelys failed, largely because they were rushed into production, barely game tested, and because ultimately they depended upon stealing an existing market from someone else. Those that have survived did so because humans are unusually sympathetic to difference, while certain folk are always able to find a specific element in something that appeals to them personally. But for myself, though I've played a number of these other games, they remain essentially D&D to my mind. The landscape remains, however, a series of shrines which each camp has built to sustain their personal fetish: realism, narrative, gear, skill trees, dice systems. What they call identity is mostly preference dressed up as philosophy.

The use of pencil, paper and mapboard were the standard because it was 1973; and it still made sense into the late 1990s. It only remains as a testament to how many DMs truly aren't computer savvy... and, without my having personally tried the plug-and-play graphic systems that exist, how poorly they've succeeded in winning over the majority. They reproduce the look of the mapboard but not the authority of it. They assume automation equals ease, when in fact it often erases the DM’s fluency. Without the ability to move every depicted element, or change every visual aspect, such designed shortcuts cannot replace a simple pencil mark on a cheap stretch of paper. The simple act of drawing a door, sketching a corridor, or writing "pit trap" by hand establishes a kind of sovereignty that no automation can replicate.

I had a collection of miniatures once. And yes, of course, they appeal in every way just as the text says. I'm glad I'm free of them. For all their benefit, they're based on a wargame combat table, where every detail about the piece was self-evident in the piece. A table-top RPG requires paper, pencils, books, laptops... and because the participants are sitting, drinks and snacks beside. This leaves little room in the tables centre for the tableaux of combat... which is why I prefer a top down representation on a wall-mounted computer screen, this being 2025.

Age Level: 12 years and up.

Number of Players: At least one referee and from four to fifty players can be handled in any single campaign, but the referee to player ratio should be about 1:20 or thereabouts.

That has to be respected. Who here would argue that a ref-to-player ratio ought to be yourself and twenty? That is not a cozy night at a table; that needs a board room, a game store, the kind of space that universities provide for small events. For awhile, my crew and I used to play at a small recessed lounge located in Science B at the University of Calgary; we'd just fetch a table from one of the open classrooms and sit on the plush chairs in a space 30 feet wide and literally 18 feet or so high. Like playing in a palace, with all the vending machines one could want. Universities were "open" 24 hours then. We had no "right" to play there, never had to sign a book to get the space; it was ours by default because we played Saturday nights and the university was a ghost town... just the typical few score of hardcore studiers scattered throughout the building. If anyone asked, we could prove we were students... but no one ever asked. Was chilled, though. Temperature never got above 65. I moved to a new place and my games returned to civilisation.

As for age 12... well, I was 15 in 1979, so I never experienced that.  My daughter's first game, not mine, happened when she was 9 or 10. Most around seem to identify an age around that range. But then, that might be because they're still around. The "dabblers," as I defined the term in the previous post, they probably all start a lot later. I've never introduced anyone to the game younger than 14. And that was when I was 15.

That's enough.

 

Dungeons & Dragons White Box 01

Let's start at the beginning:

ONCE UPON A TIME, long, long ago there was a little group known as the Castle and Crusade Society. Their fantasy rules were published, and to this writer’s knowledge, brought about much of the current interest in fantasy wargaming. For a time the group grew and prospered, and Dave Arneson decided to begin a medieval fantasy campaign game for his active Twin Cities club. From the map of the “land” of the “Great Kingdom” and environs — the territory of the C & C Society — Dave located a nice bog wherein to nest the weird enclave of “Blackmoor,” a spot between the “Great Kingdom” and the fearsome “Egg of Coot.” From the CHAINMAIL® fantasy rules he drew ideas for a far more complex and exciting game, and thus began a campaign which still thrives as of this writing! In due course the news reached my ears, and the result is what you have in your hands at this moment. While the C & C Society is no longer, its spirit lives on, and we believe that all wargamers who are interested in the medieval period, not just fantasy buffs, will enjoy playing DUNGEONS & DRAGONS®. Its possibilities go far beyond any previous offerings anywhere!

I'm not going to criticise. Rather, note the tenor of the forward given... there's no grand mission statement, no philosophy of play, no rhetoric about inclusivity or artistic transcendence. There's a youthful pride in the tone, found in the use of quaint language to describe the ordinary, the sense of something exciting about the start, the utter lack of self-importance or the remotest awareness that the writer might one day be looked upon as an engineer of history. Blackmoor is introduced playfully; no one at the time has a preconception of it, so it is merely a place between here and there. The language is reminiscent of Roald Dahl, with a bit of Lewis Carroll... and the self-reference isn't to "role-players" but "wargamers." That alone carries a considerable weight that we ought to hold fast in our memories.

While it is possible to play a single game, unrelated to any other game events past or future, it is the campaign for which these rules are designed. It is relatively simple to set up a fantasy campaign, and better still, it will cost almost nothing. In fact you will not even need miniature figures, although their occasional employment is recommended for real spectacle when battles are fought. A quick glance at the Equipment section of this booklet will reveal just how little is required. The most extensive requirement is time. The campaign referee will have to have sufficient time to meet the demands of his players, he will have to devote a number of hours to laying out the maps of his “dungeons” and upper terrain before the affair begins. The third booklet of this set will be of great help in this respect, for a number of helpful suggestions regarding how to accomplish it all have been given in order to help you accomplish the task with a minimum of time and effort. There should be no want of players, for there is unquestionably a fascination in this fantasy game — evidenced even by those who could not by any stretch of the imagination be termed ardent wargamers. The longevity of existing campaigns (notably "Blackmoor" in the Twin Cities and "Greyhawk" in Lake Geneva) and the demand for these rules from people outside these campaigns point towards a fantastic future. Tactical Studies Rules believes that of all forms of wargaming, fantasy will soon become the major contender for first place. The section of this booklet entitled Scope will provide an idea of just how many possibilities are inherent in DUNGEONS & DRAGONS.

Note the usual beats here, stretching back 50 years. The expectation that the activity cannot be done casually; the assumed abundance of players; the expectation that this thing is going to be big one day. The above, written in 1973, states the campaigns mentioned already have "longevity." How far back, then, does D&D really go? We're not told, but we see plainly that 1973 wasn't the starting point.

Further, consider that the work is done to meet "the demands of the players," and not for self-aggrandisement. As the foremost creator of a single game world on the internet (arguably), I would argue that yes, the needs of the player to have a game world that is structured, laboured upon, with maps and a display of terrain, needed hours of commitment... that is absolutely the contract I signed upon becoming a DM. That there are those who complain at this cost, who feel this cost should assign them some importance above the player... and damn it, that the player should be grateful for the effort, and not critical of whatever may have resulted from that effort (as they have every right to be), has become a normal part of our present game culture. But there it is, as near to the beginning as we need have it: expect that you'll have to work. I have written on the value of doing something in service of those outside ourselves.

These rules are strictly fantasy. Those wargamers who lack imagination, those who don't care for Burroughs' Martian adventures where John Carter is groping through black pits, who feel no thrill upon reading Howard's Conan saga, who do not enjoy the de Camp & Pratt fantasies or Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser pitting their swords against evil sorceries will not be likely to find DUNGEONS & DRAGONS to their taste. But those whose imaginations know no bounds will find that these rules are the answer to their prayers. With this last bit of advice we invite you to read on and enjoy a “world” where the fantastic is fact and magic really works!

E. Gary Gygax, Tactical Studies Rules Editor

1 November 1973, Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. 

As someone of a few years, I gain a bit of humour at the choices of literature that made the cut, as it were. No, not Tolkein, Burroughs. No, not Lovecraft, Howard. No, not Vance, Leiber. Oh, sure, no doubt such names might have arisen, if there'd been a reason to include a fourth or a fifth example... but as someone who remembers 1973, who remembers when Tolkein was not a god while Lovecraft was generally met with an attitude of "meh"... it is, after all, the same book over and over... I get a little pleasure from sources a little closer to the bone of what I saw D&D representing when I began to play in 1979.

But that aside, we see the origin of that effort to paint the atmosphere with a brush design to promote feeling over gameplay. I understand the reason for it; atmosphere grabs, atmosphere impels, atmosphere sells content. It's an easy way to put butts in the seat, and the folks here are only following up a long history of 20th century marketing. But "atmosphere" has since remaining the lingering poison of this game, putting butts in seats that never should have come to a game night, and who couldn't pick Howard or Lovecraft out in a line-up (hint, it's the dead one). But that is not the fault of Gygax, the author of this piece. He didn't know. He couldn't have known. No one could have.

I invoke it here not to fault the originators, but to show how the fault was always in their stars, how the very nature of the game carried its own gravedigging shovel. The genre energy that made it irresistible — that open invitation to imagination — also guaranteed that, sooner or later, the performance of that imagination would eclipse the play.

INTRODUCTION:

These rules are as complete as possible within the limitations imposed by the space of three booklets. That is, they cover the major aspects of fantasy campaigns but still remain flexible. As with any other set of miniatures rules they are guidelines to follow in designing your own fantastic-medieval campaign. They provide the framework around which you will build a game of simplicity or tremendous complexity — your time and imagination are about the only limiting factors, and the fact that you have purchased these rules tends to indicate that there is no lack of imagination — the fascination of the game will tend to make participants find more and more time. We advise, however, that a campaign be begun slowly, following the steps outlined herein, so as to avoid becoming too bogged down with unfamiliar details at first. That way your campaign will build naturally, at the pace best suited to the referee and players, smoothing the way for all concerned. New details can be added and old "laws" altered so as to provide continually new and different situations. In addition, the players themselves will interact in such a way as to make the campaign variable and unique. and this is quite desirable.

I could talk for a long, long time about many of the things here... and I have. We'll assume with the assumption that the rules are for miniatures... and while yes, I've often run games without miniatures, and I agree they're not strictly necessary, I feel it's important to comprehend this from a design strategy. The presence of the miniature assumes a finite-quality as a fundamentalism. The miniature occupies space; it moves through the time of combat and other procedure; its distance is not only relative to other things, it's a relativity that is expected to be measurable. For those who believe that D&D was never conceived as a "tactical" game, or those I've seen who claim to be "OSR" yet dismiss the tactical aspect of the original rules, this is a bombshell. Not one that's going to influence anybody, but nevertheless a fact. Original D&D was tactical. Get past it.

And again, for those who have revised the original work in their head so as to pretend that OSR was an abstract storytelling engine, or that it was deliberately a "simplified" form of D&D, we have the contrary before us: yes, it can be a game of simplicity. It can also be a game of tremendous complexity. I am not separated from the OSR because my game has more rules, more substance, more expectations upon myself, more options for the players, more detail, more relevant social aspects and so on. I am merely separated from others because I worked harder. I chose to use my time and imagination to dispense with the arbitrary limits that lazier, less committed, less caring, less engaged, less ardent enthusiasts chose to give. Being lazy about your game world, even if you frame it as "a simple rule system," is not a virtue... it's merely the option you took. But your choice does not define what the game REALLY WAS, right there in the introduction, just because you wish to see it so. When you attempt to do so, you only reveal how full of shit you are.

Interesting that assumption of "if you've bought this, you're one of us..." not in the sense of having joined a club, but that you're obviously an imaginative, deeply invested true believer like we are. For years and years, unquestionably, this was true. I'll be honest: those first few years of D&D, up until my first game convention I would say, around 1984, one just didn't encounter really stupid people in a game. Oh, sure, a few jerks, I can see their faces now, 45 years later... and occasionally a pompous ass. But an imaginative pompous ass, a problem-solving jerk. One could count on a certain... intellectual elan, as it were. A vitality of thought as motion, a mind with forward drive. In the parlance of the introduction, those with a compulsion to work on D&D, not unlike my own. My high school, as I've said, swilled a pan of some 2,200 students down to twenty, twenty-five nuggets. Most of us wanted to sit and devise some creative work, a map, a game rule, an artistic sketch of a character, a whole campaign. No doubt the originators of D&D were noticing a similar distillation among the various mid-west post-secondary schools that they called home. And the assumption seems to be that the game will also appeal to a certain kind... the right kind. While others won't, so to speak, want to work for it.

In this way, early D&D wasn't democratic at all; it was a craftsman's guild, the sort made of wargamers that would deliberately tank the efforts of a newly arrived player who was judged not to be "worthy" of the club, as they didn't have the assumed strategical/tactical skills. Those folks didn't want to play with dabblers... it is from within those folks that D&D got its start. Its a quiet note that the games foundation wasn't one of inclusiveness, but an expectation of competence. Just as chessplayers self-select to remove those who can't play at the room's level, old school D&D used to as well. But that's not what we mean when we say "old school" today, is it?

And yes, agreed, start small. You don't know what your world is, don't make a world.  Make a back yard. Make a swing, a tire and a slide. And a picnic table for drinks. That's your first game world: three places for the players to go and a home base to buy stuff. Then, when you're ready, add a sandbox. But only when you're ready, and only when you find yourself without work to do, while yet wanting to work. You grow the world because there’s a genuine appetite to expand, not because some online rubric says a "real campaign" needs a continent.

Of course that applies to rules as well as anything. The originators knew they hadn't written enough rules; they knew the rules they wrote wouldn't work for every table. They didn't pretend they had all the answers, which makes their glorification, in the way they have been glorified, rather ridiculous. "Laws" is put in brackets because, since Hammurabi, if there's anything in this world that is never fixed, it's the law. That's a 50 year old snub against people who haven't been born yet, who write "rules as written" as though that's a sensible approach to anything.

That's enough.

Reclaiming the Game

At some point, questions about why D&D was structured the way that it was, why the players were expected to kill monsters to achieve victory points (er, ah, experience), why it used dice, why did gold allow level increase, why combat was given so much space, why the DM had the final say, why was randomness built into play, why did good and evil exist — and a great many other questions — became more important than how the game was played.

This seemed inoculous at first... just spitballing around parts of the game to question their efficacy and perhaps find where improvements could be made. Or, perhaps, just to have fun with the concept, "Isn't it funny that we're all murder hobos." Words said in jest, the enjoyed talk about a game that had seized our imagination. We alike the game enough to ask questions. That was all.

But then, an ideology inserted itself. A very small number of people began to ask questions like, "If we're enjoying a game about murdering these creatures without cause, what does it say about us?" "Isn't wanting treasure in the game essentially a sort of greed?" "Are alignments even ethical?" "And who says the DM ought to have the final say?"

These are normal questions. In a strange way, however, they reflect the suppositions that outsiders, specifically religious outsiders, were also imposing on the game's logic. Only in the 1990s, after the S.P. had passed, other social changes were infringing on the game's licence. "Isn't killing monsters a little violent?" "What about orcs — why are they the bad guys?" And then this was paired with the dissatisfaction that emerged in the 1990s.  "I'm tired of rolling up characters." "I want my characters to be able to do more." "I want characters that are more powerful."  And of course, that's precisely when the next system was designed to provide — at the price of character generation being made more difficult, more time consuming, making it less practical to kill characters. That tax was, in fact, disastrous when more organisation in more public spaces brought more people to the game for two and three hour session play... far less than the five or six hour periods that were more common in private homes in the 1980s.  Hell, on one occasion, our group, about seven people, decided we'd have a 24-hour game session, from noon-to-noon, over the Easter holiday.  Didn't work, of course. By five a.m., seventeen hours into the game, we were all bleary and struggling to add numbers on our character sheets. People began to crash on sofas and the floor so that by nine a.m., there were just two of us left. We woke everyone up and closed the game.

Not that it matters, but I've always been able to give players time to generate characters because my games never ran from 7 'til 9... yet I've known many such persons who've never played more than three hours of D&D at a go. That changes one's perspective.

To bring this home, however, I want to stress that the moral questioning that began to surface in the 90s — the concern over violence, the anxiety over representation — wasn't malicious; it was the cultural air that we had begun to breathe, not just while playing but all the time. Every venue, from campus to the workplace, were wrestling with the same questions: not how to do a thing, but what was the morally right way to do it. D&D was inevitably folded into that conversation.

The trouble is, a game doesn’t hold up well under that kind of scrutiny. It wasn’t built to provide ideology. "Orcs" were bad because that was the Tolkein shorthand. "Death" was okay because the game grew out of little chits played in a wargame atmosphere. "Alignment" was invented because it was perceived that non-creative minded people would need something upon which to structure character and motivation. Logic didn't count, because no one in 1975 could have guessed that any of these things would matter in 1995. And because 1995 had come to treat the originators as "creative gods," it was impossible for true believers to accept that these were just college guys with no more foresight about the future than anyone else.  No, no, what had to be true was that Arneson, Gygax and the rest had a plan, an ideal, a hidden message in the concept that explained precisely why orcs had to be bad... while treating any contrary perspective as heresy.

A culture that had begun with poking fun at the silliness and irrationality of D&D slowly morphed into parsing "ancient texts" from the 1970s, such as the comic shown here, to reveal "truths" about the game that had never been given serious consideration. For example, why shouldn't thieves be able to jump up and grab hold of the ceiling when attacked? Hm? After all, mages cast magic... it's not like the game is realistic.

This was all part of the "internal meaning" that was being grafted onto a game that had none. The mechanics, the tropes, the tone... these were there to make the game run, not to justify or formalise an "ideal" of D&D. Perhaps the best reason for returning to an earlier version of the game isn't because it's simpler or less repleted with detritus, but because the books themselves don't make any attempt to describe the game in ideological terms.

I've always despised the phrase, "It's just a game," because I've always interpreted it at "it's a bit of fluff, not worth getting excited about." I am excited by the game and I resent any suggestion that D&D is no better than, say, Settlers of Catan or any boardgame for that matter.

But perhaps there's an argument to be made, one I hadn't considered until now, that "It's just a game" ought to be a sort of compact against all this nebbish moralistic bullshit that has arisen these last two decades. The orcs don't represent "black people," it's just a game you nit. No, your character does not have a wheelchair, it's the 14th century and it's just a game. It doesn't have to be a shrug, it can be a line in the sand, a moment of reason and reproval, saying that "Hey, I like this soup and I want you to stop pouring your shit into my pot."

A line in the sand is what many players had to do in the 1980s, against hatemongers, against school principles, sometimes against parents. "I'm playing this game, and if you won't let me play it here, I'll play it somewhere else." When we were kids, and parents tried to dictate what we ought to like, we paid them lip service and then we kept doing it anyway.  We need a little of that. A little less concern for what other people think, a little less willingness to bend just because they think the game is about something else. The game doesn't need an ideology. It isn't played with a million other people. It is played with only a few, who happen to play a game that shares some characteristics of what others are doing. But that doesn't make us a "community," it doesn't make us a "culture," it doesn't convey any responsibility or reason to cater just because we also happen to do this thing.

Mostly, we think when we grow up, that we were foolish wanting to do what we liked when we were teenagers. For myself, yeah. I should have done less stupid things. But I don't count D&D as one of those. And nobody, not my parents, who are passed on now, not my high school principle (who I convinced in his office that we weren't harming anybody — he was actually a pretty good guy), not my peers, and not the fucking WOTC, is going to stop me from playing this game the way I want to.

We could use more of that.

Second Step

This continues from the last post.

Ban backstories. These, above all, are an infringement of performative culture upon the game's rules. A backstory is a way of voting yourself a set of accomplishments, which then you think you're allowed to crow about, while everyone else is expected to buy in. The character who whole-hog embraces the backstory is one who can see no difference between an invented triumph and one that's earned. Both allow him or her to boast, both allow preening and the prancing that comes of self-importance, both permit a safety net of imagined competence that can be defended with words, making die rolls and real consequences inviolable. The monologue of the invented character is there to pull focus... which is precisely why such persons should never be allowed to play.

D&D is a game, not a performance. It is a series of events taking place in game, where the numbers bestowed — experience, wealth, status, toys  — reflects an ongoing series of risks that brought concrete benefits. Nothing... no item, no association, no privilege, no satisfaction, no skill, no asset should manifest in a way that is self-assigned. The dice can assign these things, every player ought to have the ability to roll on a large table of chance, with winners or losers, but nobody is blessed merely because they wish it so. You start a game, you get the same number of pieces as everyone else. You join a game, your value is your ability to play. That's the only measure. D&D is NOT a game of "imagination." Like every other form of entertainment that exists, imagination plays a part, but it doesn't make you special.  The only person your imagination serves is you, and it only counts when its in your head. The rest of the time, you must play the cards your dealt, you must play the character the dice dredged up, you must take the good and the bad along with everyone else. There's no special car for your originality and there's no seat for your imaginary friend. If your imaginary friends want to play, they'll need to roll their own dice.

It's rarely said, but the compulsion to backstory is vanity run amuck. Human activities have long suffered the admission of those who insist that they ought to be made the centre of things, for no other reason that they believe they are that. The "backstory" has empowered these people. It has given them a licence to be themselves — that is, execrable — while being able to point to official literature that justifies that claim. And we, who owe nothing to officials, who owe nothing to those who invented this nonsense, who never needed such nonsense in our games, are now expected to bend the knee simply because some fool put it in a book somewhere.

The functions that we place most highly where it comes to human collaboration and involvement are work, study, love, friendship, family and personal sacrifice for the greater good. None of these things recognise vanity as anything but an impediment. NONE of the organisations based upon these ideals rewards such vanity. Why D&D should go its own way, while branding itself as a special form of collaboration where the vain selfish assholes of the group are catered to, I can't begin to imagine. But here we are.

We're not even supposed to call it vain. We're supposed to reward it.

Yes, reward the loudest person at the table and make the game orbit them. Reward the prattling fool who insists on delivering a three-minute segment of their backstory every session. Reward the one that must remind us during every combat about the one who killed their father, who must be avenged. Reward the player that cries on cue, that won't act because it's "out of character," who steers the game because every event must be about their backstory. And with what should they be rewarded? Applause, of course, and our laughter, though we've heard the joke a dozen times. But if we can't laugh, then our tired groans will do, for those too prove that the player is the centre of the universe, again, compelling the emotional state of all others present, without relent.

Stopping this is easy. As DMs, the setting is ours. The characters were born into it. When Geoff says, "My father was murdered by assassins and I must avenge him..." then say, "Your father is a porter, he works at the Calf and Lamb inn and he drinks too much. He's an NPC, and I'm the DM."  There, settled.

When Mary says, "I was born in a far off land, where I am known as the lost princess Sheia..." then say, "You were born in the back of a milk truck while they were trying to get your mother to the midwife; your mother still calls you 'Diddlebums.' You really hate it. But your mother is an NPC, and I'm the DM."

This is a clean, surgical way to handle it. By reasserting the world's reality, not by arguing, but by defining the setting, as the DM by the rules is directed to do. We don't debate their invented past; we overwrite them with something ordinary, grounded and specific. It’s reclamation. We’re reminding everyone that characters are born into the setting, not imported from some parallel stage. The moment we reclaim authorship of origin, vanity loses its foothold.

These interventions work because they're decisive and unambiguous. We don't make a story about why the player's backstories don't fit; we just demonstrate,  in play, that the world already exists and doesn’t bend to a player’s imagination. "Your father is a porter," "You were born in a milk truck" — these aren’t punishments; they’re reintroductions to reality. These players need a little more reality. They need to remember they're playing with other people, not themselves. They need to be reminded: you exist here, in this shared space, according to the same rules as everyone else.

Handled this way, the table resets. The players learn that identity isn’t a gift they bring — it's something they accumulate with sessions, at the same time as their peers. Our job isn't to validate their self-mythology, but to give the world shape. Our world, not theirs. Let them run the game if they want to make up characters.

Then, once the premise is clear, and the players cease assuming their importance, they can start engaging with the game in front of them. With their ego on the hook above their shoes in the front hall, to be worn elsewhere. Whereupon the game returns to what it was always meant to be: a shared act of exploring, adventuring and overcoming, grounded in the present, where the effort is to help each other along, paying each kindness forward as they go.