5 ms·

This was a good read, and the author makes convincing points. Largely, I agree, but the author makes a mistake that's extremely common in the hobby: they presum

by gavmor 2y ago

This was a good read, and the author makes convincing points. Largely, I agree, but the author makes a mistake that's extremely common in the hobby: they presume that the author of the book is the authority of the game, whereas the presumption made by Gygax et al. was that the Dungeon Master was overflowing with ideas, and needed only some reference points to pin them down. One might as well refer to my garage toolbox as "anti-Cabinets" for containing no hinges. And these anti-Medieval fixtures from the text aren't even necessarily central to the experience. Hiring retainers is a hand-wave, a way to get back to the meat of the game: prying gems from the eyes of enchanted statues. I guess my point is that the most accurate possible exegesis of the Gygaxian canon misses, almost entirely, the heart of the game, which exists overwhelmingly at the table, and not in the book.

pessimizer 2y ago
I don't buy that the "heart of the game" is at the table. It's at the table where the game is being played, by the rules that the game sets up. In a way that no one had ever really played before, and a way everyone ended up playing since. You can barely call D&D anti-medieval; it isn't from a world of obsessing about Tolkien-style fantasy. It's Gygax coming up with rules for miniatures wargaming where players are individuals within a group rather than being entire sides of a war and moving armies, or being squad-level and choosing how to move squad members. That was the important part that influenced the entire world. All of the players were part of a single squad, and working (and cooperating) as individuals for their own benefit. These rules were then applied to Gygax's (and everybody else's) favorite fantasy novels. The thing that varied most about those novels was the idea of magic, so the only influence on his system from fiction that I recall is the stat-friendly Jack Vance magic, which would end up imposed onto other settings. But it's still fair to call the system anti-medieval as the article does because it was made for a competitive multiplayer tabletop game which was meant to progress over sessions, and the main aspect of its progression are stats. So it has to be as fair as possible, and you have to be able to accumulate indefinitely rather than die in the same place you were born with no more than your parents had. That's American myth, not medieval reality. There can't be a medieval system, because that would crush all of the characters, starting by burning all of the witches. If every character were a fighter trying to get ahead by fighting in an army, there's no D&D, because D&D is individual, not squad or army.
- creer 2y ago
  The original books missed the idea of initial motivation on the "adventurer" career path. Why and how did even these first level characters end up this way. That makes the rules and settings awkward and necessitates the world to contain bait for first level characters. Like posters seeking guards for (incompetent) caravan escort duty or that kind of thing. Some people noticed that and tried to formulate 1st level adventures or entire world settings which did not start with a fully formed 1st level fighter or mage. Perhaps you start as a bored teen farm hand, or something extraordinary happens in your life but it helps if there is something that kicks you outside of "normal" medieval life and into something far more individualistic.
  - jfengel 2y ago
    In my experience, there are an awful lot of people waiting around in taverns for somebody to show up with some sort of quest. Fame and fortune in return for killing the bad guy and returning the crucial artifact he stole.
- crooked-v 2y ago
  > So it has to be as fair as possible, and you have to be able to accumulate indefinitely rather than die in the same place you were born with no more than your parents had. That's American myth, not medieval reality. The medieval era actually had a pretty decent number of wandering mercenaries and adventurers, many of whom were displaced people from the neverending ongoing local wars across the centuries. (Of course, these groups were also basically interchangeable with bandits if they were broke.) Just look at the Varangian Guard, which recruited itinerant soldiers from all over Northern Europe from the 900s pretty much right up until Constantinople fell to the Ottomans. This all kicked into even higher gear in the Renaissance and later. As central monarchical control grew, so did army sizes and the impacts of those armies, leading to entire villages being wiped out or displaced entirely as a side effect of being in the way of an army passing through. Conflicts like the Thirty Years' War led to immense numbers of deaths and famine (current estimates say 4-8 million deaths just from the Thirty Years' War, for example), and consequently to immense numbers of migrants looking for work anywhere they could. The part that didn't exist was, of course, the dungeons. There was no nominally ethical-concern-free money sitting around underground; the source was other people, willing or not. But the whole point of D&D was to have a small-scale alternative to the "armies or mercenary companies fighting each other" gameplay that it originally sprang from, so I can give a pass on that, even if the writers never actually figured out any coherent setting explanations for it.
pdonis 2y ago
> they presume that the author of the book is the authority of the game, whereas the presumption made by Gygax et al. was that the Dungeon Master was overflowing with ideas, and needed only some reference points to pin them down. Original D&D may have been more or less that way, but anyone who read the AD&D 1st Edition Dungeon Master's Guide will see the opposite: a profusion of detail laid out by Gygax himself, with strong implications all over the place that this was The Correct Way to run a D&D (or at least Advanced D&D) campaign. > the heart of the game, which exists overwhelmingly at the table I agree with this, and I think Gygax probably would have said the same if asked, but at least as far as AD&D is concerned, I think what Gygax meant by "at the table" was "at the table as long as things are run the way I think they should be run". And of course no discussion of D&D and Gygax would be complete without the classic XKCD requiem: https://xkcd.com/393/ https://xkcd.com/393/
- cthalupa 2y ago
  Hmm. I still play a mix of ADD 1E and Basic/Expert twice a week, and regularly re-read the 1E DMG. I think Gary has a lot of ideas about how D&D is best played, and is happy to share them, but between what's written in the DMG, all of his posts on dragonsfoot over the years, etc., I can't agree that he thinks the only way to play D&D (or even AD&D specifically) is the way he envisions it. In fact, he's always known that the overwhelming majority of players have not ever played D&D the way that he did during the OD&D/AD&D 1e days. You have to remember that Gygax and Arneson's campaigns were much more like a tabletop precursor to MMOs than what we think of today when we talk about TTRPG campaigns. Both of them were running persistent worlds where 30-50 players were dropping in and out constantly, often with multiple characters involved in different things, multiple parties, etc. Time ingame ran linearly with time in the real world (thus Gygax's repeated insistence that strict time records must be kept), things happened in-world even when no one was playing, etc. But it's always been a tiny minority of games that were run this way, and Gygax knew it and knew that most people playing would have difficulty doing it the way he did. You also have to remember that Gygax explicitly states in the DMG that players should not know all the rules and that you should distrust any player that has a copy of the DMG, and has many places where he recommends the DM adjust things as they see fit for their situation and table. He also was in favor of DMs fudging rolls when they believed it to be the right thing to do! And there's also his quote of “The secret we should never let the gamemasters know is that they don't need any rules” - to me, all evidence points towards Gygax believing that the heart of the game really was at the table.
Supermancho 2y ago
> This was a good read, and the author makes convincing points. The meaning of MEDIEVAL is at the heart of this. D&D is Medieval, as it has markedly and prominent medieval world characteristics. When the game world clashes with what narrative is being presented, they retreat to minutia. When the game world makes no reference, a reasoning is constructed without reference. Topics are repeated - eg no feudalism and no vassals and no kings (which is incorrect and handwaved away as it serves them). I think it's empty prattle, reeking of being edgy, and seems more than a little strange to show up on HN.
- handoflixue 2y ago
  Can you actually provide any citation for OD&D containing feudalism or monarchy? Certainly, later versions add it, but I found myself nodding along going "huh, he's right, the original version didn't have anything that really resembles a large-scale government at all." Every version of D&D contains the idea that a random peasant can go make a name for themselves as a monster-slayer and become a baron. Land is literally free for the taking if you can just clear out the beasts. That seems much more American Dream / Colonialism, and not at all European / Medieval history.
  - mistrial9 2y ago
    referring from memory to little paper-bound books and dice sold in Berkeley, California.. yes there were kings and monarchy and Feudalism in the games. Granted the emphasis was on playing one or more characters that started at a "low level" and worked their way up, in many many ways, per their character type and other factors. Lots of changes from those versions but.. city characters might even pay taxes? A different thread comment says something about the Dungeon Master being the real core imagination factory and this is correct. Spelled out quest dungeons were few and carefully done -- the bulk of the printed content was rules and guidelines for the DM and players to use in a turn-based game of essentially their own stories with their own names of places and characters.
- RHSeeger 2y ago
  > The meaning of MEDIEVAL is at the heart of this. D&D is Medieval, as it has markedly and prominent medieval world characteristics. That's the important part for me, too. The general idea I always ran with was that "medieval" in the context of D&D (and most role playing games with that setting) referred to the environment (castles, villages, etc) and technology level (swords, bows, etc; sometimes early firearms). As a general rule of thumb, it didn't go into government at all, because that's a aspect of the campaign setting. The actual campaign settings (Greyhawk, etc) defined various governments, everything from kings/emperors, to mage groups, to dragon kings.
upwardbound 2y ago
Fair enough. I forgot the name of this ruleset, but there's a very simple D20-based game ruleset which is designed for beginners but IMHO is more fun even for everyone, as it focuses on creativity and storytelling! The rules are very simple: (1) The players take turns. They describe what they want to do, and the DM narrates the outcome, incorporating a dice roll into the process if needed, because: (2) Any significant action requires a dice roll, which cannot be re-attempted if failed. (3) A roll of a 1 is a critical failure (a guaranteed failure even on an easy task such as cooking pancakes), and a critical failure during combat causes accidental self-injury. A roll of a 20 is a critical success, which always succeeds (e.g. a level 1 archer can destroy a level 18 Elder Dragon if they aim for the eye and roll a 20). Any roll between 2-19 is compared to the difficulty level of the attempted action. Difficult actions require a roll of around 16 to succeed; easier ones, perhaps around 12. The raw dice roll (if between 2-19) is supplemented by adding around +1 or +2 if the player has invested skill points into the relevant skill, and by also adding around +1 or +2 if the player is using high-quality specialized equipment for the task. That's it! Of course you probably also want to incorporate standard gaming tropes such as levels, gold, HP, MP, weapons, armor, and such, but all of that is not meant to be set in stone within this system - e.g. if you want to try using a pair of sapplings and some rope as a giant improved slingshot weapon, that's meant to be allowed to work, in this system (albeit maybe with a -3 adder to dice checks, since the weapon's quality is probably total crap). It's about being nice to each other and encouraging each others' creative ideas, so the team + DM can tell a totally new and perhaps unexpected story together. When I explain DND-like games to people, I usually tell them about this system, because it's very welcoming, and encourages people to try out new ideas and find creative solutions to big tasks. A campaign can be super open-ended; e.g. "Destroy Sauron's ring - by any means - open world". With these rules, all sorts of creative ideas (such as the classic idea of asking one of the giant eagles to fly over Mt. Doom and simply drop the ring into the open caldera of the volcano) can be attempted, and can succeed, if the players are plucky and resourceful!
- chias 2y ago
  I have never liked the "20 = critical success = always succeeds", mainly because I can with a 5% chance end a "Destroy Sauron's ring" adventure in 40 seconds with "I attempt to destroy it by hitting it with a hammer, like, really hard."

by gavmor 2y ago

pessimizer 2y ago

I don't buy that the "heart of the game" is at the table. It's at the table where the game is being played, by the rules that the game sets up. In a way that no one had ever really played before, and a way everyone ended up playing since. You can barely call D&D anti-medieval; it isn't from a world of obsessing about Tolkien-style fantasy. It's Gygax coming up with rules for miniatures wargaming where players are individuals within a group rather than being entire sides of a war and moving armies, or being squad-level and choosing how to move squad members. That was the important part that influenced the entire world. All of the players were part of a single squad, and working (and cooperating) as individuals for their own benefit. These rules were then applied to Gygax's (and everybody else's) favorite fantasy novels. The thing that varied most about those novels was the idea of magic, so the only influence on his system from fiction that I recall is the stat-friendly Jack Vance magic, which would end up imposed onto other settings. But it's still fair to call the system anti-medieval as the article does because it was made for a competitive multiplayer tabletop game which was meant to progress over sessions, and the main aspect of its progression are stats. So it has to be as fair as possible, and you have to be able to accumulate indefinitely rather than die in the same place you were born with no more than your parents had. That's American myth, not medieval reality. There can't be a medieval system, because that would crush all of the characters, starting by burning all of the witches. If every character were a fighter trying to get ahead by fighting in an army, there's no D&D, because D&D is individual, not squad or army.

creer 2y ago
The original books missed the idea of initial motivation on the "adventurer" career path. Why and how did even these first level characters end up this way. That makes the rules and settings awkward and necessitates the world to contain bait for first level characters. Like posters seeking guards for (incompetent) caravan escort duty or that kind of thing. Some people noticed that and tried to formulate 1st level adventures or entire world settings which did not start with a fully formed 1st level fighter or mage. Perhaps you start as a bored teen farm hand, or something extraordinary happens in your life but it helps if there is something that kicks you outside of "normal" medieval life and into something far more individualistic.
- jfengel 2y ago
  In my experience, there are an awful lot of people waiting around in taverns for somebody to show up with some sort of quest. Fame and fortune in return for killing the bad guy and returning the crucial artifact he stole.
crooked-v 2y ago
> So it has to be as fair as possible, and you have to be able to accumulate indefinitely rather than die in the same place you were born with no more than your parents had. That's American myth, not medieval reality. The medieval era actually had a pretty decent number of wandering mercenaries and adventurers, many of whom were displaced people from the neverending ongoing local wars across the centuries. (Of course, these groups were also basically interchangeable with bandits if they were broke.) Just look at the Varangian Guard, which recruited itinerant soldiers from all over Northern Europe from the 900s pretty much right up until Constantinople fell to the Ottomans. This all kicked into even higher gear in the Renaissance and later. As central monarchical control grew, so did army sizes and the impacts of those armies, leading to entire villages being wiped out or displaced entirely as a side effect of being in the way of an army passing through. Conflicts like the Thirty Years' War led to immense numbers of deaths and famine (current estimates say 4-8 million deaths just from the Thirty Years' War, for example), and consequently to immense numbers of migrants looking for work anywhere they could. The part that didn't exist was, of course, the dungeons. There was no nominally ethical-concern-free money sitting around underground; the source was other people, willing or not. But the whole point of D&D was to have a small-scale alternative to the "armies or mercenary companies fighting each other" gameplay that it originally sprang from, so I can give a pass on that, even if the writers never actually figured out any coherent setting explanations for it.

pdonis 2y ago

> they presume that the author of the book is the authority of the game, whereas the presumption made by Gygax et al. was that the Dungeon Master was overflowing with ideas, and needed only some reference points to pin them down. Original D&D may have been more or less that way, but anyone who read the AD&D 1st Edition Dungeon Master's Guide will see the opposite: a profusion of detail laid out by Gygax himself, with strong implications all over the place that this was The Correct Way to run a D&D (or at least Advanced D&D) campaign. > the heart of the game, which exists overwhelmingly at the table I agree with this, and I think Gygax probably would have said the same if asked, but at least as far as AD&D is concerned, I think what Gygax meant by "at the table" was "at the table as long as things are run the way I think they should be run". And of course no discussion of D&D and Gygax would be complete without the classic XKCD requiem: https://xkcd.com/393/ https://xkcd.com/393/

cthalupa 2y ago
Hmm. I still play a mix of ADD 1E and Basic/Expert twice a week, and regularly re-read the 1E DMG. I think Gary has a lot of ideas about how D&D is best played, and is happy to share them, but between what's written in the DMG, all of his posts on dragonsfoot over the years, etc., I can't agree that he thinks the only way to play D&D (or even AD&D specifically) is the way he envisions it. In fact, he's always known that the overwhelming majority of players have not ever played D&D the way that he did during the OD&D/AD&D 1e days. You have to remember that Gygax and Arneson's campaigns were much more like a tabletop precursor to MMOs than what we think of today when we talk about TTRPG campaigns. Both of them were running persistent worlds where 30-50 players were dropping in and out constantly, often with multiple characters involved in different things, multiple parties, etc. Time ingame ran linearly with time in the real world (thus Gygax's repeated insistence that strict time records must be kept), things happened in-world even when no one was playing, etc. But it's always been a tiny minority of games that were run this way, and Gygax knew it and knew that most people playing would have difficulty doing it the way he did. You also have to remember that Gygax explicitly states in the DMG that players should not know all the rules and that you should distrust any player that has a copy of the DMG, and has many places where he recommends the DM adjust things as they see fit for their situation and table. He also was in favor of DMs fudging rolls when they believed it to be the right thing to do! And there's also his quote of “The secret we should never let the gamemasters know is that they don't need any rules” - to me, all evidence points towards Gygax believing that the heart of the game really was at the table.

Supermancho 2y ago

> This was a good read, and the author makes convincing points. The meaning of MEDIEVAL is at the heart of this. D&D is Medieval, as it has markedly and prominent medieval world characteristics. When the game world clashes with what narrative is being presented, they retreat to minutia. When the game world makes no reference, a reasoning is constructed without reference. Topics are repeated - eg no feudalism and no vassals and no kings (which is incorrect and handwaved away as it serves them). I think it's empty prattle, reeking of being edgy, and seems more than a little strange to show up on HN.

handoflixue 2y ago
Can you actually provide any citation for OD&D containing feudalism or monarchy? Certainly, later versions add it, but I found myself nodding along going "huh, he's right, the original version didn't have anything that really resembles a large-scale government at all." Every version of D&D contains the idea that a random peasant can go make a name for themselves as a monster-slayer and become a baron. Land is literally free for the taking if you can just clear out the beasts. That seems much more American Dream / Colonialism, and not at all European / Medieval history.
- mistrial9 2y ago
  referring from memory to little paper-bound books and dice sold in Berkeley, California.. yes there were kings and monarchy and Feudalism in the games. Granted the emphasis was on playing one or more characters that started at a "low level" and worked their way up, in many many ways, per their character type and other factors. Lots of changes from those versions but.. city characters might even pay taxes? A different thread comment says something about the Dungeon Master being the real core imagination factory and this is correct. Spelled out quest dungeons were few and carefully done -- the bulk of the printed content was rules and guidelines for the DM and players to use in a turn-based game of essentially their own stories with their own names of places and characters.
RHSeeger 2y ago
> The meaning of MEDIEVAL is at the heart of this. D&D is Medieval, as it has markedly and prominent medieval world characteristics. That's the important part for me, too. The general idea I always ran with was that "medieval" in the context of D&D (and most role playing games with that setting) referred to the environment (castles, villages, etc) and technology level (swords, bows, etc; sometimes early firearms). As a general rule of thumb, it didn't go into government at all, because that's a aspect of the campaign setting. The actual campaign settings (Greyhawk, etc) defined various governments, everything from kings/emperors, to mage groups, to dragon kings.

upwardbound 2y ago

Fair enough. I forgot the name of this ruleset, but there's a very simple D20-based game ruleset which is designed for beginners but IMHO is more fun even for everyone, as it focuses on creativity and storytelling! The rules are very simple: (1) The players take turns. They describe what they want to do, and the DM narrates the outcome, incorporating a dice roll into the process if needed, because: (2) Any significant action requires a dice roll, which cannot be re-attempted if failed. (3) A roll of a 1 is a critical failure (a guaranteed failure even on an easy task such as cooking pancakes), and a critical failure during combat causes accidental self-injury. A roll of a 20 is a critical success, which always succeeds (e.g. a level 1 archer can destroy a level 18 Elder Dragon if they aim for the eye and roll a 20). Any roll between 2-19 is compared to the difficulty level of the attempted action. Difficult actions require a roll of around 16 to succeed; easier ones, perhaps around 12. The raw dice roll (if between 2-19) is supplemented by adding around +1 or +2 if the player has invested skill points into the relevant skill, and by also adding around +1 or +2 if the player is using high-quality specialized equipment for the task. That's it! Of course you probably also want to incorporate standard gaming tropes such as levels, gold, HP, MP, weapons, armor, and such, but all of that is not meant to be set in stone within this system - e.g. if you want to try using a pair of sapplings and some rope as a giant improved slingshot weapon, that's meant to be allowed to work, in this system (albeit maybe with a -3 adder to dice checks, since the weapon's quality is probably total crap). It's about being nice to each other and encouraging each others' creative ideas, so the team + DM can tell a totally new and perhaps unexpected story together. When I explain DND-like games to people, I usually tell them about this system, because it's very welcoming, and encourages people to try out new ideas and find creative solutions to big tasks. A campaign can be super open-ended; e.g. "Destroy Sauron's ring - by any means - open world". With these rules, all sorts of creative ideas (such as the classic idea of asking one of the giant eagles to fly over Mt. Doom and simply drop the ring into the open caldera of the volcano) can be attempted, and can succeed, if the players are plucky and resourceful!

chias 2y ago
I have never liked the "20 = critical success = always succeeds", mainly because I can with a 5% chance end a "Destroy Sauron's ring" adventure in 40 seconds with "I attempt to destroy it by hitting it with a hammer, like, really hard."