Coming Home

The enduringly popular 1981 edition of D&D, often called B/X or Moldvay D&D, was my introduction to tabletop RPGs. That should come as no surprise, given the name I chose for this very blog back in the day. It's also the version I've played and enjoyed most recently, running a B1 In Search of the Unknown one-shot at the 42nd Dragonflight gaming convention last month. Its approachability, polish, and overall brilliance have stood the test of time. I truly adore it.

It's not home, though. Not really. Shortly after 12 year-old me discovered that little red book in a secondhand store circa 1990, I fell in with a local group of established (and tolerant) adult gamers, and they swore by none other than Gary Gygax's own Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Here, I'm talking the original (dare I say "real?") version, not the then-current AD&D 2nd Edition.

If B/X fired my young imagination, getting my hands on the AD&D books fanned it into a dizzying phantasmagoric inferno. These weighty tomes with their baroque prose and ominous illustrations felt like a world unto themselves; brooding, mysterious, and, in hindsight, metal as hell. Ironic, since I suspect Gygax's own musical tastes were anything but. To a middle schooler, these texts were dense and challenging, almost to the point of hostility, yet the darkly glamorous vistas of fantasy they promised shimmered mirage-like at edges of my understanding, making them paradoxically impossible to put down. It was a profoundly meaningful, once-in-a-lifetime reaction to an RPG system. To put it simply, these are magic books in my eyes.

It wasn't long after this that I became an avid reader of Dragon magazine, which was primarily an AD&D-focused publication at that time. That meant 2nd Edition, of course, but the concepts and terminology employed in most articles was relatable enough. In the pre-Internet era, Dragon was my primary connection to the hobby at large, and this further cemented various AD&D-isms like percentile strength and the nine-point alignment system as the default in my mind.

So what I'm really getting at here, I suppose, is that I've come to accept that I am, at heart, an AD&Der. Then, now, and forever. It's my conceptual norm, my platinum standard, my Real Deal Holyfield of fantasy RPGs. I've played, and harbor no small amount of affection for, all the game's TSR-era iterations. Even 2E is entitled to some love from me. I've also had great luck with the various latter day retro-clone versions of the same, such as Labyrinth Lord, Swords & Wizardry, and, of course, OSRIC. Authentic late '70s/early '80s AD&D still sits at the apex of the pyramid for me, however. Is it flawless? Lord, no! I'm just at a point where those perceived imperfections (the absurd pummeling/grappling rules, for example) don't really grate on me the way they used to. If I don't like a sub-system, I don't need to use it. Any DM remotely worthy of the title knows that. Mine is a hard-earned "warts and all" love, not a naive denial of reality. On the flipside, playing these various simplified or pared-down versions of the game, I always find myself hankering for some AD&D rule or other. Better to have it and not want it than want it and not have it.

AD&D isn't perfect and it isn't for everyone. What it is is the only game that's ever filled me with the wide-eyed awe and shuddering dread of flipping through the demon section of the Monster Manual, picturing the horrors that awaited intruders in the noisome lair of the Demon Price Juiblex. That's irreplacable and that's why it's home.

The OSR is spoiled rotten!

Just wanted to give you all a little heads-up regarding Roger's recent observations over at "Roles, Rules, and Rolls." Definitely some of the most pertinent reflections on the utter embarrassment of riches that the current classic D&D gaming renaissance has been blessed with...and how people can take absolutely anything for granted.

"The sight of the recently released 300 room Barrowmaze being docked points on Grognardia for not being big enough to be a true megadungeon - I guess that makes it more of a what? Macrodungeon? Kilodungeon? - reminds me that we didn't even know what the hell a megadungeon was in 1982...Really, what we're doing under the banner of the Old School Renaissance is much cooler than 99% of our actual old school experiences with D&D."

Amen! I was reminded of this principal yet again when I stumbled across a recent message board thread where a poster lamented that Michael Curtis' superb Stonehell dungeon is, as yet, "unfinished." There's only what, 700 or so rooms detailed so far? Geez.

D&D Next and "not getting it"

"For example, it would be difficult to imagine that THAC0 would make a comeback. Armor Class values going down to represent them getting better. System shock rolls. Racial level limits. Gender-based ability score maximums. Lots of bonus types. And so on."

Guh.

I'll admit, this one paragraph I'm quoting from did a lot to make me feel discouraged at the future of this project, because it points, yet again, to the idea that WotC's design teams in general and Cook especially just don't understand what made the older editions tick.

More importantly, they don't understand that the rules shape a very specific sort of (A)D&D game world. This is where racial level limits and system shock rolls come into play.

a) Racial level limits establish the racial power balance of an archetypal game world. Using AD&D as an example, the best magic-users, fighters, and clerics in a given game world will always be humans, due entirely to the fact that only humans have unlimited level advancement in these three classes (and most of their subclasses). On the other hand, the world of thievery favors the demi-humans due to their combination of unlimited thief class advancement and special racial abilities like infravision. It's highly likely that this archetypal world's most legendary pilferer is a halfling or an elf. Further, half-orcs can rival humans as assassins and half-elves can be among the most powerful druids. Rules like this that set a strong baseline for how a D&D world works lead to shared assumptions among players, shared expectations, and a picture of D&D as something other than a "generic fantasy game" (which it's never been any good at all at being, anyway).

b) System shock rolls enforce the idea that magic is a double-edged sword that can sometimes be as dangerous to its wielders as to its targets, thus simulating a grittier sort of fantasy where magic is frightfully powerful but not fully reliable and understood. It also helps to put the brakes on consequence-free gameplay via unlimited, foolproof resurrection without eliminating all tolerance for the occasional failure. Dropping this aspect simply because "Dude, my spell didn't work like I wanted! Bummer! That, like, totally should never happen." is the perfect example of ignorantly throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I'll cut this one short before I start in about how Fireballs that always fill a specified square footage and reflecting Lightning Bolts fulfill a similar function and make for less casual, "dumb" magic use....

In addition, I worry that the D&D Next team doesn't sufficiently understand how distinctive mechanics can be just flat-out cool.

Take descending AC, for example. I remember in the classic Nintendo 64 FPS game "GoldenEye 007", the player who took the least hits during the course of a multiplayer deathmatching session would often be gifted with the "AC -10" award. And you know what? That sounds so much cooler than the "AC 30" accolade! Why? Damned if I know, but it just does! And it's exactly the same sort of cool as a 6th level fighter being dubbed a Myrmidon or describing a thing as a "dweomer" when you could have just gone with "spell." The quirky mechanics and baroque nomenclature of classic D&D are a totally fucking awesome part of the hobby's heritage and worth preserving completely for their own sake alone.

So, yeah, I'm worried. It takes a real effort on my part to muster any kind of belief in the notion that people who fail to apprehend the game's greatness on such simple, fundamental levels can produce a product worthy of the D&D name and any classic D&D lover's money and time. Reserve final judgement I will, until there are actual products to review, but the outlook is grim indeed.

"Viva Passion?" or "The War on the 'Edition Warriors'"

When it comes to games, passion is good. Really, really good. The best.

In fact, I'd venture to say that if you're not really passionate about the game you're playing, no matter what game or what type of game it is, you'd be doing yourself, the game, and the world a favor by setting it aside the moment you realize this and heading off to find one that makes your blood boil and your heart sing.

Passion makes the gaming world go round.

At least that's how I used to feel. But if you believe some authorities, such as the venerable Steve Winter (and you should!) passion is the enemy.

Enter the gaming boogeyman de jour, the Edition Warriors! This legion of soulless, twisted monstrosities has the nerve, the sheer gall, to believe that Dungeons & Dragons is one of the great games of all time. Not only that, but that the storied D&D name itself actually means something and has some sort of precious but somehow non-monetary value (an obvious contradiction in terms!) and that products bearing the name can betray, subvert, or otherwise fail to be worthy of it. But what's worst of all, what really keeps these guys up at night, is that these Edition Warriors are also known for their aberrant belief that they should be wholly unashamed to admit this in public. The most unholy among them even feel they have a very real personal obligation to do so!

Clearly, Armageddon is at hand, for the Edition Warriors are not content with merely causing WotC's brilliant D&D 4E reinvention to fail through no fault of the company's own and despite being a peerless design copied directly from the pages of Leonardo da Vinci's fabled Lost Codex. Oh, no. They've already set their sights on WotC's next big project: "D&D Next." Yes, these heartless savages plan to nip this one in the bud, not caring one whit that the millions spent collaborating with Pepsi's ad agency on a name will then go completely to waste.

For the love of God, you degenerate monsters: Can't you just stop saying how you feel for once!? Can't you see that you're ruining everything with your stupid caring and self-expression!? Just sit down, shut up, open your wallet to WizBro and keep it open and everything will be fine. Gaming without passion isn't so bad. You'll see. After all, many of the "pros" have apparently been doing it for years and they must know better than you. I mean, they're pros!

Can't we all just not give a fuck get along?

An odd realization on the way to defining "real D&D."

So I'm thinking again, as I sometimes do, about how I define "classic D&D" or, to put it less diplomatically, "real D&D." That is, editions of the game that I consider worthy of the Name and playable without reservation.

It seems that there are three very specific rules that appear both in every single "real D&D" iteration and in none of their lesser aspirants:

a) Alignment language

b) Encumbrance measured in coin (cn) units

and

c) The designation of one player as the party caller

These three traditions all dropped off the map completely in the post-Gygaxian era and haven't been seen since.

I can't think of any other long-standing rules that vanished so cleanly from the published game at exactly that junction. How about you?