Second in a series begun with [old and new D&D] Eero and the Unitarian-Universalist branch of modern D&D (http://indie-rpgs.com/adept/index.php?topic=189.0) and founded in the much older A Hard Look at Dungeons and Dragons (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/20/).I suppose I have to get to this sooner rather than later given all my teasing ... OK, here are the definitions from the pages of Shahida, but bear in mind that my current points (in this post) are not about the particular social and doctrinal brew that I'm talking about in that text.
QuoteFundamentalism ... represents a return to basics for religious practice, seeking to perceive the direct Word of God through texts and experiences. The logic in terms of texts and the practices is generally poor; everyone who does this cherry-picks the textual passages they like and generates their own interpretation of how they apply to contemporary issues.
...
Orthodoxy isn't the same thing, but it's a good partner for fundamentalism. It is practice claiming to be "how we've always done it," or "how they did it when they did it right," drawing on the power of sustained repetition and social reinforcement, especially in the context of a given power hierarchy. As with fundamentalism, the historical justification of their claims is typically unsound; the designated orthodox practices can almost always be traced back to considerably more recent origins.
To clarify the term a little: a group with social legitimacy and power can also be orthodox; in this context, it's merely a claim with bragging rights to rivals that typically serves a high-level political purpose, as with the Roman Catholic Church's inaccurate claim to be the original Church of Rome. However, I'm focusing on groups which fall outside such established social status.
Orthodoxy and fundamentalism are the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup of social customs for a relatively powerless or isolated group. You're doing it right according to the texts, and you're doing it the original way like the ancestors always did, and consequently, you're doing it better than anyone else.
Regarding my analogy with D&D, I want to deal with the two terms separately,
not in their Reese's Peanut Butter Cup combination. In this thread I'm going to focus on orthodoxy as described in one of the paragraphs in the above excerpt: powerful institutional orthodoxy, with the social, political, economic, and educational clout to exert pure authority (perhaps in tandem with other entities) regarding domestic matters and foreign policy alike - a true branch of government, and unsurprisingly, typically with official state status. It's best illustrated by the church of that name, the Orthodox Catholic Communion, incorrectly called "Greek Orthodox" in the U.S. It is historically
the Christian institution, with a distinct breakoff-group called Roman Catholicism which only gained a global foothold by dint of the existence of the Americas. The Orthodox Catholic Communion was the doctrinal and educational expression of empire in its purest form, one which lasted from the earliest days of antiquity until 1924, and in which this church was a major player from about 325 to 1547 CE (and a minor but not trivial one since then).
Most importantly, such an institution has lasting effects even when its official reach wanes. Values, mores, acceptable interactions between citizens and states, methods of instruction and evaluation, rituals of birth, marriage, and death, social status, every aspect of language including swearing, clothing, and much much more are all stamped most thoroughly and as far as I can tell, irrevocably. Such a larger cultural sense develops specifically
because an orthodox institution wielded such power for a long time. The Orthodox Catholic Communion therefore possibly ranks as the single most consequential human institution in history, especially if you recognize it as an ongoing source of splinters and successive offshoots like Roman Catholicism, Islam, and secondarily Protestantism. Any single government or seat of government is a mere piker by comparison.
I must stress relative to Eero's "about me" religion post, that failing to "believe" or only minimally attending or observing the Lutheran Church activities in Finland, for example, doesn't make the Finns he's describing less Lutheran in the larger cultural sense. Americans are horribly confused about this because they have been incorrectly taught to think that all religious observance and identity is a function of raw belief about metaphysics, and you can't talk about religion with them until they get over that.
Also, Americans, you (we) have no call to be snotty about our allegedly secular nation ... given the points in Colin Woodard's
American Nations (with which I agree completely), the Puritan network of Yankeedom, the Anglican Church of Tidewater, the German-style Lutheran Church throughout the Midlands, Baptist and similar sects of the Deep South, and the network of evangelical Protestantism throughout Greater Appalachia, all qualify as the kind of institutions I'm talking about - and their impact on those regions and specific jump-to points from them persists in full today.
What does this have to do with D&D? Should be obvious: in a word, "TSR." It's the idea that there
is an institution which owns the entity. Most significantly, this owership designates (i) the specific product to be offered by the distributive and commercial networks, and (ii) via that product, indisputably wields the authority to
teach the activity. The historical facts are effectively extinguished in the face of the cultural belief that the entity is real, continuous, powerful, and above all valid in these spheres - in other words,
orthodox in the sense of "this is the way it is done," perceived as a
straight line through time.
I don't imagine I have to stress the historical events, that the IP/branding was sequentially controlled by several different people or groups even before its first big reboot in the late 1980s, the whole debacle of AD&D2, the WotC/Hasbro transition, and so on and so forth. Nor that the entity in question was almost always a financial catastrophe. Instead, I want to focus on the subcultural respect for the perceived entity, expressed by a wide range of behaviors including brand loyalty at one end and ostensible rejection based on deep envy at the other. And especially, the fascinating idea that every practitioner of "D&D" (so-called) has a stake in the institutional label and therefore a deeply-felt opinion about who can rightly claim it.
Consider: why does an impending new edition not only prompt extreme reactions, but also assumed to
necessitate such reactions? Who cares if TSR or anyone produces a new edition of D&D? The idea is that one must or should because you now
must re-learn and re-internalize it as newly presented. Even hotly rejecting that expectation clearly denotes its perceived reality, as opposed to, for example, failing to register the new edition as noteworthy in the first place.
Religous history displays remarkable patterns which might be helpful to contemplate.
First is the total disregard for the actual history of the religion's origins, replacing it with an utterly fictional origin of the religion as simultaneous with the origin of the Church. Roman Catholicism is especially fun with this one because the Orthodox Catholic Communion did it first, and when RC became its own entity in the 1000's, it retained that narrative but sort-of-accidentally forgot to include Constantinople in it. How many Catholics know that St. Augustine wasn't a Roman Catholic?
Second, new institutions never spring up from nothing, but rather form where and when older institutions can no longer exert sufficient power. One can consider how the Orthodox church spawn Islam to the east and Roman Catholic to the west, and within the smaller theater of Europe, how the new centers of Protestantism arose. My point is that although such developments are always based on power, the narrative is instead always based on fiddly doctrinal bits; once powerful enough, the new institution bills itself as the result of a successful popular referendum about those bits ... and also promoting the idea that it, the new one, is really the representative of an orthodox (linear) throughline of "original" or "loyal to it all along" content. As I put it in Shahida,
Quote... what follows has nothing to do with sermons on mounts or deaths on crosses. It's about whole swathes of geography and who can enforce rule over whom.
...
Such events tend to be expressed in doctrinal terms, in which theological details are currency in an unacknowledged dialogue of "yes you will" and "no I won't." You can read all about how the break in the council concerned whether Jesus was human or divine, but what interests me most is that agreeing to the latter was synonymous with submitting to the patriarchs of the imperial city.
This issue was repeated every time the power-balances shifted and new councils were held to find out which local churches considered themselves subject to a central patriarch or council and which did not. The pejorative "Nestorian" was coined to indicate those who did not, or in doctrinal terms, those who claimed Jesus was the eensiest bit not divine in some way. This was an endlessly fruitful issue because you begin with the straightforward textual description that he is a person, and you end with the doctrinal claim that although he is, he really isn't. Between that "although" and "really" lie a multitude of ways to proclaim a given area heretical, or conversely, to give the imperial super-patriarchs the finger if you can get away with it.
The third interesting pattern is how novel concepts which turn out to be institutionally useful become standard and preserved as "obvious and necessary" content through schisms - even when the schism is so grossly sold as being about doctrinal purity and originalism. One of the best examples is Hell, constructed through Augustinian doctrine quite late in the early history of Christianity and patently absent in the earlier texts and traditions ... and yet preserved, refined, and treated as original content both by Islam and later, Protestantism. Basically, it's simply too perfect a tool for societal control to give up, text-doctrinal consistency be - if you'll excuse the expression - damned.
Most of the real history of D&D/TSR was almost entirely hidden from consumers' view until the late 1990s, I think, and so the perception I'm talking about was taken almost entirely as pure reality. One of the interesting subcultural responses I noted around 1999-2000 was shock at the overt purchase by WotC - as if it were a seizure by a mere
person of something which until that point had been a continuous ownership by ... well, by someone or something godly and unassailable - a celestial council, perhaps. As late as 2005, I confronted audiences at GenCon with the point that no such continuous ownership had ever persisted (nor financial ROI for it) to their amazement; at an even greater level of remove from reality, I still find people who think "Gary" owned and controlled D&D until the WotC purchase.
The latter point brings up Gary, of course, whom I came to sympathize with in the years since I began RPG publishing. To stay with the institutional analysis, the continued use of his name, brief introductory texts, and
occasional creative input toward publications with "AD&D" on them succeeded for the institution under its various ownerships from the late 70s through most of the 80s, contributing to the illusion of a persistent originalist vision. (And provided a way for fundamentalists to remain under the umbrella of the institution, but that's going to be part of my third thread. So much more to say, as with
The Gygax (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forge/index.php?topic=25806.0)), but here I'd like to stick to the institutional focus for this thread and issues of E. Gary Gygax the person vs. "Gary" the D&D guy vs. Gygaxian something-or-other can wait.)
Consider as well the subcultural conflict over over Lejendary Adventures, which still shocks me that people would side with the brand over the man - basically, Gary was screwed blue in part due to his publisher's cowardice. It was a brutal display of the leverage an institution has over any enlisted symbol of legitimacy -
any of them can be jettisoned if it gets frisky. (Dostoevsky put it better than I can in
The Grand Inquisitor ...)
Moving to wider issues, I don't know how accurate my speculations are, but I strongly suspect that many of the ideas that became boxed sets for AD&D2, especially Planescape, Dark Sun, and Al-Qadim, weren't necessarily conceived or written as D&D, but were rather cannibalized and converted into it.
In the past decade and a half, the editions issue has heated up a lot, along with the related issues of ownership and development teams. Let's see, we have ... 3.0, D20 and the OGL, 3.5, 4th, and now some yap about 5th. Plus the important appearance of Pathfinder, bringing up for the first time, I think, that a significant swath of players became OK with the idea that TSR might not be the be-all authority over D&D.
And finally, here's my whole point in discussing orthodoxy in the first place: historically, orthodox itself develops from grassroots, ruck-and-run practice on the ground, composed of local innovations and specific communities. Sometimes they even make institutions who consider themselves equivalent to any other no matter how big (Syriac Catholics e.g.) and even more broadly includes stuff nominally labeled something else (Alawi, nominally Muslim, rather Jesus-y in doctrine). What I'm saying for D&D is that real play and people are an ongoing ferment of oral tradition, local adaptation, syncretism, opportunistic use of texts ... to a fantastic and widespread degree that is literally not observable or recordable. Zak Smith presents a wonderful example with his sort-of old-school, sort-of 3.5-ish, good-for-his-group game, and I submit that individual examples like his are the norm, in fact, the very soil of the ecology of role-playing.
Could it be that institutional orthodoxy is not as powerful as it used to be? That TSR is now better understood to be one among many, with no special authority? Such that Zak for example sees no reason to identify his game as such? This question is possibly over-idealistic on my part. Still ...
Both Pathfinder and the OSR seem to me to be really important manifestations of these phenomena as well, effectively new institutions or at least acknowledged bodies of practice that don't
have to be TSR (in fact, Pathfinder as the Islam analogue strikes me as remarkably accurate). However, as Jim Raggi recently carefully articulated to me, there isn't a singular OSR, and even thinking of a cluster of "like-minded" individuals or groups is mistaken. Here that point is relevant in one of their few unifying features: no brand-name loyalty to TSR in any guise and a deliberate callback to days when plural publishing (various D&D, AD&D, compatible with D&D, and not-D&D-but-actually) was better acknowledged.
But remember, I'm not talking merely about an institution's existence, or about identification with and economic loyalty to it, but also crucially about that nigh-ineradicable cultural stamp such institutions produce. It's huge! Which the Pathfinder and OSR phenomena, and more generally, the wider range of role-players in general, are by no means immune to. That's the topic I'd most like to see developed here.
Best, Ron
One more piece of the metaphor:
I belonged to a group which were not directly concerned with the struggle for Orthodoxy, because they considered themselves to be an alternative or parallel to, rather than a representative of, the tradition which was developing its Orthodoxy. So they could watch smugly from the sidelines as the struggles went on, even as the world passed them by.
Yes, as a T&T player, I was a Mithraist.
Part two
So if I'm talking about D&D as the Orthodox Catholic Communion, what is its doctrinal content? I doubt that I'm going to surprise anyone with this, but I equally doubt that anyone will discuss it neutrally.
Orthodox content is never found in the core texts, but in revisions (maybe) and supplemental text.
It began with the rather weird and disjointed first round of AD&D texts and the various series of modules which at first just accompanied it and then established "ways to play" of their own - shifting from retooled tourney strategy-fests into heroic sagas. From about 1981 through 1989, I think one can see a major re-alignment of what would become AD&D2 into a distinct relationship among DM, published material, players, and "story." Which is to say, the epic saga, Dragonlance, linear karaoke-play published adventures, and railroading.
I usually talk about this phenomenon in its tri-prong relationship with two other, also internally complex trajectories, BRP and Champs/GURPS throughout the 80s. Although different in their constructions of the SIS, each one privileged the GM as story-man and the setting as metaplot, all baed on a periodical model of publication. My usual point is that all of them converged in terms of published adventure design/presentation, and a blend emerged in FASA's Shadowrun, soon followed by White Wolf's first four ... et cetera. But in this case, I want to back up and look inside the AD&D one alone.
Here are the primary features: in play, the DM is the Superego managing the Id in the form of players' urgent and unruly behavior; the content is "the story" much like its later use in computer games, as an imposed sequence and a fixed back-story to be discovered; and economically and socially, brand loyalty is not negotiable.
This content is completely tied to 80s concepts of fantasy authorship and publishing, with the entry of overt gaming influence in fiction (Thieves' World as a rather fractured misapplication; more literally, Stephen Brust, Will and Emma Shetterly, David Eddings, and Raymond Feist; perhaps the ur-form gamer self-ID fantasy in Robert Jordan).* So the gaming-company versions include the ol' Gord the Rogue novels and most especially the Dragonlance series - and the publications are based on the idea that a game line (i.e. periodically published setting-and-play supplements) would be accompanied by a similarly periodically published line of novels.
Tied to all that is raw power projection in the real world, very 80s: shelf space competition, bubble-happy venture capitalism, escalated production value, the attempt to go mainstream Mk 2 (the D&D Saturday cartoon, kid-aimed play-sets), and lawfare bullying ... It's successful in 80s terms, meaning that assholes could extract massive profits while the business and product burned, but also in mind-space terms, in that D&D was always thought of as its own universe in the so-called industry, shining brightly above the fray of all other games. The message and belief is that it didn't have to compete, it simply was, and as such, set the bar toward which all might (only) aspire.
Its educational role - the absolute essence of an orthodox church - should not be overlooked. Most of the game designers well-known for their innovation in the 90s cut their first design and publishing teeth in the multitudinous AD&D publications ... I quite like Jonathan Tweet's article in the Dungeon Master's Secrets or whatever it was called in its characteristic forest green jacket, for instance.
In the games of the time, genericism was the new hotness, and many games that came out around 1980 were retooled in this form. But somehow such an endeavor was legitimized only if it could "do fantasy" in the D&D mold - that's a fascinating assumption, right? You can see it in Rolemaster, Hero System, GURPS, and more; and also in reverse, with the AD&D2 expansion into science fiction. I think the cultural primacy of this exact kind of fantasy RPG can be seen via full-on imitations too, most notably Der Schwarze Auge, and also as the "thing to beat" a few years later. I like to point out that the primary advertising image for White Wolf around 1991-92 was a white wolf killing the TSR dragon.
Do consider that the Roman Catholic Church, understood by western Europeans and Americans as the ur-Church, drew entirely upon the Orthodox Catholic Communion inheritance for its content and was largely economically and ideologically defined by intense jealousy of it and prior to contact with the Americas, attempts to acquire the Levantine trade nexus.
So this is orthodox D&D at the height of its power ... and finally, to turn to what it actually said in its rules, bizarrely incoherent in its actual procedural content. And I don't mean productively so, as so often claimed in defense - I mean the fucking thing is literally impenetrable in terms of why anyone would want to play, and features no emergent properties from its complex of rules in action. In certain boxed sets you get the orthodoxy far more clearly, just as you do with the secondary or applied texts of major religions (e.g. the Roman Catholic Catechism). But the rulebook? Don't insult my intelligence. Those aren't rulebooks, they're heaps of material thrown upon a pile and sprayed with resin to create the impression of a unified thing.
By why was such incoherence permitted? From a play-satisfaction perspective, why not write the rulebook from the ground up and embrace up-front Participationism as fully as, for instance, as the Dark Sun and al-Qadim texts do? Because the church doesn't really care how you do it on the ground as long as you overtly acknowledge the official authority, as long as you use its texts and designated authors as teaching sources (and pose no other outside its bounds of publication), and as long as you pay your taxes. If you're a contributor to texts, you can even be flatly contradictory in details as long as you bloody well behave and never say you're doing so. Institutions are not subject to user-driven market support; the presumption instead is that you're only a user in the first place if you're using the institution's stuff. So they don't have to evaluate how their "it" works or to reconsider any historically-embedded content in that light. That's why the Orthodox Catholic Communion, and its budded twin Roman Catholicism, literally don't give a shit about what's in the Bible.
I could speculate a bit more about Gary Gygax the person here - that he did in fact enjoy playing a real game with real humans, and in designing Lejendary Adventures, bucked the ideology which his name was plastered to, that orthodox AD&D2 set the standard for real role-playing. No wonder people were confused.
Moreno hates its guts - and I have trouble finding anyone who really plays it, but everyone knows what it is. So many syncretic play-groups paid and continue to pay lip service to its principles, and for a solid two decades (say 1980 through 2000) it was revered (or rebelled against) as the one and true church
OK, I'm done with my presentation for orthodoxy, and I really want feedback now!
Best, Ron
* Not to discount Wargamer's World, a DAW paperback from the late 70s, which I understand is part of a trilogy (perhaps never completed?); and the Tekumel novels Man of Gold and Flamesong by M.A.R. Barker. However, none of these were written as periodical fiction integrated with periodical game-play materials.
That is a fascinating simile, and one that rings true to me. That is, the central point seems to be that D&D in its heyday was unified by little except adherence to the brand; this accords with my own reading the topic, especially when I consider the interplay of Basic and AD&D 2nd edition around the early '90s. Especially the latter was quite explicitly nothing more than a generic vehicle for fantasy adventure gaming (that is, there was no message about the purpose and means of achieving any sort of creative goals, really, in those game texts), and while I've read quite a few TSR books from the period, I've yet to encounter one that would've cared a whit about what actually happens in play, how you're supposed to play the game. D&D at this time and in this use was pretty clear just a brand name and a bunch of traditional conventions, and a core creative team at TSR who attempted to guess Sibylla-like about what the buying audience might be willing to purchase, so they could put the brand on that very thing.
At first blush this interpretative vehicle of Orthodoxy in D&D seems mostly relevant when considering the late '80s, early '90s TSR gamer scene. I suppose that the third edition brought with it its own new orthodoxy - a similar social phenomenon, yet not exactly a continuation. At least to me it seems that there was a lot of churn in the congregation in between 2nd edition and 3rd, and the people most committed to the d20 revolution a decade back were usually younger than the TSR orthodoxy; closer to my age than yours, if you will.
Hi Ron,
Does this analogy of religion idea also treat chess (or monopoly, or snakes and ladders) as being religious? Or is it only when procedure is broken/incomplete* that religion suddenly *poofs* into existance?
* Ie, it's just 'heaps of material thrown upon a pile'
Hi Callan,
No, I'm not applying the analogy to anything except D&D in the context of role-playing subculture and hobby economics. Whether it does apply in some way, I leave to others, although I'd speculate that it doesn't.
The cut-off line for me has less to do with whether procedure is broken vs. unbroken and more to do with attitude and whatever sociologists call "embracing" or "adopting" a specific set of signifiers (my Barthes reading is rusty ...). But I do think the lack of actual procedure matters, which goes all the way back to my "Hard Look" essay and the cargo cult analogy.
I see the standalone complex concept applying perfectly to "Jesus" and perfectly to "D&D," with the added bennie of subsequent institutional features also matching nicely. That's about as far as I'm taking it - a more empirical approach than you or others might prefer, perhaps.
Best, Ron
The edits to the beginning post have all concerned its title. I finally realized who the perfect representative for the topic is, and I'll let him tell us why.
Ed
The correspondence between the history of D&D and the history of Christianity continues to fascinate me, so I'm in constant danger of making shit up to make the fit more perfect. I'm trying to remind myself that it's a useful and occasionally amusing analogy and nothing more, so failed points of correspondence would actually be pretty useful to see.
That said, I'd say T&T sure qualifies as Mithraism. Damn it, don't do that to me!
Eero
The events of the very late 1990s and early 2000's are fascinating! Let's see if I have this right - it's more complex than merely a two-step property transfer ...
1. Peter has WotC and acquires D&D and GenCon and much else,
2. at WotC, D20, 3E, and OGL are initiated,
3. Peter sells WotC along with D&D and Pokemon to Hasbro, keeps GenCon,
4. Hasbro produces 3.5e and 4e, (do I have that right? 3.5 was Hasbro?), and
5. a bit later, Paizo produces Pathfinder under the OGL, effectively keeping 3.5e in press.
It was definitely the most overt ownership shenanigans in D&D history (and a lot less shady than events in the past), and as such really brought it forward that the activity, the social network of the activity, the authorship, the product and the company are not synonyms.
For all I know, the turn of the 19th/20th century analogy still holds and we're seeing the sudden diminution in raw power of all the Christian orthodoxies (Orthodox Catholic Communion, Roman Catholic Church, Anglican Church, and more), as various grass-roots sects become more locally powerful and as multiple communities bonded by entirely different symbology gain power. I mean, if "TSR" is just another D&D publisher like "Paizo," or for that matter, "LotFP Weird Fantasy Role-playing, " then D&D is (gasp) merely another system or more accurately diverse systems, and TSR is (gasp) merely a game publishing company if that, considering it's merely a brand-line at Hasbro.
Or that's what anarchists like me would say. To observants, the narrative might differ a little.
Quote from: Ron Edwards on September 03, 2013, 12:41:04 PM
The edits to the beginning post have all concerned its title. I finally realized who the perfect representative for the topic is, and I'll let him tell us why.
Sigh! I tell Ron that I don't want to post in these threads. Not because the issue don't interest me, but because (1) I already have a conclusion and I don't need to discuss it further - I already did that too much for years - and (2) I know if I start writing about this I will lose the entire day (and maybe more than one day) writing very long rants that will only convince everybody that I am lunatic that hate a book...
...I even write a rantish G+ post to say why it's better for me to stay away....
...so he goes and name me in the subject of the thread. Because he wants me to post that rant. (that's Ron Edwards for you: I am almost tempted to post a hymn to the virtues of D&D just to piss him off. Almost)
OK, Ron, here's a rant: but not the one you wanted. This is from the Forge, about 2010 (and you all are lucky that 99% of my rants about AD&D are in italian, I could flood this forum for weeks...)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------
[...]
I am reading your latest forum post about the article at the Forge. I can't talk about DeGenesis or the German or American scene, but I was surprised by the importance you gave to Shadowrun. I don't know the impact it had on the american market (that was the time before I brought this infernal machine that allow me to talk with people living at the other part of the planet) but in Italy I think it was negligible (only one edition, in 1996, very few supplements, closing of the line for lack of sales) and we got a lot of "story before" crap anyway.
I thought that the shifting point were:
1) the first AD&D modules written by Tracy Hickman, more "stories" than dungeons, start to sell well in the early '80s. I am thinking about the cycle of adventures in the "desert of desolation" series, and Ravenloft. When I first began playing (1986) they were considered the very best AD&D adventures ever written, while the old Gygax dungeons were openly mocked.
(some more details: you can find the list of Hickman modules here: http://www.trhickman.com/my-works/tracy-laura-games/tsr-role-playing-adventures/
I don't know if there were others that produced similar "story-modules" like him at the time, I am singling him out not because I have any reason to believe he was the first or the worst, but because he was the most successful and that success changed the hobby.
He went to work for TSR in 1982, after having self-published a couple of modules in 1979 (it seems that every revolution in rpgs is from self-publisher, for better or worse...). TSR republished his modules (one was the first of the Desert of Desolation series, "Pharaoh"). In 1983 concluded his Desert of Desolation series with "I5: The lost tomb of Martek". It will be reprinted in an updated form in 1987, I am familiar with (and played) that version. The following book in the "I" series is from him, as well: "Ravenloft" (1983)
Every one of these modules was more successful than the previous one, but the big success was Dragonlace in 1984...)
2) TSR was searching for anything that could sell. Gygax was on the way out of TSR, the TSR was on the verge of bankrupt a few years before and was saved by publishing a hastly-written mishups of new rules and characters for AD&D (Unearthed Arcana) and increasing the rate of publication of new books and modules (I counted some times ago the number of books published by TSR in the early eighties, and the increase is really noticeable. When D&D was selling millions and millions of copies everywhere, TSR published a handful of slim booklets with dungeons every year. Almost nothing. When D&D sales started dropping, AD&D goes in a few years from a set of 3+some oddmwents volumes - the basic 3, Legend and Lore, and some other - to a half-shelf long line of books about every AD&D "universe", monsters, new rules, etc., with very long adventures published every month or more often.
(I did check more details about this, too.
A history of TSR http://www.wizards.com/dnd/DnDArchives_History.asp
1984 is the year D&D sales plummet and TSR gets in trouble: http://uk.pc.gamespy.com/articles/539/539197p4.html :
and Gygax leave in 1985: http://uk.pc.gamespy.com/articles/539/539197p5.html
The date of Lorraine Williams "reign" is important because she is the one that start the "no playing at work" policy. From that moment D&D products are in practice only read, not playtested. TSR become the biggest producer of unplaytested crap on the market. That level of crappyness become the norm. The idea that the GM should make the adventure works anyway because "rules doesn't matter" is fueled by this
This list of D&D products from Grognardia is not the one I remember reading, but it will do. These are the numbers:
- 1980: 1 hardback (deities and demigods), 5 accessories (geomorphs, logs, etc), 5 adventures (slim booklets of 32 pages each). Less than 200 pages of adventures. In a year.
- 1981: 1 hardback (fiend foglio), 2 boxed sets (Basic and Expert D&D), 10 adventures. 2 adventures are reprints and collections of older booklet, and they are the only long ones. Only 7 new adventures. No rules added in 3 years. No new setting.
- 1982: no hardback, no boxed sets, 9 adventures. This means that there was an average of 40 days between any new offer from TSR and they were thin booklets that sold for $6.95. And this is most successful D&D year in history, with million of copies sold of the corebooks.
- 1983: the sales begin to slow down. TSR hastly print another Monster Manual (II), produce a new edition of the Basic and Expert set (Mentzer) and the Greyhawk boxed set. And 16 adventures.
- 1984, the year of the crisis, 75% layoffs, TSR print a new boxed set (companion D&D) and 29 adventures. 5 of them are Dragonlance.
I don't think that the Dragonlance series was caused by the crisis. It was two years in development. They simply saw that "story-modules" sold well and they thought of tying together novels and adventure modules. But right at the time the corebooks sell less and less and there is risk of bankrupt, this series (and the tied novels) are best-sellers and bring a lot of money... It doesn't take much to add two and two and understand what they had to produce to make more money...
- 1985: TWO hardbacks (Oriental Adventures and Unearthed arcana), the Battlesystem Rules, TWO boxed sets (expert D&D and Lankhmar) 21 adventures (6 of them are Dragonlance) . Unearthed Arcana most of all is a big change: a "must have" corebooks with the rules that change the game. The first one in SIX YEARS. until that, there was the idea that AD&D was "definitive" and all the added rules in the Dragon were not-official. The first one in six years. And it was a list of unbalancing overpowered new character class and new game rules and spells that clearly were not very well thought off, let alone playtested (Gygax later admitted that he had to publish SOMETHING , anything, in an hurry, to save the company)
The number of adventures is lower, but don't be deceived: the page count is higher. TSR begin to print new adventures (not reprint) with more than 100 pages.
- 1986: 2 hardbacks (the survival guides) , a boxed set (Immortal D&D), 3 accessories (creature catalog and Book of lairs and character sheets) , and 23 adventures. (3 are dragonlance)
- 1987: 2 hardbacks (manual of the planes and Dragonlance) , 2 boxed sets (kara-tur and Forgotten Realms), 9 accessories (6 of them are setting modules, 2 for Forgotten Realms and 4 for the D&D world), 22 adventures.
The number of adventures is becoming stable, but I would like to point out that in this single year, TSR publish corebooks for THREE "new D&D worlds": Dragonlance (that goes from the setting of an adventure to a general D&D setting for a lot of adventures), Forgotten Realms and Kara-tur, + 2 expansions for Forgotten Realms (one of them, Moonshae, was originally a new celtic setting, that was added to the Forgotten realm patchwork like Kara-tur), + 4 new "nation setting" fo D&D. 9 new products that are simply settings books.
- 1988: 1 hardback (Greyhawk) , 1 boxed set (waterdeep), 12 accessories (10 are geographic modules, 1 is a GM design kit and one is Lord of Darkness, a compilation of adventures), and 8 adventures.
It's clear the transition from a corebook-based business model to a inflation of adventures, and then (seeing that adventures are "optional" by nature) to a inflation of "accessories", and "geographic modules" and "new universes", that most fan consider (at least at this time) must-have items.
It's interesting to see these changes seen by a old-school point-of-view:
http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2009/09/thoughts-on-d-chronology-part-i.html
http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2009/09/thoughts-on-d-chronology-part-ii.html
Very different point-of-view (I can't stand the most of the OSR, the only value I give them is the increased interest n the hobby's true root and not in propaganda), but most of the same conclusion.
The supplement treadmill was not a business model for sustained business. It was, from the start, the desperate move of a failing company to get more money by squeezing its fans with quickly-written inferior products. And the industry followed this "grasping at people's money in desperation" business model for twenty years... it's any wonder that less and less people continued to buy role-playing products? Even I, with my newbye faith in "the quality of D&D", by 1989 was seeing the evident drop in quality and by 1991 stopped buying anything by TSR...)
3) To fill thousand of pages of "must-buy" material to sell to the fans, TSR goes for Universe Inflation (Forgotten Realms - the idea of a "fantasy game world" that a 8-years old could have - and in fact Ed Greenwood was 8 when he created it, I think, and TSR got the rights for some potato chips or something like that) and even before that, stories sold as gaming product. Hickman & Weis sells? Why don't make them write a set of 16 gaming "modules", and novels, and then calendars, merchandising, etc? And Dragonlance is born, and dragonlance sells even better. Teaching people in the industry that rules don't mean shit against "stories", and that a fan of some fantasy character can spend really a lot of dough for anything with that character on it.
4) TSR goes bonkers with AD&D 2nd edition, with shit rules. Really, I noticed at the time that they were completely broken from a first read. And I was a hardcore D&D fan at the time! I played them anywhere with some houseruled patch... and then after a couple of years they published a lot of these patches on Dragon Magazines. Did it took them years to note that some spell list were insane? Did they ever played the game? The answer, I did learn a few years ago, was "not". The published a long list of playtesters, but in reality AD&D 2nd edition was never playtested in a serious manner. But who cares? The book openly says to GMs "write your story, rules are for bad GMs". Because they saw that stories made more money.
5) At this time, everybody else, with very few exceptions, jump on te bandwagon and go for "story".
I thought that Shadowrun and Vampire vere only the consequence of these commercial choices made by TSR. Did they added something that make Shadowrun in particular stand abode the rest?
By the way, I inflicted the "desert of desolation" series to my players at the time. A railroad fest second only to Dragonlance in these years (later, the bar was raised even higher. At least in DoD the character could still die and not finish the adventure...). But even I balked at the end of the scenario: "do you remember the scene you descripted to your players at the beginning, from ancient times? If your characters succeed in the adventures, they wake up these two higher beings, that then continue their fight, and your character can see the final of the movie. Are they not happy?". No, I wasn't, I changed the ending making at least the PCs the one who save the world, not some kind of GM's uber-NPC. But this kind if railroading was published in 1979-87, much earlier than Shadowrun.
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Another addition to my email:
Shadowrun (1989) was derivative not only in the setting influences (cyberpunk was really banal and common in 1989, hardly a cutting-edge concept. And adding it to D&D? Please...) but even in system. It's "innovative system"? It was directly stolen from Ars Magica (1987). It was Ars Magica the game where Jonathan Tweet used for the first time the "roll over the level of difficulty" concept. And seeing that Vampire author Mark Rein-hagen was co-author of ars magica, I think that Ars Magica has more influence on Vampire than Dhadowrun (not in the "rule zero" sense. I checked recently, and there is no trace of rule zero in Ars Magica 1st edition. God bless Jonathan Tweet). The "rule zero" concept is directly from 2nd edition D&D (1989)
D&D 3rd edition is said to have taken most of it's innovation from "Shadowrun", first of all the "roll higher" concept, but seeing that Tweet was head designer, I think we know better, right?
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Another post from the same thread:
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[...]
You say "many of us". How many? How real was for most of them? You said it yourself: their desire to be "cool" and not associated with D&D was satisfied by "D&D, but cyberpunk" (as later was by "D&D but with fangs"). And how much of that social stigma associated with D&D was caused by the image of the game, and not by the real people who really played it? I started playing in 1986 entering in a group that started no more than 6, 7 years before, and it was already a mess of dysfunctional social relationships, social misfits using the game to impose their presence to others, and the others that used that need to bully them. It was so toxic that to get away I started a group of my own (and you know how much I like being the GM, right?) trying to learn directly from the books (with the precise intent of NOT playing like my old GM - little I did know that the books would teach me to be exactly like him).
AD&D at that time was a clanking mess, something that was way overrated and outdated at least from 1979 (Gygax calling his rambling DMG "advanced" in an hobby that already produced Runequest and Cults of Prax was simply ridiculous), but I don't think that this had any effect on the social stigma. You don't get a social stigma by playing a game, even if it's way outdated (I don't think there is any stigma on the people who play monopoly). It wasn't (directly) the game. It was the people who played it, and the kind of social toxic atmosphere it fostered (the way a guy had to work to please an entire group, and the way the group had to feed his ego in fear that he will stop doing so. The way being "in the grace" of the GM was more useful that being smart, etc)
And there was really any less social stigma on superhero comics (Champions) than for fantasy, in the early '80? Or there was any way to explain to an outsider how Runequest (fantasy) was different from D&D (fantasy)?
You said it yourself: Shadowrun was simply D&D, but with some cyberpunk trapping to make it seem "cool". So if it was successful, for a time, it's not the proof that all the "coolness" these people searched for, was false and empty? That they didn't really want to change their way of playing (and their dysfunctional atmosphere) but they simply wanted to brag how much they were "better" than all the people who still played D&D (In the same way D&D players who got by stroking the GM ego called "roll-players" the ones that really risked failure rolling dice)
And... success? How many copies were sold of Shadowrun? It's existence was ever noticed by non-players?
If Shadowrun never existed, the people who brought all these supplements would have finally broke up with that paradigm and found some different way to play, or they would simply have found another D&D-clone to continue to play in the same way feeling cooler?
At the time of Shadowrun (1989) this was the situation with other famous rpgs:
Call of Cthulu (1981): in 1989 they publish the 4th edition, and yog-sothoth.com list 41 supplements already published by 1989, with different settings (dreamland, cthulhu now, cthulhu by gaslight) and big railroaded campaign (Shadows of Yog-Sothoth, 1982 / Fungi from Yuggoth, 1984 / Masks of Nyarlathotep, 1984 / Spawn of Azathoth, 1986)
Marvel Super-Heroes RPG (1984) (still TSR, but just to compare...) in 1989 at 42 supplements (not counting the gamebooks)
Paranoia (1984) in 1989 in the 2nd edition, with 23 supplements
Middle Earth Role-Playing (1984): 63 supplements by 1989.
I wasn't able to find a list of GURPS supplements with the date of first publication, but I suppose by 1989 it would be massive.
So it seems to me like the supplement treadmill path was well-trodden by 1989, even by more "highbrow" games like CoC.
[...]
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For some bits about "my history with D&D", look here on a post written around a month ago:
http://indie-rpgs.com/adept/index.php?topic=171.msg1398#msg1398
Oh Moreno, you angry, angry man.
All of that is a fine recap and adds a lot of useful detail to the history. What it doesn't do, however, is illuminate the experience of being in the orthodox congregation. I didn't sign you into this topic to rope you into repeating your rant(s), but rather because you acknowledged to me during your hangout that you absolutely fit the profile of the indoctrinated observant followed by disillusionment and rebellion. I think we all get the clear picture of the latter phase. I want to know more about the starting point!
My mom is a lapsed Catholic. Trying to talk to her about it is impossible; she can't focus on any topic except for "Why I Fucking Left It, Volume XIX and Counting." I'm hoping that I can learn more from you than I can from her about the D&D equivalent of, say, 1987-1990, so that would be your starting point (at age 22-23, for everyone's knowledge Moreno and I are very close in age) until just after you'd really tried to digest the AD&D2 texts. And not the big set-up for Why You Fucking Left It - instead, what you perceive as the messages, processes, pedagogy, and culture of being In It For Real.
Best, Ron
Ah... THAT?
I don't think I am so typical for the American scene: Italy is a very different place for rpgs. There was no D&D craze (probably no more than 1% of Italians would recognize the name, and even less would have played it. The numbers for other rpgs are even smaller), there was no BADD (sometimes someone write some christian-based attack on rpgs in some website, but they are even less known that rpgs), there was not a previous wargaming scene, there were no RPG magazines apart from a short period in the early '90s, and until Lucca Comics added "and Games" to its title (1996) there was really no big gaming convention, and there was no RPGA.
And rpg publisher had no money or interest in advertising in comic book or magazines.
In short, there were almost none of the "indoctrination" avenues used in the USA. Everything was local and group based. More of a lot of tiny "sects" than a big church.
I think I fit the profile of the post-revolutionary church-burning anticlerical idealist (and that is what I meant in hangout) much more than I did the one of the "indoctrinated observant". I played the first time in 1986, GMd my first D&D session in 1988... and by 1991 I was already so fed up with these rules (I already said that AD&D2 rules are a big pile of shit? Well, it will never be said too many times) that I stopped using them (right at the time I discovered Runequest, and Ars Magica afterwards).
The real hate come from what happened LATER. When I discovered that without me noticing, most of my gaming group (and most of the other rpg players) had turned into mindless fundamentalist fanatics (by the way, I already called these D&D fundamentalists "D&D fundamentalist" - and other less gentle things - in my first rants in fidonet in 1994. Ron, you're late!)
But you wanted to know what happened before, so here are some specific about my days as a D&D GM, and earlier.
1st phase: a new world
I first heard about AD&D in 1986. I had seen some ad in marvel comics before, but I had no idea about the kind of product they talked about (the were unable to talk about actual play even in their ads...). Then, talking in the summer of 1986 with a friend of a friend that was on summer vacation with us, learning that I, too, did read fantasy and science fiction (among other things), he did start to describe this strange "game" where you played characters in a fantasy story.
He wasn't very clear about how it worked, but me and out common friend were intrigued enough to ask for a demonstration. So he GMd (for the first time in his life, I think - he didn't even remember well the rules, so he really did improvise a lot) an adventure he had played before (as a PC) for three players. The third one - who was along for the ride because he had nothing to do that evening, i think - played so badly that his character was killed in the first scene (he never did want to play again, much to our relief), but me and the other player did clear a dungeon and saved a prisoner, with our 1st-level character (I played the first one of a long string of magic-users). And at the end of the session we were hooked. We had never even imagined that it was possible to play a game like that, and for a while we were in that state of "half the time here in the real world, half the time imagining what you did and will do with your character" described by a lot of new players (I think it's by far the most common reaction when you discover role-playing, and it's the cheese on the trap: even when it disappear after years of bad gaming, you still continue to try even for years hoping to get it back again)
After that session, we started pestering the GM for new adventures, that he had difficulties running: not only he was out of his depth (he was very good in playing NPCs, but he could not remember a rule to save his life), but he had not the time to prepare the adventures, too (he was a police agent at the time). So he called for help, but this is for the next section...
Relevant facts that happened in this phase, apart from the crazy enthusiasm for the game: the strict division the game created in our group of friends. Someone played and enjoyed the game (me, the GM, our common friend (let's call him "F") , two girls (one of which would become the GM's wife), another guy that played sometimes, and stop: all the others in the groups HATED it. Without even seeing a single session. They refused to even try.
In hindsight, I was seeing the first signs of the powerful social effects of the game, and the way social fractures reacted to it: the GM was a latecomer in a group of friends that used to go out together from when we were eighteen. He was a very funny and easygoing guy, and he quickly rose in social standing, especially with the girls. When gaming raised his social standing even more, "the game" became a sort of battle line, where you had to choose sides: I "joined his side", as the other people who played, and as a reaction the other guys refused the game altogether with hostility.
Thinking about it, having a game that avoided that "raising a guy over everybody other" would have avoided a lot of social crises in our group, even so early at the start.
2nd phase, 1987: A bigger, older, dying group
As I said, the GM was overwhelmed, he was not able to continue (another effect of the weight AD&D put on a single guy), so he did propose us to join the regular group he was playing in, that was a older group that started playing in the '70s.
That was my first contact with a dysfunctional gaming group. Years later I would have seen the same kind of toxic effects in my own group and many others, but at the time I simply assumed that some of them were simply "bad players".
And they were bad. Really bad. Backstabbing, very poor tactical sense, a "killer GM" (from this moment, when I say "GM", I mean this guy: my friend never GMd again) that was proud to never had a PG surviving to the 5st level (but that clearly had favorites and scapegoats in the group of players), people who get angry to each other for a bad roll, etc.
The funny thing is that THEY considered our first sessions as a sort of "exam" to see if we were "good enough" to play with them. At the time I had still not played with them, so I found it simply bothersome. In hindsight it was hilarious...
I quickly rose as a de facto "tactician leader" of the group, during battles. Not only because I did think about what I was doing, but, most of all, because I had ordered a complete set of AD&D from the USA (I usually ordered American books directly from the USA at the time, it was nothing out of the ordinary for me to add some gaming manual to the rest), and, more than that... I WAS ABLE TO READ THE RULES! A fact unheard of! In the entire group, before my arrival, only the GM was able to read in English. I did know the exact effects and range of spells, I could combine them, and I discovered that I had a true talent for rules-lawyering.
The problem is that, outside of battles, the social leader of the group was another guy, that played very badly but (being the leader of the group) was favored by the GM in most situations (I don't remember him ever being the target of a surprise attack. But I remember the GM giving him three rolls, one after another, to be able to save himself from falling from a rope bridge: the first one to avoid falling, the second one to grab the bridge, the third one to grab a dangling rope that didn't exist until that roll). The leader of the group had favorites of his own, and people who he did not get along... and we all player together, anyway, because "you don't break the group". And he was the ONLY GM we did know, anyway... right?
Another problem: they played with a byzantine set of house rules, that was not written anywhere and that changed from a week to the other (they were not improvised on the spot, though, because the social leader of the old group always did know them before). Rules that were in my opinion moronic and inferior to the ones in the game manual. I did play with their rules (I had already interiorized that "the GM is always right") but i didn't like them.
Another problem: railroading, and frustrating "adventures" where everything important was done by NPCs and we simply fought endless battles (entire evening passed for a single fight). We were too many - we were 10 players + GM at a certain point - and the GM preference for a lot of small monsters instead of a big one meant killing literally hundreds of dice for the smallest fights.
Something had to give. I was not really having fun playing anymore. No one did. It was frustrating, both the girls that had started to play with us had already left months before (they were frankly treated like second-class players by most of the old-timers and I can't blame them for leaving, I blame me for not seeing that happen before it was too late).
The breaking point arrived in 1988 when the GM informed me that I had been "chosen". Chosen to be what? To be a part of the new, stripped-down group of "good players" he wanted to organize, leaving behind the "dead-weights". Among the dead-weights, my old friend "F", the one who had started with me. Now, "F" had the tactical sense of a chicken, and the way his character continued to die one after another was a running joke (so much that he had stopped even giving them proper names). But he still played much, much better that half of the people who would remain (at least he did roleplay his character sometimes). And I realized I had really no desire to play in this group of so-called "good players".
Se what did I do? I talked with "F" and with the old GM, "M", and we decided to leave that group and start another by ourselves, to play with the "real" rules.
(ironically, "F" fifteen years later will be one of the guys who stopped talking to me because I didn't want to play with them anymore)
To the new group, we added two friends of M and F who were interested into playing (I did meet both the first time the first session we played together, but for a funny coincidence, I had slept in the bed of one of them, unbeknown to him, a couple of years before. One time his big sister had the house all by herself and organized a week-end long private party for very few people). I tried to convince M to be the GM again but he refused, so I had to, being the only one who did know the rules, "until we find another GM"
The third session we played, one of the player of the old group, "L" (one of the ones in the lower rungs of the social ladder) did show up for a visit. I am sure that he wanted to have a laugh seeing how we played without an "expert GM".
What he did, instead, after seeing us play for one session, was to ask if he could join us as a regular player. With him, our starting lineup of 5 players + GM was complete (Angela, who still play Trollbabe with me and is the player that played with me the longest - 24 years and counting - arrived a year later)
In hindsight, thinking about this transition, I now realize that we were leaving the old, dysfunctional, dying group, but he was not leaving us: that group was a sort of school, to learn a lot of stupid techniques to avoid having fun. At this time, only AD&D existed: it was not even "the best rpg", it was the only one we considered existing. I did know the names of some other game, like CoC or Merp, but more as a curiosity, nothing more. Even D&D was not considered (it's was not "advanced").
The way these people played was so bad that they effectively masked any problem with the rules: as far as I did know, AD&D rules were perfect and with no problem whatsoever (after all, I had never really used them as written)
Comparing what happened to my group to that one, now I see a lot of similarity. Probably even they were much better once (there is no explanation why they started playing in the first place, it that's not the case). I did not see the failure of the game itself. I did not see that the people I was getting into my group (and myself, in part) were already conditioned with a lot of bullshit "facts" about the game, and how a gaming group had to work. About "what fantasy is" (both F and L were adamant that, if a elf is not the elf of D&D, it's not an elf. if it's not D&D, it's not fantasy. I think that both of them did read every single Dragonlance novel ever published
I was so naive, that I thought that to avoid the "bad play" of the other group, all I had to do was to follow the instruction and the rules in the "ufficial game manual". It's obvious, no? The people who wrote the manual HAD to know how to play, it's absurd to think otherwise...
... right?
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P.S.: next phase in the next post, i don't want to risk losing all this if there is a power failure...
This is an interesting history, Moreno; please do keep at it.
I'm struck by how high the social stakes involved in roleplaying have been in your circles compared to my own. The auteuristic attitude towards GMing is one big point of difference that might explain almost everything else. (We never really had an "official GM" in our group in my youth, very possibly because for us roleplaying was about a multitude of different games instead of just one, and while different guys were the GM-experts for different games, we always had social leeway to gracefully reorient and back down from artistic commitments that were not working, to the extent of people starting and stopping to play without it affecting friendships.)
Another big difference is that while roleplaying seems to have changed your social circle, for me it was what originally brought my teenage peer group together in the first place: without it we were just a bunch of bookish teenagers with nothing in common, but with the shared will towards a new hobby we became friends over a few short months. I imagine that's the sort of difference that makes everything since show up in a different light.
At first I was annoyed that Moreno resurrected our discussion about Shadowrun, as I thought it distracted from the current point, but after thinking about it a little, I realized that this pivotal moment in RPG history is relevant to one of my main points in the first post.
QuoteI'm not talking merely about an institution's existence, or about identification with and economic loyalty to it, but also crucially about that nigh-ineradicable cultural stamp such institutions produce. It's huge! Which the Pathfinder and OSR phenomena, and more generally, the wider range of role-players in general, are by no means immune to.
AD&D2 wasn't alone in promoting GM story imposition but it was the key player via the processes and publications as Moreno described. For the record (if you didn't follow the link), he and I were not disagreeing about that. (i) Champions as such wasn't very good at it (in fact I suggest that the Strike Force supplement indicates the game authors' preference for play-emergent character arcs instead), but its expansion into Hero Games evolved that way via externally-written adventure scenarios. The GURPS wing or entwined twin of this trend in game design focused very greatly on setting-construction, and with Champions 4th edition (with a complete turnover in author/editorship), Hero Games finally came 'round to that technique as well. BRP was more individualized by title; remember that this was pre-Pendragon, and RuneQuest kind of hovered with widespread play and little published development until its acquisition by Avalon Hill. So BRP publication-development mainly meant Call of Cthulhu, which during this time greatly refined its play-driven publication of canned, even staged scenarios and drifted as I see it much more toward "the GM has a story to tell."
My interest in Shadowrun in the older discussion concerned why and how European role-players seemed to me so fixated on high-end publishing, on an unbridgeable distance between publisher and gamer, on thespian-Illusionism as high art, and on the periodical model of linearly-linked "adventures." And not in the Pathfinder way which I think is refreshingly honest, fun-now, and Participationist, but in the White Wolf way of "gee fun later I guess." Ultimately I decided it's because they almost all cut their teeth on Shadowrun
de novo, and to be complete about, bracketed by AD&D2 for the older ones like Moreno and by White Wolf and its raft of European clones for the younger ones.
But here, I'm interested in how the AD&D2 orthodoxy (and I include its evolution/application prior to the formal release of AD&D2) was so prevalent and legitimized that the evolving or developing other branches of game design couldn't escape it. There was nothing about Call of Cthulhu or GURPS which invited pseudo-Tolkien epic play or publication-driven metaplot, and although they both cast the GM as the primary creative participant via
prep, I submit that their texts were much less Rule Zero-y concerning
play. But somehow fantasy was the privileged genre and GM-epic-railroading - while managing unruly players who "can't be trusted" - was the privileged technique. I'm saying that although new games either partly or entirely broke with the former, they seem to have embraced the latter with a vengeance. Maybe that's what the context of an orthodoxy does: makes even the breakaways grab even tighter to the orthodoxy's most important operating principles.
@Eero: I think that the "rotating GM" aspect is the most important: these groups last much longer (and don't crumble when the only GM leave)
Regarding the cross-over between my "social" group (the people with whom I would go out at parties, at movies, etc.) and my "gaming" group, it stopped with "F" and "M". The other two girls that played at first stopped after seeing the atmosphere at the dysfunctional table, and when we finally did break up with that gaming group, one of them was too busy with work, marriage and a child, and the other one did leave even the social group after a particularly painful break-up.
In the rest of the social group there was still so much hostility regarding the game that we avoided even talking about it. So all the following players during the next years (and I think that at the end that group had seen at least twenty different players, even if the core group I described above was always the same) were always people that I did not know, that were invited by another player (some of them became my friends, other played for a while then left)
Talking about new players: all this was added fuel to my ego. At first, being the "GM" was exhilarating, especially thinking that before I was always one that preferred to fade in the background in social occasions, "be there" when things happened, but never in the spotlight. (and it helped a lot with my introversion, too: making a fool of yourself in public role-playing elfs, halflings, trolls, etc and having people love you for it really make it easier to speak in public afterwards.). But having it confirmed that you are known around as one "good GM", to the point that people from other groups ask you if they could join, and there is a long waiting list for any free place at the table, to the point that for years I had to say "no" to a lot of people? You can't buy that kind of encouragement (not cheaply, at least)
It took me a while to recognize that I was paying for it, really, and not cheaply, both in money and in other things, but let's not go too much in the future here...
@Ron: there is no "Europe" in rpg publishing. The situation of Italian rpg publishing was so different from France (aand both from Germany) that you could talk about China and Mexico and probably find more affinities. The German best-seller in a low-selling title elsewhere, there are places where D&D is on the lower rungs but in Italy it had a slice of the marker even bigger than in the USA. In 1986 one of the biggest Italian game publisher published the Mentzer Red Box. The sales were not what they expected and they stopped there (or with the following box, I am not sure, we ignored everything that was not "advanced"...), but still, it was the ONLY rpg you could find outside of a very few specialized shops.
In Italy, the Shadowrun rpg was at most a blip on the radar, and disappeared very soon. (In Italy it's the entire cyberpunk culture that never did take root, it always remained a tiny niche even in science fiction publishing). The sales were not even on the same planet with the D&D sales, but even in the tiny slice of the market that was "not D&D", Call of Cthulhu, Vampire, Ars Magica, GURPS, even games written by italians, sold more. It even arrived late (1996), when the concept of splatbooks was already squeezed to death, and I think that no supplements for that game were published anyway.
(It's even worse for Champion and the Hero system, most Italian rpg players would not have even ever heard of them)
So, for "Italy" your question...
QuoteMy interest in Shadowrun in the older discussion concerned why and how European role-players seemed to me so fixated on high-end publishing, on an unbridgeable distance between publisher and gamer, on thespian-Illusionism as high art, and on the periodical model of linearly-linked "adventures."
...have these answers:
- About high-end publication: Italian publication are usually more high-end that American ones by default, you would have found that difference in almost every sector. (for example, Italian idea of "cheap comic book" was a 100-pages squarebound softcover printed on good paper, when the American standard was still the 32-page pamphlets printed on very cheap newsprint paper), but the lines that really started to print these high-end manuals here were AD&D2 and Vampire (with very different kind of style - Bradstreet vs Elmore or Brom
- the distance between publisher and gamers almost doesn't exist anymore these days, rpgs are too little to interest big publishers. But at the beginning D&D was published by a very big game publisher (the biggest in Italy), others were published by comic book publishers (Granata Press - Nexus) and even smaller gaming companies wanted to look "professional" even if they had 2 employee and worked in a basement. So, in Italy never existed a initial "self-publishing phase" - hell, to be strict, even now the real self-published games are only an handful - and you can add to this that before Lucca Comics added "games" (1996) there was no direct contact between publishers and public.
- About "thespian"... Ron, you should have played with Italian enough times now to know that, even without generalizing too much, we LOVE a dramatic scene, acting and talking in character. Even when I did read the old D&D gaming manuals... the idea that it could be played without the "make-believe" part, without acting in character, did not even enter the discourse.
(by the other hand, Europeans players have described American players they did play with at Gencon as "rigid, passionless, roll-players that don't know how to role-play a character, etc")
- About illusionism , I will go in more details in the following posts, but the short answer is: the biggest rpgs translated in Italy at the beginning were AD&2 and Call of Cthulhu. Both in their "big railroaded campaign" period and with the Dragonlance novels in full swing. Then arrived Vampire. There was no "old school" or even later '90s games, it was "golden rule + suggestions" right away.
OK, for the next part... I tried to count all the issues I should talk about from that period, but there are too many, to avoid this becoming a (ever longer) endless meandering rant I will have to leave some of them for later additions.
One aspect of the first phase of my "GM" career was well described in a previous thread, so why write the same thing two times?
---------from http://indie-rpgs.com/adept/index.php?topic=171.msg1398#msg1398
Callan, I am that one GM!Quotefrom: Callan S. on August 04, 2013, 02:04:51 AM
It's worth remembering in AD&D that you lost a point of CON upon each ressurection. Thus your con was your final HP score (ie, there are two resource points in play in regards to perma death, not just one). It's also one of the rare sections of the book where Gary actually shows some passion AND speaks to the reader directly (as a person) about the importance of this and that without it, in his words, play is meaningless. Of course the interesting question right after noting that is, who plays with that CON loss? There's a AD&D game at a local store and as far as I'm aware, there is no CON loss instituted by the DM in that game.
Yes, I did enforce the -1 CON after resurrection, and the one-year-age penalty to the Cleric that cast it, and the necessity of having a "complete" corpse to be able to use a "raise Dead" instead of the more costly "resurrect", etc.
We even used material spell components and weapon modifiers against different armours: we were really hardcore.
Reading about other people's experiences with OD&D or AD&D I realize that out table was exceptional, in the sense that the way we played EVERYTHING "by the book" was exceptional. But there was a cause for this: our gaming group was a splinter group from a older table (with people who started playing in the '70) where the mass of house rules was so big to dwarf the D&D rules, and almost every one of these house rules was dysfunctional, unbalancing and grossly un-fun (their function, I realized afterwards, was to "keep the newbies in place". Well, we newbies realized what was our place: another table with another GM). After all these bad experiences with house rules, everybody wanted to avoid using them as much as possible.
This obstinacy in playing "by the book" didn't pay well in game terms (we realized after a while that the written rules were not much better) but it paid very well in years of internet flames afterwards, when I could cite every single rule by chapter, page and verse against people who defended D&D and I could tell them that they didn't even know the rules they were defending... ;-) -----------------------------------
As an aside: the way I could win any bet with any AD&D2 player in later years because they didn't even know the rules they were defending (they directly assumed they "were better" as a religious dogma, "because it's D&D") is a PERFECT mirror to the way, in the same years (I am much less polemic now) I could win any bet with any catholic because none of them did ever read the book that, they say, contain the "rules" for eternal happiness and to avoid eternal torture... One would suppose that if someone really believed something like that, they would pass their entire life perusing these pages to be sure to "play well" the game of life. But, like in AD&D, the important thing for them is not following fixed rules: it's following what you "pastor/GM" tell you to do, week after week. You trust that he do know the rules and you only have to do what he says.
Putting aside the aside and returning to AD&D at Moreno's table around 1988: it was the third year me and "F" played, and not even a single session we had played with the "true" rules (that I had read again and again for more than 2 years at that time). We were fed up with that. So: no more house rules, no more "false" rules, no more moronic "improvement" that broke the game. We were going to play AD&D BY THE BOOK, because we wanted to play THE REAL AD&D
And for a time (a short time) it even worked....
Dungeon Mastering is a magical and mysterious art. Or at least, that's what seemed from the books.
Until now I have used "GM", but it's error caused by later habits: it's D&D, at the time we used "Dungeon" Master. And the Dungeon Master Book is SECRET. It's forbidden tome. Guarded with the most terrible of curses: "if you read the DM Guide, you will never enjoy playing as before" (I can't be bothered to check at this time, but I am sure it's even written somewhere on the player handbook. It was "common knowledge" for any D&D player anyway)
So, I was not being very precise when I said that I had brought a "complete set" of AD&D books: I had brought the Player handbook, the monster manuals (I and II + Fiend Folio), Legend and Lore and Unearthed Arcana . Later, when they were published, I brought the Dungeoneer and Wilderness guides. (At the time it still was possible to have a "complete set of AD&D books" with less than 10 books. Less than 5 if you did that before 1985). But not the DMG. That was DM eyes only".
Having to be the DM for the new group (by necessity: I really didn't want to do it, and my reluctance was what made me wait so long before breaking up with the old group, I think), I had to buy a DMG and read it. And saying that I didn't find it a really clear manual would be an euphemism. I had thought, all that time, that the incongruences, problems and missing parts from the other manuals would be explained there, but they weren't. What I found instead were tables. Interesting tables, useful tables, stupid tables, moronic table, exasperating tables, insane tables, impenetrable tables, but tables everywhere. And subchapters about every little detail Gygax could think about (Lycantropy, erbs, gems, sages, etc.). But no "big picture" anywhere. A confusing mess of Gygax's house rules and tables for an invisible game.
I already had not a lot of respect for Gygax's writing style (I thought i had a very good knowledge of English, but I had to go consulting my dictionary more times reading the Player Handbook than reading Joyce. And some words he used were not even in the dictionary!) but that cemented it: I did lose respect for him even as a game designer (that mess of "Unearthed Arcana" and it's disruptive unplaytested changes to the game had already done much of the work). But this only increased my reliance on "TSR" as a good source of advices: after all the new TSR books were much, much better written, when Gygax didn't write them (I did not know the details of his extroversion at the time: this was before the diffusion of commercial Internet, I didn't even have a PC and the only source of information was Dragon Magazine. And the comparison reading both Dragonlance or Ravenloft (the module) at the same time with the DMG was harsh)
At the time, the 2nd edition was already announced, and among the hype there was the promise of clearer rules. So, waiting for that edition, I started GMing with no clear idea about what I had to do, and so I relied completely on adventure modules and Dragon Magazine advices.
I was lucky with my first module: "Under Illefarm" by Steve Perrin. It described a small town, a reason for the PCs to be together and fighting monsters (compulsory militia duty), a series of simple adventures for low-level characters with good simple hooks ("you are on militia duty, when a guy run to you screaming about Lizardmen attacking his farm and kidnapping his family. What do you do?") that could be solved in a single session, and a longer adventure at the end where the PCs would meet different factions inside a dungeon, decide which side they would help (OK, one side was "the evil necromancer" and the other was "the pacific Dwarwes", but it's interesting that module doesn't assume that you will align with the latter to work), and, more important... none of this had a fixed story, or ending. The only pre-scripted part was the hook, and they were short as the one I cited above (it's a real one used in the module for the lizardmen adventure). And the small town was full of NPCs to interact with that were not directly tied to any adventure. (some were, but it was not clear to the player at the start, and there was not the kind of "everybody you meet is part of the adventure" feeling present in other modules.)
There is such a thing as too much luck, I suppose: the quality of that module, right at the start would later bit me in the ass.
1) I started my "DM career" with adventures that created enthusiasm in the players and made me "famous" in a little niche of players in my city... but I had no idea about what make them special (or that they were special at all). I thought that EVERY module would have the same results and that I had gotten these results by simply following the rules. So I trusted the published modules even more.
2) I did not railroad the adventures because after the old group, I loathed railroads., But at the same times, the railroads in the old groups were so pervasive and evident that I considered THAT as the definition of railroading. The short hooks in the modules worked perfectly, but it was because they were shorts, or because they were hooks in the first place? The way they worked made me think that my work as GM was to hook the players into my adventures.
3) These adventures confirmed not only to me, but to "F", "L" and "M", too, that AD&D rules worked perfectly, and the past problems were the old GM's fault. And we said this to the new players, too.
In that way, even with a module that saved me from a lot of possible errors, I contributed to the spreading of the usual AD&D "gospel":
1) "DMG is an art magical and mysterious, only a few can do it well. Look how Moreno is better at it than the old DM"
2) "Being the DM is easy, you only need to follow the official modules"
And there was an added problem that at first I considered a feature: that module was in a TSR "official" setting, The Forgotten Reals...
I actually read the Gygax DMG last week for the first time. Those who've read it and know about my style of D&D will find it no surprise that I found a lot of it outright insane. On the other hand, I liked how it felt like the notes of a seasoned GM; he might not be the sort of GM I would be willing to play with, but at least it was based on actual play, unlike much armchair speculation that TSR published later. I am left with the impression that all of these insane rules (training costs and secret alignment-switching penalties being perhaps the most egrecious, although there was much else that was simply pointless) were ultimately caused by the fault lines in the principles that he was using in his play, which in turn led to a very Monty Haul-ish campaign. It would be surprising had this not been the case, considering that he was writing at a time when not much experience with D&D best practices had yet been accumulated and published.
@Eero: I too prefer the Gygax DMG to the AD&D2 one. Both are rather useless to teach you to play, but the first one at least give you pieces of the game, color, there an idea of a game behind, even if the author(s) forgot to put that game into the manual.
The AD&2 DMG is a useless piece of garbage with no idea whatsoever behind apart from "let's squeeze money from these suckers"
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Returning to my first weeks as "The Almighty DM", when I said that they were successful I did not describe the entire picture. The players enjoyed the game, true, and I could see that. And, in hindsight, realizing now the kind of rules I had to work with, and comparing these sessions with the ones before and after, yes, these were very successful: I.. no, we, were able to squeeze a lot of adventure and atmosphere from a rule-set that was useful at most to depict ridicule fights between two hit-point gauges that hit each other standing still, to see whose gauge would go to zero first.
But, you see, that wasn't what the game promised.
Playing the game as written, we were in very "old school" territory: the characters were grave-robbers, and when they were "heroes" it was for luck and for show: in the last adventure of "Under Illefarm" they robbed the Dwarves, for example. I let the dice fall without "goldenruling" their results, so any character who was tempted to be too "heroic" would be dead very fast, and the characters had a short life in general anyway. They tried to survive, mostly, and after playing with a "killer GM" for so many years, they even enjoyed this little increase in their chances.
But I was reading other promises. Dragon magazine talked about heroes. The modules talked about heroes. In the group everybody did read the Dragonlance Novels: yes, not very good literature, but the idea that these adventures were tied to the same gaming worlds and rules we used gave them an influence much bigger that they literary worth warranted (and, anyway, seeing what did happen to fantasy literature around that time and afterwards, I have to say that the dragonlance novels, in particular the books 1-3 and 6, were not by far the worst of the lot)
Even the setting we used, The Forgotten Realms, talked about heroes in every page, with the implicit promise that the PG would have been heroes, too
I am trying to list the reason we played as we did here, but not every reason is clear to me after all this time. For example, I remember clearly to have been less than impressed by the Forgotten Realms boxed set. The setting was bland to the point of being almost colorless, and most of the pages were dedicated to a long list of very similar "Heroes" that were clearly the PC and NPC of Ed Greenwood's own campaign. It was like a bad fanfiction full of every clichè a GM could use.
So why, after realizing how poor that was product.. I used it? Why I didn't move the Under Illefarm small setting into another world of my creation?
Bad advices were a part of this, true. Years after these adventures, reading Ron's "Sorcerer's and Sword", at the page where he suggest to start playing with a little location, building the world little by little, without mapping it all at the beginning, I nodded and thought about all the game sessions that, failure after failure, had already show me that lesson. And how many of these failures I could have avoided if I had found similar advices in the TSR products right at the beginning, instead of finding only advertising masked as "advices", that only tried to sell me a lot of "setting modules".
Another reason, I remember now, was that in Dragon Magazine they said that from that moment, every new products would have been put into the Forgotten Realms, so if I used it I could (in theory) use any module, every adventure, in my own campaign, sooner or later. And if I didn't use it, i was on my own (or at least, with a lot of work to do to change the modules).
But why I needed the adventure modules? Insecurity and time. I still didn't want to create my own setting (I never did, and I still don't: another proof that I am not a GM by heart, I suppose...), and the time that the game already did cost me was already too much. The time passed writing NPCs or maps was in my eyes wasted time, doing boring stuff. I liked the moment we played together, and loathed having to work at home to create one-use material for the game. Using printed adventure modules turned "doing gaming chores" into "reading", that was much more enjoyable
(I could not avoid all that the Game Design work that come with AD&D, though: I created a lot of magic items and a new character class for Angela to play, for example)
Anyway, all this intersected with my own "collector" tendencies (I tend to accumulate much more books and comics than the number I can read...) and in these years I spent really A LOT in buying TSR gaming products: hardbacks, magazines, gaming modules, etc.
I was used to a publication schedule that wasn't so overwhelming: before the 2nd edition, even after the post-1983 rapid increase I described a few post ago, it was still possible to buy everything without spending too much. So when they started producing manual after manual at an absurd frequency I was slow in realizing that they were taking me for a ride. In 1988-1990 my gaming expenses increased a lot.
I used this material to add new adventures to my Illefarm campaign, still waiting for the new edition books, but I was doing it badly. i was trying to do what the Illefarm adventure module DIDN'T: tie together a lot of adventures into a "campaign". I turned the necromancer into a recurring enemy, that got covered control of the city by controlling the ruler. How he did it? With a magic ring. Where he did get that? From a PC. Stealing it.
I cite the history of the ring because it's instructive and show the effects that reading all these products full of lies were having on my habits as a DM: the ring was added to the setting with a random roll. "M" (the policeman, if you recall my previous posts) was playing a halfling thief, and he had an uncanny ability to find treasure everywhere (I swear, it was incredible. Thinking that he could maybe read the modules himself I began to move the treasure around the dungeons in other locations in the map, but it was useless: he did always find them by sheer luck). So what happened in the final "under illefarm" adventures? That right at the beginning of the adventure, in the first hour of a multi-session dungeon crawl... he did find the hidden treasure of the dungeon. A freaking series of rolls (I did the math afterwards: he had less than 1/200 chance to find it so soon).
So what I did at the time, still in "old school DM" mindset? I let the dice stay, I described the treasure. And then I made "M" roll on the DMG table to find the value of the gems he had found. And I used the table from the DMG that give a little chance of magic gems (over the magic object already described in the module). And, obviously, being him.. he did every roll to find a major magic item, a mind-controlling ring.
All this happened "by the book", i rolled on the tables, and kept the results.
But at the same time, I had already the initial mindset of wanting to see "good adventures", and I didn't see this as an interesting turn, but as a freakish roll that had "destroyed" my adventure: they had found the treasure at the beginning, and they had the magic objects to easily beat their enemies now (and they did)
Worse: the halfling began to use the ring to get rich.. by stealing from the other citizens! (NPC only, not the other PCs). I wanted a group of heroes, and now one of them was becoming the menace, robbing poor, honest people...
Now, and with another gaming system I would have said "cool: i don't even have to find enemies to fight, let's see what happen". But D&D is not a good system for player vs player gaming, and I had already seen in the previous groups how these tensions could escalate in a group...
So what did I do? I did what Dragon Magazine and the DMG suggested: "if a magic object is too powerful for your campaign, steal or destroy it".
So, the after-reading-a-lot-of-bullshit Moreno, after some weeks of this, decided that the Necromancer did know of the ring existence (it was his reason to fight the Dwarves all along, it wasn't the money), he did know that one of the PCs had it, and had discovered who. So he and his henchmen ambushed the PC, took all his magic items, and fled. And after them, without the PC noticing, the Necromancer became the real power in the city, acting hidden behind controlled people...
Notice what the DM did here? I did take away the cool stuff of the PC (not only the ring: It would have not been realistic), I started to turn a city of different NPCs, friends and not, in a city of enemies, I started to use long-terms "hidden menaces"... and the quick adventures of the first sessions became a long string of sessions with things happening that from the point of view of the PCs made very little sense. But I waited for the "big reveal" and.. as you can probably guess, the "big reveal" was rather flat. A session full of explanation (repeated, because in "real life gaming", the players don't understand everything the first time as in movies: you have to explain the master plot again and again and again and again...), a "enemy behind the curtains" that they did not even remember.
OK, so my "good story" failed, this I could see. But why? I had followed the instruction of the books, the magazines... if EVERYBODY ELSE was having a lot of fun playing like this (the magazines said so), why it didn't work? It was my own fault or the player's fault?
In the meantime, adventure after adventure, session after session, the AD&D 2nd edition books arrived. And they were really simple compared to the 1st edition one. And they explained exactly where I made a mistake: I "did let a bad roll ruin my story". The rules, they explained were only a "suggestion", but the "good GM" is the one who has a "good story", and make it happen, no matter what the PC decide or roll.
Reading these books, I noticed another thing, too: the rules in some points were absurd and stupid. I asked myself how it could be possible that in all the time of the playtest, nobody noticed that a 1st-level Cleric could boil alive any armored adversary... without removing his own armor? (The cleric spells division in "Spheres" was so badly done that they had added the druid's fire spell to the cleric... without giving him any of the armor restrictions of the druid. And this is only one example of the mass of broken rules in these manuals)
OK, let's see: this was not the first example of broken rules and bad products. I had read the 1st DMG. I had read Unearthed Arcana. i had read the Forgotten Realms Boxed Set. And now the lomg-promised "new, better rules" were.. these?
It's for this reason that I don't think i am a perfect example of "D&D Orthodoxy", Ron. What I was, is a D&D "Roman Catholic".
I mean: like most catholics, I didn't have "faith" anymore in the "gospel". I could see that it was a mismatched mess of broken rules. But I followed the liturgy every week, because "everybody do", and anyway... all you need to do is using the Golden Rule ("do what the celebrating priest say") and all will be well...
If only the DMG had that advice about "the GM story", I could have dismissed it, but at that point i did read magazines and had contacts with other GM and players... and it was EVERYWHERE. "The Good GM is the GM that make you live the best story, without you noticing that he is cheating".
So I became better, much better, at cheating. I did know my players, I did know how to "motivate" them simply by adopting a certain tone or using certain words with a NPC. I could predict their tactics, I could made them follow my "story" without them noticing. And when they didn't, as sleight of hands, a magical trick from the master illusionist: the player's don't realize that they should search for the alchemist, to hear what he have to say? They go to the tavern? Oh, what a coincidence, there is a alchemist in the tavern... and he is drunk and start talking without they having to ask him anything! Or do they miss the traces and go to the wrong dungeon? It's simply a matter of switching dungeon maps. That one now is this one. Switching maps, switching names, switching location, and making the players my puppets, really.
It was not a quick process, and I still sometimes was tripped by some residue of trust in the TSR product. My Illefarm campaign ender really, really badly, because it was time for the Forgotten Realms to turn into a AD&D2 setting...
You see, I already had used the AD&D2 rules (?) for more than a year without any problem, but what about the world? Could TSR trust the GMs to be able to modify some stats? Clearly not, it's the time to... sell products! A product made JUST for this occasion, to "help" the DM with the changers.
I am referring to the "Avatar's time trilogy", the worst piece of shit I had ever run as GM, and I still don't believe I was fool enough to run it...
If you was lucky enough to have avoided reading that sanity-reducing trilogy of novels and gaming modules, this is the gist of it: the novels are about a group of stupid multidimensional badly written moronic characters that become gods by trashing any sense or decency in the already pathetic Forgotten Realms "Gods Pantheon". These novels did change EVERYTHING in the FR (just like comic books did at the time... every other month...). New Gods, new spells, the laws of nature, new geography: if you want to play in this new Forgotten Realms, yoiu HAVE to apply these changes to your own home campaign... do you want to be left back? With outdated modules? What will "they" say, the other DMs? Do you want to remain stuck in the past?
Luckily for you, TSR has a NEW PRODUCT that you can use just for this occasion: a set of three new gaming modules, that allow YOUR OWN CHARACTERS to... assist the protagonists of the novels in their adventures, like sidekick, and BE PRESENT when they (alone) win their final battle. Wow! Who would not pay good money for that? Having the DM pass the entire session narrating a fight between NPCs is the real reason everybody play!
OK, even I could see that these modules were rubbish...but I HAD to apply these changes to my own campaign!!! Don't you see? If I didn't.. I would not have played in the REAL Forgotten Realms anymore!!
So, I changed them. I changed the story, I changed the battles, I did add objectives for the PC different from "I want to look at NPC fighting". i tied the modules to PCs backstory. I made A LOT of works to make these modules at least acceptable.
I have to say, without false modesty, that I was able to make these modules 99% less shitty. in no moment my players had to listen to me narrating a long NPC fight. They traveled alone and the actions of the protagonists of the novels were something that happened elsewhere, near enough to be influenced but not in the same battles. I turned the most shitty modules ever created into a 99% less shitty modules. So they were only.. the three worst modules I ever used. And still too shitty by far.
It was still a series of adventures that changed the world and "broke" our setting, with no real reason at all! That changed the god of a PC cleric, that changed the world around.. for reasons that had nothing to do with the PCs story and background.
After a while we stopped that campaign, nobody cared about it a lot anymore, me even less than others.
Anyway, that clusterfuck did teach me a lot about railroading. I had to apply these techniques so many times that as I said i became very good at it. I never trusted anything by TSR anymore, and i realized how much I had been a fool, buying into that "you have to play in the official setting" mindset.
For a while I still used the "Dungeon Magazine" adventures. They were often very good, much better than the ones in "official modules" (today I realize why: the "official" adventures were unplaytested crap written by people who were simply very fast in producing crap at low prices. The "Dungeon Magazine" adventures were instead PLAYED adventures, that the DMs would submit to the magazine for publications. They were created for actual play and selected by their results in actual play by the people who sent them)
At this time we are around 1990, maybe 1991. I have learned my lessons. I use "good" adventures from Dungeon Magazine and railroad the crap out of them. I have learned that all the time I used years before to create monsters and maps and to give the exact xp to each characters were a complete waste of time: I give a sensible amount of xp and nobody can check if they are exact, nobody complain anyway, I use less than a minute to decide the xp for any character, without having to check my notes. My monsters falls when they have to, who has need of a fixed number of HP? I cut the preparation time to an acceptable amount, and cut it again afterward. I create "heroic" stories for the characters, that happen exactly as I want, and the players are very happy and tell everybody that I am a very good DM, and I have again the queue of people who want to enter (at this time I have 9 players, even with my "closed door" policy).
And I am bored out of my mind during the game sessions, because I am so good at railroading that literally nothing important ever happen unexpected.
Something has to change. I had to find something new and interesting. And I did.
Next: Glorantha (but don't worry, I was not finished with AD&D2)
The story of going from using your natural story telling talents to run a fun little open-ended module to, in the absence of being able to compare notes with other DMs, eventually internalizing the poor advice of the sanctioned game text? This is starting to sound like religion.
Astute observation about Dungeon Magazine vs. published modules, too. I never thought about it that way, but yeah, Dungeon was where all the little gems were, wasn't it?
@Larry,
About Dungeon Magazine: yes, especially the first issues, when they probably had a lot of submission by people who still played in the pre-Dragonlance vein. But after a while (around issue 30-40 I think, but I should read them again to be sure about the numbers) the quality dropped even there. Probably they didn't receive enough quality submission to be choosy, and many of the submissions were now "stories" dressed as adventures.
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This part of the story is mostly a blur. I remember well the 1986-1989 period because everything seemed new, even the bad parts. When in the following years playing become more of a routine, and not a very interesting one for much of the time, I don't remember the detail at all. I don't remember most of the adventures I did run in these years, and I don't remember when I began to buy other rpgs.
I did know that there were other rpgs (I saw their ad in Dragon Magazine) but so long as I had to order the book directly from the USA, or buy them from some local shop that did keep only the D&D stuff, I didn't see one. But by 1990 more rpgs were already published in Italian, and you could find shops with a lot more american games in Bologna (80 km from my home town). I don't remember exactly when, or why I decided to buy it (probably it was a suggestion from the shop owner, that did play rpgs), but I found myself reading the Avalon Hill Deluxe Edition of Runequest III.
The rules alone were already much better than AD&D, but what blew my mind was Glorantha. Even the little stuff in that box, that was just a little more than an introduction, led me to buy other boxes (Gods of Glorantha, Genertela, Elder Secrets, and most of all Trollpack). I found in the shop a copy of the English Gloratha fanzine "Tales of the Reaching Moon", I ordered the back issues and discovered that they had an Italian "distributor" right there in Bologna (that was the reason why a obscure English fanzine was in an Italian shop). I contacted him and he did lend me his complete collection of RQ II stuff to photocopy (at the time I could photocopy them almost for free). And for a while I immersed myself in all that material about Greg Stafford's World.
Seeing the sheer magnitude of the difference in quality between the AD&D2 garbage and this material (even the one in fanzines) I began to check other rpgs too, and I discovered Ars Magica, Over the Edge, GURPS, Pendragon, Call of Cthlhu, etc.
Now I can see that they didn't stray very far from the D&D paradigm (GM, players, roll to hit, hp, etc.) and when I compare them with games like Kagematsu, Spione or Montsegur 1244 the old "traditional" games seems practically the same game with different settings. But even now the difference in quality between the AD&D2 material and the rest is perfectly visible.
If until that time I was disappointed by AD&D and AD&D2, now I felt a dupe. For years I had wasted time and money on inferior products, fooled into thinking that it was the flagship of rpg design, but the truth was that practically everybody else created better material. It was not really rpg publishing, AD&D2 was so far behind in terms of rpg design that it could not really even be called "rpg" anymore, it was a con job, a box of crap with a note that said "now make it work, if it doesn't work, it's your fault"
And it was like this practically from the first hardbacks: reading again the introduction by Gary Gygax to AD&D... it's pathetic. The DMG was published when other designers had already published skill-based rpgs, more streamlined systems, evocative settings... and Gygax sustained that AD&D is superior because.. it's in hardcover!
What I didn't expect was the other player's reaction when I said to them that I wanted to change system. In hindsight, it's clear: they had not fought against that broken system for years, that was the DM's work: they were practically "shielded" by all the "goldenruling" that I did behind the screen. And even if I explained that we were not really playing "AD&D2" for years now, but we were playing "Moreno's coming up with something acceptable instead of the ridiculous results of the rolls", that was refused too.
It was, I realize now, a no-win situation: they venerated the AD&D rules because they thought that all the times I created stories they enjoyed, I used these rules. But saying that I didn't really use them devalued their memories of these stories, so even if I told them about it, they simply refused to listen with even more stubbornness.
By making all that effort to make these broken rules work, I had simply passed around more TSR propaganda and convinced more people that these rules were perfect.
Enraged, I said that if they liked so much these rules that made me waste a lot of work simply to undo their damage, they were free to use them, but one of them would have to be the DM. I didn't want to waste my time anymore for no reason. I would have concluded the campaign that we were playing at the time (the Desert of Desolation series) and then I would have not run any version of (A)D&D ever again.
So, after a lot of passive-aggressive behavior in the last months of that last AD&D campaign, this was the situation (at least in theory): we would have continued to play AD&D2, but with another DM (at the moment only "F" was available, later even "L" did run some campaign), alternating after some monts with a new RQ campaign (and later, other games) run by me.
In theory, it should have been the best solution: I didn't have to be "the GM" anymore, but I could have relaxed as a player for half of the year, and the other half I could try any game I wanted and the players would play it.
In practice, it didn't work. Some of the reasons why:
1) "F", even if he had good intention and wanted to create "good stories" like me, wasn't up to the task. His railroad was heavy handed, oppressive. Instead of tricking the players into choosing what he wanted, or switch maps and NPCs, like any good illusionist GM do, he did not want to change nothing of his finely-detailed maps, and expected that the player would have followed his "story" without giving us really any reason to do so. The most irritating habit that he had was to put us into battle with powerful opponents, and then "save" us at the last minute with the arrival of powerful NPC, as the cavalry in John Ford movies. Irritating, yes? But this is not even the half of it. If you remember a few post ago I said that he was a tactical disaster. Well, no matter the kind of opposition he used, we won. But... he saved us anyway because it was in the story! I mean situations like this: we are killing the last opponents, that are not a menace anymore because I have paralized/blocked them, the battle is finished... when the cavalry arrives, "save" us... and the rest of the session / campaign completely ignore the little fact that we had won, and the cavalry consider us in their debts because "they saved us"... this not only once, but really, really often.
Not only that, but his campaign were long. Terribly long. I jokingly said once that he wanted to write the next "Lord of the Ring", but now I think that it wasn't so much of a joke as a observation: I recently did learn that he is still not finished with the "story of the heroes that saved the world against a terrible menace from the past" that he did began when I still played with them, more than ten years ago...
The effects of this was that I didn't enjoy very much these games and that the other players practically begged me to return to be "the DM", all the time, instead of being satisfied with their "AD&D ration"...
(after some years even "L" began to play as the DM - because he was fed up, too, with "F" style of DMing. But you know what? He did reveal himself even a more worse railroader, with even the single scenes already planned for "his story", to ridiculous results. But at least he did create shorter stories...)
2) Every single time I tried to play something different, there were 2-3 players that complained, every time, that "it wasn't D&D", ruining the game for everybody...
"L" was the most fanatic D&D-only adept. If you asked him, he would play anything, no problem. He seldom protested when I talked about playing another game. He could be even enthusiastic the first session or two. Then, he would start to complain that he missed D&D, and play his character without any interest. If I confronted him saying "if you don't want to play this game it's no problem, I will call you when we start to play D&D again", he would simply say "are you joking? I like this game". And then start again with the complains... (notice that "L" was not a child, he is almost 10 years older than me. But he has by far the longer "D&D conditioning time", adding the one in my campaign to the one he passed with the previous dysfunctional group. So, he could enjoy other rpgs, and often did, but it was a sin in his eyes, to wash away invoking the old religion afterwards)
"D"is one of the two players that started to play the first time I GMd a game. The one with the sister. There is not a lot to say about his problem: he simply was a Raistlin fan. He wanted to play Raistlin, always. Not THE Raistlin (his character had another name), but practically the same. This caused really A LOT of problems during the years, because he did not tolerate well anybody having a magic-user more powerful than his own. This caused a lot of problem in Ars Magica, for example, where everybody played a mage, and even if I did "cheat" making his character more powerful than the others... in Ars Magica quick-thinking and creativity beat raw power every time of the week. So his own girlfriend, playing a far weaker mage, was so noticeable as more effective that it created problems in game and outside. She stopped playing her mage and stuck to her companion to avoid overshadowing him. Other players were not so accommodating and he did began to complain so loudly that we stopped playing Ars Magica.
"F" was irritating, because he did agree with me. He had played as a GM, and he agreed that AD&D2 rules were rubbish. He did love RQ (but not Glorantha). He often said that he would have like to play RQ as GM instead of AD&D. Once or twice he even did make us creare RQ characters...
...and then he did use AD&D2, every time, to avoid "breaking the group". "keeping the group together" was his obsession, so he GM'd only AD&D2, at the end. And to lessen his frustration with this, he wanted at least to create "good stories"...
... and I have already explained at the beginning of this post the results.
These were the only players that I had left from the original group ("M" had to change city for work, and had to stop playing). The others, usually, were not a problem at all.
Reading the description above, probably a lot of D&D-fans will say "Ah, Moreno, don't you see? It was not D&D fault, you had simply too many problem players". Well, apart from the simple fact that AD&D was giving me a lot of problems simply preparing the session, in the post-session and every time sometime rolled a die, even without these three saying anything, there is the simple fact that:
1) these people did not play like this at the beginning. They LEARNED that way of playing.
2) They had a simple element in common: veneration for AD&D. As the only "true rpg", as "the only way to keep the group united", as "the only way to play raistlin"
They were not "problem players"... if you simply played AD&D, and gave them their weekly liturgy, they veneration time.
other funny facts:
3) I have talked, face by face or online, with a lot of D&D player. Really, a lot. For the most part, they talk exactly like these three. They are not "problem" players, they are TYPICAL players. So, it's D&D that attract "problem" players like a magnet... or it's D&D that in practice create them?
4) Do you know what is the cut-off time, the time that, thinking in hindsight, separe the "problem players" from the ones that didn't complain for every game different from D&D? The time when I lost my "faith" in D&D.
I was the Ceremonial Officiant. I was the one who had to "teach the gospel" to the children. When I stopped doing so, the people simply stopped turning into "problem players".
The Next part will the the last, I hope...
OK, with the last post I arrived to around 20-25 years ago. As you can imagine, if I will describe my complete rpg history after that, I could fill many more posts. I could talk of the "discovery" of Fidonet and then Usenet and then the Web, the contacts with other players in all parts of Italy, the conventions, the LARPS, The discovery of the Forge and Indie Games, etc,, but to avoid going off-topic I will try to limit this to the parts that touched in some way the "D&D Church".
The first game that I tried once "free" from having to run AD&D2 was Runequest, in Glorantha. Learning from my past errors I made the character start with the minimal info-dump possible: they were parts of a Rhino Riders tribe in Prax. That campaign lasted 3-4 years (but less than 6 month of gaming every year). Apart from the usual D&D orphans the players enjoyed the campaign (one of them even wrote a sort of "saga" of his character's deeds), I created a web of relationships, and tried my best to avoid railroading them.
But what this campaign did teach me is that "Ouija board" role-playing doesn't work. The characters did fight raiders, slavers, renegades, monsters, to defend the tribe, to sack other tribes, but I did know that I could not continue year after year creating menaces for the same small tribe. (it's a truism of role-playing that the players can find excitement even in a roll of a die, but the GM usually can't be satisfied with that...). I wanted larger adventures, larger stakes. But they didn't evolve naturally from the game.
I was in unknown territory: no manual (or other GM, for that matter) had ever explained to me how to do this. The few that talked about story with something more practical than the usual lip service to the impossible Thing Before Breakfast had only two kind of advice: create "the story" before and railroad the players into it, or "play the characters and you will see the kind of adventures you'll play" (Runequest was usually in this camp, even if the material presented sometimes heavily railroaded adventures like the famous "the cradle")
I tried to push the players to increase the stakes, little by little, using the Lunar Empire invasion of Prax like a fuse, and trying to avoid forcing a position: they could have joined the lunar, fought them, they could flee, hid, anything... but at the end it didn't work. They were waiting for me to let them know what to do to "win". I was still full of old garbage ideas from the D&D books, like "avoid the metagaming" that I applied without thinking to the new games, and I didn't simply talk with them about the problem. At the end we were playing two different games: I wanted to know what their character would have done in a situation of foreign occupation that changed their lives, they simply wanted to decode my signals to understand how kill even this "monster" and return everything to the status quo. At the end I did gave them what they wanted, began to railroad again, and found a "good ending" for everybody, but it felt false, artificial, for me and probably for the players too.
After that I tried Ars Magica, for 4-5 years. This time too I tried ouija boarding (I wasn't still fully convinced it could not work... ) but I was faster with the railroads to avoid having the players meandering about bored.
With Ars Magica I did get some results, because some players embraced the game in a very proactive manner (F, that loves history, for example and Angela that even these days still say that she would like to play Ars Magica again, and that it was the best games we ever played with the old group) and used the "Troupe play" option (playing other characters in the scenes where you don't have your principal characters) to, using the language of today, "bang each other" (in more ways that one). But it was at the same time the game most sabotaged by half of the players (even some of the ones that usually didn't complain) that for example refused to ever play another character apart from their mage (or refused to play their mage), that made passive-aggressive things like using the extremely powerful Mages they had to cast "magic missiles" or other silly things (and then after that complain loudly that "these mages are useless", with his girlfriend that instead of wasting time with magic missiles did destroy every single wood/vegetal item in the enemy army: lances, swords (the handle...), dresses and armor, shield, everything... so that at the end he was almost dead after having improvised enough "magic missiles" to kill a single soldier, and his girlfriend had made the entire army run screaming with a single Perdo Herbam spell... and his score in Perdo Herbam was almost double the one of her mage!)
My group was probably plagued by Creative Agenda clash from the beginning, with people that played for very different reasons, but they had never surfaced so clearly before: having a game that gave finally that kind of creative liberty (both in playing lots of characters and in improvising his/her own spells) galvanized some players and repulsed the others.
At this time I actually thought about splitting the group and continue to play only with the people who liked Ars Magica, but that was a really big thing: "breaking the group". A crime so great that only a true villain would have done it. It did mean saying to some people "I don't want to play with you", and after testing a little the waters, I realized that even the players that were disturbed and angry at the actions of the haters would have not followed me.
This tug of was lasted really a lot, and it was not a fair battle: the haters were proud and sure in saying that "this is not D&D, it's not true fantasy". The players that enjoyed the game were timid and felt almost shame in saying that they liked this game, it was like by not calling for AD&D they were "betraying the group". At the end F did his usual "we have to do everything to keep the group united" turnabout and said that, even if he liked this game, he did not want to break the group. The haters began to really insist in their passive-aggressive behavior, saying directly at the table that "everybody agree with us, D&D is much better than this game, Moreno, when will you return to be the DM in D&D?". And nobody at the table said otherwise.
"OK", I said, "let's play D&D, But you will be the GM"
And this was how "L" began his own disastrous DM career...
And, in the following weeks, I had at least two players (one of them Angela) that said to me, in private "why did you stop Ars Magica? It was the best game we ever played". "Eh? But I believed that everybody wanted to stop. Why didn't you say something at the table?" "well... I didn't want to break the group"
[Mental facepalm with a long internal list of very colorful descriptions about players afraid to even speak about what they like]
After that I tried again other games between a AD&D "season" and the other, but never anything so ambitious. At the time I had begun to debate about rpgs in usenet, so I used these "season" to try other games to see how they worked, but it was more a kind of curiosity than real interest into making any kind of real effort toward having a more satisfying gaming at my table. I thought "what's the point?". Comparing notes with other GM everywhere, it was the same for everybody (it was only later, with the arrival of the Forge and Ron's theories, that every single traditional GM in the world, started saying that they never had any problem ever: at the time they still were not afraid to tell the truth). There was really the sense that it was a sort of natural law: "players go bad", they lose fantasy and creativity, don't want to change anything, the game become boring, and at the end you simply stop playing. "you can never have again the fun you had in the first game session". All "truths" that everybody at the time said without any problem to other GMs
So, I tried a lot of other games (Unknown Armies, Fading Suns, Harnmaster, and many other) but without a lot of enthusiasm: it was like a chore that you did to "stay together with the group", without any real effort, and it was a good occasion to try new rpgs (it was better that using D&D at least). I did found my rpg satisfaction elsewhere (the Flying Circus convention every six months in Modena, where I could play little larps, freeforms and tabletop one-shots with more motivated players and GM: a long Amber RPG campaign played by email, etc.), and stopped trying to improve the level of playing of my group.
And when I was not the GM, the usual long, boring, railroading AD&D2 campaign run by "F" and "L", that still blindly followed "the church of D&D".
Then I think in 2003-2004, I am not sure now without checking, it happened that for a while the group did lose all the adepts of the church of D&D: one difficult divorce, one change of working conditions, and... one clandestine relationship that had need of a "free evening" every week without alarming the girlfriend ("If she ask you, I was at the gaming table with you yesterday"), plus other changes did cut the group almost in half. I found myself practically only with the female players (Angela, Silvia that had started to play with us a few years before when she was 18 years old, Silvia's best friend that had just joined the group less than six months before - it was not the biggest numbers of female player in the group by the way, we had lost some in the previous years to clashed relationships) and "L". Silvia had asked me many times in the past to play Call of Cthulhu, that she did play in the past with another group and she liked very much, but I always thought that it was impossible to play it in my group. But now I thought that it was a good occasion to play it.
"L" declined, but this time instead of the usual passive-aggressive behavior did step out of the game (after a few weeks) saying that he would have waited until we played again "real fantasy" (D&D)
And with this stripped-down group we enjoyed the game very much, and it was the most successful campaign in years (still heavily story before, but this time it was, in hindsight, more participationist, with everybody on the same page about enjoying the single scenes and situations in a horror story)
Then, having solved their problems, the other players (F and L only at the moment) returned at the table, I said that they could wait the end of the campaign or joining it at the table, as they preferred, and they both did choose to stay away ("it's not real fantasy".
Then they started to ask "when will you close that CoC campaign so we can start to play D&D again?"
I was really starting to get angry at this point, and began to reply every time that they had only to wait a few weeks, but that I would have not closed the campaign earlier, ruining it, just to "allow" them to play D&D.
And then, next week, I found F and L at the gaming table (they arrived before me), asking the other players to roll their new D&D characters, and when I arrived they said that they wanted to talk about "when you will stop this campaign" (with the unstated meaning "that is not D&D and has to stop to allow us to play our sacred D&D with all these players")
The people who know me very well know that the more I get angry, the less I talk. (yes, when I start ranting in the forum, I am not really that angry. Fear me when I stop ranting). F and L did know me less than I thought, or probably didn't even consider the possibility that I could get angry only because they were blocking the start of our game session and asking me to stop it because they had to play D&D. Silvia's friend, instead, did notice that I had stopped talking (afterwards she said to me that she had never seen me so angry and she feared I could attack the two fools) and she tried to convince the two to leave, gently, or at least drop the issue for the moment. At the end they did leave but there was no gaming that evening, everybody returned home.
The next day, I called Angela to tell her that I had enough, that I was leaving the group. She was angry, too, and said that she wanted to continue the campaign. "fuck these guys". She organized the next session at her home, calling the other two players, and I gave F my answer about "when we will play again D&D?": "never again".
This caused a lot of noise, they talked about my "betrayal" with all the other people we did know (that usually found funny that they were so worked up for a game), and they stopped talking to me (not that I had lots of reason to talk to them anymore)
I was very happy to know that without me and without the three female players they were not able even to organize a weekly game, and they could not play for months, until they found other players. While we were having fun playing what we wanted.
In the new group I insisted to have only one very simple rule: "in this group we will never, ever, play D&D"
A funny detail: right before I said "never again" to F, he was saying to me that he wanted to expel Silvia's friend from the group because he had taken offense at being said to "stop" from one player that had joined the group only a few weeks before. This made the rest of the conversation much more fun for me, and caused a lot of laughter that evening at the gaming table.
I enjoyed being the only male at the table for a while, then Michele and Claudia, that I had known for almost twenty years at the time but had never played at my table before, asked me if they could join us, because their own gaming group (in his own way, dysfunctional as my old one) was evaporated, and I said yes. Later I introduced them to the Flying Circus scene and they started to go to the Modena conventions too.
The atmosphere at the gaming table was MUCH better, but I still had my usual problem: how to get "stories" without railroading?
Then, in 2005, a friend of mine wanted to organize a game session at the Modena ModCon, but he could not decide between some new titles that he had never tried before. I did read the titles and was intrigued to one rpg called Dogs in the Vineyard, and asked him explicitly to run that one (A western where you go around shooting sinners? I had only to read that description to know that I absolutely had to try that game...)
Claudia didn't know what to play in that time slot, and I suggested she joined us at the DitV table.
At the end of the game session, we were enthusiastic about the game. She began to talk with Michele to convince him to run the game for us (I wanted to play that one, not to be the GM), and I did start to follow the forum of the game in a place called the Forge (I already was following the forge sometimes, not regularly, from the start, but until playing DitV I must confess that i had no idea about what Ron was talking about. I started posting at the forge in 2006 to ask questions about DitV). And I started to talk about the game, with a lot of enthusiasm, everywhere. (causing a lot of flames, and with the flames, notoriety, and in very little time everybody was talking about DitV).
Some people contest the usual saying that I started the Forge gaming scene in Italy, and with good reasons: I was not the one who played these games first. I have found out later about some groups that had played DitV, Sorcerer, Dust Devils, etc, before me: but if you ask any Italian indie player today about who did show them these games, and they say to you a name, and you ask the same question to this guy too... chances are, at the end of the chain, you'll find me. A demo I ran at a convention, or a rant I posted somewhere about how much better were these new games. Some people I convinced by flaming them until they crumbled, others were interested from the beginning
Other people played them, before, true, but nobody caused even a ripple about it before me. I created the real shitstorm. The "Big Shitstorm" that, like some sort of Big Bang, started everything here. :-)
Jawdropping. Thank you for your time and the detailed posts. I'm reading Gary Alan Fine's Shared Fantasy published in 1983, and it's interesting that the kind of horrors that you described seem to be largely absent in the period covered by the book (77 to 79). Then again, I'm not through and it isn't really the topic of the book. It was also very mild in my own experience compared to what you report, but I only started playing RPGs with AD&D2 in 1998 (or 99?), and we rapidly switched to third edition when it came out (with some resistance and some group rebuilding) and then rapidly dropped D&D altogether for other games, a short RPG hiatus and then a Forge renaissance.
I'd like to extract some of the phrases that jumped out at me and to help stay focused on the orthodoxy rather than the Why I Left story. I also want to say that those posts are
incredible, Moreno, and bring the topic forward extremely powerfully. Also, I didn't know you had such an extensive experience with good old funny-animal tribesmen play in Glorantha, straight out of Cults of Prax.
You completely nail the point here:
Quote... like most catholics, I didn't have "faith" anymore in the "gospel". I could see that it was a mismatched mess of broken rules. But I followed the liturgy every week, because "everybody do", and anyway... all you need to do is using the Golden Rule ("do what the celebrating priest say") and all will be well...
This is exactly what I'm talking about: fully committed and yet fully disconnected (As a minor point related to the complete passage I pulled this from: I see no distinction b/t Orthodox and Catholic in this regard; in fact, since the latter is merely a rebranded breakaway, to me it's all the same.)
You also completely illuminate the faith that there is a "real fantasy" and that it is purely expressed by "D&D," accepting no substitutes, especially in this remarkable construction of the role of the DM. No wonder all the other games used an alternate term - their equivalent participants aren't
real priests after all.*
The players are very much the flock within the institution, including their variously errant and fanatical members. The flock is both subordinated to the priest and yet also place exacting expectations upon him, both personally and in their narrative of how he relates to the faith.
Quotethey venerated the AD&D rules because they thought that all the times I created stories they enjoyed, I used these rules. But saying that I didn't really use them devalued their memories of these stories, so even if I told them about it, they simply refused to listen with even more stubbornness.
I call attention to the point that for nearly everyone, this faith must be
socially validated regardless of individual reservations or observations.
It is so clear: for an orthodoxy, the "practice" is all about pedagogy, not text. Clearly the non-textual or secondary-textual pedagogy - the catechism if you will - deserves much more historical investigation.
Regarding the texts,
1. I think the first hardbacks (1978-80 AD&D) aren't too relevant to the orthodoxy except in specific delimited ways. In my experience, they were almost completely jettisoned as rules in favor of whatever the group was doing already and dressed up a little bit based on the parts people liked. They became canonical mainly for magic items and those bizarre little edge-case rulings scattered throughout.
2. Those three books were definitely subordinated to (i) existing work now considered rules-canonical like the various adventure-series modules, and later (ii) things like Unearthed Arcana, Dragonlance, and Forgotten Realms. The supplemental and catechistic material is really the contact zone - especially since only the DM gets to read "the adventures."
3. The AD&D2 core books appear in 1989, but it's difficult to understand just how they related to things - this was in the depth of the Lorraine the Drow Queen publishing phase and I'd sure like to hear a thoughtful voice from someone who was there in the middle of it. Trying to staple the setting content of Dark Sun, al-Qadim, and Planescape to that mess must have been a terrible experience.
Best, Ron
* Again, this brings up the difficult position the self-publishing Heartbreaker authors were in - they knew their work was different, but it was good because it was "it" ("real fantasy"), but it wasn't "it" (AD&D) you see, because it was actually good, and yet you should play it because it does "it" so much better, but it's different ...
** There's no particular reason to think that the first three hardbacks were anything but desperate attempt to keep up with and associate a product with the current panoply of activities claiming to be D&D. I definitely do not think of them as authored by Gygax in the sense of a personal vision placed into a text. But that's off-topic here.
*** It's strange how powerful that term "advanced" became, especially since it seems to refer to at least three distinct sets of historical practices.
The similitudes between the D&D cult and any religious cult can be seen in the reaction of the "faithful" to any fact or proof that threaten their faith: it's a known fact that they become in these cases more adamant in their faith, more insistent into affirming it.
And one has only to see the reactions to the creation of better games to see it in the D&D flock... People who I had seen complain for more than ten years about some problem with traditional rpg rules, suddenly "forget" not only the existence of the problem, but even that they had ever complained about that, as soon as they are shown any game that solve that problem.
Some link about this (they are not the link that I wanted to post when I started to write this post, but I can't find the links to the original essays that I did read, I forgot to bookmark them... these links are a good summary though)
http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/06/10/the-backfire-effect/
In D&D case, there is the "sunk money" effect, too (and the "sunk time" too),
http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/05/19/fanboyism-and-brand-loyalty/
Why D&D and all the games that follow that paradigm are so toxic? Because in many ways, they are promoted, spread, teach, sold and played as a religious ceremony.
- the players are not in direct contact with the rules (the game), but there is a ceremonial officer, that "is always right".
- the group meets in regular (weekly usually) ceremonies, following a very repetitive ritual - same rules, same "universe", etc.
- EVERY game is always a ritual, but in rpgs case, that is even more evident.
- The "cult" make you spend a lot of money to "learn its misteries", buying things that give you status
Yes, Jack Chick wasn't entirely wrong (even if for all the wrong reasons) :-)
Every D&D group is like that? No, but when I talk to people who played D&D without generating that effects, there is always something in that list that they avoided in the first place:
- everybody plays as the GM in rotation (no specific ceremonial officer. It's not enough to have 2 or 3 DMs, they are still "special", until you have almost everybody in the group DMing)
- They have brought only the manual (maybe only the red box) and never brought anything else, and they never go to conventions or buy gaming magazines (from what Ryan Dancey said about the results of Wizard of the Coast's old survey, they did found a lot of people like that, completely invisibles to the "D&D church")
- They played openly with no respect for the "secrets of the DM Guide"
Or, many times...
- They had precisely that effect, but they refuse to acknowledge it. (and it happened many times that people after some years told me "you were right, but i could not admit it at the time")
So, it's true that nothing in that list is specific to D&D: all that is applicable to Vampire, or Shadowrun, too. But they are at most minor sects or cults, compared to the Church of D&D. And they derived all that directly from D&D.
So, I hope it's clear the reasoning behind "no D&D, ever, at this table": it's not about the rules, it's about the social contract:
At my table, now:
- there are no "secret rules", everybody know the rules of the games we play.
- we play a lot of different games that don't push you to buy "status" with money.
- (and, anyway, We play a lot of GM-less games.)
- And, most important... no "D&D faithful" at the table.
And this is the reason why I consider every effort to "teach roleplaying" using D&D or similar games not only useless, but even harmful. I know people who will never roleplay again because someone thought that D&D was "the best game to start". Like beginning the education of children with the Bible, because "if it was right for my grand grand grand grand father, why should we change?"
There are A LOT of better games today to teach rpgs, to start. A guy I know is probably turning his 12-years old daughter into a rpg-hater trying to have her learn the D&D rules (he is failing). I played Trollbabe with a 7-years old with no problem. I know about another guy who is playing with his two children (one a 4 years old) using Zac Arnston's "Shadows".
Using D&D to teach roleplaying is medieval, obsolete, and harmful. If you do that, you risk having players that all their life continue the fruitless search for "a game like D&D, but that works": how many already exists? But they are not "exactly like D&D" (or they don't work), so that useless search continue "hot new game" after "hot new game", blind to the much better games that exist outside of that blind obsession.
So, to offer Ron an angle on the religion metaphor, AD&D2 was very big on apologetics. As in, despite the fact that AD&D was a crazy hodge-podge of unrelated game mechanics, each arbitrarily invented in the 1970s? Well, AD&D2 includes kind of a lot of editorial rationalization of why how these mechanics actually represent some aspect of things in the game fiction, and why indeed they are sensible things to be in the game. "We know you're asking, how can it be I only get one attack in one full minute of time? That makes no sense! Well, see, combat is like a crazy frenzy, and it's assumed everyone is making many attempts to attack and parry, but you're just rolling for that one attack which might connect. Verily." That sort of thing. I could probably scare up some actual textual references.
As far as the settings... I never actually participated in a game that used any of the "canon" settings. I saw all the setting material being used as inspiration to be cannibalized by the DM for setting. Like the Forgotten Realms stuff was obviously applicable to any "generic" fantasy setting, if you wanted some Arabian Nights stuff you went to Al-Qadim, if you wanted some really weird stuff you robbed from Spelljammer. But every game actually SET in an official setting seemed to reliably stall out before it began.
I rolled up a set of Dark Sun characters I was pretty pumped about, game never happened. I managed to run about half a session of a Dragonlance campaign before everyone got bored and did something else. Trying to figure out how to get Planescape off the ground? Fuggedaboutit. In hindsight, none of this should be surprising.
QuoteYes, Jack Chick wasn't entirely wrong (even if for all the wrong reasons) :-)
Yeah, for a long time I felt the problem they really had was they felt a competitor shouldering in on their turf.
Ron asked me to check out this thread. I haven't read every post thoroughly, but I've read enough to perhaps make a comment or two.
First, a brief history on my experiences. I'm an apostate Roman Catholic, and I really like that this is a sort of official status. Apostasy in the sense of "Falling away." I'm no rebel, and in fact am often an apologist for the RC church. I don't dislike the religion, I just have a lack of faith, one which started around age 12.
Which was the right about the same time I lost my faith in D&D, perhaps not coincidentally. In an event that I have often related to people, I took my D&D books out to the back yard and had a small bonfire. Why? Because my friends kept asking me to run that, and only that. It was much harder to escape from D&D than it was from the Roman Catholic church.
As a side comment, I'll note that the Roman Catholic church's opinion on D&D was... what's D&D? Unlike my Protestant friends' churches who told them that it was a path to hell. Oh, maybe the RC church knew about D&D, but in the 70s people were making movies about there being secret organizations in the church that banished demons from young girls. Either they were trying to clean up their image on this account by correcting people's understanding of the church's position on demons, or they knew where the real demons were (which interpretation you'll take will depend largely on how much you buy into conspiracy theory). The RC church, certainly a perpetrator of may great evils over time, has come a long way lately. There's a fricken' Jesuit Pope! I keep waiting for him to pull out a sword at some point, and start dueling with some dude member of the church hierarchy who is abusing their position to gain secular power...
But I digress. Though I will say that anyone who makes the mistake of assuming that the RC church is a single monolithic body hasn't looked at it too closely. All affiliations are agglomerations of local groups of belief. Be they religions or RPGs.
In fact, Chris Lehrich said on the Forge that (and I'm strongly paraphrasing here) other than the fact that RPGs do not claim to be religions... they are for all intents and purposes religions. As noted above, they function just like religions. Chris points out that they specifically function like pre-printing-press-oral-tradition-storytelling-animist traditions. And I have since argued that the reason RPGs are compelling is that they fill a need for those of us with the shamanic impetus to tell the stories of the spirits. If there's one thing that makes humans different from other animal species, it's that we're narrative creatures.
I'm already going on longer here than I had wanted, but I'll just conclude with this. At the risk of extending the analogy a bit, I think that Ron may be the Richard Dawkins of this equation. Pointing out the fallacies of orthodoxy, and espousing atheism. Often loudly and abrasively. And while I have moments that I admire Dawkins, and while I do agree that orthodoxy has caused a lot of trouble over time, I still have that shamanic need. And to that extent, I'm not willing to just completely break with the past and thousands of years of accumulated wisdom. Or 35 years of RPG traditions.
Not that I actually think Ron is proposing such a break (even if he has been a disruptive force in RPGs), he actually seems to like the OSR schism. Which is, to my mind, a bunch of born-again fundamentalists. But I guess then I have to ask... what's the point of this thread? Are we just trying to give people a historical perspective?
H'm. I loathe Dawkins' The God Delusion and the New Atheist movement in general, and here I speak very specifically as an evolutionary biologist and scholar, as well as a spiritually-deficient individual. My preferred analogue in this perhaps strained analogy would be exactly historical turn-of-twentieth-century anarchist, neither as caricatured (hairy-eyed bomb throwers) or as retrofitted (lame-brained hipster punks).
Interesting as personal disclosure is, I don't think personal religious history is necessarily relevant to personal TSR/D&D history, or that it has to be part of the discussion. My history with Unitarianism was necessary only to show that I knew a little bit about what I was talking about when I went after Eero with a chained mace.
That said,
QuoteIt was much harder to escape from D&D than it was from the Roman Catholic church.
... may have to become the opening quote for the orthodoxy section, if this material ever becomes the essay I'd like it to be.
Oh! Forgot something. Mike! Wellllllcooommmmmme!! All rise!
I was really looking forward to you mentioning the backyard-burning incident. For one thing, it'll make Moreno feel better, and for another, I remember when you first told me about it - I can't remember exactly when and where, but I think it might have been one of those late-night barroom discussions at my house, and that everyone who heard it shuddered at the apostasy, so deeply felt was the perception of pre-1983 D&D texts as sacred.
Best, Ron
OK, an analytical bit and a personal bit. I was looking through some old RPG's for "what you do in RPGs" text the other day, and ran across an old Dragon (#22, Feb '79) with an article "D&D: What it is and Where it's Going" by G.G. himself (lord, that does sound like citing a religious text!). I was struck by this bit (well, the last sentence, really, but I think the rest is needed to set it up):
"Simply stated, D&D is a multi-player game of fantasy role playing, where the rules give systems of resolution for common game occurrences, lists and explanations of things which are not actual (monsters, spells, magic items, etc.), systems for interaction, and suggestions as to how to put this into the campaign, i.e. create the milieu. Once begun, the campaign continues until the DM and/or all of the players decide it should end. As with any exercise in fantasy it requires suspension of disbelief. <b>Those who find the game interesting will soon enough thereafter create their own sort of involvement and belief</b>." [emphasis added]
I'm not sure how exactly to fit this with Ron's orthodoxy (though I'm sure it does fit), but this assumption was a big deal (though already under pressure, as the article actually demonstrates). The things Gary/TSR/whatever provided were a starting point; those who found it interesting would soon enough create, not just their own game material, but their own <b>involvement and belief</b>. Their own reasons for engaging and their own ways in which to engage.
But that pressure ... many players (me, sometimes) WANTED more "official" pronouncements (I guess this is Ron's "orthodox itself develops from grassroots"). And while Gary was clearly ambivalent about this ("I envision only minor expansions and some rules amending on a gradual, edition to edition, basis"), the commercial incentives to "give the people what they want" seem to have won in the end.
But there were, um, doctrinal issues that developed as well. I attended a GenCon at UoW/Parkside (in '78 or '79), and experienced a variety of play that was fundamentally enjoyable. Not sure if it there, local play, or maybe an ill-remembered local con that included Judges Guild, T&T, and Role Aids (Fez?) play in my experience, but - those happened, as well as a large and ever-altering local play group. Then I attended GenCon East I (in '81) and participated in one of the first RPGA tournaments. It literally drove me away from the hobby (with a few, basically abortive, exceptions) for about a decade. That local group (centered on my high school D&D club, whose roster - almost 1/3 girls, FWIW - I also recently re-discovered) "figured out" our way to do D&D, which included such common OSR-principles as "avoid rolling the dice whenever possible" (for traps and the like, esp.). When that approach was (at the very start of the session), um, quashed by the tourney GM, I was literally dumbstruck - and my character quickly (like, within the first 20 mins of a 4(or 6?)ish hour play-time) met the same fate, paralyzed with no way (that the group could find) to fix him. I didn't even check if I "qualified" to move to the next round. Apparently "I" did, as someone played on under my name and "I" was eventually awarded prizes for my high finish, but ... like I said, it was almost a decade before I played seriously again.
When I did, it was with Talislanta 3rd edition (which thanks to Jonathan Tweet is systematically a sorta-pre-3.0 D&D), and I played 3.0, 3.5, Pathfinder, even a bit of 4.0 at the same time as I was on the Forge, squeezing in a chunk of Mekton, a bit of Dust Devils, Dogs, Spirit of the Century, and my own SNAP from time to time. But that's a different story - where I'm focusing here is on that first transition from a "of course you're locally in control of this s&*t" to a "let us tell (and sell) you *precisely* how to do this" approach. I'm not sure on how the procedural/doctrinal issues contributed to the process, but - I was there, it did happen, and it was an emotionally meaningful event. I left GenCon East (the summer I graduated from high school) thinking that I was obviously doing something wrong, RPG-wise. My participation in the D&D club was a bit of a highlight of my time in high school - I was Vice President as a junior, co-President as a senior, and got more dates through that activity than anything else I did. RPGs were a fairly minor part of my (odd, long, and details not relevant here) college time due to the RPGA tourney experience as much as anything.
So in some ways, I exited out fairly early of the religious wars (NEVER owned or played D&D 2ed stuff) - but I did essentially re-enter the "church" in the early days of 3.0 and the OGL. One of things I'm most grateful to my Talislanta group for (and eventually Ron, Clinton, Vincent and the Forge) is helping me make doing all of that essentially unproblematic. I mean, being a somewhat-mature adult surely matters, but that mystified high school graduate at GenCon East is never totally unremembered...
Hi Gordon!
In addition to some agreement and appreciation, some points ...
1. I do not identify Gygax himself with the orthodoxy, but rather trapped in and only able to move with agonizing slowness and limited effect. Whatever he meant by that article is best understood, as I see it, as some such feeble movement. The orthodoxy's genuine power establishment was a hell of a lot bigger than he ever was, and it used him as its face to its benefit and to his continued obscurement. RPGA was a major piece of it, its parochial school if you will.
2. Jonathan Tweet told me, and I think it was something he told a lot of people, that he considered D&D 3.0 to be the "innovative and groundbreaking game ... of 1987." Further discussion revealed that I'd understood him correctly (and my initial inquiry was on-target): that the game's basic mechanics identity was simply Talislanta, full stop. I think your "sort of" is not sort of at all.
I've made the personal disclosure about faith to make precisely the point that you quoted. Or, rather, the larger point that RPGs are religion. Or close enough. Other religions worried about D&D precisely to the extent that they felt that this was a cult.
The importance of recognizing this kinship with religion comes in the understanding of why people are so goddamned invested in the way they play, and their subsequent behavior. As we noted back on those threads on the Forge (and you reiterate in your early posts in the thread, Ron), if you put this much effort into figuring out how to play, you necessarily come out of the process identifying with the method. And then any proposition that there are other ways to play become threats to your personal identity. So there is no surprise that discussions of RPGs online, and in meatspace both, often devolve into the sort of bickering that one sees in discussions of religion. And why people can't be satisfied with just playing their way and allowing others to play how they wish.
I often say, "it's insane to me that people argue over something like whether or not 3.5 or Pathfinder is the better system." But I know why they do. It's the old Emo Philips joke: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBKIyCbppfs (the key part starts at 2:40)
Not only am I of the belief that these things are like religion etc, but that the associations that people have with individual belief systems outside of RPGs mirror to some extent the RPGs they play! Here's an interesting article from Mike Sugarbaker that has some relation to the discussion: http://www.gibberish.com/archives/2013/09/17/conservatism-and-roleplaying/
I am keenly aware, for instance, that there is a rather tremendous liberal bias amongst people who play "Story Games." Is that co-incidence? Or does it take a less conservative person to move away from D&D (or "trad" RPGs if you like) into the newfangled stuff? The OSR folks, too, seem to me to tend to the conservative in their political views. Am I imagining these things?
Nobody would call Zak Smith a conservative. But he seems to me to be, in fact, a iconoclast who has kept on with D&D as a way of rebelling against the rebellion. In our belabored analogy, he's a Wiccan. Which it wouldn't surprise me to find out he espouses (or at least supports) in real life.
Sure, the RPG ecosphere is bound to be rife with exceptions to this linkage I'm creating. But I think the general concept holds water. And to the extent that we understand this close association to religions and the behaviors associated with them, I think the better we can do at predicting people's reactions with regards to RPGs.
Hi Mike,
I'm with you on the relationship between real-world religion and gaming values, although not really in the 1:1 way you're presenting - as you say, it might be more complex. I think I touched on that complexity with material I summarized here (http://adept-press.com/games-estimated-prophet/estimated-prophet-religion-games/musing-about-role-players-religious-backgrounds/) - check it out including the links when you get the time. It's from after your more active participation at the Forge.
I'm avoiding or de-emphasizing that side of things in this series of posts, though, because it does distract from the totally unusual topic I want to develop. Personal disclosure is useful toward that end, but I'd rather avoid the whole "I was raised X so I obviously game like Y," which would necessarily degenerate into multiple counter-examples. I say "necessarily" because I think the D&D-as-religion(s) thing is so sensitive that people will take any route they can to elide it or throw handfuls of sand at it.
Best, Ron
On Gary Gygax - while to my eye there were a few times in the early 80's where he might have been TRYING to espouse/become chief of "the orthodoxy" ... yeah, essentially forces beyond his control (and probably contrary to his inclination). That I even have such opinions of a man I knew not one whit says, I don't know, something.
Talislanta/3.0. Well, I didn't want to oversell it, but again yeah: to my analysis/opinion, 3.0 IS Talislanta, somehow both made dumber and more complex to better fit "D&D." With maybe feats as an actual innovation.
In the absence of any compelling personal religious interaction I can see in my RPG history, my only concern with watching the development of more "D&D as religion" stuff is I've got no horse in the race. I mean, I think I do (mildly uncomfortable admission) have horses at some of the same racetracks/points Ron makes in the "Musing" article, but I don't think there's a bit of lie in my saying "no strict religious upbringing here."
Still, I surely know that my personal life history (oh, like growing up "only" low/middle-class in one of the wealthiest towns in the country) had/has a definite bearing on how I dealt/deal with RPG issues. I'm in favor of anything that disrupts the idea that you-as-RPGer is somehow essentially discontinuous with you-as-political/spiritual/social/sexual/emotional/intellectual human.
I guess I'd love an even BIGGER approach than religion to the "your life and RPGs" issue, but it's Ron doing the work, not me - so I look forward to seeing what you do with this!
QuoteNobody would call Zak Smith a conservative.
Side point, but I have - in terms of conservative thinking. What really surprised me is my own conservative thinking in that I thought if someone dealt with strippers and such, they couldn't be a conservative thinker. Man, I felt such a stick in the mud when I realised my mistake.
I don't think that role-playing is like religion.
RELIGION is like (that kind of) role-playing.
Role-playing is a ritual activity (as any game) where you (imagine to) assume another identity. It's.. the real world equivalent of a Gloranthian heroquest.
When it's done with clear rules and everybody has a clear idea of what it is, it's a game.
When there is a "priest" that rule the ritual, following the "mysteries" of the ritual, and you are only asked to "participate" in a passive way, it's more and more like a cult.
When there is a entire culture and "social organization" around the cult, it become a religion
The difference is that participants "believe" in a cult in a way where gamers don't believe in D&D... but it's true? When you see people talking about "real fantasy" (and "not-real fantasy" - meaning "not D&D") and people who go to religious rites only to belong in a community, without really "believing", the difference is more and more difficult to see.
Then, to the mix, in the case of AD&D, add "the menace of the real world": it's a known phenomenon that the member of a cult become more fanatic, more rigid, and make more efforts to spread the cult, when they get proof that what the cult says is false (for example, when the date of a promised apocalypse pass without the world ending). In (A)D&D case, we have people who assert, for their religion, that "D&D is the best rpg" and that "D&D is the only true rpg", so every time the real world shows them that D&D is only a old pile of obsolete rubbish, they become more and more fanatic. And the same happen every time the game betrays them and they have clashes at the table.,
(and I don't think I have to remind the effect that the forge had to the cult: in a instant, decades of problems and bad experiences that could fill hundreds of books were negated, with even the people who wrote them insisting that they never had any problem and they never wrote about any problem whatsoever... or the other silly effect, the way players that visibly enjoyed playing a game different from D&D. after the game insist that "they didn't like it and they never enjoyed the game for a single instant")
Talking about D&D3.0 and the way it resembled other games more than AD&D2... it was incredible, at the time, to see the abrupt about-face of hundreds of D&D players in every rpg forum or newsgroup, that until a few days before did swear on their own mother that nothing was better than THAC0 and that all the games that used a different roll like Talislanta were rubbish.., and then after they got the "new edition" they not only declared that the new system (that was a old system used in other games for more than ten years) was better, but they negated ever denying that! (they stopped even talking about THAC0, as it had become suddenly a heretic word). It was like having the church suddenly dictate a different interpretation of the Gospels...
The problem is: I don't see any difference between this "D&D/Pathfinder organized religion" and the "OSR cults". The OSR has a clearer agenda so probably have less clashes and problems DURING the game, but the social contest it's the same. And it's a social contest I would not touch again with a ten-foot pole.
I simply have to provide this: Father Dougall's doubts (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytoDs2i2rK0). It's criminal to give away this moment before you simply watch the whole episode through, but it's too perfect.
Here's the whole episode, Tentacles of Doom (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II2AKCI4Q9c), it's really worth it.
Quote from: Ron Edwards on September 28, 2013, 02:26:17 PMMy preferred analogue in this perhaps strained analogy would be exactly historical turn-of-twentieth-century anarchist,
This "perhaps strained" analogy is one of my new favourite shared imagined spaces...
Anyways I had kinda thought of casting you as as an early Anabaptist, and, in a similar vein, the OSR movement as some form of the restoration Church in Scotland and America.
So I guess I have more to say - hopefully this thread is still the right place.
Re-reading this thread and following the various links has inspired all sorts of thoughts: nostalgic memories, revisited "traumas", game-philosophy debates past and present. I've done many different things with "D&D" over the years (is "essentially freeform inspired by d20 character sheets" really D&D, and if so, in what sense?), and it wouldn't be entirely wrong to call the vast majority of my RPG play "D&D." Especially if you consider something like Talislanta a form of D&D.
But on the D&D history/religious history parallel, I realized I'm in an odd (but surely not unique) category: I was involved in the early days of the church, saw (and reacted negatively) to the start of orthodoxy/turmoil, left & therefore missed a huge chunk of the controversy, and re-engaged later with the perspective to (mostly) manage that engagement on my own terms. That's all personally interesting and I'm sure my brain will continue to process implications (anyone have any ideas what religious tradition might parallel THAT? hmm, maybe I too am UU, with just a bit stronger connection to the medieval version - that would mirror the "gap" issue).
Still, how to actually contribute to the focus on D&D development mirroring church development? Maybe this:
Listening to Ron's "No one talks about religion in roleplaying" InterNosCon talk, I was struck by the (well-put and accurate, IMO) introduction about why Abrahamic religious stuff matters even if you acknowledge that, to many (DEFINITELY not all) people, the thinking is fucked-up, the churches are fucked-up, and history is full of fucked-up shit as a result (I'm paraphrasing). It matters because, in the midst of that mess can be found millennia of effort to make sense of family in conflict with community, to reconcile personal belief and survival with what the other people in one's environment might want/believe - millennia of effort to sort through the entire spectrum of issues in the human condition.
Which raised the question for me: what is it that makes D&D (more precisely, the history of D&D publishing, organized play, and traditions of play) matter? What does it represent that we should care about it? I don't think its' history as (real or perceived) market leader is enough. What struggle does it represent, and in what ways did it propose to resolve that struggle? Stripped of "corrupting" influences like profit motive, ego games and intrinsic and extrinsic political maneuvering, what are the (far less grand than "human condition") issues that we can acknowledge this thing called D&D teaches us about, even if we don't like what that teaching ended up producing?
I found myself drawn to this possibility: it represents the struggle with creating a community of practice around this new, neat-o thing called "roleplaying." Without diminishing the exploitation, incompetence, and/or malevolence exhibited by people and/or institutions, I can see that wrestling with that was and is difficult, and that much of what happened (in the very early days, at least) was at least in part a consequence of sincere efforts to find a functional answer.
There was, I think, a very utopian ideal driving the pursuit of that answer. An idealist vision of "D&D" rules as a background for all play, a unifying principle of gamer "Christendom" that all could rally around and bask in the warmth of shared understanding. TSR was to be (with NO respect to Ronald Reagan intended) a "shining city on a hill," the source of illumination and guidance for this roleplaying thing. It was not to be oppressive - it should be uplifting. It was not to be controlling - it should be inspiring. It was not to demand obedience - it should encourage compatibility . That's a HUGE word in the early days, with the weight of ecclesiastical writ and as expansive a meaning as you can possibly attribute to it. Before (or at least simultaneous with) legalistic wrangling and copyright concerns, compatibility was a word to conjure with. Expansions compatible with core, modules compatible with systems, play in Peoria compatible with play in Poughkeepsie, gamers in the Deep South compatible with gamers in the High Sierra. By creating universally shared rules and procedures of play (that is, of behavior), TSR would create universal compatibility, and gamers could happily enjoy this wondrous new roleplaying thing without fear of mistakes, mutual toe-stepping, or embarrassing misunderstandings.
Now, I'd say time has taught us that not all roleplaying can thrive in such an environment, and that the power dynamics and etc. that it sets up are almost too easily abused and abusive (which, for me, reinforces the value of "indie" in the sense that Ron has always tried to use it - which given this I'd call a different way to answer the "how to create a community" question than the "shining city" model). Still, in some ways, at some level, it is a sincere effort to solve a real problem. The technophile in me might say it could have been the "right/best" answer before the internetz were spun, but in any case - just as we can't dismiss Abrahamic traditions simply because there is bad shit associated with 'em, so we cannot dismiss D&D because of the many ways in which it's fucked-up.
I don't have much to add to this discussion that hasn't already been said, but I do think that 2e sometimes gets an undeservedly bad rap. My understanding is that TSR figured it needed cash, its 1e ruleset was a mess and its later-1e rule set even more so, and there was grounds for revision, streamlining, and better production values--all of which would generate revenue.
With that in mind, I think it is totally possible to play 2e in a manner pretty consistent with, say, B/X or BECMI: dudes go into a dungeon, kill things, wander in the countryside, kill things, and accomplish various adventures while bumping into random things. Crucially, and to the edition's everlasting discredit, it does not tell you how or why to do this.
But if you're really into "early" D&D, I don't think 2e (or at least, as originally published in '89) represents a huge break with that tradition in terms of rules. The presentation is all gunked up, but stripping out the optional rules it's largely a tweak on B/X, which was largely a tweak on Supplement I: Greyhawk.
Can it be played like an extension of BECMI? Sure. But as you say, it doesn't tell you to do so. Ron's point is that the instruction manuals that DO exist are the modules. "Here's an example of a D&D 2E adventure!" And those instructions are precisely the linear railroaded story.
I'll give an example, selected from my shelf, an Al Quadim module called "Caravans" (Rick Swan, 1994) that I picked up for a couple of bucks a few years back based pretty much on the caravan trope being one of which I'm very fond. It comprises a booklet entitled "Caravans Adventure Book," a color-covered booklet entitled "Al Quadim Caravan Campaign - Campaign Guide," a booklet of handouts and maps, several loose maps, and a 8 page folded full color poster of a magic carpet that's central to the adventure. There's nothing in the box that indicates where to start with all of this. Notably, both books begin with a bit of fiction to set the feel presumably.
The Campaign Guide is mostly details about the "High Desert" setting of play, but it does have an introduction that is the only instruction on how to run the adventure found in the other booklet. It says, basically, that the adventure is in episodes, and that "Most likely, the PCs will follow the episodes in sequence, but because their actions are unpredictable, they may decide to pursue the episodes in a different order." Well that sounds sorta open-minded. Right?
The Adventure Book, however, presents everything in clear-cut scripted format. There's zero attempt at the start to engage the PCs into the adventure, they're just supposed to have some sort of rationale for being at the locale at which the adventure starts. Once the scene is set, the book actually gives two options for how the party may proceed, talk to two men who just hailed them, or mingle with others. Literally it gives the options like a choose-your-own-adventure book, giving which section of the text to which the DM should refer if they do one or the other. Should they choose to talk to the two men, there is a literal script on how the conversation should start, and then a verbatim description of what one must assume the DM should read as the NPCs words to the players (though note that nowhere does it actually say to do this). This is basically an info-dump on what's going on. This is followed by a list of questions that the players might ask, and the responses of the two men. Yes, this is presented precisely as though it's a talking-tree from a CRPG. It even goes so far after this to say that the men "... have no other information." The implication being that if the PCs want to know more, they have to head down to mingle... which means that we've been railroaded right back to the mingling step. Oh, and by the way, the folks they can mingle with know exactly as much as the two men. In other words, the scene with the men, should it be taken, is 100% just for color.
OK, sure, maybe the players decide that the PCs do something else here than go mingle. But there's really not much more to do. Note that this is a key technique in these presentations. Never give more information to act upon than will result in precisely the follow-up action you want. It's Hobson's Choice, the PCs can choose to do anything, as long as it's this one thing right here, since we're not offering up any other interesting options.
The next section presented is background. I believe this is very important to this discussion. The background for the situation of play is NOT presented up front. It's presented in fragments that are revealed in the individual "scenes" themselves (I use the term scene intentionally but loosely here to describe what the text is relating as what should go on). Why, oh why, would they present it this way? Well, while it's true that most adventure modules include some sort of perfunctory "read everything first before you attempt to use this module" (though as it happens this module does not), they're aware that even if you do this, you're unlikely to recall all of the details precisely as you go along. In fact, you might be one of those folks who is trying to "wing" the module and reading it as you're playing through. So you need to know the background in situ for the scene in question. But this notion is key in that it belies that the writers are assuming that you will go from section to section as the game progresses. Because, if not, there will be key background information that you will miss.
To be clear, other than the one or two-sentence summaries of the "episodes" found in the Campaign Guide, there is nothing at the front of the episode that tells you what the episode is about, much less what is supposed to be moving the action as play moves along. To get the background details, you have to read through the scripted scenes. It would be one thing if the notes in the scenes were a reminder about something told up front. But to have it be the ONLY source of this data informs the DM very strongly that the idea is to play through the scenes in the order presented. These are scripts, and the DM is supposed to stick to it. If not, you're going to have to do a lot of hunting for information based on assumptions about what the PCs were "supposed" to do.
The first part of episode one basically is designed to get the players to go to a tent and end up in a fight with some creatures and save a daughter of the "patron" of the adventure. At this point the adventure seems to present a split based on if the adventurers saved the girl... but the difference between the two is merely whether they get a single piece of treasure. Worse, one of the rewards is an invitation to the next phase of Episode One, where they're invited to an inn for a party. The text then explicitly says that it would be a mistake to refuse the offer, as it would be taken as an insult.
This is another classic moment of the railroaded adventure. Instead of saying explicitly "ensure that they get to the next phase by some method," it instead includes an implied threat if the PCs don't follow the script. The attempt to find some sort of in-game circumstances to enforce the trajectory of the adventure, instead of admitting that at this point there's simply not much keeping things going in the planned trajectory, is a failure by the authors. Note that, once again, like the circumstances that start the episode, the biggest thing that'll keep the players on the rails is simply the fact that nothing else interesting is presented. But they'll mention how to keep them on track, nonetheless. Why?
Well here's where we see the issue with the orthodoxy. By the time the party gets to the encounter and kills the creatures in question, and are then presented with the "choice" to go to the inn, they've been given zero interesting choices about what their characters might do. It is at this point that one or more of the players may start to rebel, and simply say no to the single choice presented, simply to demonstrate that they have ANY control over the trajectory of the events of play. Again, using "my guy" logic. "My guy hates inns, he's not going." Knowing this, the authors have presented the DM with the response "You'd better go, or you'll have insulted somebody from a culture that won't tolerate it."
And then this is where the Village of Homlett goes up in flames, if you will. Some players, fed up enough with the lack of control, will take the implied fight option instead. And now we have the problem that there's no reasonable way to salvage the situation presented in the module (though very creative GMs can even work around this sort of disaster). Either the PCs are dead, or the Patron is.
And we haven't even finished Episode One. The rest of the module is more of the same. Even if players manage to swallow their creative desires through an episode or two, eventually they're going to revolt.
Note that I presented this module specifically because it's 2E. But as Ron says, this all started much earlier in AD&D 1E days. Anyone want to see me break down Ravenloft II: House on Gryphon Hill, Copyright 1986 by (you guessed it) Tracy and Laura Hickman, and David Cook et. al? :)
Oh, I forgot to tell you what happens at the end of Episode One above, after the PCs basically agree to take on the epic quest that Hobson is presenting as their only option. You know, the point at which the PCs might theoretically at least decide to do a different episode, as implied in the Campaign Guide?
In the section "What's Next?" it says:
"Continue with Episode Two."
And then notes parenthetically that the DM should fudge to keep the two major NPCs alive throughout the adventure, since the last episode kinda revolves around them. And that's it. So much for open-minded.
Mike, would you like to talk about salvaging the situation, in terms of what the goals are for doing such salvaging?
As a footnote to Mike's account, I cannot stress enough how utterly scripted that adventure text is, and the same goes for all the al-Qadim materials. It's one of my go-to references for such writing. It's especially obvious in its transitions: the characters are simply expected to infer what they're supposed to, or extract the information they're supposed to, or establish the relationships they're supposed to, like clockwork. Usually the text is high implicit - simply saying stuff like "Now that they are embarked to meet the guy," as the opening to the following section. Sometimes the authors apparently get uneasy about this and toss in reminders about how you're supposed to make sure this happens.
It doesn't even have the excuse of text associated with novels that you're thought to be "playing in," like the Dark Sun adventures. It just is that the player-characters have to decide what to do precisely as the adventure requires.
Best, Ron
Hi Callan. Another name I haven't communicated with in an age...
I'm not sure what you're specifically speaking about in terms of salvaging the situation. Are you asking how I might use the materials in the book to create a situation that's playable in a less linear fashion? Or how to salvage the situation once you've had a burning of Homlett event? Or something else?
I purchased a few such modules in the last decade on the hope of them being inspiring enough to reshape into something I can use. And in every case I've realized after the fact that it's actually less work to start with something like a book or play (operas are my favorite), than to rework a published adventure module. I'll say that again: it's harder to rework a published adventure into something interesting to play than it is to start with a completed story in any other medium I've tried.
One would think that stories in other media would be problematic, because they are complete, and thus require distilling back into the basic situation. But adventure modules are just as complete, and are presented in a way that requires you to practically rewrite the story first in a narrative fashion before you then continue the deconstruction further and reduce it back into some sort of situation brimming with potential. And to get to that first stage, you have to eliminate a ton of text that's completely useless. Which often times then leaves you with so little that you're back to having to build the situation up to an interesting level.
For instance, in Caravans, one of the episodes contains something like a NPC situation with some tension, but it turns out to be basically two NPCs against each other. One asks the party to stop the other. There's just not enough there from which to create an interesting situation without adding more NPCs, and twisting things up a bit. The other episodes have even less situational data, being mostly "encounters." Overall there probably are enough NPCs to create an interesting situation, but hunting them all down in the text and then figuring out how to have them all interact with the PCs in a way that drives conflict... it's just far more work coming up with all of this than if we'd started with a book or something.
In short, don't buy such modules and try to retool them.
If the question is about how one might salvage such a situation, the question becomes why you would want to start with a situation that is going to self-destruct pointlessly in the first place. If you start with a well-designed situation, and then cater to the PCs needs to move the plot forward, you never have to worry about the problem coming up in the first place.
But to answer the question in an academic fashion, for the interest of those who might want to know how the expert "illusionist" GM would save the day, I'll give a solution. If the players kill character A, who was supposed to recommend them to character B for the quest, you simply have character B impose the quest on the PCs as punishment for the killing (instead of allowing them to undertake it as a reward for saving the girl). That's the solution to the situation as presented in the module; I left out a bit about the guy whose daughter is being saved not being the patron per se, but later introducing them to the patron. Had character A actually been the patron, then on killing him, the PCs could be gifted his stuff under the tribe's honor code, and in that stuff find a reference to the woman who needs saving. And then give the PCs some info about how said woman is a priestess of a rich cult or something (instead of being the patron's long-lost love).
Any of that help?
A textual example, from "FA1 - Halls of the High Kings" an adventure module written by Ed Greenwood and published in 1990
Ed Greenwood is not a small figure in AD&D: he is the creator and principal writer of the Forgotten Realms, the default setting (even if there are rumors that says that his world was chosen because it was very cheap and TSR wanted to save every penny). He was published almost in every issue of Dragon Magazine for a decade, so he was put practically as an "example" of a good GM, a good world creator, a good module author, a good articles writer, in AD&D2 terms.
This is the start of the adventure:
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This adventure can begin in any port city on the Sword Coast of the Realms(Waterdeep or Baldurs Gate are obvious choices). It is suggested the adventure begin when the PCs are restless, low on funds, or need to relocate quickly to avoid enemies, the authorities, or a heavy tax.
The PCs are approached by a short, fat, richly dressed merchant. Your pardon, sirs, he says in a quiet, determined voice. Could your services be had for hire? I am Panthras, of Panthras Procuring, and Id like to do business with you.
Panthras has shrewd eyes set in a weather-beaten face. He is a street-smart, retired caravan master.
Panthras: AC 2 (bracers of defense); MV 12; F 10; hp 79; THAC0 11; #AT 3/2; Dmg by weapon; S 16 ( + 1 on dmg.), D 14, C 16, I 15, W 17, Ch 14; ML 15; AL NG.
Panthras is armed with a long sword (1d8 dmg.), five throwing daggers (1d4 dmg each), and several magical defenses (see below), any or all of which he will use if the PCs are foolish enough to tangle with him. He is not interested in battling the PCs, however, but in hiring them. He will ask to meet the PCs somewhere private of their choosing or, if theyve no place to offer, in a back room of The Blunt Axe tavern.
Panthras will initially offer the PCs 30 gp and four potions of healing each to perform a guard mission for him. He will reveal more and, if necessary, offer up to 3,000 gp as he bargains.
Panthras needs a band of adventurers who command some magic and as much experience as possible to see a shipboard cargo of his safe to its destination. The cargo consists of sixty tarred and sealed wooden crates, each containing twenty new long swords of the finest make. The swords must reach the Cantrev of Aithe in Callidyrr, a kingdom on the Moonshae Isles. (If the PCs ask, Aithe lies on the western coast of the island of Alaron, northwest of Doncastle, where a cape Moonfall Ridge-juts out into the sea west of Dernall Forest.)
The PCs mission, if they accept, will be to deliver the swords safely to the local lord, Haembar Hawkenhound Cauldyth. Panthras also produces a contract for the PCs to sign. It specifies how many swords the PCs are being hired to ...see safely into the hands of Lord Cauldyth of Aithe, or his successor in the lordship of Cantrev Aithe, to the best of their honor and abilities.
[...]
Panthras will turn away from the PCs for a moment, saying, "There is more. Read this, please". He produces a portable hole and draws from it a sealed parchment, slipping the hole back into the breast pocket from whence he drew it. Before proffering the parchment, he hesitantly adds, I must warn you: once youve unsealed this document, I cannot allow you to withdraw from the mission and live; this is a matter of state security. Consider your actions carefully, then. Upon my honor, the document contains no alteration in your agreed task.
The parchment is sealed with a wolfs head: the Lone Wolf of the Kendrick family. If the PCs open it, they will read: To those who accept the bond of Panthras and with it the swordguard mission to Aithe: My thanks and my debt. Dark days have come to the Moonshae Isles again, and we are in need of the strong and the valiant. Be it known that I personally shall award four thousand pieces of gold, above and beyond your pay, to each adventurer in your band who comes to Caer Callidyrr and asks for it, assuming the blades arrive safely in the hands of the Lord of Aithe. I will offer more, at that time, to those among you who will give us substantial aid against the foes that beset us in the Moonshaesdark men skulking behind witless pawns who may try to seize that which you guard.
Bring this letter to me in Caer Callidyrr, and accept the thanks, welcome, and hospitality of:
Iristan Kendrick
High King of the Ffolk
[OK, it's one of the worst "stranger talk to you in a tavern" start of an adventure ever, but it seems a normal offer up to this moment... read on: ]
If any PCs attack Panthras during the encounter, or if they try to renounce their part in the agreement to his face after the document has been unsealed, the merchants most powerful defense will act.
The mage Flamsterd, who has been eavesdropping invisibly on the negotiations, concealed against magical detection by his own personal magics, will cast a forget spell on the PCs. If hostilities erupt and he deems it necessary, a time stop will be cast first, after which he will remove the High Kings letter and move all PC weapons, magic items, scrolls, potions, and the like into a pile in the center of the gathering.
In brief, Flamsterd is a powerful archmage (Wizard, 21st Level) who carries whatever magic items and spells a DM wishes to give him. He is a gentle man, firm but polite, with a kindly manner, but he has learned that the best response to those who attack him or thwart his will is a quick and heavy-handed magical attack. (He can ask the corpses questions later and apologize to the remains if hes made a mistake.)
[the adventure is for character of at least 6th level, and right at the beginning if they don't want to go they are beaten by a 21th level archmage]
[look at the level of the details for the mage. A Mary Sue? Probably the DM character, Ed was famous for the "DM characters" he wrote in his modules, like the Mage Elminster]
Flamsterd is an eminent sage, his major field of expertise being the history, lore, and works of written magic. His minor interests include the history of human settlement and deeds in north-western Faerun, and of the Ffolk of the Moonshaes in particular.
Flamsterds eyes flash and his voice grows stern when he deems it necessary, and although he seems quick to anger, he has iron self-control. He will often act more angry than he really is in order to cow opponents or lure them into revealing their true attitudes or foolish battle strategies.He is armed with a dagger +2, longtooth and also with six darts of paralyzation. These +1 darts cause their victim to save vs. paralyzation or be paralyzed for 1 turn. They do not automatically return to the thrower, but neither do they lose their magic if they miss a target.
Flamsterd appears as a slim, distinguished-looking, long-bearded man of average height. His long, predominantly white beard, which still has some strands of black left, is often tucked into his belt or drawn up and flung over one shoulder to keep it out of the dirt. He customarily wears plain gray robes and (only when traveling outside his home) a red cloak. These continuously curl and flap around him, seemingly of their own volition, due to the cloaks power to emit a sudden gust of wind once every second round, at Flamsterds will. This handy piece of magic serves to extinguish or dramatically heighten campfires where he appears, deflect arrows or other missiles, and so on.
Flamsterd is famous and well-thought of around the Isles, by Llewyrr, dwarves, halflings and Ffolk alike. His appearances are news, and his kindnesses (such as magically rescuing livestock or people, mending broken fences or roofs that leak, repairing bridges and clearing spring ice to prevent floods) are legendary. A teleport ring, which he is never without, allows him to appear and depart suddenly and silently. Like his colleagues Khelben Arunsun and Elminster, Flamsterd is a friend to the Harpers and shares their aims of protecting the land, the weak and needy who dwell in it, and upholding honesty, fair dealing, and peace.
Flamsterd may appear from time to time during this adventure as desired. Long-term campaign play in the Moon-shaes will require a DM to detail Flamsterds spells, possessions, abode, and activities more extensively.
Flamsterd: AC -2 (plain robes plus a cloak of protection +5, a ring of protection +3, and his Dex bonus); MV 12; W 21; hp 49; THAC0 14; #AT 1; Dmg by spell or weapon; S 14, D 18, C 15, I 18, W 17, Ch 16; ML 15; AL NG).
If the PCs accept the mission, Panthras will produce his portable hole and make the payment agreed upon-on the spot. He will tell the PCs to report to the caravel Mermaid Sword at the docks three mornings hence (or whatever time the DM desires in order to allow the PCs to fully rest, heal and regain spells and gear or to have another, short adventure). After bidding the PCs good day, he leaves. If any PC rushes after him or tries to follow him on the sly, they will find that he has vanished. (In reality, Flamsterd has cast invisibility on the merchant and they both teleport away.
If the PCs refuse the bargain and elect to go their own way, they will see Panthras seeking out adventurers wherever they go in the days that follow. If they get down on their luck, he will reappear and try them again, even finding his way into dungeons theyve gotten lost in or prisons theyve been incarcerated in (offering, of course, to free them if they accept his job offer).
Flamsterd will accompany Panthras as an invisible protector at all times. Oddly enough, PC attacks on Panthras will not diminish his enthusiasm to try to hire them.
If the PCs still seem reluctant to undertake the mission, introduce the next event.
A Visitor by Night
Whenever two or more PCs are together, after dark, a pale blue radiance will suddenly spring into being nearby, growing rapidly brighter. It expands as a whirling, pulsing ball to become the ghostly image of an upright, detached human hand, which turns to point into the darkness and fades away.
If the PCs look where the hand is pointing, they see a slim, distinguished-looking man, wearing gray robes and a red cloak that seem to swirl and shift by themselves, as if disturbed by an unseen, unfelt wind. The mans white beard is so long that hes tucked it into his belt to avoid treading on it. A few hairs as black as a ravens remain around his lower lip, among their snow-white brothers. The man regards them gravely, and says, Well met. I come in peace, to speak of war and danger It is the wizard Flamsterd who has appeared via his teleport ring and created the hand. If the PCs dont look where the hand is pointing, Flamsterd will clear his throat loudly to get their attention. If that doesnt work, he will simply walk right in among the PCs, stepping on anyone whos sleeping.
Flamsterd slowly looks around at all of the PCs present, and says, I understand you are adventurers. He will wait for a reply, but whether or not one is given, will continue: My land has need of adventurers. I am come from the Moonshae Isles, that men hereabouts sometimes call the jewels on the hilts of The Sea of Swords. My fair land has faced evil aplenty in recent years, and its folk are weary and sick of death and blood-magic and blades. A new evil has come to our shores; evil never grows tired. I need you, and others like you, to fight this evil. Are you willing?
Flamsterd will quietly and politely answer PC queries. He will not bluster and cannot be pressured into bargains or admissions. He will say that the evil of which he speaks consists of . . . brigands, undead, and darker creatures, all of them guided and goaded on by priests of the god Bane, The Lord of Tyranny.
If PCs ask for payment for aiding the Moonshaes, Flamsterd will reply that the High King has already offered them coins, and more. (If the PCs did not read the letter that Panthras bore, Flamsterd will produce it now, offering it without the state security warning Panthras was obligated to offer.)
Flamsterd will tell the PCs he can offer them his friendship, aid at times when they are in the Moonshaes, and magical tutelage in a single spell of their choosing, when the evil is defeated. If any PCs are Harpers, Flamsterd will call on them as Harpers to do their duty and aid the Moonshaes, invoking the names of any powerful Harpers that may be known to the PCs.
If the PCs seem willing, Flamsterd will tell them to report to the Mermaid Sword, a caravel owned by the High King, at a particular dock three mornings hence. (Once again, the time period can be adjusted to suit the DMs purposes.).
If the PCs are unwilling, Flamsterd will shake his head sorrowfully, and sigh. I see no heroes here, he will announce. Indeed, none of you can even strike true with a blade! With these words, the wizard will vanish, using his ring to teleport away. If Flamsterd is attacked at any time during this encounter, he will utter these words and vanish.
Flamsterd has enacted a powerful steel curse, once widely used in the North. This type of curse prevents a victim from successfully attacking with any bladed weapon, from a bill to a belt-knife -and all PCs present at Flamsterds visit are affected!! Attempts to
use bladed weapons as clubs, or to strike them against walls, trees, and other immobile targets, will cause the blade to shatter into tiny shards with no damage to wielder or target (magical weapons also affected) at every attempt. Bladed weapons are simply useless to the cursed beings until a number of months equal to the level of the caster (in Flamsterds case, 21 months) have passed, or until the curse is lifted.
A steel curse can be lifted instantly by the caster or by the application of a remove curse by a wizard of fourteenth level or greater on each and every affected being. Flamsterd will lift it if the PCs undertake the mission. Remove curse spells cast by lesser wizards, and dispel magic spells, will have no effect.
One last method of tumbling reluctant PCs into the adventure is to have them run afoul of enemies or the authorities in a dockside area and start a chase, with the PCs fleeing from a trap or overwhelming force. Their flight leads them to the water, where a caravel, the Mermaid Sword, is just casting off. The captain waves the PCs aboard, face alight. Are you the promised ones? she cries. Come on, then! We sail before the days three breaths older!
[All this complicated mess only to have the PC go in the adventure makes me think that Ed Greenwood had many problems with players that stubbornly refused to go in another of his "adventures" and he never, even, discovered the simple technique of saying "guys, would you like to play an adventure here and there to do this? Yes? OK, you start directly on a ship..."]
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"OK, this was a very railroaded "plot hook", but the adventure can't be so pre-scripted, right?"
You wish...
The ENTIRE module is like this. Just to show some other examples:
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This is from a moment where they MUST go on a new part of the adventures:
DM Note: If the PCs are too weak to be victorious in this adventure, Lord Cauldyth and Rhiara may join the party or turn up as surprise reinforcements when the PCs are hurting and in a bad spot. Cauldyth will most generally come thundering along to the rescue in his old and battered armor astride a mighty charger. He will plunge into battle with gusto, bellowing war-cries (For Aithe and freedom!, For the Goddess!, and Cauldyth is upon you! seem to be favorites). Rhiara is quieter in battle, but just as ruthless.
So, the PC HAVE to win. If they are too weak, the GM simply has to use two uber-NPC to win the battle for them and "keep them on the track"..
What happen if the PC don't follow the track in a timely manner?
If the PCs tarry overmuch in Aithe, townsfolk will begin to ask when theyll set right what is wrong; first of each other, within earshot of PCs, and later directly questioning PCs. If the PCs stay twenty nights or more without setting forth into the Wild Wood, the townsfolk will begin to avoid them, murmur cowards in the streets and taverns when the PCs are near, and generally grow tired of seeing the PCs in Aithelar.
If the PCs stay in town more than six nights, they will face three attacks, on different nights. The first will be an attempt to steal their gear by nine were-rats. Then four dopplegangers, hired by a priest in black robes, will try to capture isolated PCs for questioning and eventual sale into slavery, taking their places in the party. Finally, 16 Cult-hired thugs will set wherever the PCs are sleeping afire, waiting with crossbows for any PCs who awaken to emerge
What if they want to leave too soon?
Ducking Out Of The Adventure
Whether the PCs agree to explore the Wild Wood or not, no ship will be immediately available for them to sail elsewhere. The Sword may never sail again; if it can be rescued and repaired, weeks of rebuilding will be necessary. If the PCs try to defend it while the crew rebuilds, refusing to go adventuring, the next encounter will happen anyway, at night, on the docks. If the PCs steal or hire one of the ramshackle local fishing-boats, and sail away, a storm will rise (the work of Chauntea? Aany hired crew will think and say so), and drive the craft ashore
You get the idea I hope: most of the module is dedicated to heavy-handed (and ham-fisted) ways to keep players (who don't want to play that adventure) "on the right track". They HAVE to "become heroes saving the isles", even if they don't care and don't want!
And not only TSR had the nerve to ask money for this crap ($8,95 in 1990 was the price of 9 comic books or two fantasy novels in paperback), but this was an example of "how to play as a good GM" written by one of their most "famous" writers....
P.S.: Obviously, if you talk to any GM still in the "cult of the sacred holy official manuals of the only true rpg", even the ones who did run this module to their players, every one of them will negate absolutely that ANY D&D adventure module promoted railroading...
Considering the metaphor Ron is using here, I wonder why religious icons have not come up. Thinking about my myself as a long time AD&D adherent, I would like to offer a bit of background from my personal experiences.
1) My group and I were both poor and woefully rural. It was just the handful of us (sometimes swelling to a dozen in the Vampire days of the early '90s) on a desert island. No Cons either.
2) I had one buddy that predominately DMed. The game mechanics were a mystery for everyone else. In hindsight, he was flying by the seat of his pants, but he had a strong vision of what he wanted and had definite thoughts of what was reasonable for a game. It worked, and as kids and young adults, no one questioned his authority of the material. Years later, reading the rules and bringing them to the table would ruin the game for me, but that was a temporary (10-year) mistake.
3) Our desert island, which existed until the year 2000 or so, had minimal dysfunction for some reason. Don't know why, Perhaps good luck. Perhaps #2 explains a lot.
4) The game for us as players was about the artwork. It was the thousand words cliché. We got it, the game that is, by simply looking at the artwork of dragons and heroes and maps. We were poor, but the better the artwork and the more there was in a source, the more likely we could scrap together some cash from somewhere. Maybe birthday money, maybe an odd job for the neighbor.
So back to iconography. Thinking about one through four above, I think we knew how to play AD&D by looking at pictures. I think casual parishioners do the same. It seems to fit the metaphor of the post.
Moreno, great example. Note that I don't believe that TSR pioneered the trend to railroaded modules, as it happens. I think that the first such examples were probably written for Traveller or Call of Cthulhu or the like, when the writers discovered that "dungeon" play really didn't emulate sci-fi or horror genres at all. It was only later that the TSR writers saw these more "advanced" forms of module presentation that could deliver a story, and decided to get on that bandwagon and create the orthodoxy. By comparison the early dungeon presentation method is much less prone to difficulties. Sorry if Ron or somebody above already mentioned this.
Ed, yeah, I hear ya. I recall getting the Holmes Blue Book Basic as my first version of D&D, and seeing that Dragon on the cover... in a Dungeon... with adventurers attacking. Seemed pretty straightforward. Imagine my surprise when that book had no dragons in it, and we were told we'd have to wait for AD&D coming out to get them.
Of course, the problem is that this vision of how to play that the art provides is going to be an individual thing. And quite often, the rules won't support it. So you get what you got, with the DM playing Calvinball (essentially making up whatever rules are needed as you go) to get the sort of vision they desire. So this is where you get the toxic "the rules don't matter, as long as you have a good GM" meme. Even if the GM is hiding that they're playing Calvinball, you're still aware that it's not the rules that are making the game have the feel that it has, since you're not even visibly seeing them. All of which becomes part of the orthodoxy with "Rule Zero."
I don't have any issue with the parts of the OSR that espouse simple grognardy wargamey play, nor even with folks who are able to go back to old rulesets and use them as written to provide functional play by employing good technique within the rules to do so. Where the OSR and I part ways is with that subset of the movement that has this narrative about the power of rule zero. They'll even regale you with how it is that the D&D system was so lethal (especially at low level) that it encouraged players to go about trying to solve modules using methods other than combat. And how, since the rules didn't have any way to resolve these other methods, the GM just made rulings. Which, they claim, avoids a perceived problem with recent editions where players only attempt actions defined by the rules, since there are so many of them. Including the dreaded diplomatic options, which they dread in reality because their gamism sense is (rightly from a gamism POV) upset by the unbalance that this presents.
The only way to solve this problem? No rules! Yes, this branch of the OSR has come around to the POV that the freeformers came around to the same year that D&D came out. It doesn't do what we envision, and there's no way to fix the rules to make it do so, so the only way to make it work is to have no rules. The fact that the orthodoxy kept on reinforcing at first gamism and then the later railroady play style, meant that the freeformers would continue to be right until people started to challenge the notion that rules can't support play that's creative in different ways. The OSR people of this stripe seem to have missed the creation of all of these games, and so are still stuck in their own schism of the orthodoxy.
Mike,
Your Calvinball game idea sparks a thought. The way our Calvinball game continued to be fun was through the consistency of the DM. Having been a temporary member of many protestant religious sects growing up (Baptist, Southern Baptist, Methodist, Assembly of God, another flavor of Methodist, Catholic, LDS, back to Baptist...), I think those churches had the same "big man" political structure (Jared Diamond's term) and reliance on consistency from the leader. The similarity here between D&D and religion not only supports Ron's metaphor, but reminds me of that Six Sigma business trend. Six Sigma concentrated on removing variance across six dimensions and strikes me as an interesting potential for game analysis. I wonder what dimensions a DM might stabilize variance out of for gaming in order to keep players satisfied?
Ed
Ah, Flamsterd - known to his friends simply as 'Terd.
They forgot to write up his burning bush power...
My god, that was just beautiful - so much railroading today is so scuttley, hiding behind the scenes, even the practitioners hiding it from themselves (as Moreno says). To see it so flagrantly written in cold, hard ink - it's just beautiful in a strange way!
Got a few more good links for my interesting RPG links file, now!
Mike, you mentioned salvaging in your post, so I wondered what you meant by it rather than what I would mean? Of course these modules even railroad the DM, in that a sort of sunk cost fallacy means we try and get something out of what we've bought (as Moreno says, you could have bought several comics or a couple of fantasy novels for the price. Can't just put that in the bin, can we?)
Calvinball is one of Ron's terms (referring to a game played by the titular characters in the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes), and it specifically means adjusting the rules as you go along to get what you need. So if the game was really consistent, it may not have been Calvinball per se. The rules may simply have been hidden from you. On the other hand, the consistency may simply have come from never getting to see the rules.
I mention Calvinball here because when GMs play with the curtain drawn on the rules, they typically claim to do so in order to prevent the players from being removed from the fiction by the rules. But often the reality is (take it from a guy who has done this), that this is just a way to constantly fudge everything and look like you're a master of your hidden ruleset. When often you're just freeforming and making it look like there's some consistent rule-set at work. In my case, this was a reaction to a rule-set that I didn't like and wasn't providing the sort of play I wanted. Better to pretend to be playing it, and not actually engage with the rules at all, I figured.
How visible were the rules in this game? Did you see them at all? Do you think that the GM was actually using them?
Callan... I'm sorry, you have me very confused. I'm really not sure if you even have a question that you'd like me to answer or not.
Thanks Mike,
When you mentioned it before, I could not remember the punch line to which Hobbs was subjected, but I remembered the game. I think sprinkles of pop-culture and literary innuendos are fun. I don't get all of them right away, but a quick search helps open new metaphors.
The rules for the game were available to anyone who wanted to try and understand them. That did not happen much. I did eventually read them because I wanted to offer the DM a break. He ran a weekly game (give or take) for nearly six years. He was using them, but had many, many on the spot rules he would bring into play. Some of which caused contention because I disagreed with the simulation mechanic or the ruling broke some critical part of the character I was playing. Right or wrong, though, he was consistent as an atomic clock.
On the curtains drawn behavior of some DMs, if forced to choose as a player, I would lean towards an outcome of a fun game over the obligation to follow the rules. Although, there are two are two sides of a dialectic reasoning argument going on here from my perspective. Dialectic reasoning has its flaws, but I like it for bounding a linear space between to opposite extremes. The thesis I think most gamers tacitly assume speaks to rule-based gaming, but strict adherence to rules can diminish fun at the table. Any of us could formulate examples of rule-following-gone-bad from our own experiences. The antithesis is something like continuously applied rule 0 or calvinball, which can be equally disruptive for a fun game. Your posts above demonstrate that idea. The synthesis is likely somewhere in the middle. Judgment of which to lean towards on the line then becomes the challenge.
I would like my players to believe I am a strict rule follower. That desire is what puts me up against the wall as a DM for 3.5, especially at stepped increments around 7th, 13th, then 20th character level games. Holding that many interrelated sets of character stats all at once taxes the hell out of me. I end up leaving players alone and ignored in some ways on the other side of the screen as I manage the NPCs, tracking tactical implications of 5-foot steps, and adjudicating situational modifiers. I have no idea if the players are having fun or if a story is even going on. I am mentally running (anaerobically) to keep up with the pace of the action. Mistakes get made that come up later in post-game conversations over tacos; important ones that would have dramatically altered the outcome for the player characters. All I can say is sorry, but wasn't it fun?
5th edition seemed like the road to Abilene from the playtest materials. Wiki-development was creating a game design by committee. OSRIC relieved many of the pressure factors that 3.5 and Pathfinder built up, but was too confining for the level of personal detail my friends and I wanted in our snowflakes. I was truly frustrated. I wanted both sides of the dialectic: rules I could follow and have enough horsepower left to guide story creation. The Journal is the game I put together so I could do both. The reason I bring up the game, my dissatisfaction with D&D editions, and the behind the curtain behavior is as context for what I am about to admit. On the first playtest, I fudged dice rolls on my side of the screen to keep the action rising when I identified a local climax to the emerging story. I was the wizard of oz, hoping no one paid attention to the man behind the curtain. My dilemma is that I think the friend that helped me with the playtest would be disappointed if he knew I fudged the dice rolls. I think he needs to feel as though everything boiled out of the mechanics. My rationalization for that hypocrisy is that sometimes, I don't want probability to interfere with events, even if those events should technically adhere to the rules for contested actions.
Could I be hiding a CA divide between my friend and I with my little secret?
Ed
Ed,
I think we're getting a bit far afield from the topic of the thread. But your experience is so interesting that perhaps it would merit it's own thread. If you do split it off, post a link here please.
What I will say is that you seem to me to be caught in a fallacy of the orthodoxy, that being that you can't possibly have both fun play, and play by the rules all the time. Well I'm here to tell you that you can have both. If you're avoiding the rules, they're rules that aren't working to create what you want.
I've been where I think you are now. Worried that I need to have certain sorts of rules for the players to feel that the game is somehow... right. When in fact those rules are making the game non-fun in other ways. Usually the solution I've found is... just don't have that sort of rule. I've likened the feeling that there is a need for such rules in the past to being in the Matrix. Take the right pill, Neo.
Mike
Hi Mike -
"And then this is where the Village of Homlett goes up in flames, if you will. Some players, fed up enough with the lack of control, will take the implied fight option instead. And now we have the problem that there's no reasonable way to salvage the situation presented in the module (though very creative GMs can even work around this sort of disaster). Either the PCs are dead, or the Patron is."
The question would be, maybe, is there anything valuable in looking at how those "very creative GMs" work around the disaster? I'd say it's in realizing that if that kind of creativity was available all along (and not just from the GM), there was no reason to be on the gorram module-path in the first place! But there may be other answers.
-Gordon
It makes me sad, but I do think it's time to spawn daughter threads and to let this one rest.
Best, Ron