[old and new D&D] Eero and the Unitarian-Universalist branch of modern D&D

[Ron Edwards]

You know me, Marshall - metaphysics loses me right out of the gate, so I can't begin to evaluate your point, much less respond. I acknowledge this to be a character flaw of mine.

Eero, you wrote,

... that'd be the test I'd use with D&D as well: do we actually benefit from treating D&D as a tradition of practice? My current answer is yes, not the least based on the fact that I'm doing pretty well mixing and swapping mechanical ideas from a wide variety of editions, but I don't know, maybe there is some trade-off there, analytical roadblocks or blind spots caused by this historiography over a different one? Would I be doing even better if I did not consider the unity of practice?

My position is "no" to your initial question above and the precise answer "yes" to the final two questions. Of course, that would entail ceasing to be a "D&D participant" - which in the eyes of self-designated D&D members of all stripes easily becomes blindness, insult, rejection, or (from a UU point of view) saddening. You're tap-dancing as fast as you can, but the fact is, you buy into the standalone complex or you don't.

Joshua, I think you summarized my position pretty well. Your statement about "not being a game designer" represents a phrasing that continues to amuse or fascinate or baffle me - what I see in your description is a safe space to be a game designer, quite the opposite of not being or avoiding being one.

In the past, I've often said that "when someone says they play D&D, they usually mean they're designing games." I've seen it kick off very strong aversive responses which I now think have everything to do with the standalone complex phenomenon. To the listeners, it's very important that they are not violating or personally changing "it," but rather discovering or (at most) refining "it." I'm learning to preface my comment by challenging "it" in the first place, because the established habit is to receive my comment as if I were a fundamentalist who claims to know "it" better than anyone else. And UU-style activists hate fundamentalists worse than anything. (I'll be developing what I'm saying in this paragraph in more detail for the fundamentalism post.)

This phenomenon is so fascinating it could yield a whole book based on personal disclosures - to what extent deviating from the written rules of a single D&D text is associated with determined insistence that one is really, really, totally, no qualifications allowed, God damn it I'm not kidding, truly playing "D&D." Cue amazing claims about how trivial the changs at the table are (you know, like whether we use hit points or fire-and-forget magic), and catch-phrases like "You can do anything with it" in a positively charming display of cognitive dissonance.

An interesting related point: fantasy-heartbreaker authors are unfairly derided as being "too much D&D" when the fact is that they were critically-aware enough to recognize they weren't playing D&D at the table, and that they had indeed designed a game there. Their failings (not fault) are solely that they lacked broad-spectrum knowledge of the hobby's design space and were chewed up and spat out by an exploitative and exclusive economic system.

I have a few spot-responses to bits throughout your post, which isn't my typical way to reply, so let me know if you think I became too trees-oriented.

1. I should clarify the standalone complex concept: there aren't several, there's only one, manifested by literally any number of differing interpretations and beliefs. So your father's history, Eero's, the mom of one of my friends who threw away all his comics sometime around 1978 after she "accepted Christ into her heart," my devout pal who casuallys swears "Y'Allah!" but pales in horror at the thought of using the name "Issa" to swear, and certainly myself insofar as I sing fervently along with the Jesus Christ Superstar soundtrack and sniffle throughout the last fourth ... all compose one such thing loosely called "Jesus" in English.

2. Jesus Christ Superstar was first released as an album, period (lots of people don't know that) - it was immediately informally adapted to the stage by dozens of theaters and then became a Broadway play, and not too long after that, a movie - so three soundtracks at the very least. Both it and a popular book of the time, The Passover Plot, were deeply associated with retooling Jesus as a legitimized symbol for the political protests and counterculture of the time, essentially a repeat of the process in the 1800s, and it's no surprise that such talk was central to UU activism. I don't know how much of that you knew, but I think it's pretty interesting. The original album is rightly acknowledged as a landmark event in the history of rock-and-roll and the early development of metal.

3. Your viewpoint as an activist re: genericide, particularly relative to D&D, was more surprising to encounter than you may have felt while writing it.

My reason is that I want outsiders to pay more attention and form more opinions about it. Because I think it will grow faster and in more unexpected ways that way.

I think ... I really think that it would be useful for everyone to acknowledge his or her political position about D&D, like that one, as the first step. Mine would be best described as pushing to demystify D&D and basically to destroy the focus for identity politics, while but also to embrace all manner of stuff historically labeled as such and bringing the plethora of design innovations into light. Your target audience seems to be the world at large, outside the gaming hobby; mine is the disgruntled and uneasy subset within the hobby.

4. You wrote,

Eero's descriptions have that quality for me more than anything.  His descriptions of 'primitive D&D' strike me as a subversive deconstruction of D&D more than any sort of revivalism or homage.

My point exactly, and also a perfect description of the UU activist - my snarking about it focuses specifically on Eero's and their apparent inability or unwillingness to recognize it themselves - which is to say, their need to maintain their religious identity relative to the thing.

5. Your point about critiquing and even topping TSR, WotC, or Gygax (here best construed as a percerived concept not the person) from a place of privilege sets up really well for my next little post on this topic, focusing on orthodoxy.

Best, Ron

P.S.: A couple of historical clarifications that I realized I glossed over a bit too much in my first post:

Unitarianism was originally an extreme German offshoot of Protestant reform all the way back in the Reformation (1500s), accurately recognized as bona fide heretical in rejecting the Trinity. Technically one might call it retro-Nestorian.  Its 19th century revival was mainly in the United States, which is where it was also combined with Universalism.

[edheil]

One question -- Ron, do you see the "everybody has a version of it, and thinks there is a Real Thing out there that they are succeeding or failing to imitate, but those versions are all there is" -- that is, the Stand-Alone Complex -- as applying to D&D alone as the "original" RPG, or do you think that was true of RPGs in general in the early days?

Tékumel we can consider to be under the D&D umbrella, but what about Tunnels & Trolls?  Runequest? Melee/Wizard/TFT?  If "real D&D" was a phantom, was that true with other games too?

Or is that question out of scope for this thread?

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Ed,

This is interesting. To reply, I have to present a whole model of what I think was happening, and that means re-arranging a cultural narrative into a completely new form so words don't mean what they "obviously" mean.

I'll try a Venn diagram. The biggest one is "fantasy wargaming," which is nominally wargaming in a fantasy setting, but contains within it scattered and various techniques which maybe don't rate an "it" beyond the concept of individualized agencies in play ("player" "characters") and emergent fiction. It was happening as early as 1970, among many (almost all?) wargaming and fantasy-enthusiast groups. It doesn't surprise me that fantasy was the chosen topic, considering its role in the counterculture, pop music, and politics at that time, linked with the whole Tolkien and Conan revival of the mid-60s, and Moorcock's work as a modern response. The Blackmoor and Tekumel games were among these, and aspects of Glorantha fandom and game design probably count as well. I would not be surprised to learn that full player agency, SIS, and what you and I would definitely call role-playing were happening for reals definitely not continuous in geography, maybe not continuously in time.

The box inside that one is emergent game designs, and the box inside that is game publications, especially tagged with precisely this activity. I don't know of any way to record or give examples of the game-design box, but the game publication box features items that were one kiss away from acknowledging the activity – White Bear & Red Moon obviously.

So let's say there was a game at a table somewhere (in the outer box) which "was" D&D exactly and beautifully, before it was ever written down or published, and then written on paper (so its circle penetrates into the middle box) and then published, all the way into the innermost box, yay! That's the myth narrative.

But I think it didn't happen. I think that the 1974 D&D publication is a circle in the publication box without overlap in the other boxes, with a direct connection to another published game (Chainmail) which I have no idea if it had any role-playing in it at all, and only a tenuous association with a circle in the outermost box, Blackmoor.

That's why the role-playing came from Blackmoor, but only as an implication – something that might happen at the table. The procedures were plain Chainmail skirmish wargaming, 'ported to individual scale plain and simple (that's not a controversial statement, right?).

Soooo .... It's a huge exciting thing though, not because "no one had seen anything like it," but because lots of people who were doing it were now looking at a set of books which purported actually to say how it might be done! The thousand copies vanish into people's possession and ... then publication disappears. Since the text is flatly not playable (unless you are rear-view-projecting), any number of people say well fuck, we're doing it for real, let's write our stuff down.

Here's a crucial point: Mines of Moria dungeon crawling is booming simultaneously as a tournament activity and tagged as D&D, D&D as a name has the first-comer mind-stamp product identification, so many of these in-play now-published games are similarly stamped. Either dungeon-crawling gets shoehorned in, as with Glorantha (which poor Greg really wanted to be about heroquesting), or gloriously refined into its purest form as with Tunnels & Trolls, or simply taken as a given as with Swords & Spells or Dragonquest. How all of this interacted with "create your epic fantasy saga" as an ideal is ... messy. In the Labyrinth, for example, is named to identify with dungeon-crawling, but its content continually emphasizes setting building and character arcs.

All of which leads me to shoot holes in your terminology. What do you mean by a "real" game? If you mean born in play, codified through playtesting and writing, and published as a product, then you can't get more real than Tunnels & Trolls. But it can't be separated from the phantom-D&D, can it? Because that's what St. Andre, Danforth, and Stackpole were doing, because that's "what you did." And which therefore contributed to the D&D standalone complex because these games are unfairly considered imitations or knockoffs of something which must be complete and more pure because it was "first."

It's an amazing historical detail that the 1974 publication appeared in such a way as to validate and excite people who were all doing this-and-that-bits of a new thing, and then disappeared in such a way as to open doors for published materials vastly more sophisticated and usable ("complete" if you will) than it was.

Or that's my thinking at the moment anyway.

Best, Ron

[edheil]

I think I've got ya.  I decided to try to draw (something like) the diagrams you're talking about.

I know images on a place like this aren't really desirable because they only last as long as hosting does, but I got out OpenOffice Drawing and tried producing some actual diagrams.  These are vague and wildly imperfect, because I'm not very experienced producing drawings like this, and Openoffice Drawing kind of sucks, and it's a complicated thing we're talking about.

[edheil]

I guess I'd like to add that you have to imagine those two superimposed upon each other, because the mythical "OD&D which is in fact a set of functional rules for RPG-like activity" in the mythical one inspires the series of arrows shooting down from the top in the actual one.

I was just now trying to come up with a third diagram that includes that but got frustrated.

[Ron Edwards]

Yeah, except that in both diagrams, it should absolutely not be "OD&D" written there, but rather Dungeons & Dragons 1974, to reference the precise document. "OD&D" is a modern construction with a plethora of fundamentalist claims attached to it.

Best, Ron

P.S. "Fundamentalist" is not a pejorative in the context of this discussion.