[old and new D&D] Moreno and the D&D Orthdox Catholic Communion

[Ron Edwards]

Second in a series begun with [old and new D&D] Eero and the Unitarian-Universalist branch of modern D&D and founded in the much older A Hard Look at Dungeons and Dragons.

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.

Fundamentalism ... 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,

... 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), 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

[edheil]

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.

[Ron Edwards]

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.

[Eero Tuovinen]

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.

[Callan S.]

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'

[Ron Edwards]

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

[Ron Edwards]

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.

[Ron Edwards]

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.

[Moreno R.]

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...)
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[...]

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.

--------------------
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?

----------------------------------------------------------------

Another post from the same thread:

-----------------------------------------
[...]
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.

[...]

----------------------------------------------------------------
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

[Ron Edwards]

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

[Moreno R.]

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?

-----------
P.S.: next phase in the next post, i don't want to risk losing all this if there is a power failure...

[Eero Tuovinen]

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.

[Ron Edwards]

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.

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.

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.

[Moreno R.]

@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...

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."

...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.

[Moreno R.]

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!

from: 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....