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

[Moreno R.]

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...

[Eero Tuovinen]

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.

[Moreno R.]

@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)

[Miskatonic]

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?

[Moreno R.]

@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...

[Moreno R.]

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.  :-)

[Christoph]

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.

[Ron Edwards]

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:

... 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.

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.

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.

[Moreno R.]

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.

[Miskatonic]

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.

[Callan S.]

Yes, 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.

[Mike Holmes]

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?

[Ron Edwards]

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,

It 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

[glandis]

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...

[Ron Edwards]

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.