[old and new D&D] OSR fundamentalism (warning: not insulting)

[Ron Edwards]

Forget everything you thought this was about. Today, "fundamentalist" is a distorted term, associated with the 1970s and 1980s Christian Right in the U.S., or with the Muslim splinter fiqh called Wahhabi or the relatively recent aqueedah called Salafi. I'm drawing instead on the word's meaning from the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the U.S.

Slightly modified from Shahida:

Fundamentalism ... represents a return to basics for religious practice, seeking to perceive the direct Word of God through perceived original 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.

Significantly, fundamentalism is a local thing, associated with defined communities and a specific way of life, always positioned in opposition to a powerful orthodox and the insitutions integrated with it. (Yes, it's possible to be both fundamentalist and orthodox, but that is not what I'm writing about here.)

So right off the bat: "fundamentalist" does not mean crazy, ignorant, and/or stupid. It's a totally historical term for an understandable social movement and makes more sense than you think.

In fact, the term isn't a grassroots one, but rather a reference to The Fundamentals, a series of essays written and published as a compilation in the 19-teens, which is actually a late-stage moment in the culture I'm talking about. Before that, various local sects or versions of Christianity were pretty different from one another and before the 1890s, not politically especially unified. At least half of the evangelical sects, for instance, embraced evolutionary theory, and any given one could range all over the place regarding, for instance, socialism.

To back up a little farther, I'm not talking about the larger institutions of Baptist and Presbyterians, but much smaller and sometimes even single-county denominations with all sorts of names, and some even simply going by "non-denominational." A feature which actually got right up the nose of the established churches of the Deep South was these groups' intense regard for evangelicals, distinctly not trained reverends or pastors, who served as social glue and political organizers across the landscape. We're not even really talking about the Deep South, but what Colin Woodard calls Greater Appalachia, with a completely different ethnic group (Ulster Scot) and settlement history. In the 1880s, much of this area developed a distinctive political unity based on rural priorities and religious language called populism.

Which brings up an important point, both for populism and the later narrowing of the diverse doctrines into The Fundamentals: why don't such people simply hang out on their hillsides, tend their goats or whatever, and love God? As members of the larger society might stress, by themselves. And the answer is that it's not just "religion." They have a specific and crucial relationship to the larger society: it has impinged upon them and threatens how they do things, most especially how they teach their children, and imposing limitations and options they see - often correctly - as abusive. The culture of fundamentalism is deeply defensive and draws upon religious education as its primary organizing issue for political ends the people see as survival.

Doctrinally, they're retro-purists. As the quote from Shahida says, the doctrinal points and perceived directives aren't literally originalist one bit - they're constructed in isolation by people who really need to validate something that's already important to them, to find themselves in it, and to find a voice for that thing they consider dreadfully important - "our way of life." It's best paraphrased as, my grandappy did it this way, and that's evidence sure enough that it's the old, right, and original way.

So, about that D&D thing
Not everyone bought into the orthodoxy as it developed throughout the 80s. People who cut their teeth in the rough and tumble of the initial standalone complex days knew bloody well how to play this game, with "this" meaning at their table, and thought little of such imposed pretensions of the Forgotten Realm novels. Some games ran continuously from the early days, others were begun in a repetition of the "found object" phase, and still others were based on the Mentzer boxed sets, thus obviously negating the whole idea of the one true orthodoxy in the first place. I wouldn't be surprised if such groups numbered in the single-digit thousands across the U.S. throughout the eighties, but it is also possible that the social marginalizing of D&D hit some of them pretty hard, especially if they were isolated. I don't mean dismissal of geekery, but rather genuine societal attack including deprogramming and forcing kids to burn their books. The surviving non-orthodox D&D groups, already very local and not necessarily connected to one another, may have become a very underground and even more fragmented culture indeed.

Now what about the OSR? It's young, as a designated thing - as recent as 2008. Why, if these groups have been both continously present and constantly being created throughout the whole history? Perhaps, as I mentioned in the orthodoxy essay, since 2000, TSR institutional orthodoxy is not as powerful as it used to be. Perhaps TSR is now better understood to be one among many, with no special authority, dethroning it effectively. The OSR play-groups and games seem to me to be really important manifestations of these phenomena, effectively new institutions or at least acknowledged bodies of practice that don't have to be TSR. 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. I get that. But my 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.

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 in the case of the OSR, that continued regard or context persists in their continued insistence on beleaguered defiance.

I might even reach a few centuries further back for some of what's going on now. If the OGL-D20-3.0-3.5-Pathfinder events are roughly analogous to the 16th-century Protestant Reformation, with 3.0's somewhat retro Chainmail orientation being quickly lost and Pathfinder being its sanded-off counter-revolution to be the new orthodox (and understandably more orthodox than thou, re: TSR). During the real Reformation, original Lutheranism and Anglicanism had no intention of being sociopolitically different from Roman Catholicism, they simply didn't want to pay any taxes to it or acknowledge its secondary texts affording it supreme authority. However! In all the ruckus, every little local malcontent group to pop up with radical social plans and a "this is how we've always done it" allegedly Protestant sect of its own.

A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming is available at lulu.com. It might be sort of similar - I do not claim identity - with The Fundamentals. The main similarity seems to me to be projecting one's own well-developed ideal c. 2005 back into the depths of history, specifically the invention of an "OD&D" of which there was manifestly no such thing. Instead of actually remembering and recapitulating any such play, "OD&D" means play that honors texts which preceded the onset of the orthodoxy and which does not commit to its pedagogy or its financial expectations. As such, the sector of gamers who find the Quick Primer exciting have found a means to evolve an identity in an oppositional relationship to that orthodoxy.

I don't mean to paraphrase or judge the Quick Primer here. I will try to phrase my perception of some of the key concepts of this identity.

All instructions are to be literal, and all effects of applying them are to be emergent - never ever mention them. The ongoing context of play is to know (understand) what the revered text must have been aiming at, and it's wrong to invent what you might be aiming at.

I'll take up the agreed-upon basics of play from fine-grained to coarse-grained, in layers.

1. Moment to moment mechanics: the familiar terminology of armor class, experience points, money, hit points, spell slots, and saving throws (blunt-object task rolls) at most. These are expected to interplay with circumstances, color, and spoken content without a hitch.

2. A covert layer composed of determining "what a character can do at this moment," the ongoing specification and trimming of rules, whether textual or original - none more so than alignment - this is where groups frequently break down, historically, and is typically far better designed and handled among OSR games.

3. Higher-level mechanics: levels, lives, identity, characters, and I think saving throws are more at this level than at #1. These interplay with personal social status, expectations of fantastic content and long-term outcomes, hopes for the fates of characters, and since I must mention it, Creative Agenda.

As far as I can tell, both Gamism and Narrativism are alive and well in vibrant, often strange colors, but always within the strange presumption that Agenda magically emerges from "simulatory" mechanics. The Gamism may draw upon the legacy from tourney play, especially the idea of the DM as referee; the Narrativism seems to be greatly valued in some cases as long as no one ever says they want it or, gag and spit, plan it.

I am reminded of the 1978 subcultural moment of drawing mainly on tournament play but with the textual presumption of a world to roam in - what you might think of as "Playing the Lord of Rings with the rules for getting through the Mines of Moria." A certain range seems to have developed among OSR games and discussions which can permit utterly taped problem-dungeon crisis play and still call it a sandbox as long as there are two entrances, but is aversive toward any sense of a saga-in-action as a planned or even desired event ... although it's valued as an outcome.

(I am struggling to suppress my own snottiness here. There is much talk of old grognards rising from the depths to bring their real-life Old School knowledge to the scene, and as an older gamer myself with plenty of actual D&D from the late 70s under my belt, I find it galling to be instructed on originalist doctrine from someone who encountered the game at all in the mid-80s.)

Let me stress how idiosyncratic, passionate, and imaginative OSR play is, and how thoroughly festive it can be about diminishing, ignoring, expanding, and introducing new things to the rules featured in the text of interest to a particular game. Talking about it to someone committed to the originalism is hard though, as the aforementioned defensiveness can kick in with the "I know what I know, don't confuse me with the facts" response. Still, where they claim fundamentalist commitment, I see genuine personal stamp, innovations, and understandable goals. OSR play and games are astronomically more functional than these were 'way back when - degree of constructive and individualized interpretation and use of all the layers is more skilled and more socially supported, therefore results in much more well-designed engines at each table.

They write good games.

Spectrum
What is the role in the new internet world and the emergent multiple-website role-playing community. Remember, they could have stayed on their hillsides and loved God all by themselves, but this is politics, and should be understood as such. I have no intention of fully describing the range of the OSR, and none at all of judging them individually. This a light sweep of some of the diversity, relative to the fundamentalist principles I've outlined above.

At the intellectual, even clinical end, I see Geoffrey McKinney's Carcosa, which is the closest thing I've found to gaming time-travel to the 1974 texts and Blackmoor-style spirit of play. It's probably the most literally fundamentalist of the lot, i.e. textually pure, although it's the least in ideological terms. McKinney's work doesn't care to represent anything but itself and has no evangelist qualities and very little devoted activist presence.

Jim Raggi's Lamentations of the Flame Princess is also knowledgeable and honest about its textual model (Mentzer D&D). He knows what he's working from to produce intelligent fundamentalism: holding tight to the ideal (productive myth?) of terraforming the original text and perhaps clinging to the "you can do anything with it" ideal, but he's not textually confused and the personal stamp is wholly his - you could say this is what Mentzer would have been if it had been Jim's game. And it is his. The biggest elephant is making Summon (yes, the demon one) a 1st level spell, but there are actually dozens of synergistic tweaks throughout the text, and also, consistency and clarity in the two weakest elements of that D&D's design: alignment and criteria for experience. It's not actual loyalty to Mentzer as a text, it's identification with it, such that that text is the language in which Jim learned to say what he wanted - or to encounter barriers against saying it. I think my analysis is consistent with his website text which does acknowledging the game as OSR but distances it from being locked down to that designation or limited to that audience.

From these I move on to other sites and publications to see more emphasis on social identity and "we're all OSR here. When I look at Fight On!, I see the various contributions for gaming range all over the map, but they almost always bear a recursive validating property, such that to write and submit them, and to read them, constitutes a confirmation of "us." The Dragonsfoot forum seems to be a more internety expression of that same thing, with less in terms of practical contributions but a whole lot of confirmatory identity.

As a quick look at other sites which seem to me to be analogous more to the evangelist role, I see Jeff's Gameblog, Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque, and Grognardia, all displaying intense intellectualism despite claims to "not take this seriously," and a curious focus on how OSR thinking and playing can provide that other games can't. It's much like so-called "Bible study," which is much less about actually studying the book and more about local authority, construction of a shared narrative, and even social enforcement in some cases.

Passions
Man alive, there is so much passion involved in OSR play, it's heady. Despite various criss-crossing accusations of being too extreme, they're all over the top! OK, to take it to the religious analogy, let's say you're a typical Orthodox Catholic member, with little major commitment and you've perfectly worked out your local variant which pays money and lip-service to the big Church ... now go into any one of these places and you will be in that Pentecostal tent or that Baptist snake-handler cabin or that backwoods non-LDS Mormon place ... and you'll say without irony or intended pun, Holy fucking Jesus, who are these people and what do they think they're doing? Never mind that they'll tell you "we're nothing like those people" regarding one another; to you, they are all one big family of Passionately Weird.

Another passion manifests fully socially and politically: they band together with ferocity against the enemy. Again in the religious analogy, in in religious fundamentalism, it's modernity: tits on TV, my kids will be immoral and have sex with the (cough, black) wrong people, and all this modern stuff is ruining what matters.

Why hate D&D3 so much? Especially since 3E's Player Handbook is actually pretty old-school at its core, with Chainmail as the model, although its DM Guide is disappointingly orthodox. I think the problem is that it's still TSR, still official, still reeking of the imprimature of power and the expectations of being uncritically adopted. Fundamentalism can't stand this - claiming this brand-new thing is really the same old rightest-mostest way, indeed! Such claims are nothing less than betrayal, and quite likely evidence of outright heresy infecting its infrastructure. It's drawing upon one's local knowledge that this wasn't really D&D, thus rage that someone is profiting off it and using "its good name," falsely and unrighteously in power. Such responses can also tap into geek solidarity on steroids, despite differences in local details which otherwise would be grounds for feuds and duels.

It's related as well to "the book doesn't tell me what to do," arising out of defiance of the orthodoxy's grip on publishing and pedagogy, and retroactively making a virtue out of the earlier texts' incoherence which they associate with their own locally coherent play experiences.

Why the active fear of TSR and legal assault on their use of the OGL? Again, it's the classic take on local originalist vs. malevolent orthodoxy, which simply can't be trusted. Who cares what the OGL says and how diligently you observe its details - the fuckers will get you, just see if they don't.

I need not ask about the hatred for Vampire and all things White Wolf. Not only is it yet more of the same orthodoxy, but shorn of its Christianity, so to speak. So this is the very thing that orthodoxy had opened the door to (in its failure of faith and vision, just like we said!), and my God, look what they're doing over there as well (LARPing) - sure enough, it's not even role-playing!!. Add to that the Wolf's admittedly obnoxious announcement and claim to be the One New Way, and the fundamentalist response is clear: you fuckers.

The fundamentalist solution to the moral failure and turpitude and historical corruption of TSR is radical reform (with them in charge) to bring D&D as they see it into cultural ascendancy, not its replacement by this ... this Islam!

And on grounds that I can easily relate to, this accords with their total aversion to role vs. roll, artsiness, inventing new words for shit (people skilled in Bible study do not like people who use other, different big words), and above all, new pedagogies. The tragedy here is that "story" has become their evolution - it goes back to Dragonlance and the orthodoxy certainly, but especially in this ten-times-worse heathen form. I suspect this is what "sandbox" really means: anything that isn't railroaded Forgotten Realms or Vampire.

That, finally, explains many OSR participants' otherwise bizarre anger with the Forge. It is artsy, perceived as improv theater, pretentious ... basically all the rage at White Wolf transferred over probably on the basis of my perceived devotion to "story." It's manifestly without substance - both my games and my ideas were the nastiest kick in the groin that the WW subculture ever received - but I was new, from "out there," manifestly not a (cough, real Christian) D&Der, and used big words they didn't know. They had a slot all ready for the Forge to fit into - obviously yet another one who thinks he's better than them - the fucker! Again, it's pretty tragic, really - there's nothing to Gamism or Narrativism beyond what most OSR groups are doing with great verve.

I actually had a preview of this during the site's early days, in the person of Peter Seckler, one of the originally most committed and excited participants there, but who threw a monstrous fit over one poster's disparagement of "D&D hack and slash" and then devoted years to slagging the site on grounds which as far as I can tell resembled a schizophrenic break.

At the larger level, OSR-Forge make a perfect match when it comes to independent publishing. I perceive the Forge and myself specifically as anarchic in the sense of that precise same time period (about 1900), and maybe the historical analogy is sound, again: that fundamentalists find anarchists appalling, "is nothing sacred to you people" - and their problem with the focus on social and purposeful functionality is not those things actually, but rather talking about them openly

The OSR discourse is certainly admirably feisty and sincere, but it's also full of pitfalls. It's so easy to become defined by your anger and to confound it with your passion. At their worst, fundamentalists don't argue to learn or synthesize, they argue to be right (note: I'm talking about discourse, remember, I'm saying they do learn and synthesize re: play and design). They don't do "nuance," nuance is for weasels. Whatever anyone says inflicts a genuine wound, leading to a constant state of butthurt characterized by retaliation. Every logical fallacy is hurled willy nilly: ad hominem, straw man, ad baculum, ad historium ... and the ever-present chance of an apparently homicidal rage attack, which unfortunately is known and often instigated by secondary participants who love a good internet scuffle.

I'm quite thankful that I can't imagine a gaming equivalent of what happened historically to the groups I'm talking about during WWII and the early Cold War, when they shed their kissing-maybe relations with the Labor Movement entirely and became the useful idiots of the military-industrial complex, the Libertarians, and the AEAE (later renamed AEI).

It seems instead the OSR will remain much as they are - and I'm here to say, you go, guys.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Very good, I continue liking this series. Now we should just get some fundamentalists here to discuss your analysis, somehow. I don't unfortunately know that many of them, which admittedly might be because people don't seem to stay very fundamentalist very long when they hang out with me for any appreciable period of time :D

It might be interesting to note that I found the Old School Primer somewhat constraining and unnecessarily stuffy when I read it, the comparison to fundamentalist Christianity fits very well in that regard. I can imagine that if I were some brand of Christian, I might relate to an eager evangelical sect in the same way I relate to the Old School Primer: it gets a majority of the fundamentals (heh heh) right, yet doesn't go very far into the implications, and it has some strange ideas about e.g. how traps should be found and handled. Still an useful work in the gamut of instructive texts (and much superior to almost everything TSR ever published), even if I wouldn't want to underwrite it as is myself.

As for the wider OSR, my view largely agrees with yours: the bloggers and publishers you mention, and many more, are bringing amazing energy and unique insight into the tradition of D&D writing, they're pushing the envelope in quite exciting ways. As I've said, my own inspiration for doing D&D over the last few years has largely been because I've found that I can take the OSR corpus of writing and utilize it to create a monster of a gamist game, the best one I've ever seen. (Whether that game is something new, as Ron insists, or merely one possible interpretation within the variety of D&D implementations is secondary to the point that I'm taking influence from both the OSR and old "original" D&D culture.) What I've been doing lately would not have been possible e.g. 10 years back for me, simply because the prominent TSR material doesn't have the clarity and ambition, and without the recent scholarship I'd never have discovered the esoteric "good stuff" (constructive reading of the '74 rules texts, the pre-Dragonlance adventure module tradition, Judge's Guild, Geoffrey O'Dale's Inferno and so on) from the '70s.

[Ron Edwards]

One vocabulary note might matter for non-native English speakers.

Bible Study is a popular activity in non-mainstream American Protestantism, consisting of discussion groups who seek to understand the relevance of specific, often brief text passages to modern life. It borders on divination, based on the idea that the book provides "messages" through looking at passages in a way that any other text could not do. Leaders of such discussions are primed with extremely distinctive and prepared interpretations in order to keep the participants on-message in political terms.

Biblical Studies or more generally, Religious Studies, is an academic discipline and often the title of the beginning course in variously named undergraduate majors within that discipline. Although typically uncommitted in terms of belief, and although often taught by people with training and credentials in religious hierarchies, these courses are primarily deconstructive, opening with the idea of multiple, historically layered, and successively revisionist authors for the first five books of the Hebrew Bible (the Pentateuch), and go on from there to such topics as why certain books are included or not included across the range of Judaism and Christianity, or the history of Hell as a textual subject, and the historical perspective on the order and authorship of the parts of the New Testament.

People who have participated in Bible Studies in their home communities who then to go to college and naively sign up for Biblical Studies courses routinely undergo a profound shock, to the extent that the texts for the latter usually begin with an extensive exercise to highlight the difference between the two.

[Ian Charvill]

My recollection of D&D play in the early 80's was that it was fairly heterodox.  I learned to play via Mentzer, Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks, and White Dwarf.  On Holiday in around '84 - '85 I met another kid who gamed and after about ten minutes of conversation it was apparant that outside of the words "Dungeons and Dragons" our games have nothing in common.  We ended up flying a kite instead.

What's interesting about the Old School Primer is that it's presenting a monoliothic "way that we played" when no such thing existed: it is inventing a way to play D&D, not reviving one.  The OSR post-dates The Forge but treats its output as new-fangledness.

Ian

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Ian!

I agree: that original heterodoxy, or more accurately multiple cargo cults based off widely differing found items, is really important to investigate. There were unifiers, but they operated strictly among pre-internet social and communication systems: RPGA, the military bases, Alarums & Excursions, the alcoves within more general game stores with a knowledgeable staff member, Dragon Magazine. They should be understood as throughways and overlays on top of what was, in a given spot, either a local oral tradition based on very limited available materials), or (as in my case) a cornucopia of small-press multiple-publisher titles which itself showcased that D&D was only one of many.

You've read A hard look at Dungeons & Dragons, right? This series of religion-analogy threads is pretty much the sequel to it. And a lot of scholarship and reminders have provided me with a better text summary too, which I'm trying to work up as a diagram. (Geez, I had completely forgotten that cover to Eldritch Wizardry ...)

[Ron Edwards]

I have found that whatever dog I had in the D&D culture-wars died long ago, not even leaving nostalgia. So my interest here is the same anarchic intellectualism and publishing-activism from the Forge. I want D&D as a concept neither to be pilloried nor romanticized, and I want game design designated D&D or D&D-like to be free as a bird, and I want game design that isn't D&D or D&D-like to be able to draw upon historical content and lessons of any kind. I want even TSR's D&D to be "just another" D&D.

I'm playing some D&D now, probably to Moreno's outright horror, to engage with whatever might have been written or is being done at those tables that I might learn from.

Although what you're pointing out is indeed an intellectual blind spot, it's also an energizer, and fortunately, the Primer isn't as pervasive an identity-maker as The Fundamentals was a century ago. Judging by the games, springboarding away from it is at least as common as adhering to it. The energy is generally accompanied by laser-like design sensibilities, which seem capable of producing immense clarity even from within the blind spot.

Currently, I'm enjoying reading David Morrison's Renegade - yet again, the tweaks and specifications produce an incredibly clear directive on how we play and why, completely absent from the overall multifarious but locally limited, partly networked but locally dogmatic play from around 1980.

How blind it really is, on an individual basis, seems to be wide open. I know Geoff McKinney, Jim Raggi, and Jeff Rients aren't Forge-haters or whatever you want to call it. (And I don't know David Morrison, or anything about his perspective and views.) However, regarding the rhetoric and reactions across OSR sites and magazines, I'm still bummed about "story" being their evolution (hssss!) and "GNS" being their immoral sex (gah! don't do it! don't talk about it!). Even if specific individuals aren't stressed about these two topics, the analogies are depressingly exact when it comes to the mutually reinforced opinions in discussions.

Best, Ron

[James_Nostack]

The trigger warning, "Not Insulting," may be the funniest thing I've seen on the internet this month.

I would point out that the OSR is historically contingent on three things.

(1) Gygax died in March 2008, leading to a mild amount of media coverage, but enough to make everyone who remembers the 1970's and '80's era of D&D play feel nostalgic for those days.  Lots of middle aged men suddenly felt curious about something that was a huge part of their youth and had been put aside.

(2) Long-tail PDF / POD sites had made the editions of D&D from the 1970's and 1980's available again, cheaply, to people who either had never seen the stuff, or who hadn't taken a fresh look at it in 25 years. 

(3) In mid-2008 Wizards of the Coast was releasing D&D 4e.  (The introduction of 4e did far more to grow the OSR than 3e ever did.)  The roll-out here was very badly handled, infuriating many fans of the Third Edition.  A lot of OSR-types saw 4e as WOTC giving up any pretense of "legitimate" D&D.  This is all identity politics, of course, but I do think there's some objective truth to it: just compare magic items Core 4e with, say, 2e to see what I mean (or the 1e mosnter manual with the 4e version). 

I have more to say but a lot to do this weekend.

[Moreno R.]

As far as I know there was a fourth important factor: some years ago WotC STOPPED selling the pdfs of the original editions. So there was this bait-and-switch, first the very old editions were made legally available in pdf, encouraging people to read (again or for the first time) these books (and creating a market for gaming modules compatible with "old school roleplaying" (or any other way to say "old D&D" without getting a letter from WotC lawyers), then they were taken away.
The very first retro-clones were created as a legal fiction, to be able to publish these modules writing on the cover that they were compatible with "this thing", but after that they became the only legally available rules systems for that kind of play.  And so began the publications of retro-clones that didn't try anymore to be an exact copy of D&D, but more personal variants instead.

All this rewriting of the same game trying to be "more the same as possible" reminded me of a old Borges story I did read years ago...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the_Quixote

[Marshall Burns]

Aside from a brief stint into what I think (I had no clue what the rules were or when/if they were being used) was 3.something in college, and various computer games that kinda-sorta adapted D&D, I hadn't played any kind of D&D until very recently. Here's kinda how that went:

The first time I read the Old School Primer, I scratched my head pretty much the whole way through. (Now, I just sigh at how spectacularly it fails to communicate the state of the art in OSR play.)

I picked up OSRIC and Swords & Wizardry to try to figure out what this OSR business was about, and I still didn't get it. I bought LotFP when the grindhouse edition came out because it was getting a lot of buzz from people whose opinions I respected. I thought the general attitude and perspective of it was really cool, but I didn't see a meaningful difference between it and frex S&W (I know now that the most interesting differences between LotFP and other D&Dalikes are not matters of addition, but _omission_. I wasn't versed well enough in the D&D language to spot these omissions and understand their implications), and still didn't really get the whole thing.

Philotomy's OD&D Musings (I was going to link it, but the original site seems to be gone) was something that kept me from turning away from OSR stuff completely. It was a very practical, practice-oriented look at OD&D play that reduced it down to a very accessible gaminess, and used that as the reference point for all the techniques it talked about.

From there, I bought the PDFs of the original three little brown pamphlets (like a week before WotC went nuts and pulled all their PDFs ever). It took a looooong time to make sense of them, because they're poorly organized, because I was prejudiced about things like AC and HP, and because the books were trying to describe this weird game that they didn't really have the language for yet.

When I finally got past all that, though, I thought that there was definitely a game in there that I would totally play. And it was startlingly blatantly gamey -- not simulation (small s, in the sense used in video game jargon) AT ALL -- for instance, it's in the rules that doors in the dungeon will always need to be forced open by the party (requiring a roll), yet enemies can always open them without difficulty. And of course I realized that much of the rules were _so vague_ that you have no choice but to fill in the blanks with your own interpretation to be able to play at all (frex: how exactly do hit dice work? How much XP do you get for defeating a monster? There's no direct explanation; you can only infer). I understood immediately how the cargo cult situation could happen.

But all of this material I had read kind of flocculated and coalesced in my head, and I realized that any possible individual interpretation of the vagaries of that text was potentially valid and functional. Given a) a DM with a coherent vision and the wherewithal to know that, what, how, and why he was interpreting things in certain ways, and b) players who were willing to defer to that DM's interpretations, play could proceed smoothly*. What I realized was that the core Challenge of the game was not a matter of tactical math or system mastery, but a game of "X, Y, and Z are true. Try to find a way to turn that to your advantage" where the math often needn't even enter into the picture (maybe even to the point that, if the math does get involved, you've kinda screwed up somewhere).

This is the true meaning of Christma-- I mean of "rulings, not rules." The process of discovering what is true, so you can try to figure out how to turn that to your advantage, is a matter of engaging almost (almost, mind you) directly with Situation and Color, rather than first engaging with numbers and procedures that must be interpreted _into_ Situation and Color. I'm not saying that this is somehow "purer" roleplaying (I know people that do make that claim, but it's silly) -- I'm just trying to explain that, as long as everyone groks that this is what's happening, and within a framework where players can always say "ok, forget this dungeon, we're going somewhere else" (a commonly-held tenet among various interpretations of  "sandbox" play), this is a perfectly functional procedure with any DM that isn't setting out to outright fuck over the players.

Yes, this does imply that every group is playing a different game based on the tenor of their DM, and an individual group may even be playing a different game each session, depending on where their DM's head is at. But when this is acknowledged and accepted, it isn't a problem. Even a cursory look at the OSR blogosphere (which is more interesting and useful than most of the proper texts, for my money) will show that this is acknowledged and accepted, even encouraged and celebrated -- they revel in the diversity, and, fuck, why wouldn't they? There are so many DMs out there with wildly different and pretty damn cool ideas, and the terminology and rules of various versions of D&D serve as reference points and a sort of lingua franca. They are recreating the cargo cult dynamic, but with communication, and to their advantage. And they go all the way with it; frex FLAILSNAILS, a community of several different (vastly different) online games, where players are free to play the same characters in all the different worlds, even if they really don't belong there (and now suddenly this knight in Medieval England has a thermonuclear device that he found on a UFO in this other universe, shortly before losing an arm in fantasy Colonial America).

I'm not sure if I have an overall point or not, but that was how my courtship with the OSR went, and that's why I played my own interpretation of the LBBs with my friends, and why I'm designing my own little OSR-compatible universe that I hope to get involved in FLAILSNAILS.

*I am assuming a Gamist engine of play here -- specifically a process of negotiating a hostile environment, assessing and comparing risk and reward, and strategizing to minimize effective risk while maximizing reward -- based on the play structure and  system support I perceive in that original text. I don't doubt that people did and do use the system (or at least its framework and language) to engage in Narrativist play. I just have no clue how.

[glandis]

So I've posted before (at the Forge?) about the craving for a "unified" D&D play experience, and I 100% remember caring about that, anticipating things in AD&D to help with that, and being disappointed when things didn't work out that way.  I assume that sort of craving is part of what paved the way to the orthodoxy. And yet ...

In recently reviewing a bunch of the old modules (a lot of Judge's Guild stuff), I also remembered something else - that it was sometimes no big deal to just adjust your play to whatever was being run. Tegel Manor was D&D meets House on Haunted Hill? OK, we can do that. The Maltese Clue has a Ranger named Sam "Spade" Lonetree? We sorta understand/can do noirish stuff. The deadly puzzles of the Fez tourneys? OK, we'll die if we're not smart - we're all smart, aren't we (maybe not as smart as we thought)? It seems inconsistent, but despite agonizing over the one right way, there was also joy at doing it in many different ways.

I remember having a kinda-strong, particular, locally-adapted style to D&D play by the early 80's - and being unhappy when "official" D&D RPGA went another way.  BUT - even through that, RPG play in general did include more than just TSR D&D, and (maybe - I'm trying this out) if it wasn't mainline-TSR D&D - or if it was TSR, but not-D&D (EPT, Metamorphosis Alpha, Boot Hill) - that was easier (so TSR ending the "official" endorsement of non-TSR modules may have HELPED spread alternate play styles).

So - heterodoxy AND orthodoxy? People switching back and forth between multiple cargo cults? I know I wasn't alone amongst players I knew at the time in this experience. Some ended up going down the orthodox TSR path, others just left, some I kept playing all kinds of odd bits for a while, others I have no idea about. But I think some of the pre-internet "unifiers" (Lou Zocchi's catalogs, Judge's Guild, magazines and mailed advertisements of various sorts) actually generated exposure to variety more than they unified. What's High Fantasy? Let's order it. What's this Chivalry & Sorcery thing the local hobby shop (no such thing as a "game shop") put in with the AD&D stuff? Someone buy it and we'll check it out.

Maybe this wasn't widespread. Maybe you needed to hit D&D at just the right point - not too early, or you invest entirely in it, not too late, where it "learned" to keep you better in line, but at an awkward, some-experimentation already, there are other things out there stage of it's development. Hmm - is Metamorphosis Alpha (1976) maybe a key here? Or Empire of the Petal Throne (1975)? Did early exposure to these help encourage heterodoxy?

All right, enough already, I'm rambling. This odd conflict between craving unified D&D and adapting to play all kinds of stuff is what I want to put on the table here.

[Marshall Burns]

Addendum to prevent further nose-beverage-spewage (thanks Ron):
I'm not suggesting that my post describes how 1970s D&D went down, only how modern play using interpretations/derivations of the LBBs goes down. I have no doubt that the whole OSR thing is entirely a modern animal. I mostly wanted to attempt to describe how its widespread usage of resolution-by-fiat can be (in direct contrast to most other instances of that technique) functional and valid.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Gordon,

The trouble with the term heterodoxy is that the phenomenon cannot exist without an orthodoxy in place, so what we need is a term for the pre-orthodoxy situation. I can't find it in religious studies text - for example, what "Christianity" looked like during the 2nd century CE ... especially because it wasn't necessarily (or at all?) called by that name during that time, most of it was simply spreading like wildfire through grassroots mechanisms with piecemeal content, because there was no compiled Bible at that point (but a ton of widely-read documents in various configurations), and as we now know, composed of incredible content-diversity ranging from "Yahweh is God, awesome" to "Yahweh is a son of a bitch impostor."

Just like there wasn't any conceptually-unified "Gnosticism" until a particular set of assumptions was tagged as non-orthodox, after the institutional orthodoxy gained genuine power (i.e. the Judaic-Christian power politics in 3rd-century CE Rome). And interestingly, at that point, the orthodoxy was forced to include certain texts which were grossly obviously invested in those assumptions simply because they'd taken solid root in various areas the orthodoxy now claimed. That's how the John gospel got in there at all, and significantly, a fair amount of what was published under the name of Paul.

Marshall: noted!

Best, Ron

[glandis]

Hi Ron,

Acknowledging up front that trying to shoehorn my particular experience into your - analogy? observation of parallels? - is neither necessary nor important to the general value here, two things come to mind:

First is simply the word "eclectic" as a description - though a quick google search doesn't find "eclecticism" used very widely in historical religious studies (more used by modern folk trying to be religious and not at the same time). Again, I hasten to add that a craving for orthodoxy was right there as well, but ... let me move on.

Second is looking at the pre-Orthodox days of D&D as like the early days of Christianity. We'd have to look (I think) at the main context D&D arises from as miniature and hex-and-chit wargaming (flavors of Temple Judaism?), with lesser-but-present influences like Leiber's Lahkmar wargame/Nehwon stories (all the way back in the 30's!) and Stafford/MAR Barker gaming/world-building (Zoroastrian? Roman ancestor/pantheon?)  All the cultural identification stuff that later happens within D&D happens as RPG vs. "real" gaming, especially at conventions, and I have no problem believing that some of the early tournament dungeons were partially driven by the desire to more closely match the expectations of wargaming (Judaic vs. non-Judaic spread of Christianity?) I'm not sure how to look at how the consequences of the early struggles of D&D - as allied with/opposed to/supported by/supportive of (etc?) wargaming - resonate with developments in the later time you're looking at. But it does seem almost frighteningly possible to find such resonance.

Anyway - point taken about heterodoxy not being really applicable without the established orthodoxy, but maybe early D&D was heterodox vs. the (not really unified, with hex-and-chit vs. miniatures) orthodoxy of wargaming (represented by SPI/AH - and was there a dominant miniature gaming company back then?) Not so sure that's a great fit, but maybe. I certainly remember D&D and wargaming as sorta the "same religion" in the early days, though eventually it became clear D&D was a new thing of its own (Christianity distinguishing itself from Judaism and other more-minor influences?)

-Gordon

PS - Man, this way of thinking is like an earworm! Compare the sale of TSR to the purchase - BY TSR - of SPI. The page with Costikyan's "A Farewell to Hexes" (http://www.costik.com/spisins.html) is also titled (if you look at the browser bar) "SPI Died for Your Sins"...

[Ron Edwards]

Hey, I try not to overdevelop the analogy, but you're right that it's both tempting and all-too-often confirming. At which point I look in the mirror, say, "You're making shit up again," and go do something else, pretending that it all didn't make such sense for a bit there.

I appreciate your points about settings, and also, it would certainly be unfair to exclude Tekumel from this history, which I did.

As for the phase I'm talking about, I recall very clearly that the phrase most often used was "fantasy wargaming," referring specifically to this new play-our-characters activity, not merely to wargaming with fantasy pieces (like White Bear and Red Moon).

Best, Ron

[Judd]

Interesting stuff, Ron.

Your timing is good. I borrowed a copy of the shiny new Lamentation of the Flame Princess Rules & Magic hardcover to take with me on a trip this week. After reading it on the train for a while, I was hooked and picked up a remaining copy of the grindhouse boxed set and got in with the Ref Book indie go go. I'm excited to play it, which is odd for me, as I never thought an game pulling from those mechanical sources would interest me.

Looking back on James' blog, I found this:
http://lotfp.blogspot.com/2010/12/lotfps-ultra-concise-guide-to-universal.html?zx=b1c9036e150aca9c

Which is pretty much how I have set up games with any degree of success since I can remember. It is nice to find techniques in common.

I find the online rifts between OSR and indie folks vexing. Just as James says that you can't find a singular OSR, I roll my eyes into the back of my head every time I see an OSRish blog post or G+ thread where some Story Games thread and use it as a tool to paint all indie RPGers as whatever this or whatever that. Rather than get involved in that crap, I try to keep my head down and stay away from the mess, maybe post some Actual Play as that is what Reverend Forge taught me at those tent revivals back in the early years of this century.

I was talking to Thor and he mentioned how much he loved reading Playing at the World and how these arguments over game mechanics and how they turn into identity politics has been going on for a very very long time.

edited to alter title for merge purposes - RE