Sense of History

[Doctor Xero]

As we analyze RPG theory and discuss and debate the current trends, I think it is helpful to remember that those past trends people sometimes merrily condemn had their reasons for existing.  They may not give us what we want now, but they gave people what they wanted them or at least came closer than what had preceded them.  I think it's important we spend more time learning from the past than we spend disrespecting it.

Chris, with regards to D&D and the Golden Rule, I think that it's primarily in response to the rhetoric of Gygax in first edition that the golden rule started appearing. That is, in first edition AD&D, Gygax said in no uncertain terms that if you altered the rules that were presented, that you were no longer playing AD&D. This was important at the time because of the whole convention tournament. For those who may not have ever played in one, these were very gamist events where the players who did best in purely gamist terms won prizes. It was very important at that time that there be "official" rules of how to play, or you couldn't compare sessions fairly.

Well, as everyone knows, AD&D is not without its flaws as a system, and everyone ignored the prohibition against changing the rules. "So I'm not playing AD&D according to Gygax, so what?" In fact there were some rather flamey folks who took outright outrage at the idea that they couldn't alter the rules, and who vehemently rejected the idea. Most importantly, anyone who wanted to make their own RPG - read version of D&D - was almost certainly revolting against the idea that Gygax had things right.

Soon the notion became that not only was it wrong for a designer to say that you had to play by his rules, but it became a "feature" of most games that they would say somewhere in the text that they expected you to alter the game. And most took it to a further extreme saying that "no system is perfect, if something doesn't work, play the story not the rules."

Note the slight difference there. One says that it's OK to alter the rules (which I find merely unneccessary). The second tells the players that it makes sense merely to drop the rules whenever the GM thinks that they should drop the rules (all of these games also say that the GM is final arbiter, so obviously only he has the authority to OK any such change - though a player might propose one.

By the '90s, it became obligatory to have some text like this. Wordings vary, depending on how "Story" driven the game is. The more story-oriented the system was, the more they tended to suggest ignoring the rules.

This is precisely the "System Doesn't Matter" approach talking. Only a good GM can know how to keep a game on an even keel, and the rules shall not hamper him. Because the idea of rules that actually support story was absent. Indeed they mostly did just interfere with what all of the narrativism folks out there wanted.

And what all the simulationism folks wanted as well.

Remembering as best I can to those halcyon days (I was on their tail end but I heard a lot of war stories from the RPG veterans of the day), I think the attitude at the time was this :

game mechanics are written for the combat and competition elements (what

Forgite terminology would label "gamist"),

and the game master position exists for the story elements (what Forgian terminology would lable "simulationist" or "narrativist" depending upon its focus).
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This attitude makes a great deal of sense, really, from the perspective that game mechanics function only for the combat/competition elements and that game mechanics can never truly function for the storytelling aspects other than acknowledging game master authority.

It fits in with the tendency of books of that era to reference childhood games of "play pretend" such as Cowboys and Bandits, with game mechanics having no function beyond adjudicating who shot whom and all else spontaneously generated from the shared imaginations of the participants.

The more I think about it, the more I realize we should remember this when commenting about games of earlier eras.

Disrespect of the past only leads to ignorance of the past, in my humble opinion.

Doctor Xero

[Sean]

Hi, Doc Xero.

I agree with the attitude you counsel towards early gaming in general.

I do not agree with your characterization of that gaming itself. The 'story provider' idea of the GM was there in the early days, but it was not dominant, against it many of us felt (and I was there, albeit as a kid playing in older people's games) that the GM was a referee or judge (as in Judges' Guild) whose role was to provide (a) challenge or (b) an environment which allowed players to do their own thing more generally. Ron's wonderful 'bass player' analogy for the Narrativist GM actually has its roots in some of the very earliest forms of play, in all three CA: you're the guy that helps the other guys do their thing. As a Gamist GM, you provide a setting with challenges and opportunities to Step on Up and let the players do what they want with it. As a Narrativist GM, you provide bangs, plot twists, intriguing characters, opportunities for interaction, and the like. (My first Narrativist experiences as GM came entirely by accident. I started to let the PCs wander around in cities, and suddenly the tons of NPCs became these incredible hooks - everyone wanted to talk to them, screw them, rescue their children, and do all this other stuff. I wanted to give them what they wanted, so I started developing all my old techniques that a lot of the designers here also developed before they passed me in terms of their conception of what an RPG could be, leaving my formerly cutting-edge self playing catchup. But I digress.) As Simulationist GM, you provide stuff for people to explore, and facilitate their exploration of it. A lot of this play wound up switching from CA to CA, and of course the systems mostly facilitated combat (I won't say Gamism per se), but the idea of a GM as 'storyguide' is really a somewhat later development.

Also, the GM had a specific gamist-relevant duty specified in most texts as well: to provide fair challenges and fair rewards.

Mechanics were mostly introduced on the grounds that they simulated some aspect of the imagined reality. People sometimes realized that certain mechanics were 'fun' whether they simulated anything or not, but that seems to me to be the raison d'etre behind most mechanical innovations one finds in the first few years. I definitely wasn't a designer then, though, so I'm not as sure about that.

With respect to what Mike wrote: Gygax's statements on the subject were self-contradictory. He did say things like "if you altered the rules that were presented, that you were no longer playing AD&D", in one of the lamest editorials ever written in Dragon magazine. On the other hand, in the very opening pages of the original AD&D Player's Handbook, he writes the following: "This game is unlike chess in that the rules are not cut and dried. In many places they are guidelines and suggested methods only. This is part of the attraction of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, and it is integral to the game." And there are places where one can find holdover text/ideas from OD&D where rules-experimentation, if not encouraged, is at least partly expected. But surely we have better things to do at this late date than to debate the proclamations from the Sorcerer's Scroll.

[Doctor Xero]

Sean,

I agree with you overall apropos the challenge function of the game master.

However, if you peruse the gaming magazines and roleplay advice supplements of the late 1970s but especially of the 1980s, you will encounter a large number of articles which suggest that it is the game master not the rules that is the source of any sense of storytelling in the game.  Many an article in Dragon magazine and Fantasy Gamer/Space Gamer and later Shadis as well argue that the game master's role includes providing opportunities for story and mythic experience in spite of game mechanics.

You will find a similar attitude in the introductory sections to the early Champions game and the early Runequest game, to name two off the top of my head.

Doctor Xero

[Sean]

I agree with you that people said things like this from the very beginning. However, the attitude did not become widespread or entrenched until the early eighties, in my experience, and the experience of several others with somewhat different biographies that I respect.

There's a vagueness here in 'early' which is important to keep track of. Champions and Shadis have no relevance to anything I would consider 'early' RPGing, for instance.

To go back to your topic, I think people at the Forge are basically pretty respectful and understanding of the conditions under which old designs were undertaken, but if they aren't, the admonition to be so is useful. Still, by 1976 we already had D&D, Metamorphosis Alpha, Empire of the Petal Throne, Tunnels and Trolls, Bunnies and Burrows, the City State of the Invincible Overlord, Arduin, and numerous groups of quasi-Tolkenian proto-LARPers, all overlapping with the Renfair and SCA crowds. Generalize about what people thought about the goals of mechanical design, and the role of the gamemaster, across these groups if you like, but there was a lot more variety there than a lot of people who weren't around then tend to think.

Design and theory have both developed since then, of course, but general ideas about what gamemasters and designs ought to do were actually somewhat broader early on then they became.