Slate Slams D&D
This is off-topic for this site- true, but most of us have some sort of D&D background. So I thought I’d upset everyone’s morning by linking to this. An overly sensationalistic article that uses the death of Gary Gygax to complain about this “morally reprehensible” game called D&D. The author isn’t a “think of the children/culture war” leftie or rightie – the writer is in fact a bigger geek and RPG fan than most of the geeks who are going to complain about this article. Well, the article is factually true from what I can see. But it does go VERY wrong in a few places. . . .
It’s true that D&D’s experience and character growth system are flawed and based on acts of violence and greed. The best ways to get experience points are to kill monsters and rob their bodies. But Gygax and Arneson didn’t make the game that way to push an agenda. They deserve praise because they were first. The story goes like this (as told to me by Dave Arneson). Gygax and Arneson were friends who were into playing wargames using miniatures and dice. WWII, Napoleonic, the Civil War, that sort of thing. Gygax had the idea one day that his miniature, instead of representing a regiment or group of warriors could represent a single warrior. With every player playing one character, they didn’t need to fight each other. They could fight monsters. They could make the game more personal, more co-operative, and with these decisions, other decisions followed. How do you show growth in your heroes (well, the game is about combat so why not make it about killing monsters?) and why do the adventurers fight? To get gold – why, as the article asks, do orcs have gold when they can’t spend it? Because ancient myths ALWAYS have the monster have a treasure trove and it NEVER makes sense. Even Smaug in the Hobbit slept on untold riches – for no good reason. I can see lowering this charge on D&D if it was the 3rd or 5th role-playing game to come out… but it was the first. The goals weren’t realism then. They were making it up as they went along and it’s not fair to fault what’s first for being weaker than what came after.
If you want to take D&D to task for being first, being the pioneer, then you need to slam “Rock Around the Clock” for the same reason. That song was arguably the first rock n’ roll tune, but compared to the rock that came later, it doesn’t stand up the same way. While you’re at it, Beowulf – the first English epic – doesn’t compare well to Lord of the Rings because Beowulf is rather shallow in the character development and the only theme involves killing a freak with your bare hands. How about the very first films? Action Comics #1 is the first Superhero comic book but, guess what? The Pulitzer Prize winning Maus is much, much better.
Show me something that was first, and I’ll show you something similar only better. It’s a fact of life and of art, and of innovation that things are built upon other things. You can’t, as this article does, fault the first guy to truly innovate in terms of gaming for being “morally reprehensible.” Before D&D there was nothing like this. Gary got there first and that, alone, deserves a degree of celebration.
Having spoken to them in the past, I’m pretty sure the author’s hero Steve Jackson would agree with me. It was Gary Gygax that first taught us to rock around the clock all night – and inspired us to make his game better than he did.
The last mistake the author makes is in forgetting that D&D is an open system. We’ve always been encouraged to add or drop rules. For my own game I created a different experience point system because I didn’t like the one Gygax made. I created a lot of new rules and used D&D as a template.
I haven’t met this author but I think I know him. I’ve pushed past him to do an interview at Gen Con, I’ve rolled my eyes listening to him pontificate in lines, I’ve done my best to ignore him all my life. He’s the Comic Book Guy – always ready to levy unfair critique, piousness, a warped sense of purity, a false sense of logic, and a flair for hyperbole and venom, at anything he smugly feels superior toward. He also likely has a real need for attention. And I just gave him way too much of that.
My bad.
PS: I’ve got a pet peeve. Look, nobody gets to say “without Gary Gygax there’d be no role-playing games!” If you pay attention, you’ll hear garbage like that now and then. Very few things are true leaps and for every visionary there are scores of people with the same vision who have no power to realize it. Gygax gets credit for the same thing Neil Armstrong gets. He was first. And that’s nothing to sneeze at all by itself!
March 11th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
Thank you, Andrew. I was having a hard time coming up with a response to this mental midget that didn’t start out with Dear Elitist Jerk and go straight downhill from there.
It was 1980, and me and three of my best friends were huddled around a table in the Math Lab. We’d spent every lunch hour the last two weeks getting into the nitty-gritty of rolling a d4 and dealing with what was going to come around the corner if you did. It was hard work. We were trying to wrap our heads around a system that made my friend’s Dad and his Slumlord rules for Monopoly look like Dick and Jane and we were totally on our own. There were PAGES of rules and none of them were hard and fast – they all stacked on top of each other affected each other as you played. It seemed maddeningly complicated. we kept going because it tantalized us with glimpses of what would become Nerdvana once we figured it out. But then we found the best rule of all.
On the back of the pamphlet of the first edition Basic set, there is a little box down in the corner. It read something along the lines that if the rules don’t work for you, then change them.
Finding that was a Holy Cow! moment for our group.
That small heresy has turned into one of the most evocative lines in recent history. House rules or some sort of variants were part and parcel of playing games and always have been. And the geekier you are, the more complicated they get. But never before had we ever seen a game that didn’t grudgingly put up with the upstarts and the mis-use of the little metal shoe. D&D invited the players to take that next step and just play the way you wanted. You didn’t have to get it perfect. There was no right or wrong way to do something. The questions changed to things like does everyone agree, or does this make sense.
I don’t think we ever played a supplement straight through as written. That line of carte blanche on top of the already wide-open map creation structure let loose a torrent of creativity in every part of the game gave us thousands of hours of journeying in our own world on our own terms. We didn’t just make our own maps and monsters, we made our own universes.
That freedom led by inevitable geeky concatenation to the ultimate set of house rules – make up your own game.
How many of us would have thought of that? Unless you were one of the Parker Bros, the concepts of game design were relegated to the playground and those 20 minute sessions of Calvinball twice a weekday. Once you were past third grade even that degenerated to “organized sports” and when it came to playing games inside you opened the box you were given and you moved the pieces you were given. That was how “games” worked. The concept of drawing out your own board and coming up with your own system just wasn’t a big part of anyone’s life outside of the stupid “enrichment” assignments some teachers may assign.
Many gamers went and did exactly that. You like the math and wanted to be able to incorporate just about anything into your system. Voila! GURPS was the way to go. Wanted to play a war game with giant robots? Battletech sent you stomping off to the 35th century. Later refinements like the HERO system made it even easier to build whatever sort of world you want.
It hasn’t always a good thing. Any gamer who’s been at it a while has horror stories of that one guy they know who built his own unholy amalgum of GURPS, Ravenloft, and Rocky and Bullwinkle to fix some problem only he percieves in the system and dragooned his regular group into playtesting the awful mess. That’s who that author comes off as to me.
Except he makes a cardinal error – he’s blaming the system for his gaming style. He didn’t need a new system. He needed a better DM; one who spent the time to come up with something better than a hack-and-slash dungeon crawl. Even our first dungeons had better goals than that. And over time, we grew into even more serious directions. I remember one time in high school we got into a 3 hour argument over the ethics of the ends justifying the means due to a situation in a game of Champtions. Our GM sat us down on the horns of an awful dilemma and we had to work it out.
I’ve been trying for these days since the announcement to quantify just what these concepts have meant to my life and the lives of those around me. What would my early years have been like without this game to simultaneously stucture, focus and free my imagination. That is what Gygax and his partner Dave Arneson gave us. A framework. And it’s up to us to take it and build from here.
March 11th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
I think ‘elitist’ is the perfect word … because I was reading the article after reading Andrew’s take and juxtaposing D&D and ‘Rock around the clock’ … and Imagine an article that talked about rock & roll and fairly well dismissed all of it because it is by and large less harmonically complex and technically challenging than jazz or classical forms. And while a normal person would say ‘eh, yeah, SO?!?!’ … someone like this guy might say ‘yeah, and compare Chuck Berry or Bill Hailey with Django Reinhart or Charlie Christian … it is a joke that anyone would respect them!’ I could go on with ludicrous parallels, but suffice it to say that the article does no one any service, least of all the author.
March 12th, 2008 at 6:32 am
Well said Andrew. That has to be one of the worst critiques I have ever read. What an elitist snob. Thanks for posting it. I am going to put it up on my blog, which has it’s fair share of geeks.
March 12th, 2008 at 6:50 pm
Some more responses:
http://arstechnica.com/journals/thumbs.ars/2008/03/11/slate-editorial-bashes-dungeons-and-dragons-but-we-know-the-truth
http://mrhalbert.blogspot.com/2008/03/settle-down-nancy.html
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1565