Heart and Soul

A few weeks ago, one of my readers sent me a link to an old article from 2017 about the difficulties of playing Dungeons & Dragons behind bars. I can't be certain, but I probably saw this article when it was first published and I'd be surprised if many of you hadn't also seen it. It's an interesting piece of journalism on a number of levels, including its insights into how – and how much – RPGs are played in prisons. I knew this, of course. Back in the '90s, the owners of my local game store regularly sent packages of roleplaying games to a correctional facility that permitted their inmates to play them. If you think about it, this only makes sense. Convicts have a lot of time on their hands and RPGs are a great way to pass that time. In some respects, it's not too different from the amount of gaming that happens on military bases, where off-duty personnel have long stretches of downtime and limited entertainment options. 

The linked article focuses almost exclusively on the difficulties of obtaining and using dice within prisons, for the obvious reason that dice are often used for gambling and similar illicit activities. That's a genuinely fascinating topic in itself and almost worthy of a post on its own (not least because one of the solutions was the use of chits, like those in my beloved Holmes set). However, as I read the article, what struck me was that there was no clear mention of what the prisoners were using for rules. Do they have rulebooks? I assume they must, right? How else could they play D&D?

A common topic of discussion among gamers is their "desert island" RPG book, the one rulebook they'd want to have with them if they were stranded in a remote locale for an extended period of time. (Mine is The Traveller Book, by the way.)  This makes me think about a different but related topic: how necessary rulebooks really are and how I often I actually refer to them while playing. What if, instead of asking what single rulebook you'd want to have with you on a desert island, we instead ask, "What roleplaying game could you play without recourse to any rulebook?" That's a different question, but no less interesting a one. 

For myself and I suspect most people reading this, the answer is probably D&D. I've been playing Dungeons & Dragons in one form or another for more than 45 years. From the ages of 10 till 17, it was probably the activity, aside from going to school, in which I spent the most time. Consequently, the basic rules of D&D, its foundations and superstructure, if you will, are firmly embedded in my brain – so much so, in fact, that I bet I could reproduce many of its tables and charts from memory. Not all of them, of course, but enough of them that I'm not sure anyone would notice or mind. If they did, it's only because they remember the rules even better and I'd happily use their recollections to improve my own.

Again, I'll reiterate that there are many aspects of D&D, like the minute specifics of spells or monster stats, that I probably couldn't cite solely through mental recall. I don't pretend to have a photographic memory and, even if I did, all editions of D&D, even OD&D, have too many little bits and pieces for anyone to remember them all. However, I'm not sure it's necessary to do so. While playing, I think most of us kind of wing it anyway and, so long as our approximations of the rules don't deviate too much from everyone else's own doodle memories of the rules, it's generally good enough. My lifelong experience is that the specifics of the rules matter only when there's a dispute (or when playing with children, real or metaphorical).

The longer a game has been part of your life and the longer you've played it, the more it becomes something like a folk tradition rather than a set of instructions. People start to carry "the rules" around in their heads, even when those rules are "wrong," according to the text of the rulebooks. How often have you or one of your friends been surprised to discover that this or that rule didn't, according to the text, work the way you thought it did? How long were you playing D&D "wrong" in one way or another? I know I could offer many examples of rules I learned as a kid – or thought I had – and continued to do for years before someone more knowledgeable than I pointed out I was mistaken. I can't be the only one for whom this was the case.

I think this is fine. I'm not simply absolving myself for years of being mistaken about how dragon breath works in AD&D, for example. Rather, I'm saying that, at the end of the day, I don't think it matters whether you use all the game's rules and do so correctly, so long as everyone who's playing is satisfied with the results. I have zero interest in policing anyone else's fun, especially since, as I said, I make and no doubt will continue to make all sorts of errors in remembering and adjudicating rules. I don't enjoy that sort of thing and, frankly, have a hard believing that anyone does.

All of which leads me back to that desert island question I mentioned above. It’s one thing to ask what game you’d want to bring with you. However, it’s another one to ask what game you could bring with you in your head. I think that's a much more interesting question, because it speaks to the games you've played the most and that, by playing, have become a part of you. For me, I think the only answer could be Dungeons & Dragons, as it's the only RPG that is both simple enough to remember and that I've played enough over the decades that it has embedded itself deep within my soul. I'd love to have been able to say Traveller, too, but I'm not sure that's the case. 

What about you? What roleplaying game could you run almost entirely from memory without reference to any rulebooks?