Friday, January 21, 2022

"Presents the Wrong Image"

Last week, I discussed James M. Ward's (in)famous "Angry Mothers from Heck" editorial, which appeared in issue #154 of Dragon (February 1990). It's possible to read Ward's editorial as disingenuous or at the very least canny – an act of "wink, wink" public relations intended to burnish the image of D&D in the eyes of a vociferous minority with whom the good folks at TSR no longer wished to deal. I'm not wholly convinced that's the case, but, even assuming it is, let's look at a different article appearing in Dragon exactly three years earlier. 

This article, by David Cook, is part of a series of "designer's notes" on the forthcoming second edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, a project for which he acted as lead designer. Entitled "Who Dies?", the article appears in the February 1987 issue of Dragon (#118) and discusses which AD&D 1e classes will carry over into the new edition. Cook's answers to the article's titular question are more or less as one would expect, as are most of the reasons he offers. In the case of the assassin sub-class, he has this to say:

His first point, that the assassin is "disruptive of party harmony," is an odd one in my opinion. I don't at all deny that the inclusion of an assassin character could, in certain groups, be disruptive, but in all of them? I suspect Cook was making a blanket assumption about the kinds of campaigns AD&D is intended to support, namely one in which evil player characters have no place. Since assassins must be of evil alignment, they don't belong, according to Cook. (My interpretation of his assumption is based largely on the discussion of evil PCs in the 2e Player's Handbook, which states that "the AD&D® game is a game of heroic fantasy" and that playing an evil character "is not a good idea.")

This leads to the second and, I think, stronger comment, that the assassin class "presents the wrong image about AD&D games" [italics mine]. Perhaps I am reading too much into what Cook wrote, but, as I look at it, this seems to suggest that, from its conception, Second Edition was intended to be a more "family friendly" version of the game, one that scrubbed many of its more "gritty" (for lack of a better word) elements, in favor of ones that promoted "heroic fantasy." 

Now, there's nothing wrong with that, of course, and it may well be that TSR saw the sanitization of the game as a way to increase its sales. They might even have been correct, for all I know. All that said, I think, in light of statements like this by David Cook, it's incontrovertible that bowdlerization was baked into the 2e cake from the beginning. What Ward says in "Angry Mothers from Heck" may well be wholly insincere, but it wasn't a last minute decision by TSR but rather something the company had committed to years earlier, as it charted the course of AD&D sans Gary Gygax. 

Again, one can view this as positive or negative, according to one's own tastes; that's not my point. Rather, I wanted to cite an example of the kind of tonal shift that occurred with the creation of Second Edition, one that likely contributes to the casual dismissals of that version of AD&D in many corners of the old school scene. These days, I'm much more sympathetic to 2e than I have been in the past, but there's no denying that, on many levels, it's a very different game than its predecessor and those differences are foundational.

23 comments:

  1. It's also interesting to get that blurb about 2E, but then have an Assassin kit in the Complete Thief's Handbook.

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  2. Cook comments in his follow-up to the column several issues later than the image bit was not about outsiders viewing the game, but new players who were turned off by PC-killing assassins.

    Also, when Gygax originally floated the plans for 2nd Edition, he stated that the assassin would be either cut or relegated to an appendix or NPC-only class.

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    1. Found the citations. Gygax on the 2nd Edition Assassin, DRAGON #103, p. 8: "Assassins will be reduced to optional status, or used only as NPCs, as your DM decides is best for his or her campaign." Note that this is the very same column where Gygax complains about TSR retitling Deities & Demigods to Legends & Lore.

      Cook on assassins, DRAGON #121, p. 13: "The question of "image" that came up had nothing to do with any kind of
      religious pressure, as some of you mistakenly thought. Sorry, it's much more mundane -- a lot of potential players have been turned off by bad experiences with uncontrolled assassins destroying parties, campaigns, and fun for everyone else. No fun at all."

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    2. Those are great citations. Thank you.

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    3. If that was truly the main consideration, why single out assassins? Any character class at all can arrange to kill the rest of the party, it's not even something assassins are particularly good at. I've seen irate magic-users end a campaign with a single sleep spell and a dagger more often than assassins.

      PC-on-PC violence is a playstyle issue, not something connected to any one class.

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    4. And then there are the magic-users who don't understand volume. I guess they took care of THAT particular problem in later editions...

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    5. A party member might turn on another, but for the Assassin it's built into it, no?

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  3. It seems like if party harmony was a primary consideration, the thief class in general would be a major one to reconsider. How many inter-party disputes and real-life bickering has been caused by the thief player earnestly attempting to pick the pockets of compatriots, defended by "my character is a thief; it's in his nature!" That trope might account for the shift to "Rogue," but still, the Thief title seems to encourage more misanthropy than perhaps the "Burglar" appellation that was bestowed upon Bilbo in his adventures.

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  4. how do you play an assassin? I mean, it seems a very solitary class, the jobs are not party based. I can see a thief (easily) in a dungeon, but why would an assassin go in? This is my main complaint. I can accept them having friends, a crew to work with, but how does their job work with that?

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    1. That's what I always thought. They felt much more like an NPC class, like Sages. The other PC classes more or less lend themselves to the idea of adventure. Perhaps an unsaid reason for removing them is that their profession is the murder of people, eliminating layers of abstraction around the fantasy violence built into the game.

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    2. For exactly the same reason as the rest, i.e. loot and xp. Why would a wizard risk life and limb in undergound warrens, instead of going to the library? Because it is convenient to have magic to blast enemies away, you don't need any more rationalizing for that either.

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    3. well, the wizard, I can answer. he needs a spell component, a magic item, etc, and needs a team to assist retrieving it. but my point is, he lends himself to a team effort. a hit man does not

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  5. Seems to me that a team of assassins could have interesting adventures together, possibly even without double-crossing each other all that much; they might even be "bringers of liberty" if they just killed despots, right? Same for a gang of thieves, especially if it's "Ocean's Eleven" style. On the other hand a bunch of so-called "adventurers" could very well be considered "evil" for their grave-robbing and defiling of "holy" sites, so where exactly is the line? Baking stuff like this into the rules instead of the setting is all kinds of silly. But it's also perfectly understandable in the context of "general sanitizing" that 2e went for all around.

    Back when 2e was announced and came out, I was quite excited for it. Then when we got all the REALLY stupid "and that's how THIS world changes to be 2e-compliant" pseudo-adventures it became clear pretty quickly that it's all a bunch of baloney. An epic world-wide event that... Erases a character class? Yikes. What do you even call that, "occupational cleansing" maybe?

    But for all the "bad taste" I have in my mouth regarding 2e, I have to also state quite clearly that Zeb has done a LOT of awesome stuff that I really, really enjoy. But 2e? Nope, that was a wasted opportunity.

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  6. I thought that it was "cool" to have an assassin character when I was a kid because I thought that it sounded "badass." But I was a kid, and kids generally like dumb stuff, so...

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  7. Hobby's been chucking people overboard to appease the worst people reading for a long time.

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  8. Change the name to Spy and the Assassination ability to Incapacitation and boom, viable character class.

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    1. same problem tho. not a team player. could be fun for some DMs and players, but most people would wonder why the players are working against the teams interests.

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    2. It’s no different than any other character having interests outside of the party - a cleric or paladin serving a god first and foremost, a Druid serving nature, etc. Sometimes interests DO clash if you want to play it that way.

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  9. Recalling that class was from Blackmoor and originated with Dave Arneson, I've thought that the class had a role in domain-level games where PCs and NPCs may hire an assassin to go after one another. In that context they would tend to be an NPC class, but with the proviso that if the hirer were a PC then they might want to play out that assassination attempt.

    Another way to sanitise the class is to rename it (Spy as Sean suggests) or as "ninja" because in my experience that is how most people played the assassin.

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  10. It's also important to think about what some of the designers might have been used to encountering in terms of party sizes too: I grew up playing with small groups (just couldn't find that many people interested/available to play) and we were lucky to have 4 people with one on them as DM. Often it was fewer. But in talking to some people from Lake Geneva, they'd often run games for 10+ players! An assassin in that context (or in a tournament) had potential to be a huge disruption.

    I'm pretty sure Zeb despised the assassination table, and I'm guessing between the need to completely overhaul the class and powers, plus the disruption to game play they'd been hearing about/seeing, and the turnoff to new players, they decided it simply wasn't worth including in the PHB. I don't know they were wrong about it.

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  11. As a newcomer (born in 85) I still don't understand the attempts to sanitize AD&D for new players or children when basic D&D was RIGHT THERE! Make that the sanitized version and slap an age warning on AD&D.

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    1. In the Satanic Panic environment of the 1980s and early 1990s, just putting an age disclaimer on AD&D wouldn't have demonstrated to the right people (parents, law enforcement, professional hysterics, etc.) that TSR was really out of the Satan business. Even with D&D available, the same old TSR would still have been publishing the same old evil products like AD&D and making them available to minors. (Slapping age warnings on cigarette packages doesn't make cigarettes any less attractive to kids, after all.)

      Rather, only after the Satanic Panic subsided in the mid-1990s could RPG designers finally stop worrying that fantasy RPGs were perceived as, in effect, diabolical and morally equivalent to Big Tobacco, the porn industry, or other corrupters of America's youth.

      Once that happened, the door flung wide open, and writers could let their imaginations run wild again, Mothers from Heck notwithstanding. I think that's why, by the early 2000s, Wizards of the Coast could publish something like 3(e)'s Book of Vile Darkness, which had far more adult and potentially disturbing content in it than anything in the old 1(e) Player's Handbook or Dungeon Master's Guide.

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