Friday, September 16, 2022

A Bugaboo in the Hobby

A perennial target of Gary Gygax's ire in his "From the Sorcerer's Scroll" columns in Dragon was the desire to "improve" Dungeons & Dragons by making it more "realistic." In issue #13 of the magazine (July 1978 – around the time that the AD&D Players Handbook was first released), he speaks at some length about this topic. 
It's a shame that Gygax was so quick to employ strawmen in his jeremiads, because they often undermined the legitimate point he was trying to make. No game, no matter how finely detailed or complex in its rules, will ever adequately simulate reality, which is why the single-minded pursuit of realism is, as he calls it, a "false deity." This is a perfectly reasonable position for a game designer to take (though I may be biased in saying so, as it's close to my own position on the matter). Gygax had no need for overblown rhetorical flourishes, such as the suggestion that those who want realism in their games "join the military, enter politics, become a race car driver" to experience it – and I say this as someone who is broadly sympathetic to his perspective.
Here, however, I must part company with Gygax. Very few things are "pure fantasy," which is to say, utterly divorced from our real world. Even places like Edwin A. Abbott's Flatland obey recognizable and indeed logical rules that are intelligible even to three-dimensional beings. Most fantasy settings, even the most whimsical, contain innumerable elements that we must presume operate according to the laws of mundane reality, unless we are told otherwise. Does anyone really doubt, for example, that the inhabitants of a fantasy world must eat or sleep, just as we do? The mere presence of one or more fantastical elements in a setting does not suggest that the operation of everything in that setting follows its own unique – and unintelligible – rules. Again, this is desperate rhetoric.
Gygax does a better job of explaining his position in this paragraph, though I still think he is (deliberately?) missing the point of those who want realism in their games. I fully agree with him that, once the logic of a setting is fully explicated and thereby understood by the players of a game, it can become a substitute for the logic of the real world within the game. I suspect most people reading this post have, at some point, been involved in a game session in which some matter was resolved by reference to the underlying "rules" of a setting's reality. That's a regular occurrence in my House of Worms campaign and indeed one of its great joys. 

At the same time, I'm not completely certain that this is all that relevant to the concerns of those who want realism in, say, the combat system of their favorite RPG. What the advocates of realism generally want, in my own experience anyway, is a mechanical system that better reflects the way the things being modeled operates in the real world. Thus, a realistic combat system might take into account things like bleeding, broken bones, shock, and so on. D&D's combat system emphasizes not realism but ease and efficiency of play, which is a perfectly valid emphasis. That some might want a combat (or any other) system that more closely models reality is no cause for derision, even if the desire is at odds with Gygax's own preferences and the approach he adopted in his own design.
I could quibble with some of what Gygax says here, but, by and large, I think he acquits himself well here. That said, he still doesn't quite seem to understand why some people, even if they're only a minority, desire greater realism in their game system than D&D has on offer. 
I agree with Gygax that, after a certain point, if you make enough changes to Dungeons & Dragons, you're not really playing Dungeons & Dragons anymore and you might as well be making your own game. We probably wouldn't have as many roleplaying games as we do if it others hadn't come to a similar conclusion on their own. Likewise, I readily accept the notion that D&D – or at least AD&D – was, in some sense, designed with particular goals in mind and that its rules, however seemingly haphazard they are in places, are intended to serve genuine purposes. Modifying or removing them without due consideration for their intended purposes can be detrimental to the working of the whole. The problem is that Gygax seemed to think that only he was in a position to determine which "additions to and augmentations of" D&D were fine and which were not.

20 comments:

  1. Gygax is conflating two things throughout this article: realism and reality. The whole argument of the first section you quote relies on this conflation. Gygax responds to the desire for games to be realistic as if it were a desire for them to be real, and I have a hard time believing that this isn’t deliberate obfuscation. His comments on the irrelevance of realism to fantasy are also, as you point out, disingenuous: while dragons, demons, etc. are not real, swordfights are, and it’s not unreasonable to want a system that models them more exactly than D&D does. It’s always struck me as odd that Gygax preferred to fly off the handle like this rather than make the more rational argument that realistic combat is too bloody and fatal to be fun. He did occasionally make that argument, and I can see its cogency; it’s also more intellectually honest than a rant like this one.

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  2. I think "realism -whatever that means- in games was vastly overrated, in the 80s.
    I remeber with dread how some of my friends praised games basing themselves only on the pretence of realism.
    Realism, to them and many others, ultimately meant very crunchy character generation and combat rules, as focus of the gaming experience.
    Which I find utterly boring, and often as unrealistic -if not more- as lighter and maybe even abstract rules.
    I honestly prefer "believable and practical" rules.
    I know this sounds very subjective, I think it is no more subjective than "realistic" , in the context of rpgs.

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  3. Did people's need for "realism" in a game ever apply to anything beyond combat? Genuinely curious.

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    1. Ah, that makes sense. Although I guess I should say anything beyond potential injury to a character.

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    2. Oh yes, the notorious disease tables and % weekly chance to catch a disease in .... uh, wait... Gygax's own DMG ...

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    3. To be fair, the disease table originates in Supplement II to OD&D, credited to Dave Arneson, though whether that section was actually written by Arneson or someone else I don't know.

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  4. The reason that I bring that up is many many years ago, I was exploring an old tunnel with someone that I knew, and there was a point where there was water that was obviously sewage, and he said to me "You know, if this were a call of Cthulhu game, we'd just tromp on ahead through this muck as if it were no big deal." Well, we didn't, we turned back. But that thought always stuck with me how people do many "unrealistic" things in a game. I get that characters are supposed to be heroes, adventurers and investigators, and that it's a game and all, but still some things seem "unrealistic."

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  5. The term verisimilitude leaps to mind. It's important to RPGs. They don't have to be real, but they do have to be believable.

    Also, I've read some of Gygax's later rules. He was perfectly fine with trying to improve realism in incredibly unwieldly ways (or look at how many damned polearms there are). I strongly suspect his objections have little to do with principles beyond "D&D is better than alternatives or other implementations other people suggest" and that he was grabbing any hook he could to justify that.

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    1. I think you've really hit on something important with the last part of your comment. Fans have always felt free to be critical (even hyper-critical) of certain aspects of D&D, and I think Gygax took some of that personally in the early days. Which (to me) is totally understandable. He (and Arneson, whatever) invented the greatest game in history, and I'm sure a part of him thought, "If you don't like it, fine, create your own (damned) game." To his credit, he found much more peace (and wisdom) later in life. I'm sure the content of the Sorcerer's Scroll would be different if he could go back and re-write it. How many things would we all do differently in our lives if we could go back?

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    2. Fair. I attribute it a bit more to the lawsuity-corporatey mindset he was often falling into in that era, rather than simple defensiveness. But even defensiveness would be perfectly understandable.

      I'm not 100% sure it would be different if he REwrote it, mostly because Gygax seemed to often struggle with admitting fault or error, and I could 100% see him writing the exact same thing over again just on some perverse refusal to change. But I do think a later, wiser Gygax might not have written it in the first place.

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  6. In this article, Gygax reads like an internet troll. That he was the figurehead of a company at the time makes it all the more ridiculous. The owners of Chaosium didn't behave this way.

    In the split personality idea of Gamer Gary/Business Gary, one must be the real personality. I suspect the jerk (Business Gary) was the real Gary, and the good Gary (Gamer Gary) was the facade. Because if the real Gary was "good," he wouldn't have created a jerk facade.

    I know he co-created D&D, but there are no end of jerks who are amazingly talented. Woody Allen, M.A.R. Barker, H.P. Lovecraft, etc.

    James, is your post title an intentional pun? It seems like Gygax himself is the real bugaboo in the hobby.

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    1. It wasn't intentional; I was simply using Gygax's own turn of phrase.

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    2. It's rarely that simple. He probably had both good and bad qualities, much like Barker and Lovecraft (I'll be honest, I've never heard of Woody Allen having good qualities beyond creativity, but he probably has them).

      It's also entirely possible that despite being a basically decent person he felt that to be a "good businessman" he had to adopt a jerkish personality. That myth is alive and well today, and was probably even more widely believed in the 80s,

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  7. As loathsome Barker and Lovecraft's beliefs were, I wouldn't make a comparison of them to Woody Allen. Who's crimes are more associated to scum like Roman Polanski and Harvey Weinstein.

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  8. In today's world, I guess little men have no reservations about publicly demeaning great men. Especially when it's done anonymously on the internet. (Not talking about you, James. Just can't believe some of these comments.)

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    1. I think the fact that we're still talking about Gygax, more than a decade after his death, is proof that, whatever his flaws, he was indeed a towering historical figure.

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    2. Agree. There are no end of towering historical figures that are jerks too!

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    3. Which comments here? I don't see any unfair comments. Gygax quite regularly wrote diatribes about amateur game designers and other aspects of gaming. He may have co-created a great game, one that launched a whole new hobby, but that doesn't put his behavior beyond question.

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  9. I wonder if Gary's odious behavior, in these articles and elsewhere, inadvertently launched a thousand killer DMs, rules lawyers and power gamers.

    D&D has always attracted such bad behavior to a greater extent than say, Runequest or Traveller. (Which might be why they're called Killer DMs and not Killer GMs.) Why should that be?

    I wonder if D&D players were simply imitating the obnoxious, infantile behavior of their hero, the great man, Gary.

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