Cargo Cult

Yesterday, I was chatting with one of the players in my House of Worms campaign. He mentioned that, growing up in Europe in the 1980s, he learned to play Dungeons & Dragons from the German translation of the Basic Set supplemented by a photocopy of a handwritten French translation of the AD&D Players Handbook that also included articles from the magazine Casus Belli. He even showed me some of the pages from that translation, which was well over 200 cramped pages in length, which frankly delighted me. There was, unfortunately, no name attached to the translation, so we may never know which dedicated French roleplayer undertook this gargantuan task that had repercussions greater than he likely ever imagined.

Hearing this story reminded me of similar stories I'd heard from friends and acquaintances living outside the English speaking world: how they'd learned to play D&D – and it was almost always D&D – from a weird combination of sources, including fan-made translations passed down through multiple hands (and sometimes languages) before they laid eyes on it. The result, as the player in my Tékumel campaign explained, was often a faulty understanding of the game's underlying rules and mechanics, thanks in no small part to the "broken telephone" effect that comes when ideas are filtered through so many intermediaries. Of course, none of this lessened the impact of those ideas, as evidenced by the fact that most of these people continue to participate in the hobby of roleplaying decades later.

What's interesting is that, though I grew up in America, my own personal history as a roleplayer nevertheless contains plenty of similar "broken telephone" moments. To a great degree, this is because roleplaying, as a formal entertainment, was so revolutionary. People sometimes forget just how genuinely new – and peculiar – an idea it was at the time of its introduction. Looked at from the vantage point of a world where roleplaying and roleplaying games are not only widely understood but also widely played in one form or another, it's all too easy to see their ultimate acceptance as inevitable. Having lived through those times, I can assure you they were not. I can also assure you that it took a lot of explaining to get people to comprehend just what a RPG was.

In the days before the Internet, my friends and I had to rely upon our own wits and the accumulated "wisdom" of others to make sense of D&D. We turned to various gaming mentors, like my friend's high school-age older brother and guys we met in game stores, to learn how to play – and even then we were often led astray. The early days of the hobby had a rich oral culture, in which ideas about the "right" way to play various RPGs were shared freely anytime two or more gamers met one another. My friends and I were the beneficiaries of these ideas, because we had a very difficult time make sense of the rulebooks available to us at the time (the Holmes Basic rulebook and the AD&D Players Handbook and Dungeon Masters Guide).

Even after we had a better handle on the broad outlines of how to play D&D, we continued to make use of idiosyncratic rules interpretations and additions that we'd picked up here or there. Many of these were things that "everybody knew," though they could be found nowhere in the pages of any official D&D rulebook. To this day, I am still sometimes tripped up by "rules" I long ago took as Gospel that are nothing of the sort. Such is the power of oral tradition. In those days, it was likewise commonplace to see gamers, especially those, like me, who regularly served as referee, to carry around folders or binders filled with mimeographs or photocopies of house rules or articles from Dragon or White Dwarf that helped "fix" this or that aspect of D&D. 

None of us looked askance at this. Indeed, we considered it perfectly normal, since it was so widespread. Dungeons & Dragons was, for us, a bricolage, made from TSR's published rulebooks, gaming magazine articles, ideas someone once told us, and received opinion that we'd picked up, magpie-like, in our travels to local hobby shops, libraries, and schoolyards. It was a moving target whose basic shape was more or less consistent, but whose precise details often varied considerably from place to place and time to time. That's just how things were – and we loved it.