The Equivocal Meaning of "D&D"

To call Dungeons & Dragons the 800-lb. gorilla of the roleplaying hobby, as I sometimes do, is something of an understatement, particularly when talking about the past. Nowadays, D&D's shadow remains large -- it's still by far and away the most popular RPG -- but not quite as large as it was in my youth. In those bygone days, "D&D" was virtually synonymous with "roleplaying game," so much so that I distinctly recall friends and acquaintances using the phrase "playing D&D" to mean playing any RPG, even ones that were quite different from Dungeons & Dragons.

One of the difficulties in discussing old school gaming is that the tradition of treating "D&D" as a very broad term is alive and well. Now, as I said, this practice has deep roots. So too does the practice of claiming that too much deviation from the core concepts of the game -- whatever those may be -- results in one's playing "not-D&D." Consider, for example, the cases of both Empire of the Petal Throne and Arduin. In both cases, you have games that are clearly derivative of OD&D, using not just the same terminology but in many cases the very same mechanics. And in both cases the very conception of what a roleplaying game is shows the clear influence of D&D.

Consequently, there were -- and are -- gamers who will make the not-unreasonable claim that EPT or Arduin are in fact species of D&D. At the same time, there are other gamers who make the similarly not-unreasonable claim that neither game qualifies as D&D. I myself tend to fall into the latter camp, as one might expect, for the simple reason that, in the case of EPT, despite being published by TSR and referencing OD&D in its very text, it nowhere makes the claim to being a supplement to or sub-set of Dungeons & Dragons. Arduin, despite references to OD&D in its unexpurgated pre-lawsuit text, similarly makes no claim to being D&D, calling itself simply "a fantasy game." Yet, many gamers at the time, including individuals at TSR, took it to be an add-on to OD&D.

And herein lies our problem. Because the little brown books are the ur-texts of our entire hobby, there is a very real sense in which most of us, regardless of what games we play, are simply playing species of D&D. I say that because, with comparatively few exceptions, the basic template laid down in 1974 remains the pattern every RPG designer uses, in most cases unconsciously, when creating his own game. Nevertheless, there's also a sense in which this perspective is utterly false, not least of which being that it robs the term "D&D" of any actual meaning, making it so equivocal as to be useless.

As you would expect, I'm not fond of such an approach to terminology. Unlike Humpty Dumpty, I don't think words mean whatever I say they mean. I acknowledge that discerning the meanings of some terms is difficult, but that doesn't mean they are devoid of meaning or that we should, in the interests of discussion, simply abandon such terms. Indeed, I think such an approach ultimately impedes rather than fosters conversation, which is why I often undertake the Quixotic position of arguing that, for example, "old school" isn't just an empty mantra.

And before anyone asks: this post isn't intended to start a conversation about the definition of "D&D" or "old school" or any of the other terms gamers like to quibble about. I do plan to get around to those things in the not-too-distant future, but they're not high priorities for me, mostly because I think my usage of both isn't nearly as opaque as some would have me believe. Taken as a whole, I think this blog provides pretty good "definitions" of most of these terms as I understand them. Most of my readers, even the ones who disagree with me about the content of my definitions, get that, so I'm not going to devote a lot of time to plowing the same fields I've been doing for over a year, especially when I've got lots of other things I'd rather share.

The Changing Meaning of "Campaign"

One of the interesting observations I've made in looking at the history of Dungeons & Dragons -- and, by extension, the entire hobby -- is the way that the word "campaign" has changed in meaning. "Campaign" is first used in a RPG context in OD&D and is obviously borrowed from wargames, which in turn borrowed it from the military science term for a connected series of battles. Although OD&D does occasionally make a connection between mass battles and campaigns, this doesn't seem to be the primary meaning of the word, since the text makes reference to Gygax's "Greyhawk campaign"and Arneson's "Blackmoor Campaign" in ways that don't quite make sense if the meaning was focused primarily on military matters. Indeed, I think it's in these particular usages that we can intuit just what is meant by the term in the context of OD&D.

In the Forward [sic] to Volume 1 of OD&D, Gary Gygax notes two things. First,

While it is possible to play a single game, unrelated to any other game events past or future, it is the campaign for which these rules are designed. (emphasis mine)

Second, he comments on the "longevity" of the Blackmoor and Greyhawk campaigns. Taken together, it seems clear to me that an OD&D campaign is something that is 1. "Larger" than a single "game" (i.e. adventure) 2. Maintains continuity between individual adventures 3. Not tied to a single "story" or focused on the exploits of a single group of characters.

The third item is, I think, key. We know that, in the Greyhawk campaign at least, there were multiple groups of characters, some of whom did not interact with one another regularly, if at all. I am not certain if the same was true in Blackmoor, but I believe it was. I know that it was the case with the Tékumel campaign, with its Monday and Thursday Night Groups. In each case, though, we speak of a single campaign, not multiple ones. That is, we don't speak of the Greyhawk campaigns but instead the Greyhawk campaign, even though the actions of players not necessarily playing in the same groups or on the same nights (let alone the same adventures) had an impact on one another. A "campaign" is thus what might be called nowadays, in video games jargon, a "persistent world." Thus, a campaign could -- and often did -- outlast the lives of any particular PC or series of adventures. A campaign continued on, changing and growing as the years wore on and the actions of myriad characters affected it.

While I'm not certain this is the case, I get the impression that contemporary gamers don't think of a campaign in this way. For them, a campaign is a series of adventures involving the same group of characters (more or less) and that comes to an end when its story is finished. Whereas the older understanding of a campaign was geared more toward sandbox play, the newer one seems built around the notion of a story or at least a "theme." The popularity of the Adventure Path style of play in 3e (though it has antecedents going back to 1e, Dragonlance foremost among them) is, I think, good evidence of this shift in the understanding of a campaign. Listening to gamers speak nowadays, they talk of having played several campaigns, even if all these campaigns are set in the same persistent world. It's a subtle difference, to be sure, and not a universally pernicious one, but I think it's a shift nonetheless.

I'm still not sure what to make of this or even if my intuitions are correct. However, I can't shake the sense that campaigns are different now and viewed differently and that's had a profound impact on the way RPGs are designed and marketed.

Yet More Buzzwords

I'm always pleased when I see that people have taken something I wrote and run with it. That's what's happened over at the Paizo forums, where there's a long thread that spun off from my post about Gygaxian Naturalism. Aside from the generally thoughtful tone of the thread, I was particularly impressed with its introduction of two more terms that I plan to add to my vocabulary: Gygaxian Methodology and Gygaxian Canon.

As defined by poster Jeremy MacDonald, Gygaxian Methodology consists of:

the use of tables to enhance authenticity. Rules and rulings that don't have anything to do with the players but are simply aspects of the world at large. The creation of adventures that are internally consistent and not modified one way or another simply because your players party does or does not have a Paladin. Adventures that have secrets that might or might not be discovered by the players.

Authenticity is the key here even if it trumps story.

Gygaxian Canon on the other hand:

This is adherence to Gygax's original view of the monsters and their themes and of the Great Wheel Cosmology. Kobolds are fecund little dogmen, Mind Flayers plot to extinguish the sun and there are hints that that they are either from the future or the past but they are deffinitly not from this time line. Drow are led by powerful woman and they are always evil. They worship the Goddess Lolth.

In both cases, I have quibbles and qualifications I'd make, but I agree with the general thrust of both definitions. I find these new terms useful because they help to highlight where some of the fault lines lie in "old school" vs. "new school" debates, particularly as it relates to the WotC editions of Dungeons & Dragons. In my case, it's the deviation from the Gygaxian Methodology (of which Naturalism is a sub-set) that bothers me more about the WotC editions than it is the deviations from the Gygaxian Canon.

Now, obviously, I like many aspects of the Canon and have indulged in my fair share of potshots at the re-evaluations of the Canon, but I'm actually much more open to doing so than I am to changes to the Methodology. For me, the Gygaxian Methodology is where D&D "lives," so to speak, and it's what has long distinguished it from other RPGs, both in the past and now. I have a lot of sympathy for folks who want to "save the Great Wheel" and all that, but I think it's a mistake to conflate D&D with the Gygaxian Canon, even if the Canon has such a long history with the game that it's practically synonymous with it. On this point, I don't think 4e necessarily made any mistakes by changing the Canon (even if I think many of the specific changes are just plain idiotic).

The Gygaxian Methodology, however, not only undergirds the game's mechanics (at least from late OD&D onward), but it's central to the way the game was played and experienced by most gamers before 1983 or thereabouts. That's where the "soul" of old school D&D resides, like it or not. Indeed, I suspect, far moreso than the Gygaxian Canon, it's the Methodology that's at the root of whether one has sympathy for the old school or not. That's not to say there aren't other parallel, equally valid Methodologies -- Dave Arneson assuredly has his own -- but I imagine these parallels share much with the Gygaxian one, so much so that you could easily create a superset to describe their characteristics.

With all that aside, I think it's a mistake to fixate too much on the Gygaxian Canon, love it though I do. Over the years, I've deviated from it in various ways and I plan to do so again in my next campaign. At the same time, I plan to hew very closely to the Gygaxian Methodology. One of the reasons I object to equating old school play with "a feel" is that this position tends to downplay the close connection between the Methodology and the mechanics. If you look back at the history of 2e, though, what you'll see is that each of TSR's many campaign settings either replaced large swaths of the core rules in order to accommodate a different Methodology or, if they didn't, gamers complained that the D&D rules weren't "right" for the setting in question. This is an important lesson to those who would argue that "old school" is a flavor that can be easily added to any rules set.

Fantastic Medieval Wargames

As the furor over whether or not 4e represents a major departure from D&D's roots has raged, lots of people haveturned OD&D in an effort to find support for their own position in this argument. In many cases, the people turning to OD&D have neither firsthand experience playing the game nor any knowledge of the history and culture of the early days of the hobby. Consequently, they view OD&D through a modern lens that leads them astray.

Case in point: the subtitle of OD&D. "Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures." Those words are included on the cover all three little brown books and on Supplements I through IV. On the face of it, the words "fantastic medieval wargames" would seem to imply that, from the beginning, D&D was nothing more than a military simulation, albeit one with fantastical elements, such as magic and dragons. If so, this might support the notion that focusing on tactical combat is in fact a return to the game's roots rather than a flight from them.

My own feeling is that it's a mistake to interpret the word "wargames" too narrowly. What people forget, living as we do in a post-D&D world, is that there was no such thing as a "roleplaying game" in 1974. Or rather, "roleplaying" was something actors and psychologists did; it wasn't a form of entertainment as we think of it today. Indeed, I don't recall the words "roleplaying game" appearing anywhere in the entire OD&D corpus. Consequently, it means little that Gygax and Arneson did not dub their new game a RPG.

But why call it a "wargame" if it's not focused primarily on combat? As I said, it's a mistake to interpret "wargame" too narrowly. Certainly nowadays the term refers almost exclusively to military simulations, but was that the case in 1974? If you look at the hobby culture out of which D&D arose, you'll immediately notice the import part played by Dave Wesley's Braunstein games in expanding the definition of "wargame" to include non-military endeavors. Of course, this expansion had already occurred earlier in games like Diplomacy, which, while involving military matters to some degree, was not exclusively focused on them.

My point is simply that one shouldn't make too much of the fact that OD&D calls itself a "wargame," because, at the time of its publication, "wargame" was a very broad term that encompassed a lot of different games, including several that had proto-roleplaying elements. Imagine if, at some future date, someone invented a new entertainment medium that transmitted images directly into one's brain. Imagine further that, despite the novelty of this medium, people call entertainments that use it "movies" or (better yet) "films." This medium is not at all like a motion picture technologically, but it functions analogously to the way movies do, except that there's no projector and no screen involved. This is why OD&D was initially dubbed a wargame -- it was most like that category of games then called wargames, even if it was in fact something quite different.

In short, D&D isn't and never was a wargame in the sense we understand the term now. It was, however, an outgrowth of the wargaming hobby, a hobby that was a lot more expansive and varied than people today might think. This is why I think it's vital that we study the history of not just our hobby, but of its "big brother" as well. Without such study, you're in the same position of people who try to interpret Shakespeare while employing 21st century definitions for his vocabulary -- you're going to misinterpret a great deal.

The Three Old Schools

I know it's quite fashionable of late to claim that "old school" is either purely subjective or indefinable in the manner of pornography ("I know it when I see it."), but I simply don't buy these claims. Most of the confusion arises, in my experience, from people failing to distinguish two uses of the term "old school" that, while valid in certain contexts, have no bearing on what grognards like me mean when we use the term "old school." These two uses are as follows:

1. "Old School" = "Old": This the most subjective usage of the term. Gamers who began with, say AD&D 2e consider it "old school" because it was released almost 20 years ago, just as I am sure some 3e gamers will call their edition "old school" in a few years (if they're not already doing so). I frankly consider this usage laughable, as it's both narcissistic and, more importantly, utterly devoid of "scholastic" elements. That is, this usage makes old school simply a turn of phrase to mean "not current" and pays no heed whatsoever to the idea that the "old school" games encompass a philosophy or approach to gaming. This "old school" isn't a school at all.

2. "Old School" = "Adhering to Game Canon": This is another popular usage and one with which I have limited sympathy, even if I don't think it's deserving of the name. It holds that "old school" means "consonant with the earliest editions of game X," whether mechanically or (more likely) based on setting elements, etc. Under this definition, a carefully researched 3e book that holds true to details set down in earlier editions about, say, elementals is "old school," whereas 4e isn't since it creates a new canon that rejects and contradicts the earlier one. This usage treats "old school" as brand identification rather than anything scholastic. It's all about ensuring that, if Gygax said demons do X and 3e says demons also do X, then, because Gygax and 3e are in accord, 3e counts as "old school."

Neither of these usages is what I or most grognards mean when they talk about "old school." For us, it is a school of thought we're talking about. It's a philosophy of game design and game play that emphasizes loose rules, the sovereign authority of the referee, and player skill over notions of "balance," "story," or "fun." Granted, all these emphases are fuzzy around the edges and there's room for quibbling over whether, say, RuneQuest qualifies as an old school game or not, but that's a far cry from saying there's no such thing as an old school. Likewise, despite the fuzziness, the old school still possesses enough rigidity to clearly exclude certain games from its honor roll. No one who uses this third and primary definition of "old school" would ever say, for instance, that Ars Magica is an old school game, despite its being over 20 years old. That's because old school does have a very clear meaning in most cases.

Now, I don't object to equivocal uses of the term "old school." After all, I use the term "grognard" to refer to old school roleplayers rather than wargamers, which is its original definition. Nevertheless, I think it's important to realize that the old school to which I most frequently refer and the one that's currently generating renewed interest among some gamers is not primarily characterized either by its age or by its adherence to hoary canon so much as by a spirit that has kinship with the spirit of the early days of the hobby, when rules were suggestions, referees made rulings based on them, and players, not characters, were whose skills were tested in play. That's the old school. The rest is often either simple preference or mere nostalgia.

Kids

It is both amusing and frustrating to read about gamers who've only ever played Third Edition Dungeons & Dragons calling themselves "grognards" -- amusing because it's good to see that younger gamers might finally understand that preferring an older edition doesn't mean you're "afraid of change" and frustrating because I don't believe invitations to the clubhouse have actually been sent out to these guys yet. Heck, I didn't start gaming until five years after OD&D was released; I began with the Holmes Basic Set rather than the little brown books and I never played a wargame until after I'd started roleplaying. I'm not even sure that I qualify as a grognard, so I'm pretty sure that gamers who didn't join the hobby until after 2000 don't.

But life is full of stuff like this, so I shouldn't complain.

Too much.

"Universals are no one's IP"

There's not much I can add to this rather insightful post from the Knights & Knaves Alehouse on the dilemma that has befuddled the post-1983 development of Dungeons & Dragons.

... because classic D&D deals with some very Jungian archetypes. In the seventies and eighties, before the game was commodetised, It tapped directly into what a lot of people thought of as fantasy. An eight year old, like myself at the time, could jump in and start imagining the world because the scaffolding was cloaked in universal themes and images. The problem with that, from a business standpoint, is that universals are not anyones IP.

This is also part of the dilemma that befuddles efforts to create a successful business model that caters to the old school. Coming to terms with it, I think, is a key that unlocks the way toward the old school renaissance.

"Whatever that means"

My favorite whipping boy -- Bill Slavicsek, the R&D Director for Roleplaying Games, Miniatures, and Book Publishing at WotC -- is back and, once again, he's saying something that's either unadulterated marketing speak or further proof that the man has never played D&D. In the latest "Ampersand" column in the mockery that is E-Dragon, he comments

You wouldn't believe how many times over the years I've heard people say "I play in [insert favorite campaign setting here] so product X is of no use to me," or "I only play Core D&D (whatever that means)

I've italicized the part that really sticks in my craw. Before I explain why, let me provide some further context for this quote. Slavicsek reveals in his article that WotC "won't be producing campaign lines, per se" for 4e. Instead, WotC views "every D&D product we do is a Forgotten Realms [or insert your favorite campaign setting here] game product." He goes on to explain that "This is a subtle but significant change in philosophy geared toward making all players D&D players. It just makes the products and the brand stronger if every player is using the same material."

Lest anyone accuse me of not seeing Slavicsek's point, let me acknowledge right now that he has one. Starting with the release of the Forgotten Realms Campaign Set in 1987 and accelerated throughout the whole 2e era (1989-2000), the caretakers of D&D made a concerted effort to release reams of material for a wide variety of campaign settings, each with a distinct flavor, style, and focus -- not to mention dozens of "fluff" products describing the details of the settings. Aside from making D&D compete against itself -- a bad business move -- what it also did was fracture the player base of D&D. No longer did many gamers consider themselves D&D players firstly. Instead, they became Forgotten Realms players or Dark Sun players or Ravenloft players who just happened to use the 2e rules, each one heavily modified to suit the idiosyncrasies of their favorite setting, of course.

At the dawn of the 3e era, WotC clearly recognized that too many campaign settings was a bad thing and so 3e would have only two settings: the implied "core" setting of the rulebooks, which was basically a watered version of Greyhawk, and the heavily supported Forgotten Realms. The belief was that 2e had suffered economically in part because TSR had allowed D&D to fragment into little camps that didn't buy products for other settings. This is clearly the undesirable outcome that Slavicsek is alluding to in the quote above.

Of course, WotC itself didn't stick to its original plan for very long. In 2002, with much fanfare, WotC announced a Fantasy Setting Search designed to create a new setting for D&D, the winner of which was Keith Baker's techno-magical "noir" fantasy Eberron. Eberron was intended to showcase the new v.3.5 iteration of the D&D rules and, in retrospect, it was also an early testbed for many ideas and concepts that would come to fruition in the 4e design due to be released next month.

Despite claims to the contrary, I don't believe that Eberron was much of a success for WotC, either as a gaming property or -- more importantly -- as a setting for the far more lucrative book trade. At the very least, I suspect it performed less well than WotC had hoped, which is why the Forgotten Realms continued to be the flagship of both game products and novels. The Realms itself will be the first new campaign setting released for 4e (this August) and it's intended to showcase all the "cool" changes the new edition has wrought on D&D. A revised version of Eberron is due in 2009 supposedly, but, by all accounts, will not get a full-scale reworking as the Realms did. Whether that's because Eberron was 4e before there was a 4e or because WotC sees it as a redheaded stepchild is open to interpretation.

So, what it looks like is that WotC believes that, by branding a book as for Setting X or Setting Y, they are limiting the pool of potential buyers. With 4e, they want to return to the halcyon days when there were just D&D players rather than Realms players or Eberron players. Undoubtedly, they figure, by avoiding such branding, they can sell vastly more books and please their masters in Pawtucket, who are probably wondering why D&D, as an IP underperforms compared to Transformers or Spongebob Squarepants. And, honestly, Hasbro is right to wonder about this; I imagine D&D does underperform by a serious amount and WotC needs to do something about that.

Unfortunately for WotC, this new approach won't cut it. That ship already sailed long before WotC even existed. "D&D," thanks to a variety of moves both well intentioned and cynical, is now little more than a vague brand. People who play D&D nowadays probably share far fewer assumptions about the game and its content than they have since the start of the hobby. The mere fact that Slavicsek doesn't understand what's meant by the term "core D&D" is evidence of that. Once upon a time, "core D&D" would have been readily understood and any grognard worth his polyhedrals would quickly and simply explain to Slavicsek what it means. More to the point, such a term wouldn't have even been needed, for there was only D&D without qualification, for the game itself was always intended as a common pool of ideas and mechanics from which gamers could create their own fantasy worlds and adventures. How things have changed!

It's in WotC's best interests, of course, to simultaneously deny the meaningfulness of "core D&D" and to push the notion that its 4e products are simply D&D products without qualification. If they can manage to pull off that magic trick, they might just succeed in holding off the bean counters in Rhode Island for a few more years, especially if a lucrative 4e-derived licensing deal to a computer game company or something similar occurs. But I'm skeptical. More than that, I'm increasingly of the opinion that WotC itself is so internally conflicted and at sea when it comes to their business strategy for RPGs that, even if they somehow manage to use the smoke and mirrors effectively, they won't reap the benefits of their legerdemain. Since the announcement of 4e last August, WotC has repeatedly proven themselves tin eared and sclerotic. But then, given how poorly their R&D Director seems to know the history of the very game he's selling, I'm not surprised.

What D&D Is

Many people, particularly nowadays, as we slouch toward yet another edition, claim that it's impossible to define D&D, because "D&D" is so intensely personal a thing that if you asked 10 different people to define it, you'd get 10 different definitions. Though I recognize the agenda behind such a stance, there's a certain truth to it -- how one perceives "D&D" is greatly influenced both by one's first experiences with the game and how one has approached it since. That's why, for me, D&D will always be, first and foremost, a pulp fantasy game, albeit one with a batch of idiosyncratic accretions that allow it to transcend its roots and become this weird melange I call "D&D fantasy," about which I'll talk in due course.

I'm not going to define "Dungeons & Dragons" in this entry. That'll have to wait for later, when I have more time to write at length, because it's a complicated question (though not one that defies an answer, despite what the obscurantists will tell you). What I will do, though, is present a small illustration of what D&D was back in 1980 and what it was is something that I both miss and feel is missing from more modern claimants to the name "Dungeons & Dragons."

Here are four pre-generated characters from a module I was re-reading last night, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. These guys are a nice little window on what D&D once was and what I wish it were again.

Hum Ftr 12, AL N, HP 54, Str 15, Int 14, Wis 12, Dex 13, Con 14, Cha 16, +3 battleaxe, +2 plate mail, +2 shield, ring of fire resistance

Hum MU 11, AL N, HP 27, Str 10, Int 16, Wis 14, Dex 15, Con 14, Cha 14, +2 dagger, gem of seeing, boots of levitation, wand of cold (28 charges)

Hum Cl 10, AL LG, HP 34, Str 12, Int 11, Wis 18, Dex 14, Con 12, Cha 15, +2 mace, staff of striking, ring of protection +3

Human Th 10, AL N, HP 27, Str 10, Int 14, Wis 13, Dex 17, Con 12, Cha 7, +2 sword, bag of holding, cloak of protection +3

These guys are a snapshot D&D in its most perfect, "real" form, as opposed to an idealized one, which is to say, D&D as it was played at that time, right down to the fighter's having broadly better stats than his companions and more generally useful magic items. This certainly mirrors my own experiences both as a player and as a DM.

Yet, for all that, a 12th-level fighter still only has 54 hit points. Even with his -2 AC, he is nevertheless very vulnerable -- his companions even moreso. Of course "vulnerable" does not mean helpless and, with the gear and class abilities these characters possess, they ought to be able to handle most threats in the module, even the dreaded froghemoth.

I can't yet offer a definitive definition of "D&D," but if you want an illustration of where I'm coming from, I point you to these guys.