Memories of Game Stores Past (Part III)

I'm old, old enough to remember a time when the local game store was not merely a place to buy things. It was a crossroads, a hub for roleplayers, wargamers, and fans of genre fiction of all stripes. In those days, game stores felt weird in the best possible way: crammed with strange titles, eccentric proprietors, and regulars who treated the place like a second home. They were cluttered, often a bit dingy, and absolutely magical.

I spent countless hours in such stores. I remember walking through their doors and being hit by the smell of old cardboard and newsprint and the sight of wooden shelves bowed under the weight of too many Avalon Hill and SPI boxed wargames. You could browse freely, picking up games you’d never heard of, flipping through rulebooks that transported you to strange new worlds. If you were lucky, someone might be running a game in the back room – and if you hung around long enough, you might even get asked to join.

That’s how I discovered many of the games that shaped my tastes and interests. This was long before carefully curated social media feeds or electronic publisher newsletters, when sheer chance might introduce you to a captivating cover, a staff recommendation, or a game in progress that caught your attention. The old game store was a vehicle for discovery. It introduced me to lots of games I might never have found otherwise.

That kind of store, the kind I knew in my youth, is largely gone.

Certainly, there are still game stores out there, some of them excellent in their own way – but they’re not the same. Most of them survive today by focusing on collectible card games, miniatures wargaming like Warhammer, and modern boardgames. Roleplaying games, if present at all, are often confined to a few shelves of familiar titles from major publishers. The walls of obscure and idiosyncratic RPGs I once browsed for hours have mostly vanished.

The reasons aren’t mysterious. The Internet changed everything. Online retailers offer discounts and immediate availability that physical stores can’t hope to match. Digital publishing has displaced print in many cases. Perhaps most significantly, online play, something I myself participate in weekly, has made many of the accessories that once sustained game stores obsolete. Why buy dice, for example, when a VTT takes care of it?

None of this is inherently bad. In fact, I think it's great that it’s never been easier to find people with whom to play, no matter where you live. As regular readers know, I referee or play in several weekly online campaigns with friends scattered across the world. Likewise, the indie RPG scene is thriving in ways that would been nigh impossible back in the 1980s. Yet, despite all this richness, I can’t shake the feeling that something important has been lost.

Serendipity. That’s what’s missing.

In my experience, the Internet is great at showing us more of what we already like. It’s less good at surprising us. In the absence of physical spaces where different genres, systems, and subcultures once collided, the RPG hobby has become more siloed. It’s entirely possible now to spend years playing RPGs and never stray beyond a handful of familiar games. That wasn’t the case when every trip to the store might reveal something you’d never seen before.

Back then, I had a much more eclectic gaming diet and not just because I was young and had more free time, though that’s certainly part of it. No, the environment encouraged it. Game stores were chaos. They were cluttered with possibilities and they invited you to take risks, to try something new. They were social, too, places where you talked with strangers, traded recommendations, maybe even rolled some dice together.

Today, many of the stores that still exist feel lonelier, at least to me. They’re quieter, more sterile, less open to chance. They sell games, but they rarely feel like places to do anything else.

I don’t say this to complain about change for its own sake. Much as I dislike it, change is inevitable and not all of it is unwelcome. However, I do think we’ve lost something intangible but important. The video rental store analogy fits here. It's true that streaming services offer more movies than any Blockbuster ever did, but no algorithm has ever replicated the joy of stumbling across something unexpected on the shelf or the spontaneous conversation with a fellow customer that convinced you to give it a try.

I miss that. I suspect I’m not alone in doing so. We may well be richer in options than ever before, but in some that I think matter, we are also poorer.

D&D's Biggest Problem

Perhaps one of the most infamous editorials Gary Gygax ever penned was published in the June 1979 issue of The Dragon. Along with the much later (November 1982) -- and probably far more infamous -- "Poker, Chess, and the AD&D System," this editorial was written by "TSR Gary," which is the name I give to one particular persona of Ernest Gary Gygax. TSR Gary was the persona whose sole purpose was the relentless -- and often shameless -- promotion of TSR's corporate interests above all else, including common sense and, occasionally, truth. In the two aforementioned articles, TSR Gary is in fine form, arguing not only that Dungeons & Dragons reaches its perfect form in AD&D but also that any deviation from that perfect form is a sin that cries out to heaven for vengeance. TSR Gary's efforts even go so far as to dub OD&D a "non-game" and bearing as little similarity to AD&D as OD&D's imitators bore to it.

TSR Gary's disingenuousness aside, I mention the June 1979 article because, in it, Gygax explains why he believes AD&D was necessary for the good of the game. One of his most interesting points is that "The target audience to which we thought D&D would appeal was principally the same as that of historical wargames in general and military miniatures in particular." He goes on to explain that that assumption was "a bit off target" and, consequently, there was a need for a new roleplaying game that "addresses itself to a broad audience of hundreds of thousands of people—wargamers, game hobbyists, science fiction and fantasy fans,
those who have never read fantasy fiction or played strategy games, young and old, male and female." In short, TSR Gary claims that AD&D is necessary, because it will be more accessible to a wider audience of people than that stodgy old non-game OD&D, which was written for a more narrow audience.

I could quibble at some length about Gygax's points, even his basic one, but what's more immediately interesting to me is the implication that, in its original conception, OD&D was too narrow in its intended audience. Back at the beginning, the people who picked up and played OD&D all shared a common "culture," one rooted simultaneously in wargaming (and, specifically, the wargaming of the late 60s/early 70s) and in pulp fantasy literature. You'll often hear younger gamers who claim, upon reading OD&D for the first time, that the game's rules are both incomplete and don't support the style of fantasy people like me claim they do. That's because, to read OD&D out of its proper cultural context is to misunderstand it. The guys who bought those little brown books simply got it, because OD&D was a product of their culture. They didn't need to be told how to make the rules work or how they supported pulp fantasy gameplay. Those things were givens, by and large.

That's not to say there were no disagreements or misunderstandings. Even a cursory reading of fanzines from the period will suggest otherwise. However, what's absolutely essential is the realization that OD&D arose out of a particular culture and most of its supposed "deficiencies" are only deficiencies to people not steeped in that culture. The best analogy I can think of is slang. Non-native speakers of a language often have difficulty with non-standard language that native speakers simply understand without any trouble. OD&D is written in a kind of slang -- the jargon of early 70s fantasy wargaming. It doesn't explain a lot, because Gygax and Arneson never expected that anyone outside the culture would read it. There was thus no need for explaining that, in this context, "bad" means "good," so to speak.

Once D&D expanded beyond its original audience, the game's intentions and focus became problematic. Gygax is partially to blame for this. Despite his aforementioned claim that OD&D had a specific target audience in mind, I think he also suspected that the game might be able to attract players other than that audience. That's part of the reason why he inserted Tolkien references into the game, alongside those from Burroughs. At the time, The Lord of the Rings was a huge hit in fantasy fandom. Gygax later claimed, and I believe his claim, that the game wasn't much influenced by Tolkien and the references were (mostly) an attempt to connect the game to the then-faddish interest in the Professor's works.

The plan certainly worked and OD&D did quickly become popular beyond its target audience. But with that popularity came frustration. If you read early issues of The Dragon, Gygax sometimes seems almost apoplectic in his attempts to explain that, no, Dungeons & Dragons was never intended to simulate Tolkien's world, since he didn't in fact care much for it himself. (I believe that Dave Arneson was in fact much more strongly influenced by Tolkien and, weirdly, Bob Bledsaw's Wilderlands began as a homebrew Middle Earth campaign -- just look at its name) By that point, though, the damage had been done and what D&D was about no longer lay in the hands of Gygax; it had acquired a life of its own and that life included not just Tolkien but other kinds of non-pulp fantasy. In short, the original vision for D&D didn't long survive contact with reality.

In the decades since, D&D has undergone several different reinventions of its vision, very few of which are in fact compatible with its origins. This has caused lots of problems for many gamers, because the game has never, not at the beginning and certainly not now, really explained itself well. Just what is D&D supposed to be about? What are its inspirations and influences? Nowadays, in light of a new edition that seems to gleefully have rejected much of the game's prior history and concepts, you'll hear lots of people opining about the essential qualities of the game and almost all of them are mistaken. They're mistaken because they usually begin without any knowledge of the history of the game or of the culture from which it sprang. If I seem a little cranky about this point, it's because I think it's important to remember the origins of the D&D. It may well be true that what D&D is in the minds of many gamers is not what it was intended to be, but I don't think that makes a whit of difference. If anything, it only strengthens my contention that D&D has lost itself over the years.

Had I been in charge of a new edition of Dungeons & Dragons, I'd have made my number one priority the elimination of the game's identity crisis. I'd have striven to explain the origins and intentions of the game, as well as its inspirations and influences. The end result would perhaps have been something that's no longer very commercially viable, so it's just as well that no one has entrusted me with this task. However, the fact remains that D&D has never explained itself well and needs to do so ever more desperately. I realize it's too late for the game calling itself Dungeons & Dragons to get in touch with its roots again, but I can dream, can't I?

Good Stories

So, the fourth Indiana Jones movie is apparently out, seventeen years after the release of the last one. I haven't seen it yet, but I'll probably try to do so over the weekend. Despite my misgivings, I am cautiously optimistic that I won't hate it. I've read quite a few reviews by geek friends and colleagues and they all seemed to have enjoyed it, for the most part, and many of them are guys who still haven't gotten over The Phantom Menace (a film I don't think is nearly as bad as people say it is, but I digress), so that's actually a pretty good indication that I'll enjoy myself, though far from an ironclad one. I am nothing if not eccentric in my tastes.

This got me to thinking about a comment I read somewhere recently, one that I think applies equally well to RPGs as it does to movies or TV shows. The comment was about the difference between the original Star Trek series and its modern descendants, namely that the writers of the original series were simply trying to tell good science fiction stories, whereas the writers of the modern series are trying to tell good Star Trek stories. This struck me as a very keen insight.

There's often a difference between, for example, the first movie in what becomes a series of films and the subsequent ones. The reason is simple: the first movie is written as a story in its own right (often but not always -- let's face it, since Star Wars at least, many films are written with the intention of being the first in a series), while the sequels are written as a continuation of the characters and situations presented in the first. That is, sequels are almost always about the series, which makes them more complex and self-referential. They're sometimes close to unintelligible without a close viewing of the originals, which, to me, is a textbook case of putting the cart before the horse.

I think one of the reasons why old school D&D feels so different than its modern successors is that, especially with OD&D (and to a much lesser extent pre-Unearthed Arcana AD&D), the guys who wrote and played it were simply trying to create fun fantasy situations. Anything that served that end was acceptable and indeed encouraged, which is why there's a lot less fretting about verisimilitude or whether something "fits" into D&D. Eventually, as D&D became a thing unto itself rather than a rules set for creating fun fantasy situations, it started to become increasingly about itself. D&D is now like Star Trek or Star Wars -- a genre unto itself rather than a vehicle for simply telling good stories.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. The Wrath of Khan is universally regarded as the best of the Star Trek movies, for example, and it's to varying degrees unintelligible, or at least less powerful, without a knowledge of the original Star Trek series. At the same time, I think the reason why D&D no longer resonates as powerfully with many people as it once did is because the game has become too self-referential, too wrapped up in its own mythology. Ironically, what makes the older versions more enjoyable for me is that they represent the "before the Fall" period of the game, which is to say, the time before D&D became a brand, when it was just a name given to creating fun fantasy situations and playing them out around a table with some dice and your friends.

I say this is ironic, because grognards are often accused of being obsessed with history; I think that misunderstands a key point. To be aware of one's history isn't necessarily to be obsessed with it. Likewise, I think a better understanding of our hobby's history might remind gamers that there was a time when D&D wasn't just a brand and those were heady times. I don't think it's mere nostalgia to want to see a return to the days when Dungeons & Dragons -- and gaming in general -- wasn't so introspective and self-referential or a seedbed for "IP," a concept that, frankly, is antithetical to wild and wacky sharing of ideas and concepts that used to be a hallmark of this hobby.

So, I'll likely enjoy Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, but I hope I can be forgiven if I don't think it's anywhere near as good as Raiders of the Lost Ark, when Indiana Jones was just this guy with a fedora and a bull whip and not the standard bearer for a franchise.

Meanwhile, Over at Dragonsfoot ...

... former TSR Publications Editor, Tim Kask, drops what James Raggi rightly calls a "bombshell" in response first to this comment by Greg Ellis:

As someone who was introduced to RPG's via AD&D, for years I had the impression that the old three-booklet D&D game was much simpler, more primative and considerably less detailed.

That is, until I went back and read it.

With Greyhawk and the other supplements, it's essentially the same game as AD&D...
Sure, there are some differences... but all of the building blocks are there.

Kask explains,

You couldn't have made my point better if I had paid you to read script I wrote...

OD&D must be considered as the three boxed books and all four of the supplements; AD&D was, in part, a tidying-up of the contradictions.

Now this isn't news to old schoolers; we've known this for years and have been trying, often unsuccessfully, to make plain the true history of D&D.

Ellis then goes on by stating further (in the original thread):

One could argue that the extra detail baked into AD&D maybe isn't such a good thing; it seems to have encouraged a generation of players who enjoy fussing over the wording of the rulebook instead of deferring to their DM's judgement.

This is where things get interesting, because Kask's reply is not only one with which I agree, but one that I don't believe I've ever personally heard uttered by anyone associated with TSR in the days of the transition between OD&D and AD&D.

You win the prized Periapt of Perspicacity Award! Congratulations.

We shot ourselves, altogether unknowingly, in the foot. We had no idea that we were corrupting the original players into a flock of nit-pickers and rules lawyers. It was our own fault, although I don't think any of us could have seen that far into the future and foreseen it.

This is heavy stuff. Good stuff. Valuable stuff. Heck, Kask is providing us with lots of valuable insights and perspective in that whole thread on Dragonsfoot. Anyone at all interested in the history of the hobby and how and why it evolved as it did, often for the worse, sometimes for the better, would do well to wade through all 70+ pages of the thing. It's a gold mine of information.

"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.

Live and Learn

I've been reminded of numerous truths over the last few days and one of them is this: talk is cheap. At the end of the day, the old school renaissance I remain convinced is going to happen can't be something we just talk about it and it certainly can't be something we just complain about. Instead, it just has to be done. So that's what I plan on doing. That's not to say that I won't be talking about it, discussing it, or even, from time to time, complaining about it -- but that won't be all that I am doing. The time has come to put up or shut up and the naysayers be damned.

I am certain that, for all the acrimony, disunity, and kvetching, the old school community is not in fact a herd of incontinent cats. Or at least it's more than that. Fight On! offers a good model of what I want to see more of. It's an absolutely brilliant example of people who share a common passion for old school games and not much else coming together to create something that brings the community together. That's due in no small part to the vision and dedication of its publisher and editor, who's a huge inspiration to me. Issue 1 was a terrific first start -- not without its problems, certainly, but a far, far more constructive example of what the old school renaissance could be than any I have seen. Fight On! will only improve with time and I have few doubts that it might, in spite of -- or maybe because of -- its lack of a unitary focus, help usher in a second flowering of old school gaming.

I'm a dreamer and planner by nature, as I told someone just yesterday. I'm not content with being told "but it'll never work" or "you just don't understand how it is." It's quite possible that I don't understand how it is, but I see that as a point in my favor, since it means I'm willing to try "crazy" things others have dismissed as impossible or even foolhardy. I know I'm not alone in this regard, which is why I am sure we will see more projects after the fashion of Fight On! and those projects will succeed, modestly at first perhaps, but such is the nature of leaven, whose action is initially small but nevertheless produces nourishment.

And so I say: Fight On!

Universal System

I've been known to say that the transition to 4e this year will be very different from the transition to 3e in one undeniable respect: the Open Game License. Even though Wizards of the Coast will no longer be supporting v.3.5, others can do so freely and legally, as Paizo is doing with its upcoming Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. What I suspect this means is that, if they play their cards right, Paizo will soon become the de facto inheritor of a large portion of the remnant v.3.5 community. How large a portion I can't predict and it's really not important for the point I intend to make here anyway. What is important is that v.3.5 will not die with the advent of 4e. Indeed, it now has the capacity to grow and evolve along a natural trajectory, according to the wishes of both Paizo and its fans.

For that matter, even if Paizo were to declare bankruptcy tomorrow, v.3.5 will survive, thanks to the OGL. Anyone who wishes to publish their own version of the game can do so, using rules and, more importantly, concepts that are available to anyone who is willing to abide by the terms of the OGL and WotC can't stop them from doing so. Whatever else I may think of WotC and what it's become over the years, I owe the company my thanks, as the OGL is an amazing gift to the gaming community. Besides preserving the v.3.5 rules (about which I am largely ambivalent), the SRD also preserves innumerable ideas, concepts, and terms from the history of D&D. I can now talk about magic missile spells and ankhegs and gelatinous cubes and I'm not violating WotC's copyrights or trademarks. That's a powerful thing. D&D's DNA is now there for anyone to manipulate, provided they play by a few very simple ground rules that can never be changed. Thank you, WotC, for this! (I suspect the reason why 4e is in fact so different from 3e and doesn't "feel" like D&D anymore is because WotC regrets having "given away the store" through the OGL and now needs to reinvent the game from the ground up in order to "reclaim" it, but I digress)

Unfortunately, no previous edition of D&D is open in the same way that v.3.5 is. There have been numerous attempts to reconstruct past editions through the clever use of the OGL. I'm fond of all of them, for they all attempt to preserve different aspects of the patrimony bequeathed us by Gygax and Arneson. The problem with these retro-clones, leaving aside legal questions that some have -- questions I generally don't share, I should add -- is that none of them has come close to being universally accepted, even within the old school community. OSRIC, which attempts to preserve AD&D for the ages, seems to have made the most impact, but, honestly, its acceptance does not appear widespread. The number of products available under OSRIC's license remains small and I have a hard time imagining its growing significantly. Anything is possible, I suppose, but I don't have the sense that there are publishers laying big plans to use OSRIC to help fuel the old school renaissance I feel percolating beneath the surface. (The situation is, if anything, even worse for retro-clones of Basic D&D, where we have two competing versions, each of which takes a different approach to adapting the source material.)

I don't think I'm being Pollyannish by saying once again that, within the next year or two, we will see an old school renaissance. There were rumblings of dissatisfaction with the direction of the hobby before the announcement of 4e last year, but I think its arrival next month will serve as a catalyst for a lot of people to look back to where the hobby came from and where it strayed from its original vision. I'm not (necessarily) saying that this will result in the rise of a game or a company that will take the world -- or even the hobby -- by storm in the same way that old school D&D did. As others have said better than I, tabletop roleplaying will never again enjoy the faddish popularity it had in the late 70s and early 80s. So, I have no delusions of grandeur. What I do have, though, is a powerful sense that a line has been crossed in the development of the hobby and that some gamers -- and not just older ones -- aren't well served by the overly complex, difficult to learn, and time-consuming to prep RPGs that have become the norm. These gamers are looking for something simple, exuberant, and fun. Combine that with the era-ending deaths of Gary Gygax and Bob Bledsaw and I think you have the recipe for a counter-reformation.

But there's no standard bearer, no unifying figure or company, to lead this counter-reformation. Everyone who wants to get into the old school game wants to create their own system, their own interpretation of the original editions. And I think these desires, while understandable, are making the old school renaissance harder to get off the ground than it needs to be. No one is in the position Paizo is likely to be with regards to v.3.5 and that's a shame. The reality is that, for all the various persnickety changes to the rules, it's not so huge a leap from OD&D to 2e that a product made for one edition couldn't be used, with very few changes, for another. By and large, the rules have a degree of continuity that does not exist with 3e, let alone 4e. This isn't meant to minimize the differences between editions, but the reality is that even the much-reviled 2e is light years closer to Gygax and Arneson than 3e is. Its rules, as written, can be played in an old school fashion, whereas that's mostly impossible with more modern editions.

What am I getting at? Old school D&D already has a common language. But for some "dialecticisms," an OD&Der can communicate intelligibly with a AD&Der or a 2e-er in a way they can't with a player of a modern edition of D&D. Despite this, there's no universally accepted or recognized "meta-system" for writing old school materials. Back in the day, Judges Guild had what it called its "Universal System," which was a not-so-subtle reworking of common terms ("Hits to Kill" or HTK, instead of "Hit Points," for example) so that meaning was conveyed without using terms specific to any single edition (or even game).

I can't help but think that maybe we need something like that again. In the absence of One Retro-Clone to Rule Them All, what old school gaming needs to kickstart its renaissance is a lingua franca that everyone, from a fan of the three little brown books to a Zeb Cook groupie, can understand and use without much difficulty. In a very real sense, grognards don't need new games; they already have the games they like and have had them for years. What they don't have is new products that are professionally made -- yeah, it always comes back to that -- that carry the old school spirit forward to the future. Part of the reason why they don't is because no one has stepped up to the plate to do that. And part of the reason why no one has stepped up is because, if they choose OSRIC (or LL or BFRPG or ...) to do so, they're seen as "one of them." The old school community, like many marginalized communities, is very fractious and insular. It's riddled with ancient rivalries, nursed hurts, and bad blood and I see so many missed opportunities because of it.

Finding a way to unite all these people under a single banner would be a monumental task and it may not even be possible. The reality is that pre-3e D&D players, regardless of their favorite edition, have far more in common with another than they sometimes like to admit. I understand the appeal of elitism and exclusivity; I sometimes engage in it myself. But, ultimately, it's destructive and self-defeating. Too many of this hobby's traditions have already been willfully destroyed in pursuit of the bottom line. Why must we do it to ourselves without meaning to? No, the time has come to bury the hatchets and make an attempt to build on what we all have in common rather than to fixate on what separates us.

How will we do this? I'm not sure yet. The projects I want to undertake are a part of it, but just a small part. We need to do more and that's where I'm seeking advice (yet again). What can we do to bring the old school community together and help it become the seedbed for the flowering I see in the offing? We have a chance here to reclaim much of what we love about this hobby and make it vibrant once more. Will we seize it?

Rough Edges

I still have a head cold, so I'm feeling miserable, which may explain my current crankiness. Mind you, the latest excerpts from 4e, to which everyone keeps sending me links, certainly haven't helped my mood. I don't have much to say on this score that others haven't already said, but, reading them, I was reminded of a couple of things I'd been meaning to post about, things that say a lot about where our hobby has been and where it's going.

A lot of 4e's design decisions seem to have been made to address "issues" I've never had with Dungeons & Dragons or indeed gaming in general. That's because these issues are in fact features of the hobby. They're not things you can simply extirpate through good game design and, if you try to do so, you'll wind up ripping the heart out of why I game rather than making the experience more fun for me.

The first issue 4e looks like it was intended to tackle is the "swinginess" of gameplay. "Swinginess" is a function of the fact that D&D uses dice as random number generators and, being random, there's no guarantee that the outcome of any character's action, whether player or non-player, will be what anyone wants/expects. Sometimes, this is a good thing, such as when a character makes a saving throw at just the right time avoid certain death, while at other times it's not, such as when a wandering monster that slaughters the PCs as they are preparing to take on the evil necromancer who's holed up in the dungeon they're exploring.

For me, swinginess is part of the fun. I wrote earlier about the oracular power of dice and I stand by my contention that swinginess, even when it swings against my character, is essential to the magic of roleplaying games -- or indeed games in general. Rolling dice is the closest to risk taking that we can get in RPGs and there's a thrill that comes with knowing that it's always possible, however unlikely, that something monumentally bad could happen to your character when you toss those polyhedrals. At low levels of D&D, the likelihood of a bad outcome is quite high and so there's a sense of "danger" that I've always felt formed the basis of a unifying experience for all players of the game. The war stories of how your now-higher level PC narrowly escaped death at the hands of a fire beetle or a lowly kobold is one of those things that used to be commonplace. And what elevated those stories about your standard "let me tell you about my character" tales is the understanding that, for every character whom the dice favored, there was at least one whom they did not. PCs slain by random chance were a part of life, the somber backdrop against which one drew the story of a successful character's career.

That's just one example, of course; there are many other examples of "swinginess" in action and I'd speak glowingly of most of them. I like the unexpected in my games, even when it's bad. Sometimes -- many times -- dumb luck has a better sense of drama than I ever could. Sometimes -- many times -- the game is enriched by the fact that stuff happens for no reason at all. I can't shake the feeling that 4e is throwing the baby out with the bathwater by trying to provide a formula for fun, whether it be in making low-level characters more "robust" or in ensuring that just the "right" amount of magic items are distributed to the PCs as they level up. I think the quest for a more regular, even play experience will suck the life out of the game.

Which brings me to my second concern: hand-holding. Some will say and indeed have already said that much of what I see and object to in 4e is easily eliminated by an experienced DM. The guidelines I hate are there to help novices, to train them in the fine art of Dungeon Mastering. To that, I say hogwash. You cannot learn good refereeing from a book and I could argue that there's no better evidence that a lot of game designers never bothered to understand Gygax than the continual desire to turn the latest edition of the Dungeon Masters Guide into a how-to manual for DMs.

The ability to referee a RPG is a skill like any other. You get better at it by using it and that includes making mistakes and getting hung up on the consequences of your mistakes. It also means learning from others more skilled than yourself. When I started gaming in the late 70s and early 80s, there was an unofficial apprenticeship system to become the DM. You learned at the feet of more experienced DMs, like my friend's older brother and his father, until you were ready to try your hand at it yourself. In turn, you would train others in the ways of the Dungeon Master, thereby repaying your debt to your own teachers. I get the sense this system doesn't exist anymore and that people somehow expect the rulebooks to give them everything they need to be able to run a fun and satisfying adventure every time.

Well, it simply doesn't work that way; it never has. Conservatively, I'd estimate that, especially with less experienced groups, at least half of all RPG sessions end in failure, with "failure" being defined as a disjointed, possibly nonsensical, and certainly frustrating few hours. That's just the nature of roleplaying games. I don't think you can mechanize this away. There's no magic formula or recipe I can put in the shiny new DMG that will guarantee that every session is as satisfying as a finely-crafted R.E. Howard story. That's simply impossible and I think the sooner we teach new gamers that "successful" gaming takes time, effort, and a lot of luck, the happier we all will be.

For some, tabletop gaming will simply be inadequate approximation of literature, movies, or video games. So much of the success of gaming depends on intangibles and unpredictables; there is no way you can put that in a box and sell it. Gaming has too many "rough edges" that can't be pounded smooth -- and shouldn't be. For those of us who love this hobby and have stuck with it, those rough edges are what keep us coming back. We know that there's a chance -- a good chance even -- that almost given session won't be all that enjoyable or even coherent. But we also know that, when everything falls into place, when everything clicks, it's an experience unlike any other, an experience to be savored and remembered for a lifetime.

I'm sure it comes as no surprise that I think the hobby has taken numerous wrong turns over the years, but, even with all those errors, I still think the core of our hobby, the one Gygax and Arneson created back in 1974, is still very compelling. Especially now, when so much of our entertainment is slick and computer-generated, when fun has been reduced to a formula or an algorithm, there's a more a need than ever for something that's random, unpredictable, and often frustrating. The quest to make RPGs like every other entertainment is a deal with the Devil in my opinion.

I don't know about you, but I don't want every session of my D&D campaign to come with guaranteed fun. That may seem odd, but it's not. Most of us, I think, if we're honest, understand that we like rough edges -- we need rough edges. Something that's too smooth, too formulaic, especially in the pursuit of entertainment, will wind up producing its antithesis. I realize I'm just a crazy, aging gamer, but I've been at this hobby a long time and I've tried a lot of stuff and I can tell you one thing: there is nothing more truly fun, either as a player or as a referee, than watching a D20 turn up 1 and continuing the game anyway. Failure, even death, is not the end; it's an opportunity. But to seize it you need to embrace randomness, laud unpredictability, and understand that fun cannot be bottled and sold.

Shot Heard 'Round the (Gaming) World

The big news hitting the Net this evening is that Monte Cook, one of the architects behind the Third Edition of Dungeons & Dragons is joining Paizo as a rules consultant on their Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.

This is remarkable news for a number of reasons. Firstly, Monte Cook's name carries lots of cachet in the world of 3e D&D. Besides being the author of that edition's Dungeon Master's Guide, he was among the first people to take full advantage of the OGL and D20 STL. His Malhavoc Press sold PDF supplements to 3e when no one else did and, by all accounts, sold very well indeed. This quickly established him as a leading light of the Open Gaming movement and led to his writing and selling numerous very successful products that have been consistently well regarded by D&D fans as among the best material available for 3e/D20.

Secondly, Monte Cook is seen as a straight shooter. He often speaks out against what he believes are poor moves by WotC, either from a business or a design perspective. Even if one disagrees with his opinions -- and I often do -- there's no question that he cares about the hobby and is knowledgeable about the inner working of the industry side of things.

Thirdly, Monte had previously "retired" from the game biz. He had made enough money from his D20/OGL products and had had some success in branching out into other areas (such as fiction) that he indicated he was no longer going to write gaming products. Of course, his retirement has been more theoretical than real, given that he published two significant products after he has supposedly hanged up his hat. Nevertheless, it makes great theater to be able to say that Monte Cook is "coming out of retirement" to work on Paizo's new RPG.

So, by signing on with Paizo, even in a consultative position, Monte Cook lends an air of authority to Pathfinder, much in the way that Troll Lord Games' benefited from Gary Gygax's imprimatur on Castles & Crusades. If anything, I'd argue that Monte's decision to throw in with Paizo will be even more important, because he's remained a leader in the hobby since the release of 3e, whereas Gygax's influence was largely nil by the time C&C came out (except among grognards, to whom Troll Lord hoped to appeal). Likewise, having one of the designers of the previous edition lend a hand on your upstart RPG sends a signal: we are the true heirs of 3e.

I'm sure the guys and gals at Paizo, in their usual gracious way, will deny this and express nothing but admiration for the crew at WotC and the work they've done on 4e. I even believe they're sincere. But the fact remains that this is an important coup for Paizo and for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and it solidifies my belief that there will now be a permanent split in the fanbase of D&D and a fork in the development of its rules. I won't go so far as to say this spells doom for 4e or WotC, because it won't. I remain convinced that, at least initially, 4e will be a huge success for WotC. Long term, though, anything is possible and I expect that, when -- and if -- 5e rolls around, the landscape of the hobby will still be feeling the repercussions of Paizo's decision not to jump on the 4e bandwagon.

My Secret Life

In the comments to one of my recent posts, I admitted to a deep dark secret: I regularly play and enjoy World of Warcraft. In many gaming circles, not just old school ones, WoW is viewed as the Devil's own tool. Ritual denunciations of the most successful MMO in history are de rigeur for these gamers, as a way of establishing their bona fides as "true" gamers. Heck, even game designers go out of their way to bash WoW, to ensure that we know they're "one of us" and not one of those guys.

Well, I'm one of those guys and I make no bones about it. I play World of Warcraft and have since shortly after its release in November 2004. I'm even among that rarefied sub-set within WoW players -- a raider, which is to say, that I get together for several hours every few nights with twenty-four other people scattered across the globe to take on the most difficult encounters the game has to offer.

I find World of Warcraft a great deal of fun. I'm not much of a video game player and had never touched an MMO before WoW. I'm still far from certain that, when WoW loses its appeal for me, I'll seek out a replacement. WoW is, quite frankly, a brilliantly designed video game and anyone with an interest in good game design of any sort would be wise to familiarize oneself with what WoW does and how it does it. Like all such things, it's not for everyone, but I also think that there's little to be gained by sneering at it -- or indeed any MMO -- as if the very idea were somehow repulsive.

The simple reality is that, for a lot of gamers out there, WoW scratches a number of itches that tabletop RPGs either don't or can't. First and foremost, WoW is very easy to play, both in terms of its actual mechanics, but, perhaps more importantly, in terms of the time investment needed to enjoy it. Lots of people will tell you that MMOs are massive time sinks and, for many players, they certainly are. Raiding at the level I do does take lots of time, but most MMO players don't raid and have no interest in doing so. These "casual" players simply want to play a fantasy character in a beautifully presented world, where they can fight bad guys and quest with their friends -- or alone -- for a few hours. That's it and WoW accommodates that style of play superbly -- no more 20 minutes of fun packed into 4 hours.

No, MMOs like WoW do not allow you to go anywhere or do anything. There are "walls" in the world that you can't surmount, no matter how hard you try. Likewise, the main storylines of the Warcraft world -- and make no mistake, there are storylines -- are all pre-scripted and follow trajectories determined by the good folks at Blizzard rather than your own imagination. But, frankly, these storylines are (mostly) extremely well-done and engaging and use technology effectively to give the impression -- a false one, to be sure -- that your individual character is a unique individual whose actions have forever changed the world. For many gamers, this is more than they get in their tabletop games -- and they can play whenever they want for as long as they want without the need to schedule a mutually agreeable time to get together with their friends. That's a powerful advantage of MMOs, particularly for gamers who work, have families, or are otherwise unable to drop everything to game as they did in high school or college.

So it's true that MMOs are not flexible or as open-ended as tabletop RPGs, at least not yet. On the other hand, gamers are by nature inn0vative and clever. Roleplayers have found many ways to create their own stories and use the tools MMOs give them to do in a virtual environment what they might do on the tabletop. There are still limits, of course. For example, some in-game characters are unkillable and others, though killable, don't stay dead. This tends to limit the extent of roleplaying that is possible, but it doesn't wholly preclude it and anyone who claims that "you can't roleplay in an MMO" is either trying to sell you something -- probably his RPG -- or has never played an MMO for any length of time.

For myself, I see World of Warcraft as a video game. I enjoy it primarily as tactical combat game with some roleplaying elements, much like a first-person shooter game, but in a far more complex environment. It's a great way to unwind with friends I've made online, much in the way some people watch TV. I don't see it as an alternative to tabletop roleplaying, at least not for me. Rather, I see it as a complementary entertainment that more than satisfies my need for flashy special effects -- "better graphics than my imagination," in the famous words of a friend -- and exciting "gamist" play. That is, I never once think about why my WoW character's powers and abilities work as they do or what their impact would be on the game's setting. It's just a fun diversion, nothing more. (I won't say "mindless," because most high-level raid encounters require a lot of thought, planning, and skill)

Despite all this, MMOs clearly cause a lot of apprehension in the hobby. Beneath of a lot of the contempt for the medium, I sense a fair bit of envy. World of Warcraft is the D&D of the 21st century -- a huge fad that makes the RPG boom of the late 70s/early 80s look utterly insignificant by comparison. I think there's also an implicit acknowledgment that the future of fantasy gaming belongs to computer games and MMOs. As technology gets better and the capacity for open-ended, individually customizable games becomes ever more possible, tabletop RPGs will seem even more "quaint" than they already do and no amount of harrumphing about how MMOs are as much fun as banging your head against the wall will change that.

That's why I believe, if tabletop RPGs are to survive and prosper, the last thing they should be doing is conceding computer games a home field advantage. Tabletop RPGs will never be able to beat video games when it comes to exciting combats or flashy graphics. Computer games own those things and always will. But what tabletop RPGs have always done best is provide context and continuity to those combats that are emergent properties rather than carefully designed ones.

Tabletop RPGs are notoriously "swingy" things, sometimes uproariously fun, sometimes mind-bendingly boring. Their fun depends almost entirely on intangibles -- personal chemistry, mental nimbleness, and random chance -- that simply cannot be boiled down into algorithms and mechanized. There is no way to guarantee that any given tabletop RPG session will be fun or even tolerable. Many sessions, in my experience, are painful and yet, in retrospect, those painful sessions can often lay the groundwork for the fun that emerges later on. And there's nothing even the most talented and determined game designer can do to lay that groundwork or ensure that there is ever a payoff in the end. Sometimes it happens; often it doesn't. When it does, though, it's glorious and no technology will ever be able to duplicate that.

For me, it's this that RPGs should focus on and teach people to expect and enjoy. Anything else is just ceding the field to the machines.

"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.

Memories of Game Stores Past

One of the very clear things to which I can point and say, yes, the hobby used to be much more "magical" in my youth is the state of game stores today. When I first got into roleplaying back in the late 1970s, game stores -- real, honest to goodness game stores, as opposed to comic book stores that happen to sell games, for example -- were pretty amazing places. They were utterly unlike any place I'd ever been and did a lot to help initiate me into what seemed to be a secret world I never knew about. Getting my first copy of Call of Cthulhu from the now-defunct Compleat Strategist in Baltimore was vastly different experience than ordering the AD&D Monster Manual from the Sears Catalog a few years earlier. It's no wonder I was hooked forever by gaming.

The Compleat Strategist was a local branch of a game store in New York City. Back in 1981, when I first went there, they were located in an old Baltimore row home. I can't recall the precise address anymore. I have some dim recollection of its being not far from a muncipal park, perhaps Patterson Park, but I may be completely wrong about this. Sometime before my senior year of high school (1986-87), they moved to a smaller, more cramped storefront and the place was never quite the same for me. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I went to the Compleat Strategist because I'd seen advertisements for it in the back of Dragon, along with ads for Chaosium's new Lovecraft RPG. I couldn't find Chaosium stuff at the local book stores or through the Sears Catalog, so finding a shop that actually specialized in wargames and roleplaying games was the only way to go. That shop was amazing. The shelves were lined with all sorts of games I'd never heard of, as well as filled with guys, typically much older than I, who seemed to live in the place, because they were always there. What was even more amazing to me was that the place had a game room in the back, where there was always some game or other being run. I used to enjoy just listening to these games, since I never stayed long enough to take a seat at the table myself.

What was most remarkable to me, after all these years, was the obvious love the guys who worked there had for the games they sold. Well, not all of them. Much like grognards, these guys were an opinionated lot and wouldn't hesitate to tell me their opinions of this module or that one. They were thinner, younger versions of the Comic Book Guy, but I liked them all the same. I can't stress enough how, for a kid of 11, they made me feel like I was "one of them." My age didn't really seem to matter. They regaled me with stories of their adventures and home campaigns and talked to me of games I'd never played. Sometimes, yes, they made me feel like an ignorant rube -- "You didn't know that spectres were called Nazgûl in early printings of D&D?" -- but they did this I think, not merely to show off their superiority, but to entice me and initiate me. It was a kind of gaming hazing and, rather than be discouraged, I became determined to beat them at their own game by eating, drinking, and breathing gaming trivia.

I guess it worked.

I'm sure there are still stores out there like the Compleat Strategist, but they don't seem to be the norm. By the mid-80s, I bought most of my games from shops in the mall, like Games & Gadgets, which was either a subsidiary of Electronics Boutique (now EB Games) or another company bought out by them, or at toy stores like Toys R Us or Kay-Bee. So long as I could get the games I wanted, I didn't really mind, especially since I lived in the suburbs and The Compleat Strategist was downtown.

As I get older, though, I look back on that store with increasing fondness. As I say, I am sure there are plenty of such shops out there, but they don't exist in Baltimore anymore (or in Toronto, where I presently reside). Nowadays, RPGs come from bookstores or online vendors rather than quirky little places filled with weirdos who want to tell you about their characters. Some might see this as a good thing and, I'll be honest, sometimes I appreciate the anonymity of modern game stores. Still, there's a magic missing from these more corporate shops. I no longer feel like I'm part of a secret club or a fellowship of like-minded people. Heck, I don't even really feel like I'm part of a hobby shared by the owners of the shop. I'm just engaging in a business transaction and nothing more.

Maybe I'm just getting old cranky; it wouldn't be the first time. But I think there's more at work here than that.

Are Modern RPGs Too Complex?

The beginnings of a very interesting thread over at the Knights & Knaves Alehouse.

Unsurprisingly, I think the answer to the question is "yes" without qualification, but then I would, wouldn't I?

"Old School"

In my review of The Original Bottle City below, I noted that "the mere existence of the term "old school" only highlights the discontinuity modern gaming has with its past." I won't go so far as to say that that insight was the most important thing I came away with after having read the module, but it's certainly very close to the top of the list. Among grognards, the term "old school" is accepted uncritically and, like many terms created to marginalize non-mainstream viewpoints, is even worn with a certain amount of pride. Being able to say you're an "old school gamer" is a badge of honor in many circles. Now, I certainly have no objection to this. After all, I regularly use the term "old school" without a hint of opprobrium, but I think it important to give some consideration to what the term implies and why it is used.

I'm not sure precisely when the term "new school" came into use with regards to roleplaying games. My guess would be that it's of pretty old provenance, perhaps as early as the advent of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, when AD&Ders wanted to distinguish themselves from OD&Ders, but I don't know this for a fact. When I was younger, I never heard the term -- or "grognard" for that matter -- and it wasn't until the late 80s/early 90s that I have any recollection of a distinction being made between "old school" games and what we were playing at the time. At any rate, I think it's fair to say that, by the time Vampire: The Masquerade rolled around, there was a widely accepted acknowledgment that there were old school games and, by implication "new school" games.

Exactly where that distinction lay was always vague and remains so. I have absolutely no interest at this time in hashing out that topic. Suffice it to say that I could easily come up with some criteria to distinguish between the two eras of RPGs. But that's not what I want to talk about here at the moment. Instead, let's focus on a fact that no one seems to dispute: there is an old school and there is a new school. Everyone, from grognards to the hippest Indie designers, seems to accept without question that there is such a thing as an old school and that the term carries some meaning. Certainly, that meaning will vary from person to person, according to their understanding of gaming history and their ideological agendas. But no one that I know of disputes that the term "old school" conveys something. ("New school" is rarely used explicitly, which I also think is significant)

So, what does the term "old school" convey? As I commented in my review, it implies a discontinuity with the past. Unlike very specific terms used in some forms of entertainment, such as, say, the distinction between "rock and roll" and "rhythm and blues," "old school" is broad and vague; it's a blanket term for a style or philosophy -- thus the use of the word "school" -- that is deemed out of date, antiquated, or at least not current. "Old" can, of course, be used to mean "original" and I suspect most grognards use it that way, but I imagine that the nameless originator of the usage didn't mean it that way.

"Old" can also simply mean "from the past," as in "Look at that old building," but that's not what's going on here. "Old" isn't modifying the noun "game," as in "OD&D is an old roleplaying game." Rather, it's modifying "school," which, as I pointed out above, suggests that the style or mode of thinking behind the game in question is out of date -- "old fashioned," as we say in English. And "old fashioned" is generally not a complimentary term. At best, it can mean "quaint," but it generally denotes something that has fallen out of favor, preference for which is noteworthy and eccentric.

To be fair, I think "old fashioned," in all senses of the term, is a pretty good synonym for "old school." I'd never argue that my preference for older games wasn't eccentric and out of vogue with contemporary trends in gaming. But therein lies the crux of the matter: the discontinuity with the past. Everyone recognizes this; no one denies that old school RPGs are, well, old school. Preferring an old school game isn't just like preferring R&B to rock and roll. Instead, it's viewed as evidence that one is a fuddy-duddy, who's not hip to the latest trends in gaming (or even ignorant of them). It's a way of relegating certain games and the people who enjoy them to the netherworld reserved for old guys who hang out in coffee shops and reminisce about the good ol' days.

I am not advocating banning the use of the term "old school," because I think it's a very useful term. It's filled with meaning, both positive and negative. Indeed, I can think of few terms that better describe my own preferences than "old school." At the same time, though, I think it's important that everyone recognize the central truth that it reveals: a rupture, at some undefined point in the past, between the origins of the hobby and what it has become today. We can -- and will -- quibble and argue over exactly when things changed (for good or for ill, depending on one's own philosophical commitments), but we all see that things have changed. Some will call it "evolution," some "betrayal," and others will just see a succession of different fads. But the change is real. Change happened.

The games that we today call "roleplaying games" aren't the same kinds of things we called roleplaying games in the past. The "new school" (or schools, as I think there are several of them) is every bit as real as the old school. One of the things I admire about White Wolf's World of Darkness games is that they call themselves "storytelling games." It's a self-identification that might rankle some, because could come across as pretentious and perhaps it is. Yet, it's also an acknowledgment that playing one of these games is not in fact the same activity as playing OD&D. The two may share common descent, but they are quite different things. This is one of the new schools and I applaud its clarity of vision.

I should close with a note that, while I firmly believe there was a rupture in the past between old and new schools, this isn't about the superiority of one approach over another, so much as a preference for the older approach. I've been gaming more or less continuously for nearly 30 years now. As a professional writer, I've written for too many game systems to count, including new school ones. Nevertheless, I think we do the hobby a disservice by denying the discontinuity between the old and the new and by speaking of "evolution" or "progress." I don't believe in such things where the hobby is concerned, but I do believe in change. And the hobby has changed a lot since the early days and not always for the better. I remain convinced that the old school still has many lessons to teach us, if we're willing to listen.

Alas, not so many people are willing to do so.

Times Have Changed

This is the first sample character in the history of Dungeons & Dragons. Take note of his ability scores and his class.

Name: Xylarthen
Class: Magic-User

Strength: 6
Intelligence: 11
Wisdom: 13
Constitution: 12
Dexterity: 9
Charisma: 8

This is the sample character in Empire of the Petal Throne, published the following year. He's called "Character X" in the text. All scores are out of a possible 100.

Strength: 98
Intelligence: 53
Constitution: 37
Psychic Ability: 26
Dexterity: 14
Comeliness: 83

Then, in 1977, we get this:

Furthermore, it is essential to the character's survival to be exceptional (with a rating of 15 or above) in no fewer than two ability characteristics.

That's from the AD&D Players Handbook, written by the Man himself. See a trend?

Sea Change

Since sometime last summer, I've noticed an indefinable change in the hobby, something that was lurking beneath the surface and that finally burst free in the weeks and months after the announcement of 4e last August. That's certainly when it all started to fall into place for me. As I told some friends of mine this weekend, I think 4e actually came at the right time. People were ready for a new edition of D&D, especially people who'd been playing 3e since its release in 2000. I was one of those people.

And then we started to hear more about 4e and it seems as if it left a bad taste some people's mouths. Some of that, of course, has to do with WotC's execrable PR for the new edition. They seemed never to miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity and many people began to wonder if maybe the game were similarly ill-conceived. Not badly designed, mind you -- I have little doubt that 4e will be an extremely well-designed game, perhaps even the best designed edition of D&D ever in an "absolute" sense -- but tin-eared and missing the point of why people actually play and enjoy roleplaying games. Or at least missing the point with regards to a sizable minority of gamers.

That's what's really different this time around. It's been 34 years since the release of OD&D, a generation and a half. That's a lot of time -- time enough, in fact, for the grandchildren of the oldest gamers to have been born and take up gaming. While "this ain't your grandfather's D&D" sounds exactly like the kind of slogan I expect WotC's marketing department to come up with to promote 4e, the reality is that, for some gamers, such a slogan is exactly why they feel wary and exactly there's there's been this strange, indescribable undercurrent to the hobby over the last year.

My gut tells me, though, that we're on the cusp of a change. I'm reluctant to go all-out and say there's a full-scale Old School Renaissance in the offing and yet it certainly feels as if that's the case. Just take a look at my Links of Interest on the right and you'll see quite a few blogs, forums, and companies that are dedicated to the spirit of old school roleplaying. And those barely scratch the surface. Certainly, they're a minority within a minority, so maybe it all doesn't matter in the end. Still, it's interesting to see how many grognards and neo-grognards have started to come out of the woodwork and, rather than just sniping from the sidelines and complaining about those "damn kids," they're actually engaged in some really interesting and constructive projects, things that actually celebrate this hobby. They're not just bitter beardos writing jeremiads anymore -- they're guys and gals who love the history and traditions of this hobby and are working to preserve them for a new generation. That's really exciting.

Speaking only for myself, I can tell you of two factors that finally drove me back into the loving arms of OD&D. The first is that, quite frankly, I increasingly find modern RPGs too restrictive and too driven by concerns to build an exploitable IP rather than anything having to do with the simple joy of playing games. The second is that computer and video games have now reached the stage where there is simply no point in trying to beat them on their home turf. D&D combats are never going to be, solely based on game mechanics, as interesting and as engaging as those of many video games. But then I've never felt that the heart and soul of D&D -- or any RPG -- was in its mechanics. Trying to compete with video games on the field of "pure" gameplay is a recipe for failure.

Early RPGs, though, aren't about game mechanics. Certainly, such things have a role to play, sometimes even an important one, but anyone who looks at OD&D combat mechanics and hopes to have, simply on the basis of dice rolls and combat matrices, an exciting and memorable combat is setting themselves up for disappointment. RPGs live or die by the passion and skill of their players, particularly the Game Master. This is a simple yet often overlooked fact. It's one of the reasons why some people can talk about the most poorly designed games in glowing terms: they played them with a great GM and a bunch of imaginative friends. There's no way to make a formula that guarantees good gameplay every time. RPGs are notoriously "swingy" entertainments. No company, not even WotC, can ensure that every session you play will be memorably fun. That's the nature of the beast.

What I am seeing, though, is more and more gamers are realizing that fun isn't a formula. Fun is what you bring to a game. If that's the case -- and it is -- why not play games that don't merely encourage but demand that the GM and players alike have to engage it in order to create a fun experience for everyone? That, I think, is part of why we're seeing the return to old school games. It's not just nostalgia (though I'm sure there's some of that); it is, I think, a realization that, somewhere along the line, something's been lost in this hobby. Maybe it can't be found again but it's worth looking for nonetheless. I am hardly surprised to see gamers rediscovering the roots of roleplaying and finding that, despite what collective wisdom would have them believe, older games weren't in fact so bad at all. Indeed, they might just teach us a thing or two we've forgotten.

Exciting times.

Shared Fantasy

I mentioned the release of the first issue of Fight On! the other day, but I wanted to share a little snippet from it, which I think perfectly encapsulates why I'm so excited about gaming these days. It's part of the editor's introduction to the 'zine and it's brilliant.

Fight On! is a journal of shared fantasy. We who read and write for this magazine are a community of role-playing enthusiasts united by our love of the freewheeling, do-it-yourself approach that birthed this hobby back in the 1970's. We are wargamers who write our own rules and fantasists who build our own worlds, weekend warriors sharing dreams of glory and authors collaborating on tales of heroism and valor. We talk, paint, draw, write, act, costume, and roll dice in service of our visions.

We game. And you're welcome to join us.

That's the stuff.

D&D in the News

D&D had a news story devoted to it yesterday on MSNBC, the first time I can remember such a thing occurring in many a moon. Sure, Gary's death last month brought the game back into the spotlight, but it mostly in the context of being Gygax's creation rather than as a topic of discussion in its own right. This time, though, it was different and, I suspect, much of what was said in the story will shock and offend a lot of gamers, particularly the hardcore gamers who spend a lot of time online posting to forums and reading blogs about their shared hobby.

The story was entitled "'Dungeons & Dragons' fights for its future" and begins by stating, "It must be tough to be 34 and already see your children overshadow you." Those are harsh words and yet true. The reality is that the computer games D&D helped inspire long ago overtook their erstwhile "parent" in popularity and profitability, a situation that will only get worse as time goes on. As I noted in my post yesterday, the release of D&D in 1974 was a perfect storm, an unpredictable confluence of events that led to the game's faddish popularity for a few years in the late 70s and early 80s -- a popularity it has never regained despite lots of claims by people at Wizards of the Coast that more people play D&D now than have ever done so and that the line is more profitable than ever.

Those claims might even be true in an absolute sense, but, relatively, D&D is not what it was and couldn't be. Those fad years have skewed a lot of people's perceptions, both ordinary gamers and game designers. When Gygax tried to sell his idea to Avalon Hill, he anticipated that there were maybe 50,000 people who might buy and play the game. By today's standards, where a "successful" RPG might sell one-tenth that amount, 50,000 might seem like a lot -- and it was, for an untested and peculiar kind of "wargame" -- but Avalon Hill wasn't willing to take that gamble and so turned Gygax down. In the end, Gary had to start his own company to publish D&D, which quickly sold far more than 50,000 copies and established D&D as the 800-pound gorilla of the roleplaying game industry, a position it has never relinquished, despite years of mismanagement and outright stupidity by its caretakers.

But the reality is that D&D's popularity was a fad, a fad made possible by the parallel growing popularity of fantasy literature, at once inspired by and driving the success of D&D. Remember too that, as a hobby, D&D predates most of what we would today call video games and it would be years before most such computer entertainments could compete with even the most primitive hack 'n slash dungeon crawls. In those halcyon days, D&D succeeded because it gave people something they wanted -- fantasy escapism -- in a way that no other medium could provide. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the entire video game industry, which now overshadows RPGs, arose out of a variety of attempts to reproduce the D&D experience in electronic form.

It took years for it to happen, but the video game industry has succeeded. I say "succeeded" in the sense that it now gives the vast majority of people who, in the past, might have turned to D&D for their fantasy escapism what they want but without the fuss of complicated rules or funny dice or even having to find some friends with whom to play the game at all. Most people nowadays can get the same experience they'd get out of D&D by playing computer games or MMORPGs, with the latter even providing much of the social aspect many "purist" roleplayers say is the true appeal of the hobby. The fact is, though, most gamers are very happy with the experience computer games provide. I observed this years ago, back in the dying days of 2e, when Blizzard, the company that would go on to claim the fantasy gaming crown with World of Warcraft, put out its dungeon crawl game Diablo. A dear friend of mine played it and loved, as did we all, but I still wanted to start up a D&D game and asked him to join. He demurred, saying, without a hint of irony, "Why would I play D&D when I can play Diablo, which has better graphics than my imagination?"

While my friend now regrets having ever said that, the reality is that he was right then and even more right now. For many people, D&D is a very inefficient vehicle for delivering what they want out of a fantasy game. I say that without a hint of either venom for those who prefer computer games (I am a guy who plays in a WoW raiding guild) or disdain for pen and paper games (which I continue to play and design). I simply think that what we are seeing is that the last vestiges of D&D's faddishness are finally falling away and the game is revealed for what it always was: a peculiar little hobby activity for a small group of peculiar people.

Again, I say this without contempt. In fact, I rather look forward to the days when roleplaying is comfortable being what it really is. Those days of tremendous success were oddities. The hobby has been coasting on momentum from the mid-80s and inertia is finally exerting its inexorable pull. My own kids will probably be roleplayers, but only because their father is. They might in turn spread this hobby to some of their friends, but the odds are not great. Like model railroad building or playing bridge (a fad of its own -- the D&D of the 1950s), roleplaying games will eventually become a marginal activity that a small portion of the public finds joy in. For myself, as one of the people who finds such joy, I see no problem in this future. My only concern is that, in their quest to regain something that can never be regained, D&D's current custodians will sell the game's soul and history for a bunch of magic beans.