The Apocalypse

“Peoples of the world - you appear bent upon the destruction of a civilization that has taken centuries to build, and the extinction of life on earth.”

“If that is your will ... so be it!”

“We, the Apocalypse, demand an immediate cessation of this insane violence, or we will end it for you with a force you cannot conceive.”

“We have the power!”

“The choice is yours!”

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.

The Art of D&D

Lots of people have their own understanding of how D&D has changed over the years and their own opinions of just whether these various changes have been good or bad and whether any have been extensive enough to make this or that edition "not D&D."

Naturally, I have my own opinions on these matters and I'll probably get around to discussing them at greater length in due course. For now, though, I will point out one way that earlier editions of D&D were different: the art. I'm not even specifically talking about the content of the art so much as the fact that early D&D benefits, I think, from a lack of coherent art direction. Indeed, I doubt TSR even had a formal art director until many years into its existence. Certainly no such person is credited in 1983's Monster Manual II, one of the last books of the Gygax era of AD&D.

Nowadays, though, D&D is all about its art direction. Defining "the look" of D&D seems to have been a significant part of both the 3e and 4e design process. I haven't seen a lot of 4e's art, but 3e's shows a high degree of consistency over the course of the edition's run. Though there were many artists who graced 3e's pages, they all adopted similar styles in my opinion, which makes it very possible to talk about a "3e esthetic" in a specific way that you can't about 1e books, for example.

Obviously, the 3e books look very nice. They're extremely high quality books, masterfully designed and much of the art is gorgeous. Unlike a lot of self-professed grognards, as I've said, I actually like a lot of modern D&D art and find much of early D&D's illustrations amateurish at best. That said, the one area where I think early D&D wins hands-down, though, is in terms of the variety of its art. Perhaps by design and perhaps by simple necessity, there really isn't a lot of consistency in early D&D art. If you compare Dave Trampier's 1e Players Handbook cover with David Sutherlands's 1e Dungeon Masters Guide cover, for example, you see two similar but not identical styles, with Trampier's being a gritty, "low fantasy" approach to its subject matter, while Sutherland's City of Brass encounter suggests quite the opposite. The 1e Monster Manual, whose interiors were done by Trampier and Sutherland, varies even within a given artist's contributions, particularly Trampier's pieces, which range from the starkly realistic to the cartoonish.

I don't think early D&D art is better, either technically or esthetically, than more modern treatments of the same subject matter (though I am very fond of certain older pieces). In almost every way, I think modern gaming art is superior to its predecessors. The sole exception is in its implication. This is a subtle and subjective thing but, for me, early gaming art, in its diversity, with its rough around the edges rawness, is far more evocative of what I want roleplaying to be -- an amateur activity -- and better highlights that it is an intensely personal thing that varies greatly from gamer to gamer. Frankly, I don't want slick; I don't want polished. Roleplaying games grew out of the confluence of multiple kit-bashes to wargaming in the late 60s and early 70s and it's that gung-ho do-it-yourself enthusiasm that I see in early D&D art.

It's that same enthusiasm I just don't see in many modern gaming products, particularly D&D.

Nerves of Steel

I continue to think it best, despite my intense interest in the entire Pathfinder Roleplaying Game project that Paizo has launched, that I continue to avoid the open playtest boards as much as possible. Initially I did so because they were filled with dozens of people who either didn't read or didn't understand Paizo's mission statement for Pathfinder, namely backward compatibility with v.3.5. Seeing yet another person advocating the elimination of Vancian magic or alignment or some other fundamental aspect of D&D made me wonder why these guys weren't signing up for 4e and it just annoyed the heck out of me. But, being the biggest name in fantasy gaming since 1974, D&D has always attracted more than its share of players who didn't really like it in the first place and wanted to "fix" it in ways that shredded its very soul. Players like that have been around since I started playing in the late 70s and I suspect they'll always be around. That was only the first stage of my disillusionment, unfortunately. Nowadays the boards seem to be filled with a different kind of player who doesn't really like D&D. Whereas initially the complainers nibbled around the edges of things and lashed out in pretty inconsequential ways, now we have pamphleteers, zealots, and dime store philosophers who are all peddling their own theories about how to improve D&D and correct "problems" with its mechanics and play.

Now, don't get me wrong: as a dime store philosopher myself I have some sympathy with these guys. More to the point, the entire pulp fantasy D&D project is all about "fixing" D&D so that game play is more in tune with the early game's literary inspirations. The difference, though, is that I accept and acknowledge what I'm doing will make the game different from the current version of the game. Backward compatibility with v.3.5 is not my goal and indeed I recognized early on that v.3.5 is a terrible foundation for the kind of D&D I wish to create. So, yes, I have my own little agendas and theories and I intend to run with them as far as they'll take me, but I'm not playtesting the Pathfinder RPG here. I'm not trying to impose my vision of D&D on Pathfinder.

The guys at Paizo, especially Jason Buhlmann, have my utmost respect for being able to stomach all of this. I still think the open playtest is a brilliant idea and that, if they can maintain focus and herd the cats on their forums, the end result will be vastly better for it. If nothing else, it shows that Paizo is more like the kind of RPG company I want to support than WotC is. At the same time, I can't help but think that too many of the people who're posting to the boards lack basic comprehension skills about the purpose and scope of Pathfinder. Finding the golden comments and insights in the mounds of dross that litter those forums has got to be a thankless and nerve-wracking experience. My hats off to Paizo for doing it, because I certainly couldn't.

Strength in D&D

This obviously doesn't apply to OD&D, where most character attributes have no mechanical consequences whatsoever, but it does apply to all subsequent editions: why does Strength give you a bonus to hit? Damage, yes; I can see the logic to that. A stronger man ought to deal my physical damage when swinging a sword at an orc than a weaker one. But on what basis does a stronger man have a better chance to hit?

I know what you'll say -- "hitting" in D&D isn't necessarily a matter of actually hitting your target so much as hitting him with sufficient force to overcome his defenses and deal him damage. After all, the default length of a combat round in old school D&D is one minute. During that time, your character gets to roll to hit but a single time. Obviously it's not realistic to assume your character can only swing his weapon once in a minute -- and he isn't. Over the course of a single round, your character is dodging, thrusting, blocking, and lunging, among many other things. The "to hit" roll is an abstract summation of whether everything he's doing offensively results in doing any damage to his opponent.

Given all of that, doesn't it make sense that Strength should affect "hitting?" Possibly but I still don't like it very much. The reason is that D&D already models how well a character uses his innate and learned abilities to hit an opponent through the combat matrices (or BAB in 3e). A fighter is better at doing this than, say, a wizard, which is why he has an easier time dealing damage against an armored opponent. Should Strength add to that further? Maybe. I'm of two minds about it and need to give it some more thought, but I am leaning heavily toward restricting "to hit" bonuses mostly to being class features (and some rare magic) and instead shifting most bonuses toward damage instead.

A Prediction

I have a minor sideline in the prognostication of future events. Normally, I confine myself to US presidential and papal elections (the last two of which I got right -- I even successfully predicted what the new Pope's regnal name would be), but this is a gaming blog, so I think I should confine myself here to gaming predictions.

Fortunately, I have one and it's this: Dungeons & Dragons, Fourth Edition, will not be an open game -- at least not in the usual sense of "open." The mysterious GSL (né OGL 2.0) has still not appeared and my guess is that it never will. Much more likely is that WotC will partner with a small number of select third party publishers (such as Necromancer and Goodman Games), granting them limited use trademark licenses. Heck, WotC might even call the license they grant to such companies the GSL to save face. They'll almost certainly come out with a press release saying that they're "working with the finest companies in the gaming industry to produce the best 4e support products imaginable." But there will not be an open game license for 4e that anybody can use to make their own 4e-compatible product.

Now that I've said it here, feel free to laugh and make fun of me when it turns out I'm wrong. I don't think I will be, though. The reality is that the guys at WotC who pioneered open gaming and who really believed in it are long gone. Their successors possess neither the zeal for nor the understanding of why the OGL/D20 STL was so successful and so official support for that movement will die. I've said it elsewhere but it bears repeating: the advent of 4e is not so much about making a better D&D -- though I don't doubt that its designers firmly believe that's what they're doing -- as about shoring up the value and profitability of the D&D trademark and IP. By bean-counting metrics, D&D is hugely under-performing compared to similarly well-known IPs and 4e is intended to fix that, which is why 4e won't be "giving the store away for free" this time around.

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.

Assembling Your Own OD&D Set

Here's a guy after my own heart: why pay hundreds of dollars on eBay to get your own collection of OD&D books, when you can build them yourself.

Simply awesome.

"Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet."

--Robert E. Howard, "The Phoenix on the Sword" (1932)

I can scarcely think of a character in all of fantasy literature who has ever been introduced in so succinct and beautiful a fashion. Conan is the perfect exemplar of pulp fantasy sensibilities.

What is Pulp Fantasy?

I use the term "pulp fantasy" a lot when talking about the history of Dungeons & Dragons and my own particular take on the game. So far as I know, it's not a commonly accepted term and, even if it were, I use the term somewhat idiosyncratically to mean roughly "whatever stories influenced Gygax and Arneson when writing OD&D." Now, I do have a more precise meaning that, because, for example, even though Tolkien was an influence, if a distant one (at least on Gygax, since Arneson, so far as I know, has always acknowledged the Professor as a major influence on Blackmoor, a fact confirmed by his former players on more than one occasion), I don't include his works under the "pulp fantasy" rubric, as they clearly don't belong there. So, what is pulp fantasy and what do I use that term?

In general, "pulp fantasy" roughly equates to what we nowadays call "sword and sorcery." However, the term is more expansive than that, because it also includes authors and stories that do not, strictly speaking, fall under sword and sorcery, such as Burroughs and other "sword and planet" authors, as well as "weird tales" of the Lovecraftian variety. I chose the term because, by and large, most of the authors whom Gygax cites as influences in the famous Appendix N of the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide were published in the pulp magazines of the 20s through 50s. There are exceptions, of course, such as Jack Vance, whose "Dying Earth" books (the first of which was published in 1950 and the second in 1966) were hugely influential of D&D, so much so that the game's peculiar form of spellcasting is termed "Vancian" because of its vague relationship to the magic of Vance's far future fantasies.

By and large, "pulp fantasy" stories are those written before 1970 and the adventure of what we now consider fantasy literature. They have a very different cast to them than Tolkien or his legions of imitators. Firstly, these stories feature characters that are, by many standards, morally ambiguous. While rarely outright villainous (though there are exceptions), few are what could be called "heroes" without qualification. To put it another way, pulp fantasy protagonists are very human, full of foibles and flaws that lend a kind of rough verisimilitude to their adventures. Such characters are motivated at least in part by the quest for wealth and power -- just as D&D characters clearly are. That's not all these characters are about, but it's an important component to them. Likewise, pulp fantasies are very character-centric. That is, the threats these characters face are usually quite personal or, at least, possess an immediacy for the character without too much emphasis on the wider world. Pulp fantasies rarely have Sauron wannabe "dark lords" in them except insofar as such antagonists stand in the way of a pulp fantasy character's achieving wealth, power, or the company of a beautiful woman.

Another element of many -- though not all -- pulp fantasies are their lack of naturalism. This is just a fancy way of saying that they're fantasies. You won't find a lot of scientific plausibility to the monsters of pulp fantasy stories. There is no "Ecology of the Deodand" and understandably so. The threats of such tales are not just personal ones, but they exist primarily to drive the particular story the author is telling rather than being part of some grand exercise in world building. Pulp fantasy settings, such as they are, mostly exist as vehicles for stories rather than the other way around. This carries over into early D&D, where settings arose organically through play rather than by design beforehand.

This is what I mean by "pulp fantasy." It is these things that gave rise to OD&D and most of its mechanical and conceptual elements. It is also these things from which D&D has been slowly fleeing for the last 20 or more years of its existence and why I believe the game is need of a restoration.