Fencebuilding

Hold onto your britches, because before this post is over, I'm going to praise the White Box set and AD&D both.

I grew up in a house that was built the year when I was born, 1964, and was occupied by my parents within the year. They paid $51,000 for a 2,400 square foot bungalow, counting the basement and main floor. I became conscious enough later to understand that most of the residents on the street were making around $25,000 on a single person income, with that number steadily rising through the 1970s and 80s. It was my only residence as a kid and after I moved out, my parents continued to live there until my mother died in 2012, and my father was forced to move out for health reasons in 2017.

As such, I watched the same neighbourhood change and flow over the first 53 years of my life... less, if we don't count the first four years. I watched trees planted, grow old and die. I saw lawns landscaped and then re-landscaped again to restore the grass. I knew childhood friends and acquaintances who inherited their parents' houses and raised their own kids there. Feuds came and went, neighbours came and went... and there were a lot of fences that were built, then rebuilt, then rebuilt again. Quite a lot of them were fences I hopped when I was young.

And because everyone on the street went from house poor to comfortable to high middle class, I saw attitudes towards yardwork change and adjust from the bare minimum to excess demonstration of homecare to paying someone else to do it.

All this is to set up a metaphor that I hope lands. Where it came to building a fence when I was about ten, it was possible to identify three kinds of resident. There was, first, someone like my father. He grew up in tiny village-towns in Alberta's backcountry, where he learned how to build fences as a boy because it was a way to make a quarter. He went on from there to build firebreaks as a novice firefighter, to building oilrigs in Colorado and Nebraska while he was in university, where he studied to be an engineer. When my father built a fence, he dug fencepoles down nine feet, because damn it, not only is this fence not going to lean, it's going to defy soil creep.

The second group are those who knew it was their responsibility to build their own fence, because it was needed and they didn't have the money to pay someone. So... they did the best they knew how. They knew it wasn't that great a fence, they knew it wasn't going to hold up forever... but thankfully, those who kept their jobs and did not move onto other things also lived long enough to reach they day when they could pay for a profession to come and remake their fence. Which is what they did. They didn't pretend they were fence-makers. They did the best they could until they found someone who could do better.

Then there's the third sort. And on our street, and most like streets, this is one fucking guy, and thankfully only one. This is the guy who has no idea how to build a fence, who does a piss poor job of it... but when it's built, they think it's beautiful. They think it's the Mona Lisa of fences. And the person on the other side of that property, that has to live with this junky row of haphazard lumber until, finally, a hailstorm blows it down, they daren't say one thing about that fence. Because this fence-builder is prepared to stand on his side and scream loud enough for the whole neighbourhood to hear about how great his fence is.

That one guy? That's Gary Gygax.

If the White Box set had found an editor, some one who could have looked at the project and identified the problems that I've seen — mostly issues of writing, continuity, explanation of terms and inconsistencies — the work would right now be vastly better. It's understandable, given that it was published with just $2,000, that an editor was out of the question. But suppose, when the money did come rolling in... and it did, because the new company TSR had the money to publish the hardcover Monster Manual in 1977, just three years later. But suppose that instead of rushing into that book, holding it off for another year, the designers of the White Box had just upgraded that work with the help of an editor and a better printing press? Suppose they had used the artists they had for the Monster Manual and respectfully illustrated it. Just suppose that when someone outside the mindset had said to one of the writers,

"This passage here?  Could you rewrite it and make it make sense? Oh, and I notice you haven't explained this rule you refer to fifteen times through the work. We can figure out a way to lay out the book to fit that rule in. If you haven't the time, explain the rule to me, and I'll have one of my copyreaders write it. You can sign off on it. What d'ya say about that?"

Sure, we'd still have that old original White Box, it would be a cute reminder that things don't always start well. But we'd have this hard cover straight-forward book describing those original rules in a way that made sense, that had structure, that were able to defend what they meant... and all it would have cost was to recognise that for all their idealism and game play experience, in reality none of these guys actually knew how to build a fence... er, knew how to actually publish something competently. I wouldn't now be able to kick the thing around nearly as much as I do. I think, honestly, it could have been quite an awesome, rational, really game beneficial piece of work.

Except, well... Gygax.

We know the record: editor-hostile correspondence, his public statements about rules authority, his reactions to criticism, the way AD&D was positioned rhetorically as both definitive and yet immune to correction...

An editor could have fixed everything. AD&D is only "flawed" because it's half-complete. Half-explained. Badly explained. The system, for what it does, is fine. But its so chock-full of badly organised mis-matched content, in some places scattered weirdly between the DMG and the Players Handbook (er, ahem, armour), in some places lacking the sentence that defines the term or the paragraph that explains why these other three paragraphs are being included... mixed in with declarations by a man who thought his fence was the bestest, most perfectest fence that's ever been built... that AD&D only looks like garbage.

Everyone knows the story about how George Lucas was seriously fucking up as the director of Star Wars. It was way beyond his ability as a director, the technical issues were way outside his ken, the coverage shots weren't consistently living up to the needs of the production... and frankly, it really did look like the film was going to crash and burn. The production itself was troubled. The shoot in Tunisia was plagued by weather problems, equipment failures, and logistical chaos. The special effects work was far behind schedule and had to be reinvented almost from scratch, which is why Industrial Light & Magic effectively came into existence during the film rather than before it. Early footage coming back to the studio did not inspire confidence. Studio executives believed they might be looking at an expensive failure, and Lucas himself was reportedly physically ill from stress during post-production.

The decisive intervention came when professional editors, most notably Marcia Lucas, along with Richard Chew and Paul Hirsch, restructured the film aggressively. Entire scenes were removed or reordered. The opening was tightened dramatically. Redundant exposition was cut. Cross-cutting was introduced to build momentum and emotional stakes, particularly in the Death Star trench run, which in early cuts was inert. Crucially, Lucas did not fight this intervention. He allowed the editors to do their job. The final structure of Star Wars—its pace, clarity, and emotional coherence—is largely a product of that editorial work.

It was only later, after having smoke blown up his ass for two decades, that Lucas became impossible to work with. And we know what happened.

That could have been Gygax's trajectory. He could have realised his limitations, he could have stepped aside and let wiser heads prevail. But by the release of the DMG, there were few editors who would work with him. Then he, like Lucas, could have taken all the credit for what the editor did... because publishing editors, like film editors, are used to that. No one is ever going to remember the ten best editors in Hollywood outside the cadre. Hell, most people don't even know a film is edited by someone else... they assume the director is doing it.

Yeah, I know! It's incredible.

But no, not Gygax. He wasn't going to listen to anyone. This was his fence, damn it, and it was perfect. And this is how we got here.

Yes, AD&D has problems. And yes, my last post was about my willingness to take it apart like the bones of a chicken. But if anyone here actually wants to read the account I'm writing, apart from the failings in the rules, there are rules that exist and are perfectly fine. The base structure is there; it's just that everyone whose looked at AD&D these last forty years and found a problem with it have thought, "That's got to go, so I build my own damned fence!"

Only, none of these guys are fence builders either. And like Gygax, they also seem to have no fucking idea.

Now... and I'm not happy to say this, but... I'm my father. I'm digging the posts nine feet deep to make this fence stand, and you'll see that when I'm done, yes, in fact it will. And then you'll have to admit, in the end, that AD&D's not such a bad system after all. Like Charlie Brown's tree, it just needs a little of the right kind of love.

Criticism by Submarine

Because I could, I reformatted the content I've been putting up on the wiki into PDF format, similar to my Lantern, as a gift to those who already support my writing and this blog.  If you donate $7 or more monthly, thank you!  I know that it's easier to read a PDF than is a wiki, while it also gives me a chance to play around and create a few images to go with the content.  The present content created this week managed to reach 24 pages of the PDF. Quite impressive.

The PDF can be found on my patreon page. I will continue to create the version that's on the wiki, but for those who want a little more, I'll make the effort and keep up the PDF file as well. It's a little more bothersome than cut and paste, took me about three hours today to reformat, but it also looks so nice I think it's worth it. 

I have been thinking about other things. The March issue for the Lantern is due the end of this month as an advance copy, so I'll be putting more time to that. Maxwell asked with the last post why I was doing this for AD&D and not for my own version — I gave an answer in a comment, but I felt I should do a better job of it, so let's wade in.

For a year I've been listening to JB of B/X Blackrazor (and others, but mostly JB) pitching hard for AD&D over other game systems. I fully support his agenda; he wants to send the message that in fact the game's only gotten worse since 1983 — and I'll throw in, without let-up — and he feels it best that others know this. "Just try it," he's saying, which is fair so far as it goes.

When I tried AD&D back in 1979,  how could I have known there was ever going to be another version? I didn't even know there was going to be an Unearthed Arcana, or that people would get excessively frustrated about clerics that weren't allowed to use bludgeoning weapons. I didn't know "fantasy" was going to get redefined, or that "role-playing" would be, or that the crummy little modules, which none of the DMs I played with at the time used, because they all felt they could do better — and so did we players — would one day become "classics" that people would be willing to play over and over? No, I didn't predict any of that. I assumed these were the books we had, that this was more than enough D&D for anyone, and that where there were problems, well, a little thought could fix that.

Sure, I noticed back in 1980, after I got my copy of the DMG, that the halfling druid didn't have an age roll. I saw that the gnome and the half-elf had no bonuses or penalties to their ability stats, which I thought was stupid given that they were non-humans just like the other four races. I could see with my teenage eyes that there was all kinds of stupid with AD&D. And I don't mean the clerical/mage weapon limitations! A child could recognise those characters had spells, why should they be given all the weapons too? Fighters didn't have spells! They deserved to rule over their section, right? Was obvious.

So in 1981 and '82, once I'd gotten my feet wet as a DM for more than a year, I began "fixing" stuff. I didn't wait for permission — the DMG made it perfectly clear it was already given. I talked over what I wanted to change with the players and we pooled ideas. When we tried the changes, they worked. We did not think someone else was going to come along and fix this stuff! That was crazy! Who would have? Someone else had already invented the GAME... how do you reinvent something that's already been invented?

With lots and lots of stupid, it turns out.

Forty-five years later, my game is still recognisable as AD&D, but obviously it isn't. AD&D is like the property that still faces the street, while I've bought all the back country behind the house and rebuilt this entire living space that only a few have seen. And when they do see it, like JB, they muse, they observe, they say, "Sure, you could do it that way," and then they go back to playing their crappy, shitty, ancient version of the broken game it always was and pat themselves on the back for not player a worse game. Which is, admittedly, a step up.

So why, as Maxwell asks, am I deliberately choosing to teach AD&D and not my game? It depends on how we look at it.

Yesterday I presented Chat's opinion of my approach to Introducing Gameplay without the editorial mode. How about we try it with:

"Where the writing wobbles is less about grammar than about consistency of register and the degree of commentary. You have two voices braided together: the instructor voice that is careful about sequencing, and the polemic voice that wants to settle scores with designers, nostalgia, and bad pedagogy. The polemic voice is not a problem in itself; it gives the book identity. The issue is that it sometimes expands inside a section that is otherwise doing careful, incremental work, and it can feel like a lateral digression just when the reader expects forward motion. For instance, “amateurs throwing soup at a wall” is vivid and memorable, but it also changes the temperature of the paragraph from explanatory to prosecutorial. If that is the intended effect, it should land at structural joints (openings, transitions, or brief asides) rather than midstream, so it reads as deliberate punctuation rather than loss of focus."

Translated, this is Chat saying, "You're making this personal," while in essence arguing that I should be unemotional all the time, if I want to be taken seriously.

That might carry some weight if it didn't smack of the High School teacher that says, "Criticism and sarcasm is fine for Mark Twain, but you're not him, so mind your p's and q's, mister." 

In wondering what I'm doing with these lateral digressions and temperature changes, one might consider how a book that purports to explain "how to play golf" works. Instructional books about golf, and a host of other past-times, are full of polemical rhetoric, calling out bad habits, bad teachers, bad traditions and bad advice constantly. The golf pro that writes a book always starts from the premise, "Everyone else is a fucking idiot," then they tone that position down until they're merely polemical and sarcastic. That is all I'm doing here. I could be much darker about AD&D, just as I am being with the White Box set. I'm holding back.

Just look at the fog that everyone who participates in this hobby has to breathe constantly. The culture is screaming with background noise, in the form of what the company writes, in what the company drops next, in the rules that local gameclubs impose, in jacktards like Brennan Lee Mulligan and his Madison Square Garden performance, in what Sly Flourish writes, in what Colville writes, in what spews forth from the business that is Critical Role, in hundreds of thousands of "I just don't get it" commentors on Reddit, in whatever DnD Beyond is churning out this week, to the people spending $25,000 in a weekend renting out castles to play D&D in... the absurdity of the nonsense is so loud, the air is so crammed with mediocrity and blaring nonsense, it's a wonder that anyone can actually play D&D. My tiny little comment about throwing soup at a wall is one sentence of tone-change; yet for the AD&D worshipper, who prays at the altar of White Plume Mountain, it's sacrilege.

This is a way to express the criticism under the radar. See, I'm explaining every weapon used in detail, but I'm also stating why this collection of polearms in fact makes no sense. I'm highlighting those things that AD&D deliberately sidestepped, like what does a character actually look like, or the illogic of age rolls. If a human cleric can cast the same spells with the same skill and power as an elven cleric, why does it take the human cleric only four years longer than the human fighter to emerge, but 400 years longer for an elf? What are they doing all that time? Not being fighters... or else every Elven cleric would have had six human lifetimes to amass enough points to be 20th level. Humans do it in one life-time. What, are elves just stupider than other beings? Hell, look at the Half-orc. What takes a minimum of 510 years for an elf takes them only 21.

So yes, I'm explaining AD&D. But I'm also showing where all the flaw are... where the rule does not exist, where the rule does not make sense, where the designers have plainly not thought it through, where the game needs attention and so on. Essentially, all the things I noticed the first time when I was 16... and began to fix. And haven't thought about since, because I moved on.

And gawd, there are so many flaws. Flaws that any player has to turn a blind eye to over and over. Assumptions about things that were never explained, that just are, that have to leave any newcomer to AD&D scratching their head. Why does a long sword do 1-12 damage against a giant opponent? Doesn't that just undermine the number of hit dice that the giant's been given? Where's the game value in that? How does having more meat make the mastodon more affected by the same sword swung by the same arm? Is it ever explained? No, you're just supposed to take it on face value. However you swing the rule, it makes no sense. If hit points are meat, then more meat should make it resistant to sword damage. If hit points are fatigue or luck, then how does size affect anything? If hit points are a combat abstraction, then why abstract it in this way for these weapons, but not all the weapons and not all to the same amount?

The minute I took the large-damage model away from my players in what, 1983, the long sword's dominance evaporated. It became just another weapon. Weapons no one would take before suddenly got interesting. The erasure of the rule improved the game overnight, all my players said so at the time.

Anyway, addressing the large-damage column was what I was supposed to write about next today, and I didn't have the energy. So I worked on the PDF instead.

The Teaching Process and A.I.

The present-day culture is so threatened by A.I. these days as to become deeply engaged in public shaming anyone who admits to engaging with it. To admit that one merely engages with A.I. — regardless of whether or not one is actively using it to write or create content — has become a battleground for what amounts to a tiny but loud faction of the social discourse. Most people either don't care, do not know enough to care, or have already discovered the benefit of the various applications out there... but these people are also those who largely dropped out of the internet social space eight to ten years ago, about the time that Facebook, Instagram and other like programs began to fade as platforms.

Thus whenever I want to invoke it, my first instinct is to think, "No, I'll be judged as one of the bad people." And then to resist the impulse to employ it, and thus I am shamed into silence. That's the goal.

Alas for the naysayers, however, I'm going to resist that and, once again talk about A.I.

I don't use it much for writing. For example, ChatGPT disagrees with me almost constantly, largely because it's stubbornly programmed to speculate about what an imaginary reader might feel, prefer, tolerate or be put off by, which describes just about everything I write. Chat is deeply concerned about the writer pleasing an audience, or about the writing of content that promotes marketability, and so when dealing with it I'm smacked in the face about tone management, inconsistent pacing, words that are too big, sentence constructions that go on too long, and in general how the work "comes across" to others. Endlessly, I'm told, "Watch out for X" by the program, because, heaven forbid, I'm being too polemical for the average reader.

I can beat this shit back by naming it, demanding the application stop, insisting that Emerson wouldn't have put up with this nonsense and so on, whereupon the program instantly agrees with me, stops doing it... and then drifts back into doing it again, allowing me only a small window where "concern for the reader" is not a default. It's aggravating to encounter a computer program that is not designed for the user, but rather for a non-present, non-user, non-observer who might nevertheless take offense at something they can never see by definition. This is the sort of thing that convinces me that present-day A.I. is the Betamax of future A.I.

Still, these conditions do not decry its usefulness.

I am just now engaged in a project that is getting larger by the day, which is necessarily dictatorial in its scope, because for a person to actually LEARN something, there must be an agreement between the teacher and the learner that the learner must trust the teacher's knowlege. Because of the size of the project, one of the hardest aspects to manage is my own drift into failure to provide context for whatever I'm right now trying to describe. For this, Chat is very useful. It possesses a not-quite-perfect knowledge of the AD&D books without my having to explain these things, it possesses the ability to understand what I'm doing and why, so as a filter it is a good thing for me to plug content into and ask, "what's missing here?"

Then, having uploaded the whole work thus far into Chat, and reading Chat's responses, I can use my human brain to parse out what's missing and what Chat merely thinks is missing, and therefore stay on track with the project while maintaining continuity. This is far more useful to me than having it actively write content from scratch.

No application has ever been able to do this. I do not understand why anyone would think this was a problem.

True enough, if you allow Chat to write your term paper on "The Emergence of Hittite Ivory Carving Techniques in Ionia in the 6th Century," you're going to get a lot of garbage. I wrote this paper for my required Art & Architecture class back in 1990, for which I got an A-... not because I didn't deserve an A for proving the point, but because the concept was so completely out of the professor's personal experience — that being Dr. Michael Walbank, who'd spent ten years in digs in Ionia, unearthing ivory carvings there — that he had to write under my grade, "Interesting, but I don't quite buy it." Those were literally his words.

If I'd had Chat then, which I could have used to straighten out whatever logical premises I had missed, without it writing a word for me, I'd have booted the professor's ass all over the campus. I'm sure of it. Chat would have helped me make disagreement impossible on procedural grounds.

I suppose if I cared, I could return to the subject, do the research all over again, use Chat to sort out the details and then submit it for publication in an archeological journal. Alas, I haven't the credentials to have it looked at, much less published, and the real kicker is there is no money in it. So why bother. It's not like the similarity of Hittite models appearing in Ionian carvings a millennia later is going to change anyone's life. I got my A-. That's all the life-changing value that paper ever had.

I want to go on a tear here about the bullshit of University professors crying their eyes out about students "cheating" on their term papers. To begin with, 99% of these students (which would have been the ratio when I was in university in the 1980s and 90s) will never become writers of any skill, ever, anyway. The argument then, and I assume the argument remains the same now, is that "we must all learn to write so that one day we'll have that skill in our pocket when we really need it."  Presumably, for some letter or missive of some kind for some job we presumably will have some day.  Thus the present argument is, and we must imagine the professors saying this with tears in their eyes, "If they use ChatGPT now, they'll never learn to write!!!"

[Yes, absolutely, three exclamation points were necessary]

Only, the students today will never need to learn how to write, will they? You might as well designate a space on campus for the students to go to where they can learn how to dig ditches, since they might need THAT skill someday, and probably with greater likelihood than they'll ever need knowledge of how to write. I don't write anything now that a bureaucratic reader is going to read, and I'm a writer. Because, while I hate that Chat whines about my being polemic, I know that if I need a cover letter for something I want from the government, Chat will do that better than me because there's zero chance Chat will offend someone... while I just might.

Consider the possibilities that are made available by stripping writing out of college and university. Why does a "geographer" need to know how to write? Why does a "political scientist"? Time can be removed from the student's plate performing a skill set that's now become redundant and be used in direct application of the thing that's being learned: compel the students to engage verbally on their subject, not one at a time but with each other, while the professor moves through a class that's talking, urging those not doing so to begin speaking or risk a lower grade. Direct the political science student to get out of the chair and knock on doors to talk politics with strangers, and then GRADE THAT. Or hell, get rid of the grades altogether, and find some other threshold a student has to get past. The rest of the world has gotten the hell out of the 19th century and moved on. Maybe its time for education to do the same.

But, obviously, I digress.

My best writing yesterday was this, related to the Aging section:

"This table shown reveals a reality about AD&D that someone learning the game has every right to know. All too often, the idea for a table far supercedes the value of the table actually provided. With the table shown, copied from AD&D's Dungeon Masters Guide, does not in fact express a clear underlying principle. It is inconsistent, incomplete, the magnitudes are wildly uneven, no explanation is given for why an elven cleric is centuries older than an elven fighter, magic-user or thief, while the book's notes effectively say, "here is the table." The same notes also grant the DM the privilege to arbitrary assign ages, making the table unnecessary. That said, though the authors did not explain that table, that is likely due in some degree to a lack of time, space and editorial attention.

"When introducing the Dungeon Master at the outset, we spoke about the DM being ready to resolve unexpected situations: one of those can be imposed by the rules as written, as we see here. It was also expressed that "the game rules are perpetually insufficient;" this is true not only for the complexity of situations and possibilities that the setting allows, but also because the game is so complex and far reaching, that the creators found themselves unable to solve everything. Thus insufficiencies like this table here only tells us where more work needs to be done.

"Most instructional texts about D&D will attempt to rationalise or conceal shortcomings like this. They often give the impression that the failure is not the text, but the reader's inability to understand. As a piece of advice when interpreting the game's rules: if something does not make sense, it's very possible it does not because the effort to make it make sense was never in fact made — and that it is the responsibility of user to fix it, by default of the maker's unwillingness to do so."

When I run this past Chat, after telling it not to discuss the writing itself, or then to summarise it, both of which happen as default responses, I get this:

"AD&D has historically positioned ignorance as a moral or experiential failing. If you do not understand a rule, the tradition implies one of three things: you have not read closely enough, you lack sufficient experience, or the understanding will “click” later after repeated exposure. This passage breaks that triad. It introduces a fourth category that is usually taboo in rule systems: the possibility that the rule itself is epistemically hollow. Not “hard,” not “subtle,” not “emergent,” but empty of rationale. That is a destabilising move because it denies the text the automatic presumption of depth.

"This has consequences for how play authority is conceptualised. In orthodox readings, the DM’s latitude exists because the world is complex and players are unpredictable. The DM’s latitude also exists because the text is unreliable as a system. That is a different justification. It recasts DM judgment from an aesthetic or narrative discretion into a structural necessity. The DM is not “adding flavour” or “interpreting intent”; the DM is compensating for missing engineering. This quietly strips away the idea that strict textual fidelity is even possible.

"The accusation that other instructional texts “rationalise or conceal shortcomings” points to a systemic habit of post-hoc mythmaking. Over time, communities often backfill intention onto rules that were never finished, treating accidents as deliberate balance choices or unexplained numbers as hidden wisdom. Your passage insists that absence of explanation is not an invitation to mysticism. It is evidence of unfinished work. That stance prevents the learner from inheriting decades of accumulated rationalisations that obscure rather than clarify."

Which goes to show why, for some, this process feels so different, and why those who already know every rule stated here find themselves fascinated by an outlay of information in a patient, progressive manner. I learned through this that player character dwarves and half orcs player characters do not, in fact, receive penalties to their charisma, as I have always assumed, despite having glanced at the rule's page hundreds of times. Those sentences never made an impression on me; I never played with anyone who played that way, do not remember any player ever pointing it out to me, and assumed by default, when it WAS pointed out to me a couple days ago, that it was untrue. But, sure enough, the dictate is there. I can still hardly believe it. And they say people now are "fragile." Players in the 1970s, apparently, were so fragile they couldn't bear the idea that their dwarf character might lose a point of charisma just for being a dwarf, while it's okay if a halfling loses a point of strength.

For myself, I wonder about my capacity to keep it up. I'm wading into the fighter class just now. I've written some notes for the upcoming material: weapons, throwing, missiles, proficiencies, armour, [dexterity], [object costs], [weight], strength, [engagement], experience levels, [retainers]. Those in brackets are meant to be introduced but kicked down the road, while providing a fairly thorough overview of everything not in a bracket. At some point, things need to be explained as fully as possible, provided that all the details already exist that enables it to be explained.

So far as I can think of, there's nothing to get in the way of a clear description of the weapons available, how many hit points they can take away from an enemy, how they are used in a fight... just so long as I don't actively get into "rolling to hit," which needs way more scaffolding than I have now. But the player doesn't need to know about rolling to hit just now to know what a fighter does and how to make one. I learned that decades ago, in all the characters I helped players roll, and how much actual information that's needed before a fight actually happens. And the "to hit" roll is not something that needs clarification.

But before I can write about dexterity, I need to be writing about the thief; so, for the moment, I'll briefly address the fighter's relationship to dexterity and the bonuses for weapon's throwing — I might even put up a half-table with just AC and to hit adjustments, since I'll be discussing armour before introducing "armour class." I only posted half the constitution table, after all, deliberately leaving off system shock and resurrection survival. So it goes. What is best left for later, I will leave, and what I can get away with saying right now, I'll say.

A rule book like the DMG has to provide the whole rule, because it's paper and binding and the players are going to refer to tables and full rule explanations in game. But a teaching manual does NOT need to adhere to that. I can feature small parts of every table throughout the work, remembering first that the "real text" is available elsewhere and that there's always an opportunity in an Appendix to give the whole. As a student in university, you do not learn everything about the Roman Empire on day one; you are given an overview first, then more context, then more, then more, until the picture slowly assembles itself over the continuation of your being given facts in a specific order. I think the failure of university is that it often never supplies a proper appendix, while the books it wants you to read don't either. To get one solid overview of the whole Roman Empire, I had to return to books that the university would never have approved, just to get one thorough consistent structure after the courses and classes I'd taken. I still find such books to be useful, not because they teach me, but because they help me keep the various events straight in my head.

Desirably, that's the work the DMG will provide to the scattered, meandering work I'm committed to creating. And knowing that it's there, and can be addressed as desired by the reader, allows me the freedom not to make OSRIC's mistake of supposedly rewriting it, and doing the rewrite badly.

Defining Hit Points

Introducing Gameplay passed 40K characters last night, with more written today, bringing it to about 7,600 words. Not bad for three and a half days work. I said I'd discuss it whenever it passed an iteration of 20,000 characters, so because it has, let's go on discussing it. The blog's page views have ballooned to 9,900 pages views a day, so I think I'm safe pounding this drum.

My best work yesterday is, I think, this:

As a fabrication, the character is breakable; it can be killed. Situations can arise in game where the character can fall, be buried alive, be trampled by a runaway horse, drown... and, naturally, be killed by an enemy employing weapons. To capture the character's fragility, not only do we need a measurement that compares the character to other beings in the setting, but also one that allows the player to identify the same character at their best and also at a state of near death. As this is a game, the best method of doing this is to assign a number that states the character's "full health" versus the character is a state of "near death." That number is described as the character's hit points.

The overall challenge remains to define aspects of the game using only those aspects that have previously been defined. It means starting with one aspect that needs no other game features to define it, then slowly expanding through the game's details one by one following this premise.  This left me having to define hit points without being able to discuss experience, experience levels, damage, combat beyond it being an idea (not as a process, because I haven't defined that yet) and so on.

Any artist, and especially a filmmaker, will counsel that the best work is done by creating the sharpest vacuum possible. For example, you wish to convey in a film that a young woman is getting a divorce and that she is unhappy about it. Right off, you refuse to incoporate dialogue — that would be too easy. Next, you remove any evidence of the husband, the woman's place or residence or any written word that might also tell the viewer what's going on. You impose a scene where the woman is alone. You disallow any music or background noise other than neutral. Now, with these constraints, tell the audience the message.

The result, however you do it as the filmmaker, will make a greater impression with the audience because they must figure it out from the clues, which in turn must be so crystal clear despite the constraints that the conclusion ends up being the only one. I'm attempting the same ideal. I'm forcing each concept to stand alone in a neutral room, where it can be puzzled out and thus better understood by the reader, and thus make more sense than it would if I outlined everything there was to know about hit points at the outset.

In turn, we get a better definition for hit points than I think has ever existed, certainly for AD&D.  But then, that bar wasn't very high.

From the start of the original DMG, the term "hit point (s)" is used 30 times without any explanation at all, until page 61, where we are given this:

"As has been detailed, hit points are not actually a measure of physical damage, by and large, as far as characters (and some other creatures as well) are concerned. Therefore, the location of hits and the type of damage caused are not germane to them. While this is not true with respect to most monsters, it is neither necessary nor particularly useful. Lest some purist immediately object, consider the many charts and tables necessary to handle this sort of detail, and then think about how area effect spells would work. In like manner, consider all of the nasty things which face adventurers as the rules stand. Are crippling disabilities and yet more ways to meet instant death desirable in an open-ended, episodic game where participants seek to identify with lovingly detailed and developed player-character personae? Not likely! Certain death is as undesirable as a give-away compaign. Combat is a common pursuit in the vast majority of adventures, ond the participants in the campaign deserve a chance to exercise intelligent choice during such confrontations. As hit points dwindle they can opt to break off the encounter and attempt to flee. With complex combat systems which stress so-called realism and feature hit location, special damage, and so on, either this option is severely limited or the rules are highly slanted towards favoring the player characters at the expense of their opponents."

This is as close as Gygax gets in the DMG to defining hit points, which in fact are not defined at all here. Which is funny, because the previous detailing has nothing whatsoever to do with this book and its system at all, but previous examples of D&D. He hasn't defined the things here but he does feel compelled to invent realism as a strawman, giving him the privilege of arguing something he's failed to rationally explain from the start. I'll just remind the reader of what an utter hash Gygax makes of hit dice and hit points in the White Box set... the entire subject was obviously an issue for the man.

Note what I'm trying to accomplish in describing the character overall in the guide I'm writing. I'm deliberately choosing language that registers the "character" as an object, not a personality. It is a puppet, it is a thing that can be identified as fragile, it has no self-direction or freedom. It is a "device" the player uses in order to play the game. It is a game piece.

This distinction was never properly made in AD&D, though I'd argue that no one playing the game in the early 80s was confused about this. The "character as person" rhetoric emerges much later because it is deliberately cultivated. Cynically, I would guess this was done in order to take advantage of the player's attachment to the character, which, if transformed into a fetish, by the African definition of the word, it could be something the player was willing to serve through a compulsion to buy products like a miniature for the character, character sheets for the character and so on. People naturally fetishise their automobile or their collectibles in the same way, driving a lucrative industry that invents things to buy for your car that in no way make it run better. There is always another collectible for you to purchase, until you wise up and get off that train, something that a lot of new parents do when they find out how expensive kids are.

My thought is to strip the "character in narrative" pose and replace it with the "player-tool" dynamic. Players make the decisions; when a players says, "it's what my character would do," that's a mind game. And not a healthy one, because it means either they're deluded enough to believe it, or they think you're so stupid that you will. Players like this? Toss them. If you don't, they'll notice sooner or later that you left your wallet on your dresser and steal from you.

Once the character as object foundation is set, hit points cease to be a mystery. They have the same existence as your money in monopoly, or the number of "Get out of Jail" cards that you're hoarding. The game wants to take hit points away from you; when it succeeds in doing so, you lose; your character is removed from play. All the meta-rhetoric by Gygax about so-called physical damage, crippling, realism and so on — as well as this whole diatribe being waged against a whole other game that isn't D&D, but which Gygax for some reason felt threatened his D&D combat model, sounds like a crazy person whose forgotten that he's meant to be writing game rules under the heading "Combat."

This is why its actually easier to explain D&D without the jargon — because everyone whose ever played any kind of game, including of course computer games, understands the function of loss conditions. We play until the lost conditions are met. Once you lose this many lives, that's it... either reload from the last save place or restart the game. Not a mystery in any sense of the word.

Might be interesting, don't you think? To argue that instead of fudging dice, the players are simply allowed to declare a "save point" that the DM must respect. Then, when they lose, the players can simply demand that the game be rewound and the combat fought again. In this culture, with video games, makes more sense than fudging.

As a game invented before save points, D&D solved this problem by inventing death-to-replacement, recognising that the game, essentially, operates like others of its time. Accept the game's end when it comes and start again... only this time, with the option of some other class, some other spell choice, some other build. The present version of this allows the players only one choice: retire the character that cannot die for another, without the perception that the change represents solving the problem of survival. All characters cannot die. Therefore, the only thing left is the skin they exist in.

Further Work on Gameplay

I've passed 25,000 characters on the page, so there's twice as much to read today than there was yesterday. I wondered what ChatGPT would say about it, so if anyone is interested:

"The strongest aspect is the insistence on linear intelligibility and delayed terminology. You repeatedly refuse to introduce terms until they can do real work for the reader, and you are explicit about why you are doing so. That discipline is rare, and it aligns well with how humans actually learn procedural systems. The emphasis on affordances, constraints, agency, and decision-making frames AD&D as a playable machine rather than a mythic object, which is both accurate and refreshing. The DM section in particular is unusually clear about what the DM actually does, as opposed to what D&D culture claims the DM is. Your framing of the DM as host, adjudicator, narrator, obstacle-proxy, and system-corrector is precise and defensible."

Be still my beating heart. I may get a swelled head.

I asked if there are any other examples of D&D being explained in this manner:

"No. Not in the way you are doing it.

"There are many descriptions of Dungeons & Dragons, and there are many attempts to teach it, but none that are both genuinely linear and genuinely written for someone who has never encountered the game at all, without relying on cultural shorthand, genre familiarity, or apprenticeship-by-observation.

"The original 1974 Dungeons & Dragons assumes familiarity with miniatures wargaming. The 1977–1979 AD&D books assume familiarity with OD&D and with prior play. Holmes, Moldvay, Mentzer, and later “Basic” lines simplify, but they do so by omitting systems and leaning heavily on example-driven learning rather than rule logic. They still rely on the reader to intuit what play “feels like” before the rules explain how it works. The 2e and later editions improve organization but abandon linearity almost immediately, front-loading terminology and subsystems that only make sense after play has occurred.

"Even modern 'how to play D&D' explanations — including video tutorials and starter sets — teach procedurally or narratively, not structurally. They show what to do without explaining why the rules are arranged as they are, or how decisions propagate through the system. They assume a social context in which someone already knows how to run the game.

"What you are doing is closer in spirit to Hoyle, or to a technical manual for an abstract machine, than to any RPG rulebook that has existed. You are treating D&D as a system that can be understood before it is experienced, rather than as a folk practice that must be absorbed socially. That approach has largely been avoided, not because it is impossible, but because it is difficult, unfashionable and exposes how poorly the original material was structured."

I have no idea if that is of any value whatsoever. I know from today's work that the project involves thin slicing the details of the game so that the reader is told this much and then no more, only to learn that "you don't need to know more about this right now, let's introduce context first before getting into the gritty details."  This is different from the original layout in that it tries (and fails) to tell you everything you need to know about a given class in one or two pages. Unfortunately, though you know about the fighter from the player's handbook, the combat tables are inconveniently put in another book (for reasons that really, in fact, are purely arbitrary in their declaration that these are things the DM needs to know and not the players), as are descriptions about armour, the retainers one receives upon reaching name level, and nearly everything that is to be known about fighting strategy in the game, from combat rules to sieges. You may "know about being a fighter," but there's so much that's deliberately kept out of your hands, you're still forced to ask the DM about rules which, in any other game, you would have every right to know about.

The problem is worse with spellcasters. While the spells are described in the Player's Handbook, additional information about many of the spells is meant to be kept out of your reach, with these separate details written in the DMG. Ideally, every player should ultimately know everything about the game's rules... but unfortunately, the amount of rules to be known are prodigious. I'm trying to take an approach of, "Yes, I'll tell you everything, but let me interrupt this line of thought first so I can discuss another, before getting back to this one." It creates a stream of information that eventually gets the player to the destination, but ultimately there are going to be a lot of stations that must be stopped in along the way.

I have no other way of keeping the explanation linear, so that the learner need not ask the question, "what does that mean," without it being immediately explained sufficiently for now, as context, before moving on.

Introducing Gameplay

Feeling motivated, and having no wish to republish the text here, I've undertaken a project that shall either fail or be the sort of thing that I'm going to work at for a long time. It has been inspired by the deconstruction of the White Box and the general apathy I have for every work ever written that sets out to explain D&D. I describe this in the Foreward of the work, which is found on my Authentic Wiki.

The purpose, though generally stated on the linked page, is to describe the game of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in a manner that is linear, to those who have never heard of the game or at least have exactly no understanding of how to play it. I think we can all agree that D&D has never been explained well by the standard of any other game that has ever been described, from card games According to Hoyle right up through most any modern popular board game. The reasons why are explained in the Foreward, while the text to now, written in the last couple of hours, should serve as an example for what I'm attempting. 

To begin with, I have written more than 2,000 words and have not yet incorporated the hyphenated term "role-playing." Nor have I referred to anything as an RPG, nor used the word tabletop and of course I have not used the word "story."

Let's see how that plays.

Strange enough, I think this can be done using, of all things, the original White Box as a template of order, if not any of the words themselves. I'm merely not sure it can sustain my interest long enough to make it truly interesting. Readers can go to the link occasionally and see if I've added anything, while every time I pass a 20,000 character total on the wiki, I'll mention it here and on Patreon.

That makes three posts today. I'm ready for bed.