Tablets from God

"Regardless of how we're running the game, when you're doing all original material with your friends, there's something called 'convergence' that happens.  And that is, you'll do kind of a mediocre session one day that introduces something to the game, and there'll be another kind of mediocre the next day, next week, and the week after and the week after ... and you'll feel like this isn't going anywhere.  And then there'll be some sort of impetus; something will happen, and the players will be particularly inspired.  And you know you, you as a DM may have put something in front of them that you thought would challenge them or entertain them or, and excite them, or engage them ... but then something magical happens.  Some kind of synergy happens — and then everything that has been put into the game or that has emerged from the game, week to week, over usually about six to eight weeks or so — all of it becomes suddenly weirdly relevant.  Things you didn't know were important, in retrospect ... and then you have this scenario that happens ... all these things ... they all come together and produce a scenario that is better than anything you could have."

 — Jeffro Johnson, BROSR

I had to cut and shorten this quote at several points, as it waffles quite a lot while Johnson does his best to express the concept.  Following the quote, he drifts into war story examples of what he means, but he never comes around to explaining why this moment of "magic" occurs.  The best he does is ascribe it to something in the game's design, which Gygax and Arneson inserted on account of their previous experience with wargaming, but even that is a vague collection of sentences that make little sense when quoted.  Feel free to listen and see what you can make out of it.

I agree.  It definitely happens.  As discussed in this treatise by Zittoun and Brinkmann, it's a factor of "studies in situated learning" and "cultural approaches to apprenticeship in thinking."  I plunged into this hardcore back in 2018 when I discussed meaning making, game consensus and situated learning ... concepts that go right over the heads of most.  In each case, I tried to dumb it down as far as I could while retaining the core research, but these are not easy subjects.  If you have no experience reading psychology, you might want to keep sharp instruments well out of reach.

In brief, the bros approach to rules-as-written D&D works because they're compelling everyone to coordinate the trajectory of their learning process in the same direction ... sorry.  Everyone is thinking the same.  By nullifying the "metagaming," the effort players commit to get around the rules — by saying "NO, you cannot get around these rules," player commitment falls in line with the game intention.  You can't kill the orcs by out-inventing them, you can't simply blast them away with your twenty fireballs ... you have to beat them with random die rolls and scant resources.

The result is that every choice and every die roll dramatically increases in importance.  More game hinges on that which the players cannot directly control — so when the die falls the right way at the critical moment, everyone is overjoyed.  Effectively, D&D is tranformed from role-play pissing for distance into a ring of people playing roulette ... which as anyone whose seen hard core players around a roulette wheel know, things can get loud.

This has zip to do with Gygax and Arneson as game designers.  It has zip to do with the players being especially "inspired," though it can certainly look that way if one is casting around for explanations.  And of course it takes weeks and weeks before the experience "emerges" ... these are players who have been trained since their inception to see D&D's eternal metagame.  It takes time to break their will with the rules and force them to put their chips on the table for REAL.

As I wrote in 2018:

"We focus on the words, accept each rule as written, with some assumption that it will become clear later. We view the individual rules as separate bits of data, having little to do with one another. We give considerable credence to the rule source; we interpret the rules as the meaning, bestowing innate, inviolable knowledge to the writer of the rules, presuming that the writer cannot possibly have failed to make the meaning clear when wrestling with the language."

This is, in essence, the argument that Johnson makes.  He's accepted the rules as written, he expected results, the results have happened.  He has no idea why, but he assigns the "why" to the rule source, to Gygax; Johnson bestows innate, inviolable knowledge on Gygax and presumes Gygax must have known what he was going.

It's really rare when I get to smash someone's argument four years before they make it.

As my post goes on, Johnson's understanding is "surface knowledge."  Real knowledge begins with a wholistic understanding of what the rules set out to accomplish ... which is the path the bros are on, evidenced by the rest of the podcast.  Further along, understanding pushes past the rules-as-written and into the realm of rules-as-intention.  Why does a rule exist, what does it accomplish ... and does this rule, in the way it's written, accomplish the goal it should?

This is the reason I don't play other people's rules-as-written.  I try very hard to play MY rules-as-written, or as I prefer to think of it in game, OUR rules-as-written, but I don't play AD&D's because AD&D's rules were a good try, but they missed the mark.

Take a rule I've replaced very successfully.  AD&D's experience award system is based upon the monster's attack die (determined by HD), hit points and some very fuzzy logic for a monster's special abilities.  The idea is clearly that more powerful monsters, those with more hit dice and hit points, which have powerful special abilities, should provide more experience than weaker monsters.  Agreed.  The question is, does the rule-as-written really do that?

If an orc with 1 hit point gets lucky with a d20 and causes 27 hit points of damage against the party before it gets killed, that orc gives less experience than an orc with 8 hit points that missed every swing.  If a monster with a special ability fails to use that ability during the fight, it gives the same experience as a monster that got to use that ability once, five times or twenty times before it died.  The only answer the book gives to this kind of inflation/devaluation of monster experience given is for the DM to make an ad hoc judgement call on what the experience for that monster "ought" to be ... which is a pretty damned fuzzy fix for a rule that clearly fails in its function universally.

Think of it this way.  Your camper has a black water reservoir with a listed capacity of nine gallons.  Only, you've found that in fact, although the actual tank does have this capacity, the way it fits in your camper causes some of that capacity to be wasted, since the outflow valve stops working when the tank is only 8 gallons full — whereupon, the extra black water overflows into your camper ... and worse, it does this when the outside meter reads somewhere inconsistently between 7.5 and 8.5 gallons.  Now.  Do you put up with this, acknowledging that it's up to you to make guesses as to where the actual blackwater limit is, and accept that you have to empty it more often than the camper designer rated, even when the gauge reads nowhere near full, or do you fucking fix it?

The goal of the original experience award rules did not include "it gives the DM one more bit of contentious decision-making to worry about," although that's what AD&D's rules amount to.  The goal is, harder monsters ought to give more experience.  Well, we can measure that.  Everything has hit points.  The orc that hits nothing, gets no experience for hitting, period, while the one that hits everything gets lots.  The monster that never uses its special ability might just as well not have had one, while the one that gets to use its ability is measured on how well that ability was used, not the fact that it has one.  Design a new system.  Play it AS WRITTEN.  Fuck Gygax.

The AD&D rules are not an inviolable system that produces magic.  The bros have several features relating to AD&D — their highly questionable interpretation of time, for example — that come off like someone explaining how their "totem" keeps elephants away.  "See?" they say.  "No elephants."  Somehow they've convinced themselves that several game elements, such as training, patron players, reaction rolls and yes, time, are essential to this business of solving all your problems and keeping away elephants.

Plumbing my own memories, unquestionably I had my own totems and talismans of this kind, which I gripped tightly for decades before recognising the underlying value, or lack of value, that some of these things had.  I said with the last post, and with this one above, what the bros are going through is a process.  It's evident from their dialogue that they have zero understanding of anything they're saying.  Their schtick is to repeat, "IT WORKS!" as loudly and arrogantly as possible.  Which is does.  But they don't know why it works.  It works because it does.  It works because Gygax was a genius.  It works because gods came down to Wisconsin in 1975 and handed over two tablets full of rules.  We don't need to know why it works.  Put your faith in it; that's what matters.

Which is, really, awfully pathetic.  Things don't "just work."  They work for sound, rational reasons.  Cars go faster and burn fuel more efficiently because we invented fuel injection, transmissions, coolants and ten thousand other items.  AD&D is not the end of the game's evolution, no matter what it's done for the bros.  They're assumption that it is, and their further assumption that "no one" has thought about any of this since 1980, is ignorance on a spectacular level.

We can do better.

Thistles

"This is not something that someone just casually goes off and sets up a 1970s-style campaign, ex nihilo.  That just doesn't happen, and like, and when you're not the BROSR, and you haven't gotten two or three years of work into figuring this out and playing with this, it's like, you know, if someone actually has done all this, I guess it would be obvious.  But when you done know what you don't know, there's a lot of big process there to find out what matters and what doesn't.  And there's a lot of things that are going to like not necessarily work out."

 — Jeffro Johnson, BROSR

Okay, so why am I taking pieces from this podcast and deconstructing them?  I assure you, it's not to humiliate or disparage the "bros" — which, I confess, they make more attractive by mispronouncing Latin and statements that begin, "If you're not us ..."  But this is not my goal.  Rather, it's that much of what the bros say is based upon absurd bits and pieces of information, based upon what appears to be gut instinct than real knowledge.  That needs to be addressed, since they're plainly reflecting the messages they've heard and drinking that kool-aid.

Which gets in the way of a message that IS a good one, that needs adoption.

Agreed, obviously, D&D is a mountain to climb.  Any one can see one doesn't need to be "the BROSR" and that, in fact, it doesn't take two or three years of work to figure this out.  I and my friends, all 15 years old, began running our games during the winter of 1979-80; we had older people around us whom we could go to for advice, from whom we could get good advice.  By the summer of 1980 we were all fairly confident about DMing.  Going in rotation, playing twice a week — Friday after school in the cafeteria between 2:30 and 6:00, then Saturday between 7:00 and 10:30, by the end of 1980 we had some 300-350 hours of play under our belts.  Three quarters of that was play and about a quarter was DMing.  All this was after I had finished with football, which was only that fall in 1979.  I didn't go out for football again with grade 11.  And this doesn't count the time I spent playing in other campaigns, Empire of the Petal Throne and Chivalry & Sorcery.

By the summer of 1981, between grades 11 and 12, we had sorted out which of us wanted to DM and which didn't.  Because we were older, facing our last year before graduation, most of us were freer to play later hours before we had to go home.  I ran about 60-70% of our games because I was better prepared than John, and our time had shifted from 7 hours a week to 9.  So, 18 months after starting the game, I had about 225 hours of DMing to my credit.  By then I was also running Traveller on Sunday afternoons and occasionally switching D&D up for Top Secret.  Gamma World, Paranoia, Tunnels & Trolls and straight wargames, like Car Wars, got shoved in here and there ... the two months that summer gave all kinds of opportunities to play.

By winter of 81-82, two years after my DMing began, I was the only DM left in our group.  I was not a bro and I could already see there were huge problems with AD&D, none of which are the problems that any modern-day blogger bitches about.  Alignment was weak, but not because it didn't make sense or because it couldn't be perfectly defined, but because it got in the way of the players seeking higher expressions of their character.  Any literate person knows that human beings are NEVER of a single mind; they never commit to one behaviour in every circumstance.  We are a hodgepodge of badly thought out decisions and actions that are both cruel and noble ... and the alignment system, with it's stodgy "tell you what to do" approach was simply kindergartenish and unnecessarily restraining.

The weapons vs. armour class adjustment isn't hard to run and it does make sense ... but any capable, wargame strategist — which we all were — could figure out in a few runnings that certain weapons were plainly better than others ... which drastically compelled wise players to choose the more obviously superior weapons.  We agreed after playing with it a year that the constraint was limiting the spirit of the game, while liberating no special value of any kind, so we ditched it.  If you want an end to power gaming, eliminate any system that arbitrarily specialises a weapon beyond it's functional limitations.

A battle axe needs two hands, and a sword does not, permitting the use of a shield.  They both do 1-8 damage ... so it appears that the sword is superior.  Why would anyone use a battle axe?  Well, you can't cut through a door with a sword.  When a sword breaks, the whole weapon is useless, but a battle axe always breaks at the weakest point, the handle ... which is cheap and easy to replace.  The weapon is made that way.  In the long run, the battle axe is more reliable.  Like a car with a spare tire.  You can carry the extra handle with you, or pirate it from another weapon.  Meaning the sword and battle axe each have their strengths and their weaknesses.  There's no definite right or wrong choice.  This doesn't keep a simple-minded player thinking that one or the other IS superior ... but the game includes elements to make them change their mind.  On the other hand, if you make the sword clearly superior by creating arbitrary weapon-vs.-armour rules, then every player would be stupid to lessen their chance of survival by choosing an axe.  That's not power gaming.  That's sensible.

The larger point is that, no, it doesn't take two years to get a handle on this game.  Those DMs who stepped down after trying it were fine as DMs, if a bit overwhelmed.  I can still easily get overwhelmed while playing.  A DM is a particular personality that likes being overwhelmed, who sees it as a good thing, because it's exciting and a high.  He or she looks forward to the next time the opportunity to DM comes ... whereas others view the next running with anxiety.  There's only so many times one can be possessed by that anxiety before one quits running.

Understand, however, this isn't a sign of the game being comprised of bad rules, or of the prospective DM not knowing what needs to be done.  We can know perfectly how to run, and still fail at it because it's really not for us.

The bros make the pitch hard that by playing AD&D by the rules exactly, it's a much better game.  And they repeat over and over that it's "the AD&D rules" — and apparently, only those rules, that affords this better game.  This is nonsense.  The problem with 5th isn't that it has different rules.  It's that the rules aren't "rules" at all.  They're suggestions at best, easily compromised, badly defined and overall a ghastly mess for organising a campaign.  AD&D is superior to 5th not because it's a better rule system, but because it IS one.  Any consistent, structured, limiting rule system is vastly superior to 5th for that reason.

It's a good idea for an unsupported DM, without practical experience with wargames (which are all about hardcore exact adherence to rules), without access to good advice (which throws out everything on the internet), to adopt AD&D rules-as-written as a starting point.  I encourage that, whole heartedly.  Not because I think AD&D is a good system as written, but because, as a matter of fact, that's exactly how I started. 

Nor do I think AD&D's rules represent "how Gygax envisioned the game," which is a load of dingo's kidneys.  In any case, who gives a rat's boil what Gygax intended?  He's dead, we're still here, and humanity moves on from what inventors invent.  We don't make cars the way Henry Ford did, and guess why.

Most would-be DMs out there have had ALL their opportunities to learn viciously co-opted by morons and exploiters.  These poor DMs desperately need to stop viewing D&D as a set of guidelines and instead as a set of hard, strict boundaries, which have the capacity to change and discipline these DMs into new people with new perspectives.  Playing AD&D rules-as-written might do that.

5th is not about disciplining players.  And while I hate to sound like a christian website urging you to beat your children, "discipline" in the academic sense is necessary for building the strong, sustainable apparati that will keep a game campaign going, year after year.  Us old school guys who played 1812, El Alamein and Tractics had our mental spines broken over the backs of rule systems that permitted zero flexibility.  That's what we wanted.  It forced us to solve the problem using the games rules, and not solve the rule problems with our flippant imaginations.  And hell, regarding what Gygax "thought," he contributed to the design of the last one linked ... 'course, that was years before he lost his shit with TSR.

Every player faced those same rule constraints; and as it played out, it became clear that some could see how to move units in a way that would win a battle and some did not.  For those who did well at this, and for those who did okay and occasionally succeeded, this was a triumph of game design.  But for those who could not think like a commander, who could not make sense of strategy and tactics, these games were horrible.  Those people did not enjoy these games.  Yet no one ever spoke of changing the rules to suit their shortcomings.  Simulation, Avalon Hill and other publishers didn't pump out "basic" game versions for these games, designed to make sure "everyone had fun."  Fuck everyone.  "Everyone" could go to the fucking beach if they wanted fun.  We were playing games that challenged our intellect and our limitations.  We screamed at each other, we fought viciously over half an inch of movement, we tore the skin on our fingernails and on our knees moving units over carpet with the fastidiousness of a surgeon.  We did not speak of having "fun."

The crucifixion-cross of "FUN" for everyone has ruined D&D past the point where most players introduced to the game have any chance of experiencing the sort of game we played 40 years ago.  If it takes them two or three years to learn D&D, it's because they didn't learn the importance of rules at a young age, or because they were taught that "fun" was the only defensible hill upon which anyone would play a game.  If the bros above feel the need to self-aggrandise themselves as "the ones" — go Neos — who have seen the blessed light of AD&D rules-as-written, all power to them.  At least they're on the right path, even if they've decided to start on it 43 years later.  At least they're a tiny percentage of the community that's finally realised that Mentzer, Holmes and the string of fucked-up weak-player enablers who followed in their wake, were taking the game on a crooked, EASY road to Hell.  At least someone woke the Chriscakes up.

So, yeah, I'm annoyed by their ignorance and terse arrogance — but unlike a lot of people, I see the bed from which it's grown.  From soil that's done little but grow mould these last forty years, along comes these two thistles.  And they're pushing out a couple of flowers.  I'll take that over what I've had.

Still.

I can't resist deconstructing the donkey piss of misinformation they're dribbling out, so there are going to be a few more of these posts.  I hope my readers are wise enough to see the good in this process.

Practical Learning

"... if you look at any role-playing game from the 70s, Metamorphosis Alpha assumes you're going to draw out 24 levels of a giant starship — and there were people at the time, who were just like me, and said like I don't know how to do that.  How's that gonna work?  And then there's, um, Tunnels and Trolls, says 'Okay, the first thing that's gonna happen is, someone's gonna have to dig the tunnel.'  Map out the dungeon.  And of course St. Andre there was copying from Original D&D where Gygax says, 'Okay, somebody's gonna have to design six levels of a dungeon,' right?

"Now a kid like me was always baffled by this.  How did someone come up with all this stuff?  Because you look at professionally produced modules and you — and I think, I'm never going to make something that good.  You know.  It's always been a mystery to me.  How did all these people in the 1970s — how did they give themselves permission to just go correct things, to create things?"

 — Jeffro Johnson, BROSR

It's a gift that keeps on giving.

Metamorphosis Alpha was originally published in 1976.  The game included descriptions of 17 levels of the "Starship Warden", a 50-mile long damaged vessel.  Not 24.  17.  Most children in the days before helicopter parenting, video games, cellphones and even cable television suffered from acute and crippling boredom, which encouraged the drawing out of physical pictures from descriptions.  It's not a mystery.

Tunnels and Trolls was originally published in 1975 by Ken St. Andre.  I don't have any memories of the game before 1979, and perhaps I didn't play it often enough, but I have no memories of any text saying, "Okay, you have to dig the tunnel."  But I could be wrong about that.  In any case, it's not like we had to head off to a place with dirt with our shovels.  It's just lines drawn on paper, right?

Nor do I have any memories of Gygax saying a dungeon had to have specifically "six" levels.  I accept that Johnson's goal is to stress the difficulty of prepping the game — but again, these are just lines drawn with pencils.

While I didn't play RPGs until 1979, starting around 1970, at the age of six, I had grown remarkably adept at playing in the sand, where we would collaboratively build villages with roads, hotwheels cars, complete with small plastic garages, post offices and police stations, because these things were available and we were boys.  These villages would fill the sandbox from side to side, and then we'd collect rocks, golf balls and wooden blocks and smash these villages "from space" just before dinnertime.

By eight or nine, we were drawing our own comic strips — or in my case, making maps — as well as drawing out spaceships smashing into planets, or whatever took our fancy.  Virtually everyone's binder (a thing used to carry paper) was side-to-side illustrated, because we were punchy with boredom in school and doodling made the clock's minute hand move faster.

By eleven, we were playing playing complex wargames, having moved beyond RISK into Panzerblitz and Squad Leader; by twelve, it was rebuilding the rumpus room floor with anything we could find in order to build large battle maps, on which we move our plastic-model built tanks and miniature soldiers all-day Saturday ... before these had to be cleaned up before everyone went home.  We knew every detail about those tanks; we could rattle off engine types, range, fuel use, weight, etcetera, because we collectively owned all of Jane's Big Books of whatever ... which included scale models of cut-away diagrams of giant battleships and airplanes, which we would stare at for hours and discuss for longer.  Pffft.  Invent 17 levels of a giant spaceship?  Yeah, like we had no template for that.

Anyway, my being 11 takes me up to 1974.  It was another five years before I even heard of D&D; and after first hearing of it, I played it in a space of an hour.

I'm a little fascinated by these people talking in the present about how "in the 1970s," role-playing games were supposedly everywhere.  Um, no.  The friend who introduced me to the game had been playing a month, while the DM had been introduced to the game only three months before.  It was going like wildfire in 1979, but no one in Calgary could have easily played the game before December of 1978 ... because that's when the only game store in the city opened its doors.  So this "what people did in the 1970s" is bullshit.  Yeah, maybe some people played, somewhere, but it wasn't a widespread phenomenon and every one of those people had a wargame-obsessive background like I did.  This is a very tiny subset of the population, with a specific mindset ... the sort that would know exactly how to design 6 levels of a dungeon, or a huge spaceship, without any trouble.

I have mentioned before that I joined a campaign in 1980, run by a fellow who played with Gygax in 1974.  He passed away last year; his name was Bill Hartley.  He didn't publish any modules or get famous in any way ... but he did begin running his own game after moving to Calgary post-school.  He became a teacher, reappearing in my life as my daughter's grade nine english teacher.  That was a very funny parent-teacher interview, I can tell you.  My daughter was barely discussed.

In 1975, I'd wager that Bill was the only player of D&D in Calgary.  And as it happened, he lived just three blocks from where I lived, in a house overlooking my elementary school playground.  I can show you the house.  But as a 5th grader in 1975, I had no idea — though I probably glanced towards his house every day.  I think that's kind of funny.

Giving ourselves "permission" to make things was how the world worked.  I made my first science fair project in 1976, a working circulatory system along with quite a lot of knowledge about it.  I put forth science fair projects each year until grade 10, by which time I'd lost interest in practical science and had moved onto theatre arts.  The same year that I discovered D&D I had also begun performing in city wide events on stage ... which is a different kind of collaborative, creative effort.  I also got interested in football, in those days when I was young, raw and lean, which is intensely collaborative and a good place to wear out aggression.  But it was football or drama, and in the end drama won ... which, CTE considered, was definitely for the best.

I have no idea what kind of kid Jeffro Johnson was, but certainly not the kind that I ran around with when I was building model ships and planes, or building physical representations to display contour lines as a science fair exhibit (1.5 meters wide and 0.5 meters high, built with 5 mm sheets of styrofoam and carefully cut to represent the contoured landscape around Sylvan Lake in central Alberta), or learning how to program computers with punch cards (yes, christ, that's where I started with computers).  Long before I played D&D, I was trained to play D&D.

Make a dungeon?  From scratch?  Oh ffs.  Give me something hard.

The Boys

 

These guys talked for 30 minutes yesterday, this far apart.  I could hear them clearly, with my window open in July.  They called each other "Bro" approximately once every 26 seconds, or on average placing the word at the beginning or end of every fourth sentence.  I took the picture because I thought it might give me the opportunity to talk about why I so heartily dislike men so much of the time.  Honestly. They shifted their feet, shook their shoulders, flapped their arms and so on, but they kept their distance.  Standing far apart keeps it het, bro.

I didn't think I'd find a use for the pic until JB of Blackrazor drew my attention to this podcast, using the acronym, "BROSR."  Ech.  Yeah, that's really ... execrable.  Makes me look forward to the future acronyms for BROCD and BROBE.  To be honest, the "bro" bit truly put me off.  At first.  I did listen to all of it.  From James Streissand:

"Every single time we bring up any of these, uh, '... well I just do what I feel like, I just do it whenever I want' — and then we have to spend time, every single conversation, spend half of it or more, explaining why attack rolls are not adjudicated through DM fiat, or sorry their attacks are not adjudicated through DM fiat.  We have attack rolls, because we as designers have decided that if the DM was there to, uh, adjudicate, was to decide on a completely new and random method of adjudicating how attacks are handled in the game, every time the game came up, the game would probably be unplayable.  At very least in this context.  We need some sort of supporting structure, we need some capacity at this value to players declaring that they're going to make an attack, as opposed to asking the DM whether they can make an attack, and then have them adjudicated ... there's value to independent mechanics that the players can rely on to ensure that the game will progress in some fashion.

"Having this conversation every single time is far slower than calling you an idiot.  And saving myself all that exhaustion because I know you're not going to get it anyway."

I fully expect that James gets blasted for this kind of talk but of course, here, I applaud him.  This is a game, it works like a game, you idiot.  James goes on to talk about how he'd rather use his energy for people who can understand what he's saying.

So.  This is not a post disparaging these guys ... though in many, many, many ways they have not done their homework.  This post is also not going to talk about AD&D, or the rules of that game, or comparing it to other forms of D&D.  I am done with all that shit.  I am not rehashing those conversations.

I'll begin by saying, first, that the boys, the "bros," have stumbled across the principles of playing the game as written first before thinking you're smart enough to change them.  Genius.  For the record, I played AD&D pretty close to "as written" between 1979 and 1985.  And there were many parts of the game that I found myself still adhering parts of it for no good reason as recently as four years ago; much of my gaming history has consisted of hacking off parts of the old game and replacing it with mine, with each part going over time.  The boys, however, seem to have hit on their comprehension in 2020.  It's hard to be sure; searching their names turns up a lifeguard in Clovelly with a hot bod named Jethro James who's described as a "deep-thinker."  That's my kind of boarder.

I give them credit.  It's not easy to rediscover the round wheel when every wheel we see is stupidly square; they've uncovered a basic fact about D&D that's been lost a long time (except to we who have not died yet) ... and they have spines, telling people who say a thing is "bad" must produce a reason.  On the whole, I'm in their camp.

But as a blogger I need things to write about ... and I know a good thing when I see it.  Here are the boys talking:

Streissand: "Those of us who are interested in objective discussion of game design — which a great deal of the stream is going to be — just having objective communication between different parties about the games that we love ... it necessarily comes off as abrasive.  People will come in and muddy the waters, and say, 'well just do what you think is fun, as long as everybody's having fun at the table, everything is valid' ... and those people of course don't hold to that standard themselves, but it doesn't matter.  Because what you have to do, I find — or the most effective way of chasing those people away, is just being abrasive."

Jeffro Johnson: "No, no, the worst thing is like when they're like, 'Hey, your message is going to go so much further if you just change the way you deliver it." [Streissand facepalms]

I don't know ... that could be something I've heard a few times also.

Johnson: "... when D&D, or the elusive shift happened ... where wargaming shifted into RPGs ... if that shift actually happened, and if it was predicated on rule zero thinking, then there are no standards.  There are no standards for discussing what role-playing is, there's no standards for discussing what's better at the table and what's not, for what works and what doesn't — there's not even a game there.  There's just people that are sort of larping as people that are playing a game.  And so, by having these objective standards, and pushing them really hard and not compromising on them, we can actually begin a discussion that in some sense that stopped sometime around like 1979, 1980 or so." 

Okay, so, this sets the tone for where I and the boys go our separate ways.  The reason why I keep referring to them as "the boys" is because, by phrases like this, they betray themselves as phenomenally stupid about the world's turning these last four decades.  Or, if you prefer, magnificently self-involved, believing that what they see about D&D in the present allows them to easily extrapolate events and perspectives based on a few extant source materials they've happened to read.  As if what Gygax or Arneson wrote down, or what the Dragon said, is the last word in early D&D culture.

They're not wrong about rule zero thinking.  They're not wrong that there was a discussion that existed in 1979 and 1980 that has evaporated since ... but Johnson hammers the word "stopped."  Obviously, it didn't.  There was no wargame-to-RPG shift.  And I'm material proof, as is every player I've participated with in 40 years, that the discussion never ended.  It's still ongoing, OSR notwithstanding, the company notwithstanding and the general popular bullshit notwithstanding.  Johnson, however, and Streissand as well, have no idea.  They live in the bubble of their present and they've no reason to step out of it.

This is not the only time in the podcast that they're guilty of this assumption.  It happens so often, with blinding regularity in fact, that it helps to look at their choice of branding ... and remember they're only boys with a bright idea.

Do I think the conversation should be taken up by more people?  Absolutely.  That's why I listened to all of the podcast.  I don't usually.  In general, they're insipid.  The boys are definitely on the right track.  They don't know why the track works.  Their "wisdom" is totally experiential ... and so it's regularly backed up with "explanations" for things that sound much like the "theories" most people concoct in high school about what the real world is like.  For example, they're convinced that the way they measure game time is an absolute necessity to game success.  To support this faith, they've radically misinterpreted and cherry-picked a few gygaxian paragraphs about game time, and then "proved" to themselves that "Gygax was right" about the importance of time.  It's a delightful bit of tautological thinking which helps them believe their one the right track about this whole following the rules thing.  They are on the right track.  Not for that reason.  But they think time matters ... so they'll grip that totem tight until they realise it's nonsense.

Since I was there when the discussion "ended," I feel bound to explain that the world of 1979 didn't have the internet, and therefore knowing what "everyone thought" was drastically limited to what the news decided to report upon and how many people one could conceivable talk to face-to-face.  As such, there existed a sort of dividing line between what we knew from direct communication (which we could trust for the most part, because we could ask questions and present arguments), and what we knew from the limited media (which we could not trust, because it was mostly presented by people plainly trying to bullshit us for our money).  In 1979 and 1980, between the 20 or so people I gamed with, the additional 15 people who played that I didn't game with, and they guy who ran the only gamestore in Calgary (population:469,000) that sold D&D content and therefore knew everybody, no one ever praised anything Gygax said or did; no one even knew Arneson's name; no one cared who wrote the books; and the discussion was mostly about important stuff like how many frost giants does it take to kill a gold dragon, and if elves live forever why isn't the world hip deep in immortal elven children?  We did not, ever, talk about the value of rules, or which rules to follow, or if we needed rules, or if the DM had to obey the rules; we argued over what the words in the books actually meant, exactly.   And those arguments often got so heated that physical fights started.

The "conversation" that mattered in 79/80 was this:  what is D&D, and How do I run it?  I mean, just what the fuck is it, anyway?  What is it supposed to be?  Because, if I'm going to run it, it would really help if I knew what the fuck I was running.  This is the core conversation that everyone was keyed on.  No matter where, no matter when, on the way to school, on the way home, waiting in line for a movie (we used to do that), laying on our backs and looking at the stars, with the game shop guy, with the older guys, with the guys who played Napoleanics, with the guys who played Tractics, with the guys who played Squad Leader ... how does it work when we say we want to do something and the DM doesn't know how we're supposed to do it, because there aren't rules for that and yet I'm not physically prevented by the game from doing that thing?  What is the DM supposed to do, and does that mean the players aren't allowed?

We went around and around in a circle with this ... and then modules to appear everywhere and the conversation was still there, but it was way easier to run a module and most of the lower echelon people ran to that as a DM tool, which kind of left us elitists still talking but still not finding an answer ... though I thought I was onto something because I'd started letting the players just do stuff, while I reacted sort of like how a player is supposed to react when I tell them that stuff is happening.

Then the splatbooks of Unearthed Arcana, the Fiend Folio and Deities came out, and the conversation started to be about which of these new rules we'd use, and meanwhile we were ditching rules that didn't work, and then I started inventing new rules, which changed my game and I moved away from the public discourse for about 17 years, and when I came back, it was all about 3rd edition and sandboxing/railroading, and generally people are better educated about what a DM needs to do now than we were in 1980.

So, the boys deciding that running AD&D by the rules "solves problems" makes sense from both a 1979 and 2022 point of view.  We did it, because those were the only rules.  The Dragon magazine was mostly about fluff and general interest chatter until 1983, coinciding with the splatbooks, when it got new rule heavy.  The boys in 2022 are doing it because they're seeking a grail and they think they've found it.  We played AD&D "raw" because when we didn't, we got shouted down.  Remember: I grew up in an age where every game had rules and everyone followed them.  No one thought to question the rules of AD&D ... at first.  It was only after trying to play with them for a couple of years that we decided they didn't work.  Which is what the boys are essentially selling on the podcast.

It's only that they don't know they're selling that.  Because they haven't gotten to where we were in 1983.  Yet.

So, yeah.  They're on the right page.  But they're 40 years behind me.  I'll be 98 years old before they get to where I am now.

You'll forgive me if I call them "the boys."  I don't think they're my age.