For a while now I have been meaning to write a blog entry about that profoundly odd artifact, the Wilderness Survival Guide. But it has defeated me. There is too much in there to read and take in, let alone write about.
But it did spur me to think about the practice of D&D. One of the interesting thing about hobbies (they share this with religious groups, in a sense) is the way they mix conformity and diversity. No judo, chess, book or archery club does things in exactly the same way as another. They share certain core commonalities (the rules of judo or chess or whatever) but there is a nebulous space of difference around those core commonalities for each group. One judo club does their warm-up one way and other does it another way. One chess club rotates opponents every 30 minutes, while one just pairs people up for the evening, etc. Different hobbies have slightly more core commonalities than others (you get much more uniformity, I guess, between hobby groups based around sports with agreed rules).
When groups collide you can get a certain amount of friction over what the core commonalities are. Maybe the simplest and best example of this is the "Free Parking" rule in Monopoly. Some people think the "Free Parking" rule is harmless fun which adds a bit of enjoyable randomness to the game. Some people think that it undermines player skill. Usually the friction ends up getting resolved pretty quickly because, really, nobody cares about it that much. But things can get heated when other areas of friction appear; there was once nearly a serious falling out in a game of Monopoly I was involved in at university because of a disagreement over the use of "outside payments" for properties. (Somebody, if I recall, offered to sell Old Kent Road to somebody else, who they happened to live with in the "real world", so they could complete the "Browns" - in return for washing all the dishes for a week. This did not go over well with other participants. But I digress.)
Reading the Wilderness Survival Guide got me thinking about the core commonalities of D&D. There is no way that all of the rules in that book could ever have been intended to become standard. It has to be understood simply as an additional supplementary toolkit - if you happen to need rules for fighting while climbing, or the availability of medicinal plants, you might refer to it. But equally, you might not. Some groups will not refer to it at all because of the simple reason they haven't got it. Others may just incorporate some of the rules they use often or which they find most useful. A few might rely on it extensively. But you couldn't describe any of it part of the common core.
What are the core commonalities of D&D, then? What rules exist for more or less every group and are applied more or less universally irrespective of the edition?
Hit points and the six stats. Levels. Separate 'to hit' and 'damage' rolls. Those seem as though they exist everywhere. You can't really have AC, because it means different things depending on the edition. What else is there? What is the distilled essence of the game beyond hit points, stats, levels, and to hit and damage rolls?
Subsidiary question: could you make a version of D&D in which the rules just consisted of hit points, stats, levels and to hit and damage rolls?
I would argue that Searchers of the Unknown comes the closest. While it doesn't have stats, I would submit that mechanically (thought certainly not psychologically) the six stats were never that important.
ReplyDeleteMechanically unimportant but they appear everywhere. I am thinking more along the lines of what always exists, and the six stats basically always exist.
DeleteSotU was my first thought as well. My second thought was: half of those rules (e.g. separate to-hit and damage rolls) don't exist in OD&D if you use the Chainmail combat rules as opposed to the "alternate" OD&D combat rules.
DeleteTrue, but how many groups actually really use the Chainmail combat rules?
DeleteI would try it if I had them.
DeleteWhy hasn't anyone retro cloned it?
There is this (http://www.grey-elf.com/Forbidden_Lore.pdf) but you have to have the Chainmail rules to understand it and they are hard to get hold of.
DeleteActually, the Chainmail rules were just released on pdf this year: http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17010/Chainmail-Rules-for-Medieval-Miniatures-0e?term=chainmail&test_epoch=0&it=1
DeleteExcellent!
DeleteI think you're getting into a definition question, here. As you change rules, when does it stop being D&D?
ReplyDeleteI think it's kind of a silly question, like all definition questions. When you want to say something, you need to define your terms, so that people know what you're talking about. So, when I say "D&D is like X" I need to define what I mean by D&D. But it doesn't matter if my meaning of the word D&D is different from yours, when you say "D&D is like Y". We're just talking about different things.
However, I once tried to run a game of Lamentations of the Flame Princess. In order to not have to explain what Lamentations of the Flame Princess was, I called it "old-school D&D," when talking to prospective players about it. I ended up with one player who did not really know anything about any D&D other than third edition, who was extremely confused about low-is-good d6 skill checks. For that player, it simply couldn't be D&D without almost all rolls being high-is-good d20. For that reason, among several others, that group/campaign just did not work out, so that was a time when it really did matter.
In reference to your subsidiary question: Into the Odd is a game that is, to me, recognizably D&D but that does not have to-hit rolls. I am currently running several games using my own house-rule'd Scarlet Heroes/B/X D&D, in which most NPCs do not make damage rolls - they do a flat 1 damage on a hit. To me, Searchers of the Unknown is recognizably D&D, and it does not have stats. So I guess "Level" is the only one of those that's absolutely necessary? Probably if you really wanted a formal definition of "D&D", you'd need something like the Berlin interpretation of "roguelike" - a set of features that you have to have some of, but no individual one of them is absolutely necessary.
I notice that all of the rules you are thinking about are player facing, and they're even mostly combat mechanics. I think the more interesting place to look (when talking about how people do D&D the same between groups, differently between groups, and the same or differently for other RPGs), is actually in the question of what does the DM do? What is he allowed to do (if that's limited)? What is he responsible for? What does he always do even if he doesn't think of it as a rule? How and what does he prep, and how and what does he improvise, and what does he roll on tables for?
An RPG rulebook is someone's attempt to communicate "This is how our group does it, and how your group can do it too." (even if some rulebooks are more like "this is a bunch of ways your group could do it") But, most rulebooks are full of assumptions about how everyone does things, so they often fail in that communication. So you get many groups with very different ways of playing, all calling their game by the same name.
I think OD&D was great, because it had so many of those assumptions, and was so unclear, that it created the entire RPG hobby/artform out of differing interpretations. But I also think B/X is the best rulebook published under the name "Dungeons and Dragons", because it has the most clarity about exactly one way to play. (4e has equal clarity, I guess, but I like it less.)
I tend to think Into the Odd is its own game. The roots are recognizably D&D but only in the sense that Rolemaster or Tunnels & Trolls are - it has changed so much that I think it can be said to be a totally different game.
DeleteThis is sort of like the question of when a dialect becomes a different language. Or when a subspecies of animal becomes a different species.
Your focus on the DM is an interesting one. Good food for thought and I daresay another blog post....
At least in linguistics we don't have to determine when a dialect becomes a separate language; it's decided by politics.
DeleteAnyways, to me, Into the Odd to B/X D&D is sort of like Norwegian to Danish, if it makes sense.
Howdy Noisms! I catch a lot of heat because I love that book. As a whole, I feel that it made my wilderness designs stronger, but as a gaming book, it isn't very practical, if something comes up or if the DM wants to incorporate a mechanic into a scenario, they can, but for the most part it stays on the shelf. I guess that since I already use NWP and they had always just been there for me, I didn't see Wilderness Survival as controversial.
ReplyDeleteAs far as play goes, we had a game turn into a bloodbath, we were playing 2nd Edition but we stripped all of the complex character creation because it made no sense to use it; we were dying as fast as we could roll these guys up. It was a blast and the system still functioned.
Don't get me wrong, I like the WSG and the idea of it. I just can't imagine anybody using all of those rules. Doing the merest thing would take hours!
DeleteI feel classes are right there with levels as integral.
ReplyDeleteI would also say dungeons are integral, but not dragons.
Yeah, you are right about classes. Also probably dungeons, but maybe that is more of a playstyle thing than a rule thing?
DeleteHow about "Dungeon as concept" is core, meaning we can include old school hex crawls. There's something about the picaresque quality of a keyed out dungeon or hexcrawl... each room or hex as a unit of interaction separate from others.
DeleteTo me a core commonality of D&D is AC. It doesn't matter if it is tied strictly to armor worn, starts at 9 and goes down, or 10 and goes up. AC as a value that determines the difficulty in success of an attack is D&D.
ReplyDeleteYeah, fair enough.
DeleteSpells
ReplyDeleteI was tempted to put "Vancian magic" but I think there is a certain minority of groups who would play magic-less D&D or very low magic "historical" style D&D.
DeleteAnd also folks who use spell points instead of "Vancian magic"...
DeleteI think you summarized the problem very well with the "Berlin interpretation" (which I didn't know about until now, thanks!).
ReplyDeleteThere is a couple of features related to D&D but you need only a subset of these features to make something that you can call D&D.
I also think you and other commenter already pointed some of these features like Hit points, The Six Stats, Experience Points, Levels, Separate 'to hit' and 'damage' rolls, Armor Class, Vancian Magic, etc.
> Subsidiary question: could you make a version of D&D in which the rules just consisted of hit points, stats, levels and to hit and damage rolls?
ReplyDelete5e minus races, classes and skills
The thought behind this came before your post (Scout's honour!) but still seems somewhat relevant.
ReplyDeletehttp://worldbuildingandwoolgathering.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/the-cosmopolitanism-of-d-vietnam-and.html