There are all kinds of sources for our knowledge, but none has authority.

One of the things I like about traditional RPGs, and older editions of D&D in particular, is that they have what David Brooks calls "epistemological modesty". That is, the designers seem to have understood the futility, indeed the foolhardiness, of attempting to come up with a coherent and robust system from the outset that will work for all players; their philosophy rather seems to have been to provide a starting point, a toolbox, with which DMs and players can make what they will, and which have almost been conceived with the expectation of evolution and change. The lack of cogency in these games, and the very necessity of house ruling them, is seen as a flaw by some, but it's all a matter of perspective; I suspect Karl Popper, William Morris and Michael Oakeshott would all have approved of OD&D's approach.

In fact the history of RPGs could in many ways be seen as a struggle between epistemological modesty and reductionism. On the one hand you have those who believe in decentralisation and freedom of interpretation. On the other are those who think that the complexity inherent in a game played by literally tens of thousands of different discrete groups at any one time could be simplified to the point where a satisfactory unified mechanical structure could be maintained. The latter seems like tilting at windmills to me, but it's been the philosophy of game design since at least the mid-90s.

What the Public Wants is the Image of Passion, not Passion Itself

One more thing: don’t spend too much time merely reading. The best part of this work is the play, so play and enjoy! - Gary Gygax

In another life, I took what literary theorists said seriously - seriously enough at least to disagree with many of them and consider them a blight on humanity; very well educated but fundamentally not-very-intelligent people are responsible for a lot of what's bad in the world. George Steiner in particular always struck me as a very eloquent and very widely read fool, but I reserved a special place in hell for Roland Barthes, a man I considered not far removed from Satan. I was a very angry and far-too-intellectual-for-my-own-good 20 year old. (One of my favourite quotes is by the writer Jonathan Franzen, who said that he spends around ten minutes a day fretting about the fact that, when he was in his 20s, he used to spend ten minutes a day fretting about things like the fact that Americans have substituted medical products for genuine psychological healing. I understand what he means in a very deep and meaningful sense - why was I so serious about things like that?)

Anyway, these days I'm a lot mellower and I think I can see a little bit of what Barthes was getting at, especially regarding Death of the Author. This was a famous essay by him in which he basically argued that in interpreting a text, it is the text and the reader's understanding of it alone which matters - not the author's intent. As soon as the author has produced a piece of writing he no longer owns it and no longer should be seen as having any relation to it - it is not his or her history or views which inform analysis of it, but the reader's. And each new reading by each new reader, or even each re-reading, is a new interpretation of a new text with a new meaning.



We can see this process in Dungeons & Dragons, you see. When Gygax and Arneson and their circle created the game, they had an idea of what they wanted to do, and a whole history of reading and playing and thinking behind that idea - a witch's brew of Tolkien, Moorcock, Howard, Leiber, Avalon Hill and a thousand other cultural artefacts from their own experiences. But if we interpret that in light of Barthes, where the author has 'died' the minute he has produced the text (and I should say straight away at this point that I refer to this in a purely metaphorical sense which has nothing to do with Gary Gygax's actual regrettable and very sad death), we should really throw all of that out of the window and ignore it. The text of Original D&D and 1e are for us to take meaning from for ourselves, irrespective of the intentions of the authors; if we want to use it to play games utterly different to what they envisaged, then we can do so. In fact, it could be argued that we ought to do so.

This is one of the reasons, really, why I'm not a great fan of stick-in-the-mud-ism when it comes to 'old schoolers', although I've never previously thought to articulate it in reference to Roland Barthes! The vast majority of old schoolers are, of course, creative individuals who just like to play. But there is a certain section who seem unduly wedded to what the orginators intended and to their vision of the game. Indeed I wrote a long rant about the very topic back in June, which I still mostly agree with, even if the painful stridency of the piece irks me. (I think I tend towards the painfully strident a little too much.) Gary Gygax and his generation created a great game, but it's not theirs anymore; they were the 'scriptors', to use Barthes' term, but we are the readers, the interpreters, and the ones who give the game meaning for ourselves. If we want to use the OD&D rules to play a campaign about mutant monkeys invading the star ship Enterprise at the edge of the universe, or about heroic halflings saving the world from the Dark Lord, then we should just go for it and devil take the hindmost.

More on Archetypes and Demihumans

In many ways I do rather wish Gygax and Arneson hadn't put demihumans in D&D. Although my love for dwarves is well documented, I think I would be willing to see them removed as playable races as a sacrifice so that I never have to come across an elf or halfling character ever again in a game. (I do have my tongue half in my cheek here, but only half.)

The reason isn't just the one I mentioned yesterday (the tendency towards "I want to be a good Xer, therefore I must play a member of race Y, because they are the best Xers" as Anonymous put it). I think it's also because Demihuman player characters ruin the sense of mystery that comes with the exploration of something truly weird and fantastical - which is one of the major cornerstones of D&D. They make everything mundane: Melville's banalifying systematisation, rearing its head again. I much prefer the theme of strangers in a strange land, and you can only really explore that fully with human characters at large in a world full of weird and incomprehensible things. Elves and dwarves and the like would be infinitely more interesting if they were unknown and unknowable - the alien "other", permanently present and yet never understood. Rather than, basically, humans who like trees or humans who like mining, respectively.

I've quoted this passage by M. John Harrison before, but the more I think about it the more I start to see his point:

The moment you begin to ask (or rather to answer) questions like, “Yes, but what did Sauron look like?”; or, “Just how might an Orc regiment organise itself?”; the moment you concern yourself with the economic geography of pseudo-feudal societies, with the real way to use swords, with the politics of courts, you have diluted the poetic power of Tolkien’s images. You have brought them under control. You have tamed, colonised and put your own cultural mark on them.

The part of me that finds great excitement, pleasure and comfort in creating finely realised fantasy world rebels against that statement with every fibre of its being, but the other half of me - which likes mystery and strangeness and romance - finds it compelling. How is it possible to reconcile the competing desires for systematisation and non-banality? For me, it's the key question not only of D&D or role-playing but of fantasy literature. Demihuman player character races are at the exact point where those two competing desires come together and are repelled; do you systematise elves to make them playable, but in doing so make them banal? Or do you preserve their sense of magic and mystery, but in so doing make them inaccessible? Not a question to keep you up at night, maybe, but one that I think the hobby itself could do more to consider.

I suppose it should come as no surprise that OD&D is the version of D&D which comes closest to reconciling both positions: although it strays into systematisation with its statting-out of the fantastic, it keeps this to a minimum while also providing a bare-bones framework on which to hang whatever strangeness your mind can come up with. There is no Forgotten Realms-esque bloat, no endless anal-retentive cataloguing of pointless minutiae. There is freedom for the unknowable to exist. Maybe there really is more to the old gal than meets the eye.

White Box Volume II: Monsters & Treasure - First Impressions

Another list of first impressions:

• Monsters only need one line of text to set out all their stats and abilities. This was a tradition that was maintained through 1st and 2nd edition AD&D (all you really need to know, even with 2nd edition, is the number of hit dice, the armour class and the morale rating) and it's a shame it's fallen by the wayside.
• There's no attempt at locating the monsters in a fully-realised gameworld. Dervishers are just "fanatically religious nomads"; Mermen are "similar to berzerkers in most respects but they fight at -1 on land"; kobolds should be "treated as if they are goblins". That phrase, why let us do your imagining for you, echoes through the pages. It has its advantages and disadvantages; the 2nd edition Monstrous Manual provided sheets and sheets of information on each monster, but it was chock full of good ideas to spur your imagination and creativity. There's none of that in OD&D. On the other hand, you have a blank slate on which to work, more or less.
  
• It's a book written by wargamers: "Buccaneers are water-going Bandits in every respect except composition of their force: Light Foot = 60%; Light Crossbow = 30%; and Heavy Crossbow (Chainmail) = 10%." Giants "act as light catapults".
  
• The gnoll is patently not a hyena-thing. It is a "cross between a gnome and a troll." (See picture below.)
• No fantasy puritanism here: robots and androids are given a big stamp of approval. That's started me off thinking about a Viriconium game again...

White Box Volume I: Men & Magic - First Impressions

The first impressions of an OD&D newcomer to the Game Wot Started Everything Else. I'm just going to note things down in a convenient point-blob style list, as and when they come to me. Don't expect much in the way of coherence; I'm literally just jotting down notes as I scroll down the pdf in Foxit Reader.

• It's an utterly banal observation, really, but as Milan Kundera once remarked (in one of my favourite quotes), it's often the most banal observations which intrigue and surprise us the most: the cover and title page of Men & Magic make no mention of 'role playing', because at the time it didn't exist. Instead, the game is described in a rather cumbersome and innaccurate way as Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures. (It's often complained that 4e D&D 'requires' minatures while older editions don't. Whether OD&D required miniatures is debatable, but you can certainly argue that their use was encouraged.)
• Gary Gygax, in his dedication, thanks the people who helped expand on the Chainmail rules (what we would now call 'playtesters', I suppose) and then remarks: "Here is something better!" A great line. I wonder if early players realised just how much better this strange new world of gaming was.
• The Gygaxian writing style is immediately noticeable: enthusiastic, verbose, and unselfconsciously flowery. The sly digs and put-downs that he would become infamous for are present even in the 'Forward' (sic): "Those wargamers who lack imagination", he announces sniffily, "will not be likely to find Dungeons & Dragons to their taste."
  
• In its own very simple way the introduction provides one of the most inspiring manifestos for the roleplaying hobby that has ever been written:
  

  [These rules] provide the framework around which you will build a game of simplicity or tremendous complexity — your time and imagination are about the only limiting factors, and the fact that you have purchased these rules tends to indicate that there is no lack of imagination — the fascination of the game will tend to make participants find more and more time.

• Number of players: "At least one referee and from four to fifty players can be
  handled in any single campaign, but the referee to player ratio should be about
  1:20 or thereabouts." I believe that bears repeating, in bold type: The referee to player ration should be about 1:20 or thereabouts. (!)
• I quite like how IMAGINATION is stressed on virtually every page of the set-up as the key ingredient to a successful game.
• Another banal-yet-intriguing observation: this was a game about dungeons (hence the title). The referee's job is to map out levels of his 'underworld', people them with monsters 'of various horrid aspect', and create 'a huge ruined pile, a vast castle built by generations of mad wizards and insane genuises'.
• Fuck balance. Right from the off, it is explicitly stated that Magic Users are the strongest characters in the game at higher level, but the weakest at the beginning. I'm not altogether sure why, twenty-five years later, that idea suddenly became anathema to the people at WotC. It always seemed like a fair trade-off, to me.
  
• I love how one of the key examples of a magic item is an X-ray vision ring: the one thing that geeky 12 year old males prize above all others. I think when I was 12 I would have sold my soul to Beelzebub for an X-ray vision ring.
  
• These were medieval military history enthusiasts, alright: not 10 pages in and we're already discussing units of horsed crossbowmen of the 'turcopole type'. Look it up on wikipedia.
• The iconic dwarf is armed with a sword, not an axe. As somebody who makes a point of always arming dwarf characters with swords just to be contrary, I appreciate that picture.
  
• "There is no reason that players cannot be allowed to play as virtually anything": you want to be a dragon? Go for it!
  
• For some reason, one of the cleric ranks is a 'Lama' - maybe the only intrusion of non-European culture into the entire book.
• THAC0 was a real Godsend: one look at the combat matrixes and my eyes are already glazing over and I'm beginning to experience brain-stem death.
  
• In finest 'Players Handbook' tradition, the section on spell descriptions is about as long as the entire rest of the rules put together.
  
• There are naked breasts and a self-confessed "beautiful witch" on page 27; meanwhile, on page 29, there is a goblin who looks...well...nothing like how later editions of the game have envisaged goblins to be. (There is an even more surprising picture of an elf on page 32; I'll Winshot it in to the bottom of the entry, for those who are interested.)

And that's the end. Short but sweet. I wouldn't describe the thing as rules lite in the same way that Risus is rules lite; it's more....what's the word? Rules skeptical? A skeleton is provided, and it's for you to flesh it out. "Why let us do your imagining for you?", as the man himself used to say.

Volume II tomorrow.