WotC... just no

A preview of the 6e PHB dropped on the DnDBeyond YouTube channel. I don't recommend you watch it; it's nearly an hour long. But there are some highlights from 6e that are worth pointing out.

First off, the changes to the mechanics sound like they're going to be more substantial than was previously suggested. Although WotC is resistant to calling this 6e, that's clearly what it is. The changes from 5e to 6e sound much more substantial then the changes from, for example, 1e to 2e. I've seen a few people suggest 50e to highlight the anniversary nature of the game. Whatever you call it, it's a new edition, clearly. WotC being disingenuous about that is hardly surprising though.

As one YouTube commentator said, this hardly seems to resemble the game he remembers from his own youth in the 90s or whatever. Not that he's OSR, because he's not, but it's just that the game is nothing like what D&D used to be. You can see it in the art; very twee and precious, everyone smiling and powerful, while almost nobody is white or male or medieval in any sense. WotC fetishizes big, ugly black sheboons in particular, which is odd because it's not like attractive black women are impossible to imagine, as well as all kinds of other ridiculous things: PCs in wheelchairs, black, trans elves with boob removal scars, and most unexpectedly, orcs as Mexican cowboy/Mad Max hybrids.

What in the world are they doing?

Curiously, nobody had thought about orcs being blacks until WotC suggested it. For DFX, I actually thought that made them more interesting. Orcs as not necessarily evil was probably inevitable since Warhammer included then as armies. Orcs were always my favorite team in Blood Bowl, for instance, through the 90s. Warcraft and even Heroes of Might & Magic 3 ran with the idea that they didn't have to be evil. I thought that made them more interesting myself, but I never thought about orcs as negroes, or any other minority, until WotC suggested it: at which point orcs became a more nuanced problem. Sure, they are less intelligent. They are more violent and impulsive. They are incapable of maintaining high civilization, as a whole. But they're not evil, just incompatible with living among the Hillmen. Except, of course, for the talented tenth.

Thought about in this fashion, orcs become more interesting than just "always bad" goons, or as virtue-signaling cheap shots. You actually have to consider what to do about them when they're causing trouble because neither the woke submissive solution nor the hard genocide solution is acceptable to most players. 

All that said, I dunno. There's a big chunk of folks that haven't cared what WotC has done in years. To them, D&D is either some older version of the rules, or some other D&D-like game, maybe even a retroclone. Others have left more recently after WOTC's bad behavior. Maybe this bizarre turn in the game is actually what what remains of their market wants to see. If so, well, there are more alternatives than ever for those who've had enough of their wokeness. Almost too many alternatives, honestly. Nothing in the marketplace is exciting to me anymore because the market is too flooded.

Anyway, here's some DFX orcs. Most of them are even villains. 

Inventory

Because I've been relatively successful in my professional career, although saddled with many expenses as a SI4K couple (as opposed to a DINK couple) I've been able to pursue my hobbies to a decent degree without worrying about how much they cost. D&D, or the RPG hobby more specifically, isn't really that expensive unless you get into super expensive miniatures, terrain, or other money pits that aren't really either my thing or at all necessary. I've been able, even, to get lots of stuff that I don't even anticipate using, either for nostalgia reasons, or just as a bit of a collector, at least in digital format, because WotC recognized around 2014 or 2015 or so that there was plenty of demand for older games that was being unmet, and that it wasn't going to cannibalize their current edition, because it was either collectors like me buying for the heckuvit, or people who wouldn't be customers of what was then the newly minted current edition, 4e. Supplemented here and there with some used stuff picked up at used book stores, or from online variants of the same, I've amassed a fairly comprehensive collection of D&D rules, and a not comprehensive but still impressive collection of supplemental material. The teenaged version of me in the mid to late 80s would be in awe, and even the 20s version of me throughout the 90s and earliest 00s would have been pretty impressed. Nowadays, it seems pretty routine. 

I thought as part of my 50th celebration of D&D and the RPG hobby as a whole, I'd take inventory of the various "D&Ds" that I have. I don't intend to inventory all of the product that I have for every game, but for each game that I have the full set of actual original rules, I've going to make a list, and then annotate it slightly with some, at least, of the supplemental material that I might have for it. What counts and what doesn't is a little arbitrary; for example, I'm not counting Shadow of the Demon Lord as a "D&D", although I could fairly do so, I suppose, nor am I counting Dungeon Crawl Classics; but I am counting Pathfinder (both editions) and the retroclones that I have. I guess I see the former group as alt.D&Ds in the sense that they fill the same niche as D&D, but do it in a different way, whereas the latter group are either straight up clones of D&D, or in the case of the Pathfinders, an evolution where D&D "forked"; the first Pathfinder was clearly a slight evolution from D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder 2e is clearly an evolution from Pathfinder 1e, whereas D&D went the direction of 4e instead.

I'm also going to count a few not-quite-retroclones, but games that are meant to bridge the gap between different editions of D&D, like ShadowDark and Five Torches Deep, but including them seems, I admit, a bit arbitrary when excluding games like DCC or Index Card RPG, or even Castles & Crusades or Hackmaster seems a bit arbitrary (actually, I don't have the latter, so it doesn't count... but I wouldn't have included it anyway.) But you've got to draw a line somewhere, and that means using some judgement, because what is and isn't a "D&D" is in the eye of the beholder (no pun intended) more than something that can be objectively identified.

Original D&D. I have this game, plus all of the original supplemental materials for it (minus adventures) as well as a number of "new" supplemental materials up to 10 or 12 or so made more recently and unofficially. Honestly, I just have this just because—there's no way that I'd imagine I'd ever play this or even attempt to read it cover to cover (to cover. To cover, etc.)

Basic D&D (Holmes). I don't know of anything that's actually a unique follow-up, add-on, or supplement for this game. Again; I doubt I'll ever read this again, much less play it. It was tedious reading when it was new in the 80s.

Basic/Expert (Moldvay/Cook). I will actually probably read this, and I have read much of it. I doubt I'll ever play it (or any of these D&Ds, honestly) but if I were to play one of these D&Ds again, this might well be one of my go-tos. I actually think that some of the retroclones are probably a bit better; they fix the organization and a few wonky mechanics while otherwise feeling exactly like this version, but then again; I've got the original source right here, although with some of its supplements, and especially the two modules that originally came with the two sets; B2 Keep on the Borderlands (I know that B1 In Search of the Unknown was originally included, but more people saw B2, including me) and X1 The Isle of Dread. 

Basic-Expert-Companion-Master-Immortals (Mentzer). I've read a fair bit of the Basic set since getting these, but it's a bit of a slog. The text is kind of dumbed down and it feels tedious to read rules to me these days. I don't think the game really changed that much from the Moldvay/Cook series, with the exception of the expansions that went beyond them, of course. I also have DA2 Temple of the Frog and a few of the Gazeteers, but I doubt I'll read them either. Although I'm not actually a huge fan of this version of the game, I'm a huge fan of the Larry Elmore artwork of at least the first four boxes, and I want to buy signed prints of them from Elmore's online store once I finish relocating and am setting up my own office the way I really want it.

The Classic D&D Game. The fourth revision of the D&D line (while AD&D had long ago forked). There are multiple different printings of this, but I seem to have the 17th printing from 1994.

Rules Cyclopedia. The final expression of the D&D game before it went out of print and TSR focused solely on AD&D... until they were acquired by WotC. WotC, of course, used the D&D (rather than AD&D) title, but they used the AD&D edition numbering scheme, and 3e, although called D&D rather than AD&D, was clearly a follow-up to AD&D 2e, not to the RC. By this point, TSR had, of course, dropped the Immortals from the end of BECMI, but I do also have The Wrath of the Immortals set which replaced it and sits kinda atop RC as a capstone.

AD&D (1e). I have the three main books, the Monster Manual 2, and a few other supplements like Manual of the Planes up to Unearthed Arcana. I don't have the three books that turned 1e into "1.5", but I do have a number of adventures, and the old Forgotten Realms gray box.

AD&D (2e). I had left the game by the time this came out, so I picked this stuff up after the fact as a collector. Mostly what I have is the three main books and a number of the old campaign setting boxed sets (in pdf format. Planescape was the first of these that I picked up.) I don't have any of the Complete books, so I don't have "2.5" I suppose. I'm actually a little curious about some of them, but probably not enough to look them up.

D&D 3e. This is the game that brought me back to D&D, so I have most of the product that came out for it, actually, although mostly in physical form, because when I bought it, I wasn't really buying pdfs yet. I also have a pretty fair pile of third party product for it, because you could get that again with the OGL and the SRD.

D&D 3.5. I bought most of these too, with the exception of some of the latest books, or a few that just never piqued my interest. In physical form, again. I also didn't buy more than a couple of the Forgotten Realms subline, which was quite extensive. I did, however, eventually pick up all of the 3.5 Eberron material.

D&D 4e. Bought these cheap after the fact; the main books and a few of the setting books. I never had any interest whatsoever in the rules, but I did like the setting material more than most D&D grognards did. I appreciated the changes to things that made more sense, had more mythological resonance, and was more focused on usability—in fact, I thought that WotC didn't go far enough in that regard. But I understand why a lot of others didn't go for it.

D&D 5e. I eventually bought the core books in pdf form, and most of the big campaigns, just to read. I had long, by this time, stopped playing D&D, but it's been nice to have. I doubt I'll get 6e. Yes, yes... I know that WotC is trying really hard not to call it that, so they're saying D&D 5e 2014 vs D&D 5e 2024, but that's ridiculous. (UPDATE: Looks like, after the fact, 5.5 is sticking)

Pathfinder (1e). Honestly, by this time, I was done with 3.5-like D&D, so Pathfinder seemed like it was more of the same, except perhaps even more rules-heavy. I think from a system standpoint, it broke as many things as it fixed, but I bought a bunch of this stuff because the rulebooks were pretty cheap on pdf, and it was worth it for the art alone. At least for a time. I have a lot of Pathfinder 1e books, but not all of them.

Pathfinder (2e). I know that it's relative, but this is one that I think starts to become maybe not quite a D&D; Pathfinder 1e was clearly designed to be D&D 3.75, but Pathfinder 2e is now starting to go its own direction, more separate from any edition of D&D. That said, it's an evolution of a game that's clearly a D&D, and it's also clearly just an evolutionary step in mechanics while still covering all of the exact same tropes. Again, who says DCC isn't covering all of the exact same tropes too; it mostly is, but the rules were always different from D&D in at least enough that I don't call that one a "D&D". Like I said, the line is arbitrary. There's a reason that a lot of people suggested DCC as a replacement for D&D when people were all talking about leaving WotC a year and a half ago, but y'know. Even more suggested Pathfinder.

Basic Fantasy RPG. The first actual true retro-clone, a mostly clone of B/X mentioned above. Rather than actually playing B/X, I'd probably look at either this or Labyrinth Lord.

Labyrinth Lord. Another of the "Big Four" retroclones, meant to emulate B/X.

Old School Essentials. The final B/X retroclone (at least that I have). A lot of people really like it, but it feels a little too pamphlety and reads more like an instruction manual than an evocative gamebook. It may well be easier to use in actual play, but it's a beast to try and read.

Swords & Wizardry. I actually have the White Box, the Core Rules and the Complete Rules. This is another of the "Big Four" and emulates OD&D. If I ever wanted to play OD&D, I'd use these instead. I really like the cover art, too. But, c'mon. I won't ever want to play OD&D.

OSRIC. The retro-clone that put retro-clones on the map, and the last of the "Big Four". This emulates AD&D 1e.

Dark Dungeons. After you get over the in-joke of this being named after a Jack Chick tract that gamers like to make fun of because it targeted them specifically, you'll find that it's a BECMI clone, or somewhere at least on that spectrum of BECMI to RC. It has some unique new stuff that does the Immortals material, because nobody has ever thought that the Immortals stuff was done well by TSR.

For Gold & Glory. I was actually a little surprised that there was enough nostalgia for 2e; the rules, I mean, not the ancillary stuff like settings, for anyone to attempt to emulate it when 1e was already out and 2e is mostly considered inferior by ... most people, or so it seems. But there's always someone, and this game covers that gap, if that's what you want.

I also have the following games, all of which hybridize OSR and "modern" (i.e., usually 5e) design and take different tacks on trying to bridge the gap between them. Most of them are written especially by OSR fans, and the goal is mostly to get you to an OSR-like experience using 5e-like rules. I haven't read most of these in depth, (or at all, in some cases, although I'd like to eventually get around to it) so I won't really comment on what makes them all different from each other, but I will note that compared to 5e or even most of the retroclones, all of these are quite rules-lite, and the shortest of them is less than half a dozen pages long: Five Torches Deep, Maze Rats, Knave, Knave 2e, ShadowDark, Low Fantasy Gaming and Deathbringer (the latter is playable completely as is, but a "full" version of this game is due sometimes in 2025, I believe. I'll buy it. I like the creator's content well enough to give him that much.) Because these all modify or hybridize specific D&D systems, I call all of these "D&Ds" whereas something like DCC, again, hybridizes D&D with stuff that is unique and not really D&Dish. For relative values of D&Dishness; but there are a few that I'm looking at a bit side-eyed as truly being a "D&D" rather than just a D&D-like but different game.

Finally, Microlite20 or m20 is also specifically a stripped down version of D&D, but it arguably strips it down enough that it's not quite recognizable. Also, there are so many variants that I couldn't possibly attempt to take inventory of what I have without just copying and pasting the table of contents, which I won't do.

Aaaannnd.... it's worth noting that, of course, I don't actually play any of these; my own "D&D" is my own creation of house-ruled Frankensystem, and I won't call it a "D&D" but I suppose I could. It doesn't deviate from D&D than any of the ones mentioned just above Microlite, although it does hybridize rules from many more versions of D&D than any of them do, and it does deliberately eschew one of the main, most iconic D&D activities as out of scope just because I'm not at all interested in it.

UPDATE: Oh, I forgot one of the retroclones that I have: Delving Deeper, a possibly more faithful interpretation of OD&D than Swords & Wizardry. I should probably note that I don't have all of the versions of all of these retroclones, who seem to go through revisions left and right, especially as they build up their brands and then get kickstarters for more expensive revisions that the producers can sell to the fans. 

All of these can fairly be called "fantasy heartbreakers", but honestly... does anyone really care anymore? The barriers to entry mean that fantasy heartbreakers have finally found a place where they aren't superfluous anymore.

D&D and genre over time (1985-1999)

Let's keep striking while I have a moment and the iron is hot. I quoted James Maliszewski's Hesiod-like "ages of D&D" post in describing the "Golden Age" earlier using the 50th tag. I don't personally think that the "Golden Age" is Golden nor do I think that a Hesiod-like descent really applies, but Maliszewski's descriptions, even if his labels are not apt, are still valid. He also oversplits; I don't see any reason to put 1985 or so through 1999 into three distinct ages, but rather one, that did at least have some trends that waxed and waned a bit. Let me start by quoting his descriptions, and then edit them so much that they're essentially unrecognizable, with many additions by me. I'm not noting what I'm editing and adding, so you'll have to read the original if you're so inclined to see what he said in detail. (Note: it's less detail than I'm using even so.)

1985-1999 is an age that marries a sophisticated (some might say "decadent") interpretation of Gygaxian naturalism with a growing concern for "dramatic" coherence. It is one of "fantastic realism" and the construction of believable worlds and stories is its great concern. It's also the age where the Great Wyrm begins to eat its own tail, being influenced not just by epic fantasy generally but more specifically by second or third order epic fantasies that were themselves influenced by D&D. The mass marketing of the game begun in the earlier 80s reaches its fullest flower. In 1983 or so, TSR had released a boxed set that detailed the Greyhawk campaign setting; during this later phase, partially possibly influenced by wanting to replace Greyhawk and stop paying royalties to Gygax as much as possible, this model was expanded on and boxed campaign sets seem to have been a popular item; TSR in fact produced a very large number of campaign boxed sets during this era, especially as the edition rolled over from "1.5" to 2e, and it became a hallmark of the era. Most are exhaustively detailed through many products—a result of the simulationist idea that in order to properly run a game, you needed to know what all of the NPCs and monsters and the weather, climate patterns, etc. were doing independently of the PCs. Even before the boxed sets, the Dungeoneer's Survivalist Guide and the Wilderness Survival Guide expressed this trend by giving you all kinds of details that it's hard to imagine most players were very interested in, like how much warmth a campfire provided, modified by its size and how close you're sitting to it, or how long it took packed food to spoil depending on temperature.

One of the fascinating things about the this period is that it was heavily focused on commenting upon and embellishing the works of the earlier canon. This is very evident in the pages of Dragon from the period, which, if looked at today, would no doubt seem unduly obsessed with minutiae, such as a "realistic" method of calculating a character's height and weight based on his ability scores or determining how far a character could jump up or across based on the same. "Realism" was a watchword of products from this sage. This concern about realism is why issue 88 could, for example, boast not one but two different articles on the physics of falling damage (and a further article on the subject by Gygax himself a few issues later). To some, arguing over whether falling forty feet causes 4d6 damage or 10d6 damage might seem like needless nitpicking and, honestly, it is. This is a consequence of the maturity of D&D. The game had been out for ten years by this point and was so firmly established in its essentials that all that was left to do was gild the lily, so to speak. In short, there's a hint of decadence even amidst the enormous creativity.

D&D also came increasingly to be seen as a generic vehicle for the publication of a wide variety of "fantasy" settings, almost none of which bore much resemblance to the game's literary roots in the earlier phase, and many were indeed detailed as much in a very successful line of extruded fantasy product novels that is another hallmark of this phase of the game. These were less concerned with the game itself frequently, even though written by gamers in many cases, and sometimes the events of the novels had to be shoe-horned awkwardly into the rules to satisfy this perceived need to show verisimilitude. 

This didn't just impact the newer rulebooks, but it became a hallmark of the Dragon articles of the time; the "Ecology of..." series being a barometer of the publisher's focus on this kind of fantasy realism. It also crept into the D&D line (as opposed to the AD&D line) and by the time it was retired after the Rules Cyclopedia it wasn't really all that rules lite of a game anymore that still hewed to the original pre-AD&D paradigm of "rulings, not rules" and referee (now called DM) authority. TSR established itself as the authority on how the game was "supposed" to be played and what stuff meant.

Module design had changed considerably too, as I noted earlier, but this wasn't just about moving from site exploration to plotted pseudo-stories—although that did certainly happen. The meme of the "failed novelist module writer" was born in this era as boxed text was first created and then expanded, and in the worst excesses would literally sometimes last for pages. There was a whole lot of expectation of what the PCs would do ingrained here; sometimes literally spelled out in boxed text, but more subtly, the idea that the writers couldn't conceive of the PCs doing anything other than the most liberal busybody "heroic" thing possible was born in this age. I don't know what the politics of employees of TSR was like during the 80s and 90s because we rarely cared about that kind of thing in those days and the internet wasn't around to virtue signal anyway. That said, these all laid the foundation for a great deal of wokeness that was inevitably going to follow eventually, because virtue-signaling morality became a marketing line as 1e rolled over to 2e. Demons and devils were removed from the game, for instance (although they eventually crept back in renamed with funky fantasy names). The garage band feel of the art and presentation had long ago been replaced, by "1.5"'s reprinting of the original books and in anything else that came out, but they still had a kind of edgy Heavy Metal magazine feel to them that was replaced by what—in the case of some artists—literally looked like children's books illustrations. Assassins were also removed as a player class, and a focus on good PR, moral marketing was introduced to the game, much to its detriment. Rather than recognizing that D&D's slight edginess was part of what led to its faddish brief semi-mainstream popularity (the same happened to a lot of metal music genres during the same era; contrary to the beliefs of many of my Gen X cohort peers, metal came as close to mainstream as it was ever going to get because of that perceived edginess, and its popularity faded quickly to a niche. If you like metal, that's fine, but if you just assume that everyone else your age will too, or everyone else who plays D&D or whatever, then you're a victim of perception bias; metal went through a brief period of faddish popularity when Ozzy Osbourne was allegedly biting heads off of bats onstage and bands courted a kind of Satanic edgy look, but when the fad faded, very few people really cared all that much about the music after all.)

Of course, chasing supposed marketing trends is a bad way to do business in most respects, and I have my doubts that people disconnected from the hobby really understand what hobbyists want. (Ryan Dancey's article describing the acquisition of TSR by WotC indeed lays that out as the main factor in TSR's failure.) But that's also part of the story of what happened to D&D in this era. It wasn't just that Gygax was forced out in favor of a non-gamer "generic CEO" figure, although that did happen, but that the direction of the company was pulled away from gamers in general and in favor of a kind of proto C-suite management. This is, of course, considerably worse since WotC was bought by Hasbro, but we're a long way from worrying about that yet... hold tight. Then again, the gamers had also run the company into the ground. At the start of this era, TSR was deeply in debt, and the publication of Unearthed Arcana and the eventually rollover to second edition was largely prompted by the need to generate revenue to cover debts. Gygax had spent the better part of a year in a largely fruitless attempt to get Hollywood to invest in the brand, the only result that I'm aware of being the brief D&D Saturday morning cartoon.

Of course, by the end of the era, most of this had turned to ashes in the hands of these "businesmen" (and women; Lorraine Williams being one of the most prominent figures of the era.) Chasing after marketing trends that never materialized, too much material that cannibalized the sales of each other, and general poor business practices that led to the inability to even capitalize on material that was produced led to TSR eventually in the throes of bankruptcy. Luckily for gamers everywhere, some genuine gamers—who also happened to be successful businessmen, with a juggernaut entertainment company called Wizards of the Coast, but make no mistake; they were gamers first—made it their mandate to save D&D. And they did. In fact, they did so well that the hobby grew tremendously; to levels undreamed of even in the heady days of D&D's faddishness of the 80s. It was still shepherded, sadly, by clueless C-suite woketards, or at least is certainly is today, and lots of decisions made throughout the last 20+ some odd years since WotC was acquired by Hasbro still indicate that they don't really get it, but the gamers who saved D&D made it evergreen, in spite of Hasbro's best efforts. 

I don't want to get too into the details of what comes in the next three eras, which tend to be more tightly correlated to specific editions of the game (i.e., 2000-2008 3e, 2009-2013 4e and 2014-present 5e, and soon 6e—although Hasbro is anxious to not call it that) but now not only is D&D a successful brand and successful product, but it is also synonymous to a certain degree with the hobby itself. Loads of people since 2008 or so at least have been playing "D&D" that doesn't even bear the D&D brand name, but which are more similar to older D&D than the current holder of the brand is. While that isn't necessarily great news for the owner of the brand (although they've been making plenty of money and sales of actual D&D are very high), it is great news for the hobby, which probably will remain until the last old grognard finally dies with his books and dice in his hands.

Anyway, although from the very earliest transition into this age, I still think that Larry Elmore and his cohorts are kind of the artistic face of this era. Here's one of my favorites of his, which if I remember correctly, was a module cover art from the Dragonlance series.

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus, EGG

I've blogged a bit about my general busy-ness. Work the last year has been pretty killer for me. However... I just finished the job that was so killer; my technical last day was earlier this week, and bright and early on Monday, I'll start a new job. I will also be forced, however, to relocate within the next month or so, so my blogging will still be delayed. However, I imagine that once I'm actually moved, my new job will be more chill than the one I'm leaving. Plus, since I won't really know anyone and I'm kind of antisocial anyway, when I'm not out hiking or exploring our new area with my wife, I'll be homebodying at home, which is good for blogging. In fact, I can look forward to a greatly improved set-up from which to do my computer stuff, reading, music, etc. as we'll use one room as an office-slash-library "for my own particular use" to quote Charlotte from Pride & Prejudice. Heck, with a purchase of a slightly better rig and a new microphone, it could even be a credible studio for me to record much better youtube videos in, if I'm inclined to do so.

Anyway, I'm taking a moment now to blog, because I haven't in a while, and I remembered a tag I created that I intended to use off and on all year to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the RPG hobby, which was kicked off by the publication of the original D&D booklets in June or so of 1974. In my last post, I "debunked" or at least said that I don't really buy the premise that D&D was really all that based on sword & sorcery. What it was really based on was Gary Gygax's love of Medieval historical wargaming, which is why people looking back at older D&D works written by EGG scratch their heads wondering what glaive-guisarmes and fauchard-forks are or what they have to do with Conan or the Gray Mouser or even Aragorn. Not to say that Gary didn't enjoy sword & sorcery, because I think that's one of the things that we can take him at his word on, but he didn't actually incorporate nearly as much of that into the game as people tend to think. It's much more based on actual history, actual mythology, and the self-contained and unique game loop of D&D of "go into a dungeon for loot, return to town, sell it, level up, and then go to tougher dungeons to repeat"; a loop that has, again, nothing to do with sword & sorcery, or any kind of fiction at all up to that point, for that matter.

But that actually brings me to the point of today's post: Gary Gygax is not actually a reliable witness and what he says can't be taken at face value very often. As the legal doctrine represented by the Latin phrase that the post's title ascribes, once Gary Gygax is shown to be blatantly contradicting himself and using a disingenuous "certain point of view" to justify it, you learn to be pretty wary of taking any of his other claims too seriously. One of which was what I talked about in the last post on the 50th tag, but it's not unique. Sure, Gary Gygax probably wasn't as sold on Tolkien as some of his audience was, but the idea that he wasn't pilfering bleeding chunks, as the saying goes, straight out of Tolkien more frequently, or at least as frequently, as he was pulpish sword & sorcery tropes is laughably absurd, and his claims to how it doesn't resemble Tolkien at all are so clearly untrue that you almost are stuck with a double take when he makes them; does he really have a straight face while he's typing that column? Well, yeah, because the threat of legal action by the Tolkien estate was still relatively fresh on his mind. But that also gives a blatantly obvious ulterior motive for him to dissemble about how closely D&D resembled Tolkien too. A kind of 70s van art Brothers Hildebrandt interpretation of Tolkien, but Tolkien nonetheless.

There are a number of other claims that seem to cover up pretty shady practices too, that can be pinned to Gygax, and while I'm not attempting to cast aspersions or judgements on the guy, I'm saying that again, just because he said something doesn't mean that he is really a reliable witness. Dave Arneson did have to sue TSR when Gygax was running it because they weren't paying him the royalties due. TSR made the shady decision to replace some of the elements of the old BD&D set with a module B1 In Search of the Unknown, which was supposed to discourage Arneson because the author of B1 was a friend of Arneson's and now instead of taking royalties away from Gygax, he'd be taking them away from Mike Carr. Of course, as soon as the Basic set took off due to the notoriety of D&D after the "steam tunnels" incident from about 5,000 sales monthly to roughly 30,000 sales monthly, Gygax decided that he didn't want to keep paying royalties to Carr, so he replaced the module with one that he wrote, B2 Keep on the Borderlands so that he could pocket the royalties instead.

Gygax used to famously say that there was no right or wrong way to play D&D; the whole point was that the referee had the authority and explicit mandate to make the game work for his players, and neither Gygax nor anyone else knew what was best for any other given group other than their own. But then, he later recanted and said that AD&D was the only correct way to play and explicitly said that unless you followed every rule as written, you were playing the game so wrong that you couldn't even be considered to be playing AD&D. Also in spite of the clear similarities and cross compatibility, he made the dubious yet "protesting too much" claim that D&D and AD&D were completely separate games that had no real relationship to each other. Again, when anyone in the know knew that he had clear legal reasons to do so to drive sales towards the game that he was trying to box Arneson's royalties out of. 

Gamers in general are sympathetic to Gygax when the Blumes (or more specifically Lorraine Williams, acting in behalf of the Blumes' share in the company) essentially forced him out of his own company in 85 or 86 or so and took over everything that he built (with mostly their money, it should be noted) but I tend to look at it as the classic case of "live by the sword, die by the sword." It wasn't much worse than what Gary himself had done most notably to Arneson to also to the Tolkien estate, the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate, Michael Carr, arguably Grenadier Miniatures, and plenty of other people if he thought he could take advantage of them for his own benefit and hide behind legalese and belabored justifications such as the above that are clearly not true, especially when the clear ulterior motive is plain for all to see.

And there shall also be many which shall say: Eat, drink, and be merry; nevertheless, fear God—he will justify in committing a little sin; yea, lie a little, take the advantage of one because of his words, dig a pit for thy neighbor; there is no harm in this; and do all these things, for tomorrow we die; and if it so be that we are guilty, God will beat us with a few stripes, and at last we shall be saved in the kingdom of God. (Of course, this is followed by the following...)

Yea, and there shall be many which shall teach after this manner, false and vain and foolish doctrines, and shall be puffed up in their hearts, and shall seek deep to hide their counsels from the Lord; and their works shall be in the dark. 

Anyway, lest this be merely a personal complaint about a specific person, and one who's passed on and can hardly defend himself even if he wanted to, I'll quit here; most of these items are public record (many of them even available on various Wikipedia articles) with little independent interpretation by me, other than my general lack of empathy for someone who played a bit heavy-handed with his business colleagues and supposed friends getting the same treatment himself a few years later. Let it be said that Gygax's departure by coincidence (or maybe not) was timed more or less with a number of other things that were happening in the game and at the company, which reinforces my earlier benchmark of 1984-5 or so being the change into something different. Much of the original staff and crew at TSR was gone or would soon themselves leave, and most of the employees were newer hires who had not grown up in the Wisconsin wargaming crowd, and therefore had in many cases very different ideas for what the game should be like. It seemed to be, for a time at least, that they were sorta right, as the types of products (modules at first) that were written under different design parameters to be less games-like and more story-like were quite popular, and found a ready market who seemed to be inclined towards the same things. Reviewers started talking about the dungeon-crawl as if it were a passé thing; an immature phase that the hobby had to go through to get to where it really "wanted" to be. The original Ravenloft module is often hailed as a landmark in this new direction, but the reality is that the game, the designers and the audience to a large degree, had been heading that way already for a long time, and if Ravenloft hadn't come along, shortly something else would have accomplished the same goal. Tracy Hickman gets either the credit or the blame, depending on how you think his influence has changed the hobby because he was in the right place at the right time, but if he hadn't been, there are plenty of other candidates who could have played the same role in more or less the same time frame, because they were already working towards similar design parameters and expectations out of the game.

While in retrospect the hubris of this second wave who wanted to transform the hobby to something that it hadn't previously ever been is kind of obvious, However, I'm sympathetic to their opinions because honestly; I was never in love with the paradigm of the D&D loop of play or its obvious wargaming roots, and Gygax's own insistence that the game be firmly rooted in gamist design philosophy and that role-playing was merely an adjective, not the whole point... but in their efforts to remake the hobby they probably created more problems than they really solved. Even today, the majority of most product out there, and Paizo's long adventure paths and WotC's "campaign novels" are prime examples of this; aren't really very well suited to be just freakin' played. My own struggles to wrangle some of the Paizo adventure paths into something that I could run are a perfect example of this, but its a common refrain among players of many different playstyles. I've had to take just the kernels of ideas from Paizo or WotC and completely rework them so that they are hardly recognizable at all anymore in even a generous interpretation. The "best" style of play, for me at least, was just as poorly served in most respects by "modern" 1985+ game design philosophies as it was by 1974-1984 "classic" design philosophies.

But those were all things that had little to do with the actual rules of the game, which remained largely unchanged even as this completely different philosophy of module design and how the game would actually be played percolated through the designers and from them obviously eventually to the players. Of course, there were many changes coming to the rules too; 1985 or so is also the advent of Unearthed Arcana, and more ominously, least for old school players, the publication of Oriental Adventures which produced the first "skill system" of sorts for D&D. It was followed shortly by a much more detailed and codified version of the same in the Dungeoneer's Survival Guide and the Wilderness Survival Guide. But let's cross that bridge in the next post in the 50th tag, shall we?

D&D and genre over time (1974-1984)

OSR types will typically tell you that the original mode of D&D is sword & sorcery of the type that was popular when Gary Gygax was writing. In other words, guys like Robert E. Howard were back in print (the famous Frazetta cover volumes), the Fahfrd and the Gray Mouser stories were popular, Jack Vance was popular, and “pastiche” writers like Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp were at their peak. In my opinion, this is both true and also untrue. It’s true that that’s what a significant portion of fantasy looked like in the early/mid 70s if you trawled through your typical bookstore or library shelf. And no doubt Gygax really liked that kind of stuff and heavily leaned on it for basic implicit setting assumptions. Famously, the Thief was supposedly based on the Gray Mouser to a great degree, and the magic system was heavily influenced by (or even copied explicitly, according to some) from Jack Vance.

However, by the time D&D came out, high fantasy had become extremely popular. The Lord of the Rings was very popular, Ursula LeGuin was popular, etc. It’s a little hard for Gygax or his OSR adherents to claim that D&D was explicitly sword & sorcery and not high fantasy when the game explicitly included elves, dwarves, hobbits, orcs, balrogs, rangers based on Strider and more as core, integral elements of the game. Gygax famously claimed in a column in Dragon Magazine that the inclusion of such was a bait & switch to get high fantasy fans into the game, where the fun would convince them to stay. However, this claim always struck me as disingenuous, and even if Gygax himself believed that, my experience with my friends in the 70s and early 80s was that high fantasy fans did not abandon their high fantasy preferences and play Leiber, Howard and Vance inspired settings as they adopted the game. Even Greyhawk itself didn’t feel much like the Hyborian Age or Nehwon but more like the Medieval real world with funny names and some Middle-earth elements generously sprinkled in here and there. Every setting that I ever fooled around with or played in was much more high fantasy than sword & sorcery when I was younger. And we drew maps based on the famous Christopher Tolkien map included in the copy of Lord of the Rings. True; many D&D maps from this era were hexmaps, but every novel, every story, and eventually almost every D&D map published started to resemble them as well.

Conan the Renegade. True S&S, or military fantasy pastiche?

High fantasy was always in the DNA of D&D from the very beginning, and it became more prominent very quickly as D&D absorbed more and more high fantasy fans; or at best, fantasy fans that weren’t particular between styles of fantasy and were happy incorporating any element from any style of fantasy into their game. But mostly high fantasy, because that was quickly becoming, if it hadn’t already, the default mode of fantasy that most fantasy fans thought of first. As an aside, not only was Lord of the Rings in print by this time, but so was Earthsea, Deryni, Narnia and Prydain. Shannara and Thomas Covenant would follow shortly, and before long the Belgariad and Riftwar series. Most of these were already out before AD&D itself was, but they certainly predate 2e, and clearly by the time D&D became 2e, the expectation of the game was that it more resemble those high fantasy works than anything by Howard or Leiber or Moorcock (Moorcock himself is, perhaps ironically, considered high fantasy by many critics.) But that change doesn’t mean that D&D changed from sword & sorcery to high fantasy between 1974 and 1984. Quite simply, the high fantasy was always there, although its influence and overtness grew swiftly during that decade. Gygax may have not understood why anyone would want to play a wizard or elf, but he made those options available, and they were among the most popular from the get-go.

In addition, early D&D had a lot of other stuff in its DNA besides sword & sorcery and high fantasy. Science fiction, post apocalyptic, planetary romance and horror all put their two cents in, although these gonzo elements were often novelties and had relatively low sticking power, other than a few minor elements like the displacer beast or the gorillon. Horror seems to have been the most successful, with vampires ripped straight out of Dracula, zombies pretty much straight from George Romero, and plenty of Lovecraftiana. But that stuff was always in fantasy anyway; a lot of the Howard Conan and Kull stories could be considered Cthulhu Mythos stories in their own right, and Solomon Kane was even more overtly horror-influenced. Psionics has an uneasy relationship with the rest of D&D, but it does survive from its importation into the game straight from science fiction, at least. The old gratuitous slick Heavy Metal was maybe a better description of D&D's implicit setting than anything specifically sword & sorcery. I don't know for sure what you'd call that kind of gonzo 70s van art type of fantasy, but it didn't necessarily resemble the sword & sorcery of Howard or Leiber very much.

Perhaps most jarring is that any attempt to link early D&D to sword & sorcery explicitly can only be done at the implicit setting level anyway (and as seen above, I don’t buy even that.) Nothing about D&D, especially as it was played, resembles sword & sorcery. Going into a dungeon, and then “resting” in between dungeon delves to recover, train or level up, spend your money on improvements, is completely unlike anything in sword & sorcery. The zero-to-hero leveling paradigm is also nothing like any sword & sorcery character; Conan, Fahfrd, the Gray Mouser, or Elric are all supremely competent adventurers even when striplings. And the character-driven sword & sorcery genre has little to do with the ensemble D&D adventuring party, especially as it was played in the early days with large groups and a dozen or more characters all participating at once, not to mention hirelings and other assorted followers and hangers-on. If anything, the fellowship of the Ring is a more true-to-life model for D&D parties as they were played, and no genre of fiction at all really resembles the “story” of D&D of “clearing dungeons” for loot and competency advancement.

However, now that I’ve spent all of this time attempting to debunk, or at least validate my opinion, that early D&D was never really sword & sorcery, it’s certainly worth pointing out that it was more like sword & sorcery in most respects than it later came to be. The implicit setting may have been more like a more humano-centric and overtly Medievalesque high fantasy setting, but it was more likely to feature some more overt sword & sorcery tropes than it did later, for the most part. Much of the way campaigns were expected to be structured, and for that matter, the way modules were written, would likely have resembled some sword & sorcery tropes such as punchy, action-packed short stories that weren’t necessarily meant to be stitched together into a “novel” form or over-arching campaign metastory, and the stakes were usually lower and more modest, much more like sword & sorcery. Whether or not the characters were heroic high fantasy archetypes or charismatic antiheroic roguish archetypes from sword & sorcery was, as it is today, up to the actual table and players, not the game itself; although high fantasy archetypes like the paladin were included early on. (It’s worth pointing out that antiheroes were increasingly common in American and western literature and entertainment outside of the fantasy genre during this period. James Bond and the so-called Man With No Name were already household names by 1974. Dirty Harry had been out for a few years, and Death Wish also came out in 1974. You don't need to refer back to Howard or Leiber to get antiheroes.)

James Maliszewski of Grognardia calls this period the Golden Age of D&D, and although I disagree with his assessment that this would resemble sword & sorcery, I think his delineation of its limits in time is spot on. Let me quote his brief description of it:

Golden Age (1974-1983): This is the era of D&D's ascendancy and, for me, its perfection. The argument could be reasonably made that the "pure" Golden Age ends somewhere between 1979 and 1981, depending on whether one considers the completion of AD&D or the mass marketing of the game through the Moldvay Basic Rules to have struck a heavier blow to the culture of early D&D. If one wants to make such fine distinctions, the period between 1979/1981 and 1985 (or thereabouts) is the Electrum Age, which straddles the tail end of the Golden Age and the beginning of the Silver. The Golden Age is one of "gonzo pulp fantasy," with a hodgepodge of influences, particularly Howard, Vance, Leiber, de Camp, and Pratt. The dungeon remains the linchpin of adventure design and the sandbox is the assumed role for a campaign setting.

He's correct both in that the release of AD&D and Moldvay changed the culture of D&D, but perhaps only indirectly. Both were responses to changes in the player base as the game became more popular, marginally more mainstream, and certainly attracted large numbers of new fans who simply wanted the game to pull more in the direction of their tastes and preferences, which were not the same as the  original wargaming crowd the mid-70s in Wisconsin. New focal nodes of player bases sprung up that led the game in different directions, or even experimented with abandoning D&D altogether to develop something more along the lines of what those regional players bases were looking for. By 1983 the Mentzer boxed sets were out, and the Ravenloft module was published, and by 1984 the first Dragonlance novels were in print and selling like gangbusters. By that point, none of those products very closely resembled sword & sorcery at all except in a number of superficial ways, and they set the direction for the game much moreso than what came before. But as I said, this coincides pretty well with similar movements in the fantasy genre overall; sword & sorcery was still in print, but new stuff was rare. Conan pastiche novels were being written, but arguably being novels, they had already abandoned one of the core defining elements of being sword & sorcery; they weren’t short stories with punchy, pulpy action, they were longer and focused more on more complex plots and characterizations. Eddings, Feist, Brooks, and more were what mainstream fantasy looked like by the mid-80s, not Howard, Leiber and Moorcock.

Which makes for a good stopping point for this post, and I’ll come back to 1983-4 for my next one and talk about the trajectory of D&D leading up to and through the release of 2e. The release of a new edition actually was probably driven more by business needs for more sales and the removal of “family unfriendly” elements that were causing the game bad PR than it was a marker for a change in the direction of the game, really. D&D after the release of Dragonlance was on an unbroken cultural trajectory up until TSR went bankrupt and the brand was acquired by Wizards of the Coast.

Happy 50th, D&D!

Speaking of birthdays; I just had one as I mentioned in my last post, and sometime in 2024 is the actual 50th birthday of Dungeons & Dragons, which was released in 1974. By default, this also means it's the birthday of the entire hobby, since it effectively didn't exist until D&D created it. I believe June is when the first printed copies started shipping, but of course the "birthday" of a product isn't like the birthday of a person, so we'll celebrate the birth of the hobby under the tag 50th all year long in a series of posts. I'm not sure exactly how I want to celebrate this, or what I want to say about it yet, but I've got all year to think about it.

For now, let's just announce the anniversary, and say Happy 50th, D&D! I'd love to see you make it another 50 years, and if I live as long as Olivia de Haviland, who I mentioned in my last post, I'll actually be able to see it for another 50 years, which would be tremendous, not to mention statistically unlikely.

I think for my first post on this topic (after this one) I'll talk about the change in implicit setting over time in the game, from thud & blunder to extruded fantasy product, to Millennial wankery and the sometimes subtle changes over time that enveloped it. I'd say, for instance, that both 2e and 3e were characterized as extruded fantasy product, but they were also quite different; the first being inspired by forgettable high fantasy of the 70s and 80s like Terry Brooks or David Eddings, and the latter picking up a kind of Mad Max video game edgy vibe.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. I'll have to give that post some thought, and maybe do a bit of research even before I'm ready to write it.

Happy Birthday, TTRPG hobby!