D&D Truthers

A recent article by Cecilia D'Anastasio asserts, in effect, that the RPG community has been purposely misled to believe that Gary Gygax was the sole creative force behind Dungeons & Dragons. She quotes Rob Kuntz as stating:

“We are in a mass delusion that it’s all Gary, that he’s the father of role-playing games,” he said. “Humans do not like to admit they’ve been hornswoggled, lied to, cheated, or fooled.”

Kuntz’s thesis is that Dave Arneson was deprived of his share of the credit—deliberately and falsely.

Who are these people who’ve been hornswoggled, lied to, cheated, or fooled? Not anyone interested in the origins of Dungeons & Dragons. I’m not especially interested in this topic, but both Gygax and Arneson are credited as authors of the original edition. Isn’t that a clear enough sign that Gygax was not solely responsible?

I’m not committed to a particular view of the origins of Dungeons & Dragons. I’m sure there’s plenty of credit to go around. But a careful reader will note how D’Anastasio’s article repeatedly undermines its thesis. It acknowledges that:

• Arneson himself characterized his Blackmoor game as a Chainmail variant;
• “Arneson didn’t have a concrete ruleset; he was making things up as he went along”;
• Arneson gave Gygax “18 pages of handwritten notes, a lot of which were simply stats for Chainmail monsters”;
• Arneson “wasn’t much for polished rulesets” and his Blackmoor game “didn’t exist as a full-blown set of rules”;
• Gygax subsequently generated a 50-page manuscript of rules, “later accepting and integrating some notes from Arneson”;
• the ecosystem and mythology of D&D reflect Gygax’s fantasy preferences; and
• Gygax’s and Arneson’s home games differed from one another and from the published rules.

Boiled down to its essence, D’Anastasio’s claim—presented through the words of others, often Kuntz—is that Gary was merely responsible for the mechanics of the game, and that Arneson authored the all-important core of the game: “the things that D&D fans love the most about the game—the things that distinguish ‘role-playing’ from ‘fantasy wargaming.’”

Assuming that role-playing is the true core of the game, however, it is not intellectual property in any meaningful sense. It may have been an imaginative breakthrough in gaming—serially playing a single character in a fantasy setting—but it’s a very general idea. Arneson might be the father of D&D but no more than he is the father of all role-playing games. It doesn’t mean that Arneson’s role in the creation of the specific game of Dungeons & Dragons as it developed was especially meaningful.

And on its face, the claim that game mechanics are secondary is quite dubious. The early editions of the game are markedly different from later editions of the game, and they have different fanbases largely because of their different mechanics.

So when Kuntz says that Arneson’s Blackmoor “wasn’t a prototype” and that Gygax stole a "fully functioning game" from Arneson, he’s making an insupportable claim. Notably, he chose to make this claim only after Gygax’s death.

There’s no grand conspiracy to deprive Arneson of his rightful share of the credit. Setting aside the fact that most gamers don’t really care about the origins of Dungeons & Dragons, Arneson has a lesser reputation than Gygax for the same basic reason that we know less about civilizations that didn't leave behind written records. Gygax was far more productive in this respect. We can still reference, adopt, and modify the mechanics he set down in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons core rulebooks and they have informed the content of subsequent editions. Arneson did not leave such a legacy.

On Privilege

Antero Garcia, a very goofy-looking assistant professor at Stanford, wrote an article entitled Privilege, Power, and Dungeons & Dragons: How Systems Shape Racial and Gender Identities in Tabletop Role-Playing Games. I'd give you an overview of this important work, but the article is only available for $42.50, which buys 24-hour access. That's a pretty steep price-point for a fellow who is concerned about privilege.

The Scorpion and the Frog

You'd have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the lame proposed boycott of GaryCon, given Bill Webb's prior attempt to buy Stacy Dellorfano's love.

Reason Magazine on Dungeons & Dragons

Reason has an article authored by C.J. Ciaramella entitled The Radical Freedom of Dungeons & Dragons. Ciaramella contends that “D&D is a deeply libertarian game.” I’m not convinced, but that’s another argument for another day.

What caught my eye was Ciaramella’s self-contradictory observations about the sexual politics surrounding the game. At one point, he observes:

Although advertisements for D&D in the '70s and '80s always included an obligatory girl player at the table, there was a chauvinistic attitude within the cloistered fraternity of war gamers that lady brains simply weren't wired to be interested in gold and glory. Internal and external surveys from the late '70s showed that the percentage of female players was in the low single digits; one didn't have to be proficient in the "investigation" skill to figure out why girls weren't rushing to play games that included a "harlot table" and where women in the stories were often little more than furniture on which boys could act out their less chivalrous fantasies.

It's an odd assertion. What are the odds that girls or women not playing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons were familiar with an obscure table buried in one of several appendices in the Dungeons Masters Guide? The table appears on page 192 of 240. And unless one knows where to look for it, it's hard to find, as there's no reference to it in the table of contents or index.

While the Harlot Table may be infamous nowadays, in the 70s and 80s—before the Internet—the only people who would have been familiar with it for the most part would have been those who used the DMG. A lot of the early-D&D-was-sexist talk is like this: it takes contemporary criticisms of the game and retrojects them into the past as if those criticisms were there all along. Can anyone cite a criticism of the Harlot Table as sexist that was made back in the 70s or 80s?

What’s odder still is that Ciaramella identifies an entirely plausible alternative explanation for why girls and women were not playing D&D in large numbers back in the day. In an earlier characterization of the three core books for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, he writes of the game that:

It looked, in other words, like what would happen if you opened up a preteen boy's imagination and dumped the contents on the floor.

Why would a game that resembled “a preteen boy’s imagination” appeal to girls and women to the same extent as boys and men? It wouldn’t, of course, and there’s nothing sexist about that, unless one thinks that a game should or must equally appeal to a preteen girl’s imagination. I don’t. Neither does anyone reasonable.

Dungeons & Dumbasses: Rob Kuntz Edition

You’ve disappointed Rob Kuntz for the last time. After channeling Oral Roberts—announcing that he could only continue to grace the flock with his presence if it committed to buy a certain number of his planned module-design aid—Rob discovered that a world mired in unbelief had forsaken him. So, alas, the project is no more and, like Middle Earth's elves, he must depart:

I have decided to go in a completely different direction with what Arneson gifted to us, and outside of the RPG Industry. Once I make up my mind it is pretty well set in stone because I have usually assessed all angles prior to such decisions.

I will be exclusively promoting design theory and systems theory for play from this point forward and will be spending increasingly less time on RPG related matter as well.

In the next 6 months I'll probably be finished with my last effort in RPG's, a history, the BOOK, and from there I hope to stay in theory, essays, board games and other. RPGs have run their course.

Such irony, too. I have an idea for an open systems RPG, really good *written and outlined in 2010* but cannot/would not produce as it would be something that people would not play. I would. Gary would have. Arneson, of course. But folks today? Nah. They are stuck with their brand of gaming, don't take chances and look for sameness, a comfort zone. This is not BITD of wild and carefree meandering, the huge cross sections of science and fiction and history which intersected with design, those days are gone at least as I have attempted to find any comparison to them in this industry.

I have seen this coming, btw, since 2007 and probably even before. No surprise. Thought I'd give it a last shot for the good ole times. No biggy. I have interested parties outside this hobby sphere, in fact much bigger than within it.

He didn’t fail; the hobby failed him. This, of course, is more of the same Arnesonian one-true-way dead-enderism that Kuntz has been flogging for years. It’s Dungeons & Dragons as gnostic cult.

Between this and Frank Mentzer’s recent antics, the hobby’s old-timers are really embarrassing themselves. I wish they’d just go away and I don’t think I’m alone in this opinion.

Secret Doors

Erik Tenkar makes the following criticism of secret doors in dungeons:

I find secret doors to be an overused obstacle. Just how many does a single dungeon level need?

My problem with secret doors is that they are a potential show stopper that even with good play from your players, the dice can decide the door is never found. What lies behind? For all intents and purposes it never existed if the dice decide it was never found.

Concealed doors? Now THAT is something I can get behind. Look behind that armoire. Why are there curtains on this wall? What's under this rug? Good play will reveal with concealed doors what dice may otherwise steal with secret doors.

I think this reflects a poor understanding of the various purposes that secret doors should serve. They should never be a “show stopper,” and if you are not designing boring, linear dungeons that generally should not be an issue. To state the obvious, however, secret doors should not be placed in a fashion that could halt the party’s forward progress in the dungeon.

So what should secret doors be used for? Among other things:

• to segregate a sublevel that somehow differs from the present level;
• to secure significant treasure from casual discovery;
• to conceal a useful additional entrance or exit (e.g., out of the dungeon, to a much deeper level);
• to serve as a hidey-hole for opponents to lay in wait for or seek refuge from the party;
• to hide a route that allows quick or safe passage past an obstacle or hazard; or
• to seal off an especially dangerous foe so that the party does not merely stumble across it.

Nor should secret doors be discoverable by random dice rolls alone. Players should be able to locate secret doors—or at least increase their chances of doing so—through good play. For example:

• intuition as to where searching might prove fruitful based on room or corridor shape or structure;
• careful mapping that reveals curious empty spaces in the level; or
• examination that turns up telltale clues, like footprints that lead up to a blank wall, seams in the masonry that outline a portal, or an unexplained draft that causes torches to flutter.

As for the concern that areas lying behind secret doors might go undiscovered . . . well, this is a game of exploration. It is not a foregone conclusion that the party will unearth all of the underworld’s secrets. There’s no sense of the unknown or adventure in a dungeon that lays bare its mysteries to everyone who stumbles through the front door.

Blueholme: Journeymanne Rules — A Review

Blueholme: Journeymanne Rules
Author: Michael Thomas
Dreamscape Design
Approx. 120 pages
Available on Lulu ($24.99 hardcover; $14.99 softcover)

Blueholme: Journeymanne Rules essentially is a restatement and expansion of Holmes’s basic edition of Dungeons & Dragons, which in turn was a restatement of the original edition of the game and some of its supplements further edited in anticipation of the publication of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Whereas Holmes’s basic edition only covered the first three levels of play, Blueholme aims to be a complete roleplaying game, supporting play through level twenty.

The rulebook is divided into several sections, including but not limited to:

• 11 pages on character creation that cover four classes—clerics, fighters, magic-users, and thieves—as well as armor, equipment, and weapons;
• 31 pages of spells: 8 spells per level, spell levels one through seven, for clerics; and 20 spells per level, spell levels one through nine, for magic-users;
• 9 pages of combat-related rules, which includes some Holmesian elements like parrying, attacks provoked by retreat, and the effect of cover;
• a 26-page bestiary detailing 123 monsters (more when different subtypes are accounted for; e.g., different types of giants and dragons); and
• 19 pages on treasure, including a table of treasure types, which are referenced in monster entries, and a wealth of magic items.

In comparison, Holmes’s basic edition was just 48 pages. But Blueholme’s increased page count is not unreasonable given its expanded scope. And Blueholme generally does a nice job of revising and condensing Holmes’s prose while retaining its clarity.

Blueholme likely will not appeal to those who prefer AD&D to other editions. But for those who want a less complicated, more streamlined version of the game, Blueholme is a very good alternative. Class, spell, and monster descriptions are far more concise than those in AD&D. In general, Blueholme is better organized than its inspiration, not that Holmes’s basic edition was poorly organized.

Blueholme’s artwork is strong. Its cover depicts an adventuring party in a cavern gathered before a treasure chest and hoard; a dragon reminiscent of the one on the cover of Holmes’s basic edition lurks behind them in the shadows on the periphery of the party’s light source. Stylistically, the cover art melds old and new in a manner well suited to a restatement and expansion of an older edition of the game; its color scheme, which features gold and aquamarine hues, is appealing to the eye.

[Blueholme’s Cover Art]

The interior of the rulebook includes a lot of old-school style black-and-white artwork, including a really nice callback to the cover art by a different artist that depicts the adventurers in combat with the dragon amidst the treasure hoard. Some of the interior art might be considered too racy for younger readers:

• a sorceress with ample cleavage;
• some bare-breasted water nymphs;
• an amazon archer with exposed breasts;
• a trio of saggy-titted harpies; and
• a half-serpent woman who’s mislaid her blouse.

This is not inconsistent with Holmes’s basic edition, which included a buxom, bare-breasted harpy. Nor do I personally find this artwork objectionable (even for younger readers). But some might not care for such nudity or so much of it.

I’m not especially knowledgeable about Holmes’s basic edition (or other editions of the game for that matter); however, to my non-expert eyes, Blueholme appears to emulate its namesake well. A few interesting features traceable to Holmes’s basic edition that differ from at least some other editions of the game include:

• a five-point alignment system: lawful good, chaotic good, neutral, chaotic evil, and lawful evil;
• an initiative system that largely turns on the relative dexterity scores of the individual combatants, subject to the following attack sequence: spell-casting, missile weapons, and melee combat;
• a combat round that is 10-seconds in duration (as opposed to OD&D’s and AD&D’s one-minute combat round);
• simple rules for magic-users to create level-appropriate new spells and scrolls without first attaining several experience levels; and
• good and evil clerics are limited to casting opposite versions of certain spells (e.g., cure light wounds for good clerics and deal light wounds for evil clerics).

Like the scroll-making mechanic for magic-users, Blueholme adds similarly simple rules allowing clerics to create holy water and healing potions.

At least one significant deviation from Holmes’s basic edition stands out. Holmes’s basic edition has specific rules as to the abilities of dwarves, elves, and halflings; it also limited the classes available to demi-humans. Blueholme leaves these racial abilities and class availability to the discretion of individual DMs. It does refer the reader to monster entries for demi-humans, which specify various racial abilities that could be applied to characters as well. But this is not the only place the racial abilities of demi-humans are discussed. Racial modifiers for several types of demi-humans regarding thieves’ abilities are included at the very beginning of the chapter on monsters, and some additional rules about elves and secret doors and dwarves and traps are included in an altogether different section of the rulebook. This leaves a bit to be desired in terms of organization.

Like Holmes’s basic edition, Blueholme emphasizes that players can play just about any creature detailed in the section on monsters, subject to the DM’s approval. In particular, it suggests dreenoi—humanoid insect-men—as a racial option in addition to dwarves, elves, and halflings, because Holmes played such a character. But the monster description for dreenoi does not necessarily provide any meaningful abilities for them apart from the possibility of telepathy, which they are said to use only in communicating with one another. For an experienced DM, the lack of default rules concerning the abilities of demi-humans and the classes available to them won’t pose too much difficulty. But less experienced DMs could find the lack of default rules a little more challenging; making demi-humans distinct and interesting while not rendering humans a second-class species can be tricky.

Nor is that the only instance in which Blueholme might be less user-friendly for inexperienced DMs. To take a relatively minor example, the monster entry for "gnoll" provides no clue as to what one is apart from “bestial, vicious, and stupid”; whereas, Holmes’s basic edition succinctly identifies gnolls as “beings like hyena-men.” The same is true of the entry for "spectre." Blueholme says spectres are “incorporeal” but not much else, while Holmes’s basic edition references Tolkien’s Nazgul. If one does not already have a sense of what these monsters are, Blueholme does not clarify matters. For monsters that are well known outside of roleplaying games, like vampires or zombies, descriptions might not be necessary. But for lesser known monsters, like gnolls and spectres, some rudimentary description might be helpful.

Blueholme deviates from Holmes’s basic edition in some minor ways as well. One notable instance—it adjusts the experience points required per level by one so that each class begins first level with one experience point rather than zero. Why? The rulebook does not explain, and this revision is sufficiently atypical that an explanation would be useful. I surmise that this change might have been made to distinguish adventurers from “normal humans,” who are 0-level and belong to no class, based on a couple of references within the section on monsters, specifically the entries for “normal human” and “vampire.” But this is a guess, and its in-game significance is unstated. My hunch is that 0-level retainers who return from an adventure and are awarded experience then take on a class and become first level.

Like any revision or expansion of a prior edition, Blueholme has some material that is new (or at least it’s new to me and appears to have no precedent in Holmes’s basic edition). One of the more intriguing bits is its optional rule regarding light and heavy weapons. Under this rule, one can attack with a light weapon (e.g., dagger) twice per round but rolls two damage dice per hit and takes the lower result; one can attack with a heavy weapon (e.g., great sword; light crossbow) once every two rounds but rolls two damage dice per hit and takes the higher result. Standard weapons (e.g., long sword) allow one attack per round and one damage die. The damage die for all weapons is a d6. I’m not sure how this shakes out mathematically (i.e., whether it confers a relative advantage on the use of light or heavy weapons).

Blueholme’s monster entry for “demon” is another addition. Whether due to space limitations or some other consideration, Holmes’s basic edition consciously excludes demons. Rather than including numerous entries for the various subtypes of demons made famous by OD&D’s supplements and AD&D, Blueholme includes a single entry with a table for generating random demonic abilities along with the guidance that demons “come in all shapes and sizes, and may have wings, extra limbs, horns, scales, tails, or any number of usually grotesque physical features.” A creative DM could expand on this entry with additional tables for physical attributes as well as additional abilities to create a wide array of unique demons (or types of demons). This is a nice way of making something familiar new again while conserving space.

Arguably, the weakest section of Blueholme is the final one on campaigns, which discusses dungeons and the wilderness. This material generally is new. Its shortcomings relate not so much to what is there as what is not; this section spans just five pages and omits key material that Holmes’s basic edition includes, specifically a cross-sectional dungeon map and sample dungeon. Blueholme states that these materials are omitted due to space considerations, however, and that an introductory adventure—The Shrine of Sobek—is available in .pdf for free that discusses dungeons and the wilderness in further detail. This adventure has not been released yet, but it likely will make up for this material’s absence from the rulebook.

Blueholme is very well done overall. Its strengths far exceed any ostensible weaknesses. Many of my criticisms may be attributable to hard choices posed by considerations of space and price point. Personally, I’d rather pay a little more for some additional content, but that’s a judgment call. That said, this rulebook makes me want to run a Blueholme game, and that’s probably the highest praise one can give a product of this nature. Kudos to Michael Thomas for his excellent work.

[cross-posted at Knights & Knaves Alehouse]