Trying to figure out the history of fantasy roleplaying games. One in particular, for the moment.

[Why do I care? Because tabletop roleplaying is extremely important in the evolution of modern American fantasy, not only generic fantasy but the mass-mediated fantasies that lull us to sleep (and rouse us to fight - each other, if no one else). D&D is far and away the most popular pen-and-paper roleplaying game - that doesn't matter as much in the post-EverQuest, post-World of Warcraft era, but it still matters. The new books are bestsellers, and D&D still gives popular fantasy - books, movies, and games - much of its basic structural and stylistic vocabulary (y'know, the bits that don't come from Tolkien and Star Wars and such).

Plus, what can I say? Lately I spend my weekends rolling dice. I wanna know what's going on, and why.

I'm not an authority on this stuff - this is my attempt to put down the 35-year history of one game that's had tremendous influence. I'd like to try to talk about the nature of that influence later, as I think about it more. And so we're clear: I wasn't there, and this isn't about What A Swell Time It All Was Before The Suits/Millennials Ruined It. Nor is it cultural history. This is one attempt to summarize the history of a design as I see it. Probably I'm all wrong - I'm sure I've overestimated the irritations of actually playing AD&D, which I'm limited to reading rather than playing. This is all Big Angry Declaratives because I get that way sometimes, but really the whole thing has a giant question mark on top of it.]

OD&D

In the beginning you had miniatures wargaming - Napoleonics, Ancients, and so forth. Gary Gygax wrote a fantasy-wargaming ruleset, Chainmail. In 1974 he took a bunch of Dave Arneson's ideas (in particular the central conceit of roleplaying games, 'You are your character'), mixed them in with his own fantasy-gaming preoccupations, and produced Dungeons & Dragons, a tabletop game that was much closer to individual-scale wargaming than 'storytelling with dice.' Indeed, original D&D was more a Chainmail expansion than a full-blown game in its own right; while the three 'little brown books' presented an alternative combat/measurement system, D&D players were expected to own Chainmail, and to be familiar with the conventions of miniatures wargaming. The game's setting was straight-up midcentury pulp fantasy, with no small amount of Tolkien (and a few spoonfuls of Lovecraft) thrown in to sweeten its heavy Leiber/Howard men-of-mixed-morals flavour.

Other games followed, from Tunnels & Trolls (a D&D knockoff with simpler rules) to Arduin (an unofficial D&D expansion/knockoff with grungy production values and a few very clever rules tweaks, like 'critical hits') to Bunnies & Burrows (probably the most unique product design of the hobby's infancy). Mechanically, none of the games approached the elegance of later story-centric RPGs, but their limitations actually encouraged a DIY culture of homebrews, retrofits, handwritten houserules, and idiosyncratic interpretations (often geographically based around regional gaming communities). The RPG community then was more or less adjunct to the wargaming hobby, though it slowly developed an identity of its own. Gygax remained active and authoritative in the community, and in an effort to assert something like the 'canonical fantasy roleplaying game' (indeed the canonical D&D rules(!), given the multiplying houserules, interpretations, and variants) he released the obsessively elaborated Advanced Dungeons & Dragons as three core hardcover books between 1977 and 1979.

(This is the sanitized version of the history; I'm cutting all the personal politics and character assassination and corporate/interpersonal maneuvering, not to mention avoiding discussion of Gygax's personality and readily apparent social/psychological predilections, which are very important to the recent history of American fantasy but are a little too knotty for this post. Or at least this paragraph.)

AD&D

AD&D 1e represents Gygax's attempt to perfect fantasy roleplaying, and his (in)famous First Edition Dungeon Masters Guide is in some ways his canonical statement as a game designer. AD&D differs from OD&D in a couple of key respects - not least the astonishing number of world-data and combat-engine tables, system patches, baroque subsystems, and formerly-optional-now-official rules specifications that ballooned the ruleset from OD&D's 116 half-sized pages to four times that many large-format AD&D pages - full of cramped small print, to boot. The key shift in D&D design philosophy in the late 70's was arguably just hubris: Gygax's project went from a modest effort to adapt fantasy minis wargaming to a new style of play, to an attempt to 'authentically' recreate his beloved pulp-fantasy worlds. Gygax insisted that medieval-society simulation was not an AD&D design aim, but it seems he was being disingenuous: AD&D is obviously an attempt at simulationism, but the subject of Gygax's simulation was fictional rather than historical. The interpretive, improvisatory play of OD&D mutated into a much, much rules-heavier game in less than five years; for better or worse, later editions of D&D continued the AD&D line rather than the deliberately run-and-gun original D&D play style.

Back to Basics

Gygax's company, TSR, produced a clean, streamlined version of D&D - the 'Basic Rules,' edited by Dr. John 'The other John Holmes' Holmes - as an introductory product. It covered only low-level play, which in those days was still assumed to cover many many months of gaming. The Basic Set in three major editions (Holmes, Moldvay/Cook, and Mentzer), along with its expansion/companion products the Expert, Companion, Master, and Immortals rules, developed in parallel with AD&D's First Edition; Aaron Allston's 1991 Rules Cyclopedia presents a single-volume comprehensive version of D&D, the endpoint in its design evolution and the most complete (and expansive) single D&D product.

AD&D 2e

Meanwhile, Gygax focused on AD&D, and was preparing a second edition when he left the company (for above-mentioned political/personal reasons, it seems). TSR put out AD&D 2e in 1989 without Gygax's direct input, and without his name on the cover - [editorial] putting the game's original designer in the position he'd put Dave Arneson in with the release of AD&D 1e.[/editorial] The second edition refined some rules and added a few new subsystems, particularly proficiencies (non-combat/-dungeon skills), but it was in most regards a fine-tuning of AD&D with much of Gygax's perversely-charming aesthetic flavour and personality gone (in the interest of playability, consistency, customizability, etc.). Crucially, the 2e era saw the release of more than a dozen campaign worlds by TSR, from the gothic horror of Ravenloft to the space-fantasy universe Spelljammer to the much-loved multiverse setting Planescape. This profligacy was accompanied by increased focus on fiction publishing at TSR :while earlier products (e.g. Dragonlance) had seen simultaneous adventure-module and fiction development, the AD&D 2e gaming products drew heavily on the company's plotted fiction rather than vice versa. This business development reflected a growing emphasis on structured narratives in fantasy roleplaying, a play style to which D&D, with its wargaming roots and heavy combat emphasis, was not terribly well-suited - the 2e non-combat elaborations notwithstanding.

TSR was purchased by Wizards of the Coast in 1997. WotC was the publisher of the massively successful Magic: The Gathering card game - selling a billion cards in the first two years of production - and showed a willingness to rethink the purpose and simulation/narrative/game balance of AD&D. Advances in game design, and shrewdness about the nature of the tabletop-gaming audience, made for a stark change from TSR's unself-consciously nerdy presentation and corporate culture. Indeed, you might say 3e was the first edition of D&D that tried to be 'butch.' Any such attempt is doomed to failure, of course, given the adolescent-escapist nature of pulp-fantasy gaming, but WotC knew that the shot of testosterone would appeal to its post-Magic target markets.

D&D 3e

Opinions on WotC's 2000 release of D&D Third Edition vary, often revolving around its primary innovation: the introduction of a universal task-resolution mechanic. Whereas previous 'Did it work?' rolls might be resolved with odd combinations of polyhedral dice, D&D 3e (which is, remember, essentially AD&D 3e) simplified the game's central mechanic. 'Did it work?' was resolved in 3e by rolling a 20-sided die, adding a proficiency modifier (+2 to an attack with a magic sword, say, or +5 for a highly-proficient action), and comparing the result to a fixed difficulty level or opposing score. If the action succeeded, its degree of success would then be determined by another dice roll - the loss of d6+2 'hit points' from a broadsword, 2d8+6 in damage from a tentacle lash, etc. In a marketing masterstroke, the basic game engine - called the 'D20 System' - was made available to third-party publishers, which could make D20-compatible products under WotC's 'Open Game License.' The hobby flourished for a couple of years prior to the various Bush-era economic catastrophes, and saw renewed commercial interest and media coverage at D&D's 30th anniversary in 2004.

[Upon further reflection: The OGL is obviously the biggest deal about 3e - a big deal for the industry, but also an opportunity for a huge number of new writers, designers, and artists to try their hands at games-making. This article is about D&D as a game engine, but any serious consideration of modern fantasy gaming should have more to do with the OGL, Blizzard Online, and Magic: The Gathering than with D&D as such. Oh well.]

3e's combat system all but required miniatures (or tokens) and a 1-inch grid - and these rigid play-setting requirements freed the designers to produce a complicated combat game that was enjoyable in itself (though overdesigned with too many special cases, in my mind). Yet the system clearly aimed to be an all-to-all fantasy simulation of some kind, still reflecting the hobby's wargaming roots in well-intentioned but misguided attempts at 'realism.' The 3e rules were the endpoint of AD&D's evolution - a complex, highly customizable variant of the 1979 game's strict pseudo-simulationist design. It was the heaviest D&D ruleset yet, and bore little resemblance in style or (seemingly) design philosophy to Gygax's original works.

D&D 4e

With the rapid proliferation and bubble-burst of third-party D20 products, and facing stiff competition for young males' attention from the unbelievably popular World of Warcraft - which has seen far more play, by far more players, than every edition of D&D put together - WotC (now a subsidiary of Hasbro) struck out in a new direction. Building on the elaborate gameboard-based combat system and increased emphasis on numerical optimization that dominated D&D 3e play, but consciously rejecting the top-heavy skills system and fine-grained character customization that 3e had inherited from AD&D 2e, the designers of D&D 4th edition (2008) moved the D&D franchise in a new direction that puzzled some gamers and thrilled others - and crucially built a new young audience. 4e hearkens back to the dungeon-exploration flavour of OD&D and jettisons the overwrought non-combat skill system of 2e/3e. The main design decision is this: play centers on a streamlined, balanced, numerically consistent revision of the 3e combat system, which is like a complex chess variant with menu-driven 'powers' per token and a flexible task-resolution mechanism (still utilizing the unified 'd20 plus modifier vs DC' mechanic). The basic element of 4e is the 'encounter' - generally a combat setpiece with strict rules governing position, movement, and physical interactions; the system's emphasis is on maneuverability and (in a design decision obviously drawn from online 'roleplaying' games) party synergy - indeed 4e's bestiary and difficulty ratings are designed for well-balanced adventure parties.

In other words, 4e is the first D&D engine that makes no attempt to simulate anything - it's its own game, like Tetris, and in purely mechanical terms has about as much in common with Magic: The Gathering as it does with AD&D 1e. This is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, importing outside game materials to the modular, expandable 4e ruleset is trivial, and Dungeon Master customizations are unprecedentedly quick. In particular it's the first version of the game in which DMs can be confident at every stage of design and customization that their personal materials won't break balance or playability - it is, in other words, a well-written API for developers (DMs and publishers). And while 4e combat can be sluggish, it constantly provides interesting choices for players - the basic metric of game-design quality. It's the most refined D&D combat system so far.

On the other hand, it's just (largely) combat! D&D remains a juvenile escapist fantasy game, without even the old editions' gritty pulp veneer and raggedy nerds-in-the-basement aesthetic to leaven the rock'n'roll-fantasy hijinks. And the family resemblance between editions has faded with time, and while it's easy to run an OD&D adventure in 4e, the game's heavy math vibe, its post-World of Warcraft cultural emphasis on numerical optimization and stock 'character builds,' can lend 4e play a rote or button-mashing quality at times. OD&D wasn't built for anything in particular, so you could do an awful lot with it (as long as you didn't demand, say, narrative complexity or originality or cultural richness, etc.). 4e is built to do one thing, more or less, and does it well - and while you can do all the 'old school' things with it, the system's elegance does dissipate the more you tinker with its underlying math. It doesn't like to be houseruled - and since many gamers will insist on the importance of their houserules, they'll end up with versions of 4e that are much more rickety than the Rules As Written. OD&D and AD&D were made to be houseruled and homebrewed - which is, you might charitably say, a collection of glaring design weaknesses turned to ostensible cultural strengths.

The arc

The way I see it, the evolution of D&D has followed a bit of an up-and-back trajectory: from the quick'n'dirty duct-taped assemblage of OD&D to the distended, monolithic AD&D lineage, reaching the end of the line with D&D 3e. A game that was once about 'being good at pulp-fantasy fun-having' turned into a game about 'being good at playing D&D' - it started to become its own category, its own experiential end, but 3e never achieved independence from its structural forebears. And so you get the evolutionary hard-left: 4e's return to comparatively rules-light design, stripped of simulationist/encyclopedic pretense, catering to a hobby that's now part of a tabletop/online/computer/console gaming continuum rather than a nerdy niche of its own. I say 'rules-light' while acknowledging that 4e features the most complex (not complicated) combat system of any D&D edition, its designers attempting to split the difference between enormously complicated online games and the narrativist advances of less mainstream RPGs (from adolescent storytelling engines like Vampire: The Masquerade to the rich culture of indie RPGs, with their evocative mechanics and (general) total lack of combat emphasis).

For my money, 4e is less a sequel to 3e or AD&D than a bold solution to the problem the 3e design team identified but couldn't solve: What the hell is the point of a new D&D game? The 3e team waffled and gave a game that was even more 'Advanced' than AD&D, but with a modern, consistent, rules-heavy game-mechanic philosophy replacing Gygax's Asperger's-tinged amateur-encyclopedist (and, let's face it, glorious and infectiously joyous) excesses. The new edition chucked the brand's formal expectations and found its purpose in an older question: What was the point of the original game? Like it or not, 4e offers the first truly original product to bear the D&D name in 30 years.

The next, bigger question is: how has American fantasy changed around these games, in parallel with them, often heavily influenced by them?

And since it's late and I've been writing since 5:30 this morning, if you don't mind I'll try to answer that some other time. See you.

Comments

[Xander]

Excellent history, and correct as far as I can tell. But I have to disagree with your sorta waffling assessment of 4E.

For my money, it's the most hackable, customizable, reskinnable, flexible version of D&D ever... so long as you leave the core engine the hell alone.

What I mean is: Give me 30 minutes with the online tools and I can whip up a setting where the players are librarian monks fighting a war through the narratives of their books, or sky-pirates raiding airship trade routes, or members of a magical rock band touring the big cities and battling other bands onstage, etc., etc.

How? Because the classes, weapons, monsters, traps, everything really, is insanely easy to reskin without breaking anything. Also, Skill Challenges are amazing.

I think the core materials are moving towards more flexibility, too. However, the smartest thing 4E did was position itself as the first and only edition of D&D to be player-facing, i.e. the game is built from the perspective of, and for the enjoyment of, the players, not the DM. The game's only been out for a year, and most of the content released has been in the form of expanded options for players. Wait and see how much more DM options and material arrive in DMG2 and DMG3.

[zhan]

"Because tabletop roleplaying is extremely important in the evolution of modern American fantasy, not only generic fantasy but the mass-mediated fantasies that lull us to sleep "

Mmmmm.... Surely Tolkein is more to the point, and beyond Tolkein, the Anglo-Saxon-Norse & Celtic (and other bits of European, I guess) mythology he's inspired by?

[Wax Banks]

xander -

I like the way you think! I lost my nerve re: 4e while writing this, but I think we're 90% in agreement. Reading lots of old old D&D materials is biasing me this week, but when I'm more myself I tend to think 4e is the only edition of D&D that's a truly elegant piece of game design.

MR PANDA BEAR -

In terms of the content of generic fantasy, as well as its romantic-reactionary tinge, Tolkien is the big daddy (or as the dashing China Mieville puts it, 'the wen on the arse of fantasy literature'). But without really knowing what I'm talking about, I'd suggest at first that D&D has had these two big influences:

1) Tolkien's definition of 'fantasy world' was basically 'world.' Gygax's was 'enough detail to lie convincingly.' Gygax won - and would-be fantasy storytellers might ask as obsessive as Tolkien, but kids who grew up on fantasy games, even computer/video RPGs, are used to thinking of their fantasy worlds as movie sets rather than living organisms. Which narrows the player's definition not only of 'fantasy world' but of 'world,' I'd say.

(And anyhow, Tolkien gave us the raw materials and the ethics, but LotR was a decidedly literary novel - modern fantasy just isn't that. Maybe the way escapists think of 'fantasy quests' has changed somewhat? But Frodo and Sam aren't the model of the adventurer, god knows.)

2) Abrams, Lindelof, Rogers, the Wachowskis, del Toro, Whedon, endless others - the generation of Hollywood fantasists now ascending to big decision-making power grew up with D&D as a primary source of fantasy material rather than (as for the first wargamer/RPGer generation) a complement to the pulp sources. The storytelling model for serial genre TV isn't the fantasy cycle - it's the campaign.

Imagine a giant question mark there too - this is a first pass. But my suspicion is that for people under the age of 50 - everyone after the first high-school-age D&D players - D&D as a defining 'fantasy experience' was a key pressure on their notion of escapism, fantasy, etc. It's codified geekdom in portable form. And geeks increasingly rule the world in secret, don't they.

Can't think yet. Must try later.

[Stu Willis]

"The storytelling model for serial genre TV isn't the fantasy cycle - it's the campaign."

Amen to that.

As a teenager, I grew up GMing Shadowrun games. We had a massive 2-year arc, full of recurring baddies, character development, escalation and the Big Bad.

Science-fiction and Fantasy TV's emphasis on the Arc just made sense to me... starting with DS9 and Babylon 5.

That I am now working on my own projects (Hi Xander!) I can't but help feel that my dramatic sensibilities have been shaped by... the campaign.

[Sherv]

Check out the new Something Awful article in the WTF, D&D? series:

http://www.somethingawful.com/d/dungeons-and-dragons/fiend-folio-1.php?page=1

[Aion Online Power Leveling]

Your posts, are awesome....
very well written...i am one of your regular readers...

[Junta]

Thoughts. A well written history of D&D. I have one thing to add and a few declarative questions.

The fact: AD&D expanded the number of playable classes from 3 to 10 which was a huge change in player experience. I think this is true based on flipping through your "little books".

Question the First: You use the terms simulationism and simulationist a few times in your posts. I often see this term on the Wizards forums, usually in discussion of different edition of D&D or different RPGs. Every seems to use the term a little differently and as a result I'm never sure exactly what someone means by it.

Question the Second: When you write On the other hand, it's just (largely) combat! are you referring to 4E or D&D in general? A friend of mine is playing 4E and in their campaign half the encounters are non-combat, which was not the case when they played 3E. I think the modules I've played so far that Wizards wrote for 4E are definitely mostly combat. Even worse they are poorly motivated mostly-plot-less dungeon crawls. Bleh. That said I certainly agree that D&D compared to some other RPGS is more combat focused

Question the Final: What makes you say that 4E doesn't like to be house ruled? Wow! A direct question!

[Wax Banks]

Hi Junta -

I'm glad you liked the post! You're my imagined audience for these.

The fact: AD&D expanded the number of playable classes from 3 to 10 which was a huge change in player experience. I think this is true based on flipping through your "little books".

I think this goes to your question about 'simulationism,' which I think of as 'the aim of simulating some real-world system.' GURPS is more 'simulationist' than D&D 4.0 because its combat mechanics are far more nitty-gritty than D&D's, whereas Vampire is less simulationist than either, as its combat mechanics are markedly more abstract than either of the other games'. (I think 'simulationist' is also used to talk about player tendencies, but fuck all that.)

I suspect that Gygax's idea with the class-expansion was twofold, and half right:

1) More classes allow greater customizability of play. (True!)

2) More classes will more accurately simulate the fantasy world that is our referent. (False! There is no referent, 'simulation' is nonsense in this context.)

When you write On the other hand, it's just (largely) combat! are you referring to 4E or D&D in general?

D&D in general, i.e. 4e has a cleaner combat system than previous editions but it's still very combat-heavy, which is a little juvenile. :) It seems to me that the D&D fanbase has always tended more toward martial combat than, say, the Vampire playerbase.

I'd like to find a way to run less combat-heavy sessions myself - but I think I lack confidence to push for more roleplaying, to slow things down and enjoy the dialogue and worldbuilding. Maybe that'll come in time?

You know that D&D's focus has shifted toward more detailed combat gaming and (since AD&D) less complicated mechanics, particularly simpler noncombat mechanics - but the overall trend in roleplaying games seems to be toward more evocative social mechanics, etc. I'm increasingly sympathetic to the aims of e.g. freeform gamers and storytelling-heavy games (holy crap I wanna play My Life with Master and Baron Munchausen!!). Not that I'm bored with D&D, but I want our games to be more story-ish. I guess that means buy-in and confidence...

What makes you say that 4E doesn't like to be house ruled?

I just mean the unified mechanic is elegant and balanced, unlike the modular approach in D&D and AD&D - the 'random harlot' table could be anything at all, whereas changing the way powers work maybe means altering balance throughout the system. I think 4e can be houseruled, sure, but it's resistant to too much mucking-about - not least because all the additional material is so carefully balanced and interconnected with the core stuff. If you design a 4e class that's not roughly comparable in power to the others, you're knocking the system sideways; AD&D didn't mind that shit because the whole system was cockeyed anyhow. :)

Kick my ass here if I'm out in left field! I'm slightly drunk.

[Sherv]

And part 2 of the Fiend Folio chuckles:

http://www.somethingawful.com/d/dungeons-and-dragons/fiend-folio-2.php

And also: Hey, are you ever going to get back in touch with me about your visit?

[Margaret]

I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don't know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.

Margaret

http://racingonlinegames.net