I have been thinking
a lot about the game, as it is played now, even by us OSR types,
versus how it was played at the beginning. This led me down a couple
of similar, related paths regarding the origin of the game and the
expectations of it's players.
These days D&D,
and RPGs in general, have evolved into two distinct categories. I do
not claim that one style of play is superior to the other, I merely
observe that there are two camps. They are not mutually exclusive of
each other either, though groups tend to fall with a majority of
players in one of the two camps and rules systems have developed to
play to the advantages of both styles. I also do not claim that the
camps are opposed to one another, they simply are.
The first category
of RPG takes the RP part and expands upon it, to the near exclusivity
of the other parts of the game, essentially making the experience a
directed improvisational theater performance. Some D&D players do
this, most everyone in the “Storyteller” type games is doing
this. I have found this type of game to be generally too abstract and
often too linear. I like to make the story for myself, reacting to
the world around me, even as it reacts to my actions; I don't like to
be locked into a pre-plotted narrative.
The second group
embraces the G, and become somewhat gamist about it; meta-gaming and
rules mastery are rewarded, most people playing 3.x D&D,
Pathfinder, or 4th edition D&D seem to fall into this
camp in my experience, which is, admittedly, small. Games that
emphasize tactics and have detailed rules systems kind of encourage
this, I found this style of play to be too simulationist for my
tastes.
So I sat down and
read a bunch of blogs about OSR gaming. I read through a couple of
different iterations of the D&D rules from the early days, and
their modern clones and variants. When I was done doing that I
thought about it for a while.
On Player
Characters-
D&D started out
as a cooperative skirmish scale wargame. Players, at least beginning
players, were encouraged to play only one “unit” in this game.
One unit being a single individual, the character. Wargamers tend to
begin to identify with certain units, or at least they think of
certain units with regard for the memories of what those units have
done in past games. When there is a campaign game, and units can gain
experience, moving up from green, to veteran or even elite status,
they care even more. Since early D&D, and presumably the
“Braunstein” games that preceded it, adopted this experience
system, and the players were identified solely with their single
unit, those units developed a life and personality of their own. The
game could be played with miniatures, and I am certain it was, in the
beginning. That's how I played it when I started out. However, and
this is important, it could also be played “theater of the mind”
style, with out miniature figures, without a board or table. This
opens up a lot of possibilities, you don't need as much space to
play, and you don't need to have the “right” unit (miniatures
wargamers tend to hate substituting in the “wrong” miniature), to
name just two, off the top of my head.
My point here is
that the single unit that you play in this cooperative skirmish game,
becomes something you get attached to more and more over time, with
repeated successes, or at least escaping death. Your character's
stats may be written on a 3x5 card, but he ultimately becomes more
than the card he's written on. He doesn't start that way though.
Gygax is famously quoted as having said “Backstory is what happens
in the first three levels”*. Generally as your character gets more
experienced he starts to acquire retainers and hirelings,
sub-characters whose job is to assist in the success of whatever
“mission” the party is on and to help keep the primary character
alive**. The player character becomes a “squad leader” as the
game scales up, and it generally becomes expected that the trusted,
experienced henchmen will become player characters in their own right
over time, usually at the death or retirement of the primary PC; and
all of this was necessary because PCs never reached the power levels
that are common now.
I came to wargames
and D&D at the same time- I played my first hex-and-counter
wargame one week to the day before I played D&D for the first
time. I had no preconceptions of how either type of game “should”
be played, so I approached both of them from what my previous board
game experiences had taught me, and, in the case of D&D, just
what being a kid with a good imagination taught me. The lack of a
board was slightly confounding, but I got that my single character
was my “piece” or token for the game, and that, if I died, it was
game over (a term I was just beginning to see in the nascent video
game industry). The more difficult part to wrap my head around was
the “play acting” part, that took time.
My original D&D
crew also had to be slowly coaxed into having hirelings, and never
really took to henchmen at all. I suppose AD&D taught us to
regard them as experience point leeches. We did start to really give
personality and individuality to our characters though, eventually,
as they were played more and leveled up some. I guess we were more or
less on point with regard to how the elders of the game had
originally played there at least.
So, to sum it up. I
think it's possible that we are placing too much emphasis on our
player characters, making them too individual, with their own
backstories and personalities too soon, jumping the gun trying to
make all of our characters special snowflakes right out of the gate,
where in the earliest days of the hobby that wasn't really a thing.
Both schools of thought in modern gaming seem to have lost sight of
what was just obvious in the beginning, for different reasons.
On Alignment-
My second thought
was about alignment, which has been popping up here and there across
a bunch of blogs, but I never would have understood in it's
originally conceived form, if I had not thought about D&D as a
wargame. Simply put, alignment has no real morality to it in it's
original conception, it's just the faction or “team” your
character plays for. Lawful versus Chaotic (Law vs. Chaos), with some
neutral parties that could go either way, or they might form their
own team and fight against both sides. This “which team does my
unit belong to” alignment system makes a great deal of sense when
coming at this from a wargaming point of view.
Admittedly, there
was some moral component creeping in even at the start (or at least
near the start).
This is the
alignment chart from the Holmes Basic set, which I think we can all
agree is closer to OD&D than it is to either AD&D or B/X.
The moral component,
or Good-Evil Axis only really comes into it's own with AD&D,
where each of the nine alignments in the spectrum have distinct
definitions. Few aspects of the D&D game have brought about more
rancor and disharmony than the expansion of the “team” alignment
system into the “morality spectrum” alignment system, and we lose
an important part of what alignment meant back at the beginning.
Holmes Basic was my first D&D, followed quickly by the X half of
B/X and AD&D, pretty much concurrent with each other, so my
entire concept of alignment was the AD&D style, until now. Now I
like the “team” alignment system present in OD&D, that
apparently continued, with a slight hiccup in Holmes, through the
entire TSR D&D line.
To conclude I want
to state that I wasn't looking to declare any one play style superior
to the others, but instead to discover for myself what we do
differently than the creators of the hobby did. Going back and
reading through OD&D, skimming through Chainmail, and reading
through S&W White Box and Delving Deeper, but from a wargamers
perspective was an interesting exercise. The expectation of what the
play experience was going to be is somewhat different than it is now.
Regardless of whether the game is more story oriented or more
simulationist, new games spend a vast amount of time in character
creation, which means that high mortality rates are extremely
undesirable. Contrast this with the five or so minutes of character
creation in OD&D and it's simulacra, and the concept that the
character is just a playing piece and the high mortality rate is no
big deal, but you really start to feel it when they have some time
invested in them later on.
I don't think any of
this is ground-breaking news, simply stuff that I was unaware of. I
may be wrong about the whole thing, this is just what I got from
trying to see things from a different perspective as I read through
these early D&D books and their more recent restatements. I had a
similar epiphany the last time I did this, after I had read a series
of blog posts about the post-apocalyptic assumed setting of OD&D
with regard to setting and encounter design, and embracing
randomness.
* Or five maybe?
It's possible he never said it at all, but that doesn't make it a bad
sentiment.
** I suppose that
makes Charisma seem less like a dump stat, it affects how many
retainers you can have and whether or not they stick around; which is
important in the “squad leader” phase of the game.
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