Dammit, Viktyr's Being a Boomer About D&D 5e

[T. Foster]

There are a few folks out there who claim that Gygaxian AD&D is the Perfect Game and that most of gaming and fantasy has been doing it wrong for the past thirty years or so. They don't seem to hang out here or at theRPGSite, though, and they've all been banished from TPB; I tend to run into them on Twitter due to some mutual connections.

The biggest thing I get from them is that whatever I want out of gaming, Gygaxian AD&D 1E isn't it.

I’m about the most passionate advocate for Gygax and 1E that I know, but I don’t (at least not recently) say that people who don’t play that way are doing it wrong or should play differently, and hope I don’t come off that way. My motivation is that I really like that style of play and feel like it got totally neglected, virtually erased from history, in the 90s, and then when it supposedly came back in the 00s it was as a cartoonish distortion (ultra-high lethality, arbitrary, etc), and even now it’s been heavily overshadowed among OSR types in favor of ultra-minimalism, so it feels like it’s still worth making the case in favor of Gygaxian 1E. Not for purposes of evangelizing or trying to get anyone to play differently (assuming they’re having fun) but more both so people will understand what I’m actually talking about when I talk about the way I like to play and also (though this is probably futile and Quixotic) so maybe fewer people will use “Gygaxian” as a shorthand for either arbitrary “killer DM” style play or reductive ultra-minimalism, which is never what it was about.

 

[Brock Savage]

Good points being made all around.

That said, you also have to be familiar enough with Gygax’s tropes and design style to know that the best and most important stuff is always hidden - that sometimes you need to dissect a monster to see what’s in its gullet, that treasure chests sometimes have false bottoms, and sometimes the false bottom has a second false bottom, that sometimes there’s a secret door inside the pit trap. This looks like it requires tedious pixelbitching to progress and succeed but that’s not what he intended - rather he wanted a sort of logic-informed “targeted pixelbitching” where the players would grasp when the picture was incomplete and, if so, what the logical way to search for the missing pieces was (going back to #1 - players who like solving puzzles).

Tedious pixelbitching is on the nose as far as I am concerned. My beef with this style of GMing is that it favors a risk-averse, methodical, "intelligent coward" playstyle that bores me to tears as an adult.* I find the "metal" and pulp influence in the OSR is a welcome infusion of fun into this style of play.

The D&D of my youth is akin to the really punishing old-school video games. I enjoyed both of them back in the day because I didn't have anything to compare them to; 35 years later I'm still playing challenging video games but would never revisit Contra or Castlevania on the NES because it would be incredibly boring and frustrating. The same goes for Gygaxian D&D, at least the way I experienced it.

*I want to be clear that I am not disparaging anyone who favors this style of play

 

[T. Foster]

Good points being made all around.

Tedious pixelbitching is on the nose as far as I am concerned. My beef with this style of GMing is that it favors a risk-averse, methodical, "intelligent coward" playstyle that bores me to tears as an adult.* I find the "metal" and pulp influence in the OSR is a welcome infusion of fun into this style of play.

The D&D of my youth is akin to the really punishing old-school video games. I enjoyed both of them back in the day because I didn't have anything to compare them to; 35 years later I'm still playing challenging video games but would never revisit Contra or Castlevania on the NES because it would be incredibly boring and frustrating. The same goes for Gygaxian D&D, at least the way I experienced it.

*I want to be clear that I am not disparaging anyone who favors this style of play

I get that some people just don't like this type of play, and that's okay - there are types of play I don't like too, and am happy that the general hobby (and even just D&D) is broad enough to accept and support different preferences. That said, I think at least some folks' distaste for Gygax-style puzzle dungeons comes from two things: (1) players - especially young ones - who didn't have the instinctive puzzle-solving sense to be able to deduce solutions logically (i.e. where to search for traps and secret doors, what the hints in the riddles mean, etc.) so they just decided to grind everything ands slow the game way down and make it tedious and boring, and the DM went along with (or even encouraged) it because they also didn't have that instinctive puzzle-solving sense to know that the players were doing it wrong, which leads to (2) DMs - especially young ones - who created their own dungeons in imitation of Gygax's but didn't have the same internal logic that his did so the traps and secret doors really were arbitrary and random and the best/only route for success was to grind everything and slow the game down and make it tedious and boring.

I'll admit, with only a bit of shame, that I was guilty of both of these as a kid. I both played in and ran some boring-ass tedious pixelbitching AD&D games because I thought that's how it was supposed to work. It was only coming back to revisit the stuff years/decades later with adult eyes and a fresh perspective that I caught a bunch of stuff that I had missed as a kid and more fully grokked what it was Gygax was doing. I'm not very good at puzzles and riddles so I'm not actually a very good Gygaxian player (though I am good at strategizing and teamwork and remembering things and staying mission-focused, so I'm not terrible - just, like, B- level) and when I design my own adventures they aren't very Gygaxian in this way, which is why I'm always on a search for good content in this mode (which is depressingly rare), but when I'm running a good Gygax-style module, or playing in one, and there's somebody in the player group who IS really good at this kind of stuff ( Black Vulmea is one of them) and the pieces all come together it's really fun and exciting to be a part of, even in a secondary quasi-observational capacity. Or at least it is for me

 

[CRKrueger]

I get that some people just don't like this type of play, and that's okay - there are types of play I don't like too, and am happy that the general hobby (and even just D&D) is broad enough to accept and support different preferences. That said, I think at least some folks' distaste for Gygax-style puzzle dungeons comes from two things: (1) players - especially young ones - who didn't have the instinctive puzzle-solving sense to be able to deduce solutions logically (i.e. where to search for traps and secret doors, what the hints in the riddles mean, etc.) so they just decided to grind everything ands slow the game way down and make it tedious and boring, and the DM went along with (or even encouraged) it because they also didn't have that instinctive puzzle-solving sense to know that the players were doing it wrong, which leads to (2) DMs - especially young ones - who created their own dungeons in imitation of Gygax's but didn't have the same internal logic that his did so the traps and secret doors really were arbitrary and random and the best/only route for success was to grind everything and slow the game down and make it tedious and boring.

I'll admit, with only a bit of shame, that I was guilty of both of these as a kid. I both played in and ran some boring-ass tedious pixelbitching AD&D games because I thought that's how it was supposed to work. It was only coming back to revisit the stuff years/decades later with adult eyes and a fresh perspective that I caught a bunch of stuff that I had missed as a kid and more fully grokked what it was Gygax was doing. I'm not very good at puzzles and riddles so I'm not actually a very good Gygaxian player (though I am good at strategizing and teamwork and remembering things and staying mission-focused, so I'm not terrible - just, like, B- level) and when I design my own adventures they aren't very Gygaxian in this way, which is why I'm always on a search for good content in this mode (which is depressingly rare), but when I'm running a good Gygax-style module, or playing in one, and there's somebody in the player group who IS really good at this kind of stuff ( Black Vulmea is one of them) and the pieces all come together it's really fun and exciting to be a part of, even in a secondary quasi-observational capacity. Or at least it is for me

Shit, you and Black Vulmea play? I gotta get my ass back down to SoCal.

 

[T. Foster]

Shit, you and Black Vulmea play? I gotta get my ass back down to SoCal.

Not recently, because we live too far apart from each other (he's in Long Beach, I'm now in Simi) but back a decade or so ago we met up and played together at about a half dozen assorted game days and mini-cons - he played in my OD&D and AD&D games, I played in his Boot Hill games, and we both played in a couple other guys' D&D games. I would absolutely play with him again any time, and hope the opportunity will arise to do so again someday...

 

[Brock Savage]

I get that some people just don't like this type of play, and that's okay - there are types of play I don't like too, and am happy that the general hobby (and even just D&D) is broad enough to accept and support different preferences. That said, I think at least some folks' distaste for Gygax-style puzzle dungeons comes from two things: (1) players - especially young ones - who didn't have the instinctive puzzle-solving sense to be able to deduce solutions logically (i.e. where to search for traps and secret doors, what the hints in the riddles mean, etc.) so they just decided to grind everything ands slow the game way down and make it tedious and boring, and the DM went along with (or even encouraged) it because they also didn't have that instinctive puzzle-solving sense to know that the players were doing it wrong, which leads to (2) DMs - especially young ones - who created their own dungeons in imitation of Gygax's but didn't have the same internal logic that his did so the traps and secret doors really were arbitrary and random and the best/only route for success was to grind everything and slow the game down and make it tedious and boring.

I'll admit, with only a bit of shame, that I was guilty of both of these as a kid. I both played in and ran some boring-ass tedious pixelbitching AD&D games because I thought that's how it was supposed to work. It was only coming back to revisit the stuff years/decades later with adult eyes and a fresh perspective that I caught a bunch of stuff that I had missed as a kid and more fully grokked what it was Gygax was doing. I'm not very good at puzzles and riddles so I'm not actually a very good Gygaxian player (though I am good at strategizing and teamwork and remembering things and staying mission-focused, so I'm not terrible - just, like, B- level) and when I design my own adventures they aren't very Gygaxian in this way, which is why I'm always on a search for good content in this mode (which is depressingly rare), but when I'm running a good Gygax-style module, or playing in one, and there's somebody in the player group who IS really good at this kind of stuff ( Black Vulmea is one of them) and the pieces all come together it's really fun and exciting to be a part of, even in a secondary quasi-observational capacity. Or at least it is for me

I appreciate the reply and you make some good points- good enough that I should clarify my position. I would LOVE to play through Rappan Athuk before I die and it is arguably the most brutal, challenging Gygaxian megadungeon of all time. The problem is, every time I try to give something like that a shot it's just ugh.. BORING! Last time I tried was 2017. So I guess I could say my problem isn't Gygaxian dungeons per se but the tedious pixelbitching playstyle and boring DMs that often come with it.

Hey man I am in Orange County if you guys ever want to get some SoCal gaming in. The Mrs would join too.

 

[T. Foster]

Hey man I am in Orange County if you guys ever want to get some SoCal gaming in. The Mrs would join too.

Hey, if we can get a critical mass maybe time is ripe (well, once we're finally through with "social distancing") for another SoCal Minicon where we can all meet face to face and have to justify our abrasive forum personae IRL. We'd need a dozen or so interested folks, someone willing to either host or procure a spot (hopefully somewhere reasonably central so nobody has to drive more than about an hour), and then we'd have to figure out a day that worked for at least 2/3 of the interested folks and count on about 3/4 of the RSVPs actually showing up leaving a nice tableful of ~6-8. Meet up around 10am, somebody runs a game during the day, we all eat an early dinner, then someone else runs a game in the evening. A couple folks would probably leave early and a couple more might come late. I'd be down for that!

 

[under_score]

As for wanting to stick back to it's 1970's inspirations, isn't that what the OSR was about? To bring it back to that?

If you're interested, Jim Wampler (designer of Mutant Crawl Classics) had a short lived podcast called Designers & Discourses that discusses this a couple times. Dungeons & Dragons with every edition, and all the various other media that is has produced, has become a more and more self-referential game, so cutting away all the cruft and re-examining the material that originally inspired D&D. It needn't be restrictive - Wampler's own contribution being a marriage of Gamma World and Dungeon Crawl Classics, and the wide breadth of the loosely defined OSR I think shows plenty of creativity - but starting from the same materials that Gary & Co. were working with is certainly a fun exercise. I've discovered a lot of great material in Appendix N, but it's only a shelf or two of my library.

 

[Brock Savage]

Hey, if we can get a critical mass maybe time is ripe (well, once we're finally through with "social distancing") for another SoCal Minicon where we can all meet face to face and have to justify our abrasive forum personae IRL.

Dude that sounds awesome and I am so down once this whole pandemic thing winds down. Some people call me abrasive but I call it cheeky, extroverted and fun so I am not too worried. I've had nothing but good experiences when meeting online people IRL, I guess I am just lucky?

I am happy to help with planning and stuff, the logistics can be a pain in the ass. Maybe this will get me off my ass and painting some miniatures.

 

[Black Vulmea]

. . . ( Black Vulmea is one of them) . . .

Trent's being very generous here.

Shit, you and Black Vulmea play?

Not in far too long, unfortunately.

I gotta get my ass back down to SoCal.

Hey man I am in Orange County if you guys ever want to get some SoCal gaming in. The Mrs would join too.

I'd be down for that!

Funny, this very thing's been kicking around in my head the past few weeks; perhaps after the first of the year; the pandemic willing? If we do this, we need figure out what it will take to drag Dumarest up from Sandy Eggo . . .

 

[Black Vulmea]

Was dual-wielding for anyone a thing in 1e?

Any character could fight with a second weapon in 1e AD&D - see 1e AD&D DMG, MELEE: Attacks with Two Weapons, p. 70 - as long as the second weapon was a dagger or a hand axe; UA added the spiked buckler. Because the to-hit modifier was based off Dexterity, it tended in our games to be mostly utilized by thieves

However, I ran two high Dexterity fighters who fought with two weapons: a dwarf 'ranger' - dwarf fighter/thief with the forester secondary skill - who fought with two hand axes, and a human 'pit fighter' who fought with a short sword and spiked buckler.

 

[Dumarest]

...what it will take to drag Dumarest up from Sandy Eggo . . .

If Eiza González personally invites me...like so:

​

 

[AsenRG]

Note the qualification of Gygaxian in my statement. Mechanically, they're pretty compatible--my first group actually started out with a 1E PHB, 2E DMG and 2E Monstrous Compendium. But the stuff espoused by Jeffro Johnson and others on Twitter is big on following Gygax's playstyle advice in the 1E PHB, 1E DMG, Role-Playing Mastery, etc. rigorously, with the emphasis on 'smart play', 'time records,' emergent campaigns as opposed to preplotted or plot points, etc.

2nd Ed's style--which is what formed me--is looser, more narrative and dramatic, and somewhat more forgiving.

Interesting. Would you mind elaborating on that about the perceived ideas of playing 2e vs 1e? Maybe with a mini-example?

Dave Arneson’s True Genius, by Rob Kuntz. I haven’t read it.

Is it published already? Last I checked it wasn't.

I have, however, read this and it was really remarkable in its lack of insight or practical applicability. It was written right after Gygax left TSR so he was (apparently) making an effort not to focus on D&D specifically but that meant that everything was so generalized and vague that it lost all meaning.

There are a couple of pages in the back of the AD&D Players Handbook of practical advice for players about how to prosper in a Gygaxian campaign - about the importance of establishing a mission and sticking to it, to planning wisely and conserving resources, working as a team with the other players, avoiding distractions, etc. A book-length expansion of that might have been pretty cool. This book is nothing like that at all.

The only real point he makes in the book is the difference between what he calls “role assumption” - taking on a pre-defined alternate personality and play-acting it at a surface level - and “real” roleplaying - which to him meant, essentially projecting yourself into the fictional world through the lens of your character avatar. But even that is all expressed in such vague general terms, with zero practical examples or illustrations, that the only way I was able to figure out that’s what he was actually getting at was to read an earlier “rantitorial” in Dragon magazine from 1985 on the same topic, but only 2 pages long and using more direct language.

I know you brought this book up as a joke, but it’s worth emphasizing how truly mind-numbingly worthless it really is.

Funny, most people today would use "real roleplaying" for taking on an alternate personality and "self-insertion" for what Gygax obviously termed "real roleplaying"...

Gygax’s modules work with a particular type and mindset of player moreso than any particular type or level of character. Someone who likes solving puzzles and riddles. Someone who’s focused on small unit hit-and-run tactics. Someone who is focused on a mission goal and doesn’t get distracted by shiny stuff - who will only pull a lever if they’ve figured out they need to and not just because it’s there. That said, you also have to be familiar enough with Gygax’s tropes and design style to know that the best and most important stuff is always hidden - that sometimes you need to dissect a monster to see what’s in its gullet, that treasure chests sometimes have false bottoms, and sometimes the false bottom has a second false bottom, that sometimes there’s a secret door inside the pit trap. This looks like it requires tedious pixelbitching to progress and succeed but that’s not what he intended - rather he wanted a sort of logic-informed “targeted pixelbitching” where the players would grasp when the picture was incomplete and, if so, what the logical way to search for the missing pieces was (going back to #1 - players who like solving puzzles).

OK, that's about the first thing that made me interested in maybe reading an adventure - a rare event in itself - written by Gary Gygax, for a system I'm unlikely to use...

If you’re that type of player, level doesn’t matter so much. Gygax’s adventures don’t tend to have a lot of level-based roadblocks - you need to cast a spell of a particular level or need to have a magic item of sufficient potency or whatever (though his disciple Frank Mentzer very much did that) and if anything Gygax’s adventures are infamous in the other direction - for stripping away high level character abilities (declaring by fiat that various spells and magic items won’t work) in order to force players to rely on their own ingenuity rather than the numbers on their character sheet. When a Gygax adventure says it’s for high level characters what he really means is for experienced players who’ve learned all the tricks in the first paragraph. That’s much more of a determinant to success than how many hit points that character has or what their total attack bonus or maximum spell level is.

1) Mentzer's misunderstood the true teachings! His understanding of Referee-Fu wasn't deep enough, obviously!
2) Yeah, there was a tendency to mix "player" and "PC" level in those early days. Seems easy enough to understand the reasons, too!

 

[Armchair Gamer]

Interesting. Would you mind elaborating on that about the perceived ideas of playing 2e vs 1e? Maybe with a mini-example?

I don't think I could do 1E justice; everything I know is second- or third-hand or coming to the books years later (with the exception of the 1E PHB, as mentioned earlier).

 

[AsenRG]

I don't think I could do 1E justice; everything I know is second- or third-hand or coming to the books years later (with the exception of the 1E PHB, as mentioned earlier).

That's very fair of you...but maybe you could just write it in a format like "these things are like THAT in 2e and they would be DIFFERENT (but I'm not sure how, exactly) in 1e"?

 

[T. Foster]

Is it published already? Last I checked it wasn't.

The Dave Arneson book (which is really short, something like 64pp) was published a year or so ago. The larger-scope multi-volume RPG Theory book Kuntz was working on, that apparently (from what I've heard) provides at least some of the foundational info needed to understand what he's saying in the Arneson book, is still unpublished.

Funny, most people today would use "real roleplaying" for taking on an alternate personality and "self-insertion" for what Gygax obviously termed "real roleplaying"...

Yup, and that's been confusing people since the 80s. It's a shame Gygax wasn't able to make this point more eloquently and comprehensibly back then, when he was still in a position of influence, before the conventional understanding of the terms was so firmly set in the opposite direction.

OK, that's about the first thing that made me interested in maybe reading an adventure - a rare event in itself - written by Gary Gygax, for a system I'm unlikely to use...

The AD&D modules are written in such a minimalist style (most of them around 16 pages of text or less) that none of this stuff is spelled out and it all has to be inferred. I recommend his later adventure Necropolis (originally published for the Dangerous Journeys game in 1992, adapted to d20 by Necromancer Games in 2002 - I don't own the latter but from what I understand they retained most of Gygax's original text and just changed the mechanical stuff) which has a much longer page count and includes a lot more "GM advice" and asides about design choices and expected PC actions and pacing and stuff that give more of a sense of what Gygax was thinking about when he wrote the adventure and how he expected it to play out that illuminates more of his design ethos.

1) Mentzer's misunderstood the true teachings! His understanding of Referee-Fu wasn't deep enough, obviously!
2) Yeah, there was a tendency to mix "player" and "PC" level in those early days. Seems easy enough to understand the reasons, too!

Mentzer is a complicated figure, because on the one hand he was one of Gary's most loyal disciples (he's one of the only ones who gave up his position at TSR to follow Gary into exile) and Gary clearly trusted and valued him (sometime around 1982 Gary declared him the "official AD&D rules guru" and gave him the job of revising the classic D&D line and had him pegged to do the same with AD&D - and they remained close through the rest of Gary's life) but if you look closely at Mentzer's adventures and his rules commentary I, at least, see a pretty big difference - that "Mentzerian" D&D is not the same thing as "Gygaxian" D&D in several pretty consequential ways. It's something that has to be approached gingerly because Frank is still around and, as was demonstrated at Dragonsfoot a few years back, tends to get VERY defensive if this topic is broached.

 

[AsenRG]

The Dave Arneson book (which is really short, something like 64pp) was published a year or so ago. The larger-scope multi-volume RPG Theory book Kuntz was working on, that apparently (from what I've heard) provides at least some of the foundational info needed to understand what he's saying in the Arneson book, is still unpublished.

Thanks, I'll check his site out. I suspect the shipping would still be bad, though.

Yup, and that's been confusing people since the 80s. It's a shame Gygax was able to make this point more eloquently and comprehensibly back then, when he was still in a position of influence, before the conventional understanding of the terms was so firmly set in the opposite direction.

But all his influence didn't prevent it from being set in the opposite direction!
"The street finds its own use for things".

The AD&D modules are written in such a minimalist style (most of them around 16 pages of text or less) that none of this stuff is spelled out and it all has to be inferred. I recommend his later adventure Necropolis (originally published for the Dangerous Journeys game in 1992, adapted to d20 by Necromancer Games in 2002 - I don't own the latter but from what I understand they retained most of Gygax's original text and just changed the mechanical stuff) which has a much longer page count and includes a lot more "GM advice" and asides about design choices and expected PC actions and pacing and stuff that give more of a sense of what Gygax was thinking about when he wrote the adventure and how he expected it to play out that illuminates more of his design ethos.

Thank you, I'll check it out!

Mentzer is a complicated figure, because on the one hand he was one of Gary's most loyal disciples (he's one of the only ones who gave up his position at TSR to follow Gary into exile) and Gary clearly trusted and valued him (sometime around 1982 Gary declared him the "official AD&D rules guru" and gave him the job of revising the classic D&D line and had him pegged to do the same with AD&D - and they remained close through the rest of Gary's life) but if you look closely at Mentzer's adventures and his rules commentary I, at least, see a pretty big difference - that "Mentzerian" D&D is not the same thing as "Gygaxian" D&D in several pretty consequential ways. It's something that has to be approached gingerly because Frank is still around and, as was demonstrated at Dragonsfoot a few years back, tends to get VERY defensive if this topic is broached.

...I was just making a joke, though!
And of course Mentzerian D&D wouldn't be the same as Gygaxian. Every Referee sets things at least slightly differently, even if they're close friends. AsenRG's D&D would be way different from T.Foster's D&D, if they were ever compared, too.
That's also the unfortunate reason why nobody can actually write a Conan that feels like Conan to the fans.

 

[T. Foster]

And of course Mentzerian D&D wouldn't be the same as Gygaxian. Every Referee sets things at least slightly differently, even if they're close friends. AsenRG's D&D would be way different from T.Foster's D&D, if they were ever compared, too.
That's also the unfortunate reason why nobody can actually write a Conan that feels like Conan to the fans.

Right. But Mentzer is heavily invested in his claim to be the truest spiritual heir of Gygax, citing the authority bestowed by that 1982 rules guru designation as well as the impressive sales figures of the edition of D&D he edited (the BECMI sets), so when people would point out what you said above, which should be self-evidently obvious and non-controversial, he reacted very, very badly - taking it as a personal attack on him and his legacy and going hard to the mattresses. It got really ugly for awhile, and ultimately led to Mentzer severing all ties with Dragonsfoot and declaring it anathema.