DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS: ALL MORALITIES BEING EQUAL, PART 2

Hello all!

If you’re still reading, note that from now on I’ll normally post Monday and Wednesday, as I am trying to finish a novel, but sometimes I’ll have a bonus post on Friday.

Upon further thinking, I’m going to have to elaborate on what I’m talking about with Dungeon & Dragons ™ (shortened as DND) and these other fantasy settings. The first, I haven’t read all of them or done as in-depth research as a scholar. I know this, because nerds and maybe scholars may end up reading these posts one day. The former will scream their heads off, the latter may take an interest? There are Historians of Comic Books, of how that medium developed. I don’t know if there is a dedicated art criticism/’philosophy of art’ associated with comics. Maybe? If the Renaissance has art critics dedicated explaining, living, and propounding the underlying beliefs of Renaissance art, there likely will be for comics.

…What I mean to say is that I’m going to shoot my credentials in the foot. I’m not a scholar—I am a traveler who has asked a lot of questions. I’m not a philosopher, though I’m now so familiar with the basics that you can tell me any kind of conceptual framework and I’ll be able to procedurally generate what its conclusions, responses to situations, and how it operates in the world (and what kind of people it will create). I’m a big goofball who deals with dangerous, strange, and god-awful ideas—there are places where ‘here be dragons’, and sometimes the dragons come rampaging through; sometimes you have fools like me who visit and run away, and then you have complete morons who see them and say ‘wouldn’t it be great if dragons lived among us?’.

I got no credentials save your trust. I’m also a gullible fool—but not quite. How I learned all this crap is simply, I took it all in with earnest seriousness. That’s it. I listened as if every word they said was true, and had the words rattle around in my head, and then (somehow) I had a ‘Eureka!’ moment where I realized there was a flaw or shortcoming—and my brain keeps having those Eureka moments! It’s also why I’m usually described as living on another planet—I take those planets with utmost seriousness, until they reveal a serious shortcoming or gap. Usually, it is because they borked up their teleology or ontology.

With all that out of the way—let us begin!

We travel back, back, back, minutes, months, years, decades, back to that fabled time, back to that ancient race of Elder Nerds and Troll Lords; back to the fabled lands of Wisconsin and Minnesota! In that ancient era, there was not the hallowed Role-Playing Game, but lo! It was the age of warfare, of mighty mini-armies crashing together according to the rule of the sacred tape measure, and chance was determined by the inscrutable, hate-filled beings known as ‘six-sided dice’. Yea! The first of the Elder Nerds were not, as our own debased, degenerate Internet shades who haunt the airwaves from our smelly caves. Nay! The Elder Nerds were gamers. Gamesmen all, who dared the sport of strategy, spat in the face of chance; each who greeted an opponent as friend and victim, who in confidence strode mightily across the field of battle, only to be greeted by ignominious defeat! Neither for fame nor fortune did the Elder Nerds strove but the thrill of chance, plans best-laid and mis-played, for all like sportsmen saw the consequence through.

It was, all and all, a small world compared to our own. Superhero comics were hitting their full mature stride around this time. The sit-coms had changed from homely black-and-white idylls to the more biting, crass, crude and sharp sit-coms we know today (though they wouldn’t be as we know them until the 90s). Tolkien’s works were about twenty years old by this point, in the public. The Internet wasn’t a thing. Rock-and-roll was still rocking strong, and had not yet diversified into the many sub-genres (power, grunge, etc.) though Heavy Metal was causing controversy. The multiplication of rock would come soon. You could say, that hobbies were still hobbies, and not lifestyles.

Don’t mistake that world as placid, though. I’m not even talking about the politics of the era, I mean that Joseph Campbell (grrrr), JRR Tolkien, and our friends Robert E. Howard and HP Lovecraft’s stories and myths were working their way through the fiction-subculture, plus the science greats of Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein, and Issac Asimov* had published their recognizable stories around this time, and they had to mature in the American culture for a few years. (And this isn’t even covering the other authors who are unknown in our time, like John Brunner of Stand on Zanzibar fame, for sci-fi, or dark fantasy writer Michael Moorcock, of Elric of Melniboné infamy, or Poul Anderson, his effective predecessor.)

[*Arther C. Clark was a hack! I don’t like him!]

For cripes sake people, Dungeons & and Dragons is older than Star Wars! Stars Wars, people! DND came out in 1974, and Star Wars: A New Hope came out in 1977. But DND was conceived even earlier than that, and its soul bounced between two men—Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax*.

[*Now, I don’t intend to give a biography in these posts, and I mean no ill will towards any of the personages involved. People are complicated and make bad choices. So it goes. The most I’ll do is provide a very brief sketch, though never think that sums up the person. People are fascinating.]

First, with Gygax. For our story, he and his gaming buddy, Jeff Perren, got tired of ordinary wargames—you know, like ones based on Napoleon’s conquests, or historical real-life battles*. Together, they made the game Chainmail, published in 1971 by Guidon Games. Over the previous decade, in the 1960s, there was an experimental phase in wargaming, in trying to invent new forms of the traditional battle-simulator game, or in making new scenarios for existing games. What made Chainmail new was that it had clear fantastical elements, like knights jousting with giants, and wizards acted as living artillery pieces (like cannons!). But all the miniature models—because you used small figurines and moved them on a table—were classed as one of six unit types, which determined how the models ‘fought’. In other words, a universal system of numbers applied the same rules and results to mortal men and magical creatures.

[*Risk was published in 1957, Axis and Allies in 1981, and Settlers of Catan in 1995, for reference. Here, I’m talking about people making accurate figurines of Napoleonic-era soldiers, or models of soldiers from antiquity, and moving them around on the game board to fight each other. Others games were based on WWI or WWII battles.]

This is extremely important in our history—the same rules and numbers applied to all.

With Don Kaye (childhood friend), Mike Reese, and Leon Tucker, Gygax made the Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association, in 1970; its headquarters was Gygax’s basement. Earlier than that, Gygax worked with Bill Speer and Scott Duncan to found the International Federation of Wargamers in 1967—basically, their hobby-store gaming club bought up other hobby-store gaming clubs in the area. And around that time, Gygax met Dave Arneson in 1969, after Gygax made the Lake Geneva Wargames Convention in 1968 (aka, Gen Con). Later, in 1972, Arneson visited Gygax and pitched his ideas to him.

What Arneson did, for our story, was that, like Gygax and co., he was a gamer, and loved to experiment with games and game rules. Arneson was working on his own material, called Blackmoor, inspired by traditional wargames as well as elements drawn in from Chainmail. For Arneson, his twist was that, instead of pitting armies against each other—what if you had only one figurine? One model, one unit? And you had a collection of then—just a handful—and you had them run around in some dungeons on an adventure? Even then, with those mechanical changes, Arneson focused on the story, not the setting. Why not? If you shrink down to just a few people—well, who are they? What’s their character like?

What was in Blackmoor? Everything. Everything that would be the signature style of DND from there on out. Arneson and Gygax were nerds, and they loved the Medieval era of the Dark Ages—though Arneson actually did not care much for Conan and thought the Conan stories were too samey—and they both loved games that had sailing ships/navies in them.

Ahem, in Blackmoor, there was already medieval fantasy element, but (thanks to Arneson), both steam-powered and clockwork-powered fantastical machines, limited time travel, some science-fiction elements (other dimensions), gunpowder, and wonky submarines. Mechanically, Blackmoor had hit points and armor class, dungeon maps and of course character development—how they grew more powerful and changed over the course of the adventure. All of these are staples to today, fifty years later!

And then, in 1973, Gygax and Don Kaye founded Tactical Studies Rules, Incorporated (TSR, Inc.), and from there the world was never the same. Unfortunately, Arneson and Gygax had a falling out, and Arneson disappeared from the spotlight in 1976. Later, in 1986, Gygax left TSR, after it had become a proper corporation, and slowly pushed out Gygax as an influence. Those legacies are whole other stories, that rest, I’m sure, on differing personalities and a bit of ego getting in the way. That’s for history, let’s talk metaphysics.

So how did DND grow up, then? As a setting, and as a set of rules? The first is that the rules are effectively universal. No matter the setting, as long as it is sufficiently fantastical, all settings used the same rules. (This changes by necessity when you get to the modern era of automatic firearms, because modern firearms would dramatically change how the small-scale tactical combat would work.) Yes, as long as the technology level stayed in the spectrum of ‘stone age tools’ to ‘primitive, bulky steam engines’, the rules stayed the same. Once you get to the proper Industrial Age? Things needed to change.

For, the rules and setting of DND are inextricably linked. One must express the other.

No, no, not with the rules or the metaphysics. Not yet. Rather, ask, ‘what’s the appeal of DND?’

The answer is that one can adventure in safety. It is almost like a stage-play, intimate, with costumes and dramas and plots. It is not, like I’ve heard some other players have described, a power fantasy or ‘superhero simulator’. Truly? You have that kind of cynical outlook, when you’ve been playing the game for 20 years*, as I have? Shows how opinions vary. And, okay, there can be truth to those statements. I’m trying to start with a more noble origin, because I believe that things start as good and then can turn sour later.

[*All right, if you want to be nit-picky, I learned the game when I was 12 and began playing in earnest around age 14; the real twenty-year anniversary will be in 2027.]

Yes, a stage play, where the players are actors who make up the script as they go along. A long-running group of friends, like my own, can turn into like an amateur acting troupe. You can say that Dungeons & Dragons is like exploring outrageous characters in the privacy of your own home. Sure, you can ‘be anything’, but like some actors you get typecast into roles you like. How it goes.

But that’s the high-falutin’ reason, the BLOOD COMBAT is where it’s at! More than rolling dice or crunching numbers, it is the high-stakes tactical decision making that truly shines, that is then completely upturned by a freak roll of the dice. I don’t even mean a ‘critical hit’ or fumble, I mean when the characters involved, friend and foe, roll so badly on the Initiative check that every one just stares at one another, dumbfounded, for an entire combat turn—which can waste valuable time limits on special bonuses. I mean when, as is the curse of my good friend, when he rolls four twenty-sided dice (a large number of attack dice) and gets three 1’s and a 6, and then gets pummeled by an angry tree spirit or troll. Or, like what happened to one of my favorite knightly characters, I roll poorly on a check and then get disintegrated to dust by a foul wizard—only to curse at myself minutes later, when I discovered that I forgot I had a special bonus that applied in that specific situation and if I remembered to apply it, my knight would have survived! (The evil wizard escaped after dousing the party in magical mustard gas, and afterwards the party had to go on a different quest to revive my very dead knight.)

Another of my friends described combat—at least at our level of play—as ‘tactical puzzle solving’. Not entirely wrong. All of them are true math nerds, I’m along for the ride. I’m the old, doddering man at this point, as I can’t keep up with all the numbers. I’m too busy devoting brain power to other endeavors, like writing novels (or this blog) to keep up with a fantasy battle simulator. Five other brains thinking for you is more than enough.

…Right, high-stakes tactical decision making, treating combat as an elaborate puzzle, the world is a stage and the players make up the script as they go along, pushing the envelope by playing as persons wholly unlike you or are too outrageous for public politeness…there’s more, too. Whatever the setting, the world is a player, too. Even typical games are more than just the heroes. Yes, there is the Dungeon Master, who acts as arbiter and trickster, but the world in any DND game is active. It has its own rules that scale from vermin to gods. A well-made DND setting is alive in the background. It has, a cosmology.

More to follow!