Dungeons & Dragons is a roleplaying game. I don’t think many people would dispute that, though they may quibble about the exact definition of what an RPG actually is. Smarter people than me have tried to define it, and I'm not here to do that today. I'm still thinking about what I am here to do, but sometimes I need to let those thoughts flow out of my fingers, through the keyboard, and onto the blog page before I really know what I'm on about. Please bear with me as I work my way through it.
D&D is also the first RPG. Yes, yes, there was Braunstein, and Blackmoor, and who knows what else… Commence quibbling if you like. But as far as the world of normal people goes, D&D came first. But it also came in a form that normal people would find - let's be generous - somewhat difficult to interpret. Hell, there are many highly abnormal D&D obsessives who are still puzzled by it, even after decades of internet discussion.
Reading the original booklets again for the umpty-umpth time, particularly in light of the dissection of them that's happening over at Tao of D&D, has made one thing very clear: the original creators were not writing this game as an RPG. Of course they weren’t, and they couldn't have: the genre didn’t exist, and the term had yet to be coined. But what’s apparent on a close reading, especially when one tries to throw off assumptions from later iterations of the game, is that what’s written on the page is not an RPG. Not one as we’d understand the term today certainly. I don’t even think it much resembles the style of play that was prevalent when I picked up the game in 1988. Whatever game the folks in the Twin Cities and Lake Geneva were playing, it's not the same game that many of us grew up with and are playing today. The more I look into it, the more fascinated I've become with what I call "the game before the game".
The obvious lens through which to look at original D&D is that of wargaming. The game sprang from that scene after all, as an outgrowth of Chainmail. Just as wargames are played as individual battles or scenarios, possibly linked as a campaign, D&D is played the same way on a smaller scale. A game is a single underworld foray or outdoor adventure, in a “scenario” (dungeon or wilderness) set up by the referee/dungeon master, with a campaign being a series of such adventures with a consistency of player characters and world setting. None of this is news to anybody reading this blog, although I gather that the older playstyle resembles a picaresque, or series of short stories with a revolving cast, much more than the ongoing quests and epics favoured by modern D&D.
But there’s more to the original D&D booklets than dungeon and wilderness adventuring, especially once you get to the naval and aerial battle sections of Vol. 3. I’m starting to feel like original D&D is best understood as a collection of sub-systems, or mini-games. You have the core game of dungeon exploration in the referee’s “underworld”; ad-hoc wilderness adventures using the board and some rules from Outdoor Survival; the domain game, where players carve out an area of the wilderness to build their castle and rule once they reach “name” level; the medieval fantasy wargame of Chainmail; the naval wargame adapted from Don't Give Up the Ship; and the aerial wargame adapted from Fight in the Skies. All of these can be interlinked to form a campaign, and even though the rules between them aren’t always fully compatible, and some aspects are far from adequately explained, the framework is just about sturdy enough that it can be made to work.
I’m not really sure where these thoughts are leading me, but I’ve been getting more interested lately in treating the game as a game, and divesting it of the amateur storytelling and theatrics it’s accumulated over the years. I can see why it went that direction after it got out of the hands of the wargamers and pulp fantasy fans who originated it. Maybe it was inevitable, especially given that the most popular fantasy fiction over the next couple of decades was chasing after Tolkien, but it doesn’t help that original D&D does a pretty poor job of explaining itself. The conceptual power is there in those booklets, as evidenced by how quickly the game spread in spite of its shortcomings, but it barely explains how D&D is played, or how the sub-systems/mini-games fit together. At best, it lays out some rules for dungeon and wilderness adventures, and vaguely gestures at the rest.
I wonder what a version of D&D that could be shelved alongside Monopoly (as Gygax envisioned) and played out of the box would look like. Certainly the rules would have to be rewritten for clarity (not by Gygax, as much as I enjoy his writing). And maybe only one of the sub-games would be included, probably dungeon adventuring. The various D&D basic sets did just this, but they still required a lot of pre-preparation by the dungeon master. Perhaps the game would come with a pre-packaged underworld (or “megadungeon” if you prefer), and stock character types, and play something like a boardgame where only the DM sees the whole board. There are a bunch of games like that now (and Dungeon! existed back then), but who knows what D&D might look like now had that been done in 1974.
Of course, in many ways this is removing the unique elements and the core appeal of the game. D&D’s greatest strength, I feel, lies in its freeform nature, the ability for players to take any action and for the DM to improvise based on those actions. There’s also the personalisation that comes with character creation, and also the crafting of the dungeon and wilderness on the DM’s part. The DM and players can't play without creating characters and an environment to adventure in, and that process builds a strong investment in the game. I doubt D&D would have lasted without those elements.
In some ways, after all of this writing, I feel like I’ve just gone around in a circle and conceptualised the BECMI line. You have your boxed game for dungeon adventures (basic set), followed by your wilderness game (expert set), followed by your domain game and war game (companion set), and so on. But even that version of the game, just a decade later, feels vastly removed from the game that original D&D hints at.
Perhaps I'm just grasping at phantoms here (no save or die effect, thankfully!). We all have our own ideas about what Arneson, Gygax and company were doing back in the earliest days of the game, but only those who were there know for sure. It doesn't really matter to anybody's home game what those guys were doing 50+ years ago, but I still find myself fascinated by it. And I find myself wondering, if I do my best to set up and run a campaign exactly as the original booklets instruct, what will the game look like? Will it be a wargame, or will it be a roleplaying game? Or will it be something in the middle, undefined?
