This was a good read, and the author makes convincing points. Largely, I agree, but the author makes a mistake that's extremely common in the hobby: they presume that the author of the book is the authority of the game, whereas the presumption made by Gygax et al. was that the Dungeon Master was overflowing with ideas, and needed only some reference points to pin them down.
One might as well refer to my garage toolbox as "anti-Cabinets" for containing no hinges.
And these anti-Medieval fixtures from the text aren't even necessarily central to the experience. Hiring retainers is a hand-wave, a way to get back to the meat of the game: prying gems from the eyes of enchanted statues.
I guess my point is that the most accurate possible exegesis of the Gygaxian canon misses, almost entirely, the heart of the game, which exists overwhelmingly at the table, and not in the book.
> This was a good read, and the author makes convincing points.
The meaning of MEDIEVAL is at the heart of this. D&D is Medieval, as it has markedly and prominent medieval world characteristics.
When the game world clashes with what narrative is being presented, they retreat to minutia. When the game world makes no reference, a reasoning is constructed without reference. Topics are repeated - eg no feudalism and no vassals and no kings (which is incorrect and handwaved away as it serves them).
I think it's empty prattle, reeking of being edgy, and seems more than a little strange to show up on HN.
Can you actually provide any citation for OD&D containing feudalism or monarchy? Certainly, later versions add it, but I found myself nodding along going "huh, he's right, the original version didn't have anything that really resembles a large-scale government at all."
Every version of D&D contains the idea that a random peasant can go make a name for themselves as a monster-slayer and become a baron. Land is literally free for the taking if you can just clear out the beasts. That seems much more American Dream / Colonialism, and not at all European / Medieval history.
> The meaning of MEDIEVAL is at the heart of this. D&D is Medieval, as it has markedly and prominent medieval world characteristics.
That's the important part for me, too. The general idea I always ran with was that "medieval" in the context of D&D (and most role playing games with that setting) referred to the environment (castles, villages, etc) and technology level (swords, bows, etc; sometimes early firearms).
As a general rule of thumb, it didn't go into government at all, because that's a aspect of the campaign setting. The actual campaign settings (Greyhawk, etc) defined various governments, everything from kings/emperors, to mage groups, to dragon kings.
D&D (and much fantasy) is the inverse of theatres staging Shakespeare in modern dress. Macbeth can be made to look modern by having modern suits and a set resembling an office or whatever, but the language and cultural attitudes depicted are still renaissance.
D&D has the swords and castles which makes it look somewhat medieval on the surface, but the culture of the world does not resemble medieval times at all.
I don't buy that the "heart of the game" is at the table. It's at the table where the game is being played, by the rules that the game sets up. In a way that no one had ever really played before, and a way everyone ended up playing since.
You can barely call D&D anti-medieval; it isn't from a world of obsessing about Tolkien-style fantasy. It's Gygax coming up with rules for miniatures wargaming where players are individuals within a group rather than being entire sides of a war and moving armies, or being squad-level and choosing how to move squad members. That was the important part that influenced the entire world. All of the players were part of a single squad, and working (and cooperating) as individuals for their own benefit.
These rules were then applied to Gygax's (and everybody else's) favorite fantasy novels. The thing that varied most about those novels was the idea of magic, so the only influence on his system from fiction that I recall is the stat-friendly Jack Vance magic, which would end up imposed onto other settings.
But it's still fair to call the system anti-medieval as the article does because it was made for a competitive multiplayer tabletop game which was meant to progress over sessions, and the main aspect of its progression are stats. So it has to be as fair as possible, and you have to be able to accumulate indefinitely rather than die in the same place you were born with no more than your parents had. That's American myth, not medieval reality. There can't be a medieval system, because that would crush all of the characters, starting by burning all of the witches. If every character were a fighter trying to get ahead by fighting in an army, there's no D&D, because D&D is individual, not squad or army.
> So it has to be as fair as possible, and you have to be able to accumulate indefinitely rather than die in the same place you were born with no more than your parents had. That's American myth, not medieval reality.
The medieval era actually had a pretty decent number of wandering mercenaries and adventurers, many of whom were displaced people from the neverending ongoing local wars across the centuries. (Of course, these groups were also basically interchangeable with bandits if they were broke.) Just look at the Varangian Guard, which recruited itinerant soldiers from all over Northern Europe from the 900s pretty much right up until Constantinople fell to the Ottomans.
This all kicked into even higher gear in the Renaissance and later. As central monarchical control grew, so did army sizes and the impacts of those armies, leading to entire villages being wiped out or displaced entirely as a side effect of being in the way of an army passing through. Conflicts like the Thirty Years' War led to immense numbers of deaths and famine (current estimates say 4-8 million deaths just from the Thirty Years' War, for example), and consequently to immense numbers of migrants looking for work anywhere they could.
The part that didn't exist was, of course, the dungeons. There was no nominally ethical-concern-free money sitting around underground; the source was other people, willing or not. But the whole point of D&D was to have a small-scale alternative to the "armies or mercenary companies fighting each other" gameplay that it originally sprang from, so I can give a pass on that, even if the writers never actually figured out any coherent setting explanations for it.
> All of the players were part of a single squad, and working (and cooperating) as individuals for their own benefit.
Sorry, I'm not sure if this is specifically referring to Chainmail or early D&D. If the latter, this is explicitly not how Gygax (and Arneson) ran their campaigns back in those days, though. They had groups of people playing that fluctuated in the 30-50 player range, and people often had multiple characters specifically because they frequently did not have the same people at the table each session. They were in the same shard, persistent world, but there were many different parties, and they all decided on their own goals. These often conflicted - adversarial interactions between groups were things that happened! B2 - Keep on the Borderlands - even includes a lot of details around how the DM should handle such situations, how the players can protect their treasure from other players, etc.
No doubt more in some places and times than others: there is a lot of variation over a thousand years and an entire continent or more.
On top of that the player in D & D are not playing very low ranked characters (they have weapons and money, are free to adventure, etc.) and are adventurers of some sort so are exceptional to start with. Clerics even belong to a group that could rise a great deal through ability (albeit by showing administrative or leadership ability within the organisation rather than by going off on adventures).
> sarting by burning all of the witches
Witch burning was more of an ancient and early modern phenomenon than medieval.
> I don't buy that the "heart of the game" is at the table. It's at the table where the game is being played, by the rules that the game sets up. In a way that no one had ever really played before, and a way everyone ended up playing since.
To an extent, yes, but while, as I responded to the GP just upthread, I think Gygax's view, at least with AD&D, was that every game should be played a certain way, I don't think that's what actually happened. Every D&D campaign I have been in has had plenty of house rules, ignored some of the standard rules, and in the end, if what the rules said didn't make sense at the table, the rules got thrown out and everyone just roleplayed what made sense at the table. So in the end, I think the heart of the game is at the table; that's where the actual stories are made. The rules are a helpful framework for cooperative storytelling, but they don't and shouldn't be the final determiner of what happens in your world.
The original books missed the idea of initial motivation on the "adventurer" career path. Why and how did even these first level characters end up this way. That makes the rules and settings awkward and necessitates the world to contain bait for first level characters. Like posters seeking guards for (incompetent) caravan escort duty or that kind of thing. Some people noticed that and tried to formulate 1st level adventures or entire world settings which did not start with a fully formed 1st level fighter or mage. Perhaps you start as a bored teen farm hand, or something extraordinary happens in your life but it helps if there is something that kicks you outside of "normal" medieval life and into something far more individualistic.
Fair enough. I forgot the name of this ruleset, but there's a very simple D20-based game ruleset which is designed for beginners but IMHO is more fun even for everyone, as it focuses on creativity and storytelling! The rules are very simple:
(1) The players take turns. They describe what they want to do, and the DM narrates the outcome, incorporating a dice roll into the process if needed, because:
(2) Any significant action requires a dice roll, which cannot be re-attempted if failed.
(3) A roll of a 1 is a critical failure (a guaranteed failure even on an easy task such as cooking pancakes), and a critical failure during combat causes accidental self-injury. A roll of a 20 is a critical success, which always succeeds (e.g. a level 1 archer can destroy a level 18 Elder Dragon if they aim for the eye and roll a 20). Any roll between 2-19 is compared to the difficulty level of the attempted action. Difficult actions require a roll of around 16 to succeed; easier ones, perhaps around 12. The raw dice roll (if between 2-19) is supplemented by adding around +1 or +2 if the player has invested skill points into the relevant skill, and by also adding around +1 or +2 if the player is using high-quality specialized equipment for the task.
That's it! Of course you probably also want to incorporate standard gaming tropes such as levels, gold, HP, MP, weapons, armor, and such, but all of that is not meant to be set in stone within this system - e.g. if you want to try using a pair of sapplings and some rope as a giant improved slingshot weapon, that's meant to be allowed to work, in this system (albeit maybe with a -3 adder to dice checks, since the weapon's quality is probably total crap). It's about being nice to each other and encouraging each others' creative ideas, so the team + DM can tell a totally new and perhaps unexpected story together.
When I explain DND-like games to people, I usually tell them about this system, because it's very welcoming, and encourages people to try out new ideas and find creative solutions to big tasks. A campaign can be super open-ended; e.g. "Destroy Sauron's ring - by any means - open world". With these rules, all sorts of creative ideas (such as the classic idea of asking one of the giant eagles to fly over Mt. Doom and simply drop the ring into the open caldera of the volcano) can be attempted, and can succeed, if the players are plucky and resourceful!
I have never liked the "20 = critical success = always succeeds", mainly because I can with a 5% chance end a "Destroy Sauron's ring" adventure in 40 seconds with "I attempt to destroy it by hitting it with a hammer, like, really hard."
> they presume that the author of the book is the authority of the game, whereas the presumption made by Gygax et al. was that the Dungeon Master was overflowing with ideas, and needed only some reference points to pin them down.
Original D&D may have been more or less that way, but anyone who read the AD&D 1st Edition Dungeon Master's Guide will see the opposite: a profusion of detail laid out by Gygax himself, with strong implications all over the place that this was The Correct Way to run a D&D (or at least Advanced D&D) campaign.
> the heart of the game, which exists overwhelmingly at the table
I agree with this, and I think Gygax probably would have said the same if asked, but at least as far as AD&D is concerned, I think what Gygax meant by "at the table" was "at the table as long as things are run the way I think they should be run".
And of course no discussion of D&D and Gygax would be complete without the classic XKCD requiem:
Hmm. I still play a mix of ADD 1E and Basic/Expert twice a week, and regularly re-read the 1E DMG. I think Gary has a lot of ideas about how D&D is best played, and is happy to share them, but between what's written in the DMG, all of his posts on dragonsfoot over the years, etc., I can't agree that he thinks the only way to play D&D (or even AD&D specifically) is the way he envisions it.
In fact, he's always known that the overwhelming majority of players have not ever played D&D the way that he did during the OD&D/AD&D 1e days. You have to remember that Gygax and Arneson's campaigns were much more like a tabletop precursor to MMOs than what we think of today when we talk about TTRPG campaigns. Both of them were running persistent worlds where 30-50 players were dropping in and out constantly, often with multiple characters involved in different things, multiple parties, etc. Time ingame ran linearly with time in the real world (thus Gygax's repeated insistence that strict time records must be kept), things happened in-world even when no one was playing, etc. But it's always been a tiny minority of games that were run this way, and Gygax knew it and knew that most people playing would have difficulty doing it the way he did.
You also have to remember that Gygax explicitly states in the DMG that players should not know all the rules and that you should distrust any player that has a copy of the DMG, and has many places where he recommends the DM adjust things as they see fit for their situation and table. He also was in favor of DMs fudging rolls when they believed it to be the right thing to do! And there's also his quote of “The secret we should never let the gamemasters know is that they don't need any rules” - to me, all evidence points towards Gygax believing that the heart of the game really was at the table.
IIR by the time AD&D 1st Edition Dungeon Master's Guide was published, there were already a bunch of blooming competing systems, with different dynamics between explicit and implicit, not to mention the combat systems. Those alternates include the Arduin Grimoires for example! Not everyone read or stuck with AD&D 1st Edition Dungeon Master's Guide but some did.
There is an entire ACOUP post [1] on what feudalism actually means, and it is a _lot_ more complex than "land in exchange of military glory for your overlord". Actually the "overlord" is surprisingly weak wrt. our current assumptions about the powers a "monarch" should have.
I've long contended that most uses of the "-ism" terms in popular discourse mostly serve an emotional purpose and otherwise do more to obfuscate than they do to illuminate understanding, especially because most people have very little idea of what the -isms actually entail.
As a case in point, there was a recent conversation I was having with someone kvetching about modern-day feudalism, and when I asked them what they thought feudalism was, they were modelling it after Louis XIV's absolute monarchy. Louis XIV was the king who abolished the last vestiges of feudalism in France. (To their credit, after I explained the history of feudalism and absolute monarchy, and why absolute monarchy is almost the complete opposite of feudalism, they did understand the mistake they were making.)
As Bret Devereaux points out, I think a large part of the problem is the sheer compression of history. We take about 1000 years of history and compress it into just a few events: the Fall of the (Western) Roman Empire, Charlemagne crowned Holy Roman Emperor, the Viking Age, the First Crusade, (maybe) the Black Death, the Protestant Reformation, and two of those are bookends for the period.
This was the first thing I thought of when I saw “dark age” in the post. If you want to get a historian spun up, start talking about dark ages and prepare to be educated.
Depends on the historian. The overly theatrical way some historians react to the term "dark age" is a bit revisionistic (and perpetual revisionism seems extremely popular among academic historians).
And many get similarly spun up about the term "feudalism" as well.
Violence and the State in Languedoc, 1250-1400 by Justine Firnhaber-Baker is an interesting and in-depth investigation of this power-without-power dynamic.
Sure: D&D is the American Dream. (Lizzie Stark said it in 2012 https://nordiclarp.org/w/images/a/a0/2012-States.of.play.pdf and I'd been saying it for the best part of a decade already at that point.) That's why Paranoia, a middle finger to the mores and expectations of late-'70s, rules-lawyer-era D&D, is a role-playing game about being, basically, a work gang of gulag prisoners in a totalitarian state; while Call of Cthulhu, another RPG from people who were sick of D&D, experiments a bit half-heartedly with ideas of cosmic despair and creeping personal ruin, and bigs up Cthulhu himself as an unbeatable grudge monster.
It's interesting to look outside the US, in countries where the D&D translations didn't come in a decade early: When facing Cthulhu, Paranoia, Rolemaster, Vampire and the like on an even playing field, D&D didn't really win.
Don't forget Toon as the radical alternative for somebody who wants to run an easy and fast game that is not set in such an unforgiving setting as CoC or Paranoia.
Gary Gygax himself says so. He describes the original D&D books as “Rules for Fantastic Medieval War Games” (on the cover) and “rules [for] designing your own fantastic-medieval campaign” (in the introduction).
The original D&D books (before the Advanced series) did not describe a combat system. Instead, the rules of the wargame "Chainmail" were recommended (as was the map from Avalon Hill's Outdoor Survival for adventuring between dungeons).
Which is to say, the context of Gygax's remarks was gone by the time D&D books showed up at the Waldenbooks in every local mall. D&D was literally a different game in the 1970's.
I'm not sure what you mean here. I had the original books, the supplements, then "Basic D&D" and "Advanced D&D". The rules were the same, just repackaged. The original rules didn't "recommend" using Chainmail, they assumed you had a copy and knew the rules, which was a source of confusion for newbies.
I remember being disappointed with AD&D as it was just the same old shit rules, with Dave Arneson's name cynically removed from the copyright. The next year I discovered Runequest, and later in College, Champions, and never looked back.
I think by the 80s D&D was well known, and not just because of the TV show. This was before 2nd edition, which came out in 1989.
I vaguely remember looking over 2nd edition, they tweaked a few things, but the core mechanics were the same.
3rd edition did shake things up a bit, and were the first version I considered worth playing.
This is to say nothing of the modern "baristacore" fantasy, which seems to be a projection of modern American urban life, with many of its social attitudes and creature comforts, into a fantastical set-dressing evoking a mixture of high-fantasy and medieval aesthetics. Like a fancier-looking version of the Columbia U bar scene.
For recent examples, Dragon Age, Warcraft, and D&D itself are pushing further and further in this direction lately.
For me, that book sits in a weird crux of interesting yet underwhelming. I think it suffers a lot from the implied quasi-D&D setting intersecting with modern assumptions. It has a lot of absentee worldbuilding that amounts to a blank space implying all the stuff you're already used to from the real world, instead of doing anything interesting with it being fantasy.
There's a huge retrojection problem going in a lot of fantasy right now.
I really wish authors would write books that authentically described an alien society, rather than wish casting "vague liberal fantasy with different clothes"(usually liberal, but libertarian authors do it too, same problem, different lumps under the clothes).
Now, I wonder: would that sell? I dunno.
But I might scream the next time I read or see an "other" society dumping duty for individualism as per European upper crust romanticism. Again.
Consider this: Why not write fantasies about non-anthropomorphized dogs or jellyfish?
Art, inclucing fantasy, always has been a mirror to reality (not 100%, of course). Otherwise, nobody would understand it, it wouldn't move them, and they wouldn't care.
Also, it would be very hard to write well. People write well about what they know. Hemingway famously advised that you need to know the entire iceberg to write convincingly about the tip.
Despite never directly playing AD&D or any other TTRPG, I consistently get sucked into the fandom aspects of it, including a period of binging the Mann Shorts productions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UW8kYzDNw1I
D20 rules applied, usually, to "slice of life" situations and mixing in four strong personalities, with zero production values, just talking heads around a table, rolling dice.
D&D is what happens when you put pulp novels in an idea collider. The really big influences are Conan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Barbarian and Tolkein, which are themselves very different styles, but there's also a magpie effect where anything that Gygax read and thought was cool got added in.
Expecting "realism" and coherency from a fantasy world destroys the fantasy. But somehow projecting realism onto fantasy is a popular activity for fans.
D&D's main setting is built as a kitchen sink with tons of weird conflicting ideas happening at once so that people can exclude whatever parts they want to create their coherent setting. You want to do a vampire story? A tolkien-esque quest? Steampunk? Wizards of the Coast is happy to sell you rules for all of that.
verisimilitude, not coherency. The real world doesn't appear coherent, why would a fantasy one. The consistent application of style and rules- that gives verisimilitude, and that's what counts.
It’s a popular activity because you aren’t being graded or financially incentivized to make it all work seamlessly. You’re playing make-believe with your friends, so if you want to project some realism into your game because that just sounds like a fun idea, well then you can!
As long as everyone is on board you can kind of do whatever the hell you want, like playing with legos and toy cars and whatever else is on the ground as a kid. I’d venture to say it’s also why “rule of cool” is so popular. Sometimes you just want to do cool/funny/etc. stuff and D&D told a lot of people “hell yeah get after it.”
By the time the original D&D books came out, the Blackmoor campaign (that inspired the original game) already had crashed spaceships and trans-dimensional travel.
There are a lot of authors and RPG creators who create coherent fantasy worlds. I feel it is mostly just a matter of preference and I can enjoy both. Worlds without internal consistency like Discworld and worlds with internal consistency like Amber or any of the many worlds created by Sanderson. Excepting realism does in no way destroy the fantasy, in a world which was created with a focus on consistency it only makes it easier to play RPGs since you can use the already existing rules to easily make up new things.
But of course if you expect consistency where there is none to being with you will likely be disappointed.
It's fun to see Amber described as internally consistent, but it seemed to me obviously built as an onion of lies and most of that onion was built a layer at a time seemingly by the seat of the pants for what would be most jarring/weird/fun at the given part of the book where Zelazny thought he needed a big twist and/or gut punch to the current protagonist (and by proxy, the reader).
Perhaps that's partly why the attempt by a different author to build prequels failed so spectacularly, too, because it assumed too much the world was internally consistent and so was boring and didn't reveal anything truly new because it wasn't really trying, it was just playing out the obvious consequences for if you believed in some of the consistency of the previous books. I suppose that it didn't really understand the onion it was trying to emulate and that there should have been a lot more lies and a lot less consistency.
(ETA: It's also why sadly it felt like the last five books were all gearing up [often literally, new equipment every stage like levels in a videogame] for a war that will now never happen, because we don't know with who and for what reason or why because the lying protagonist wouldn't tell us, probably because Zelazny hadn't yet figured it out either and was waiting for the right moment to strike in the books that would have followed in some other timeline freer from cancer. I do still wonder where those books would have been leading. I don't know the author that could answer that definitively for us other than Zelazny.)
Depends on what type of realism you are talking about. The details are very scant on for example how Shire is politically set up and how the farming in general work and supply lines and all such things.
I just got around to reading Howard's Conan stories a year or so ago and was surprised how much it felt like just reading a novelization of a D&D adventure. It feels like a much bigger influence then Tolkien, where the influence seems limited to borrowing some races and creatures.
I remember when our group in the 80s tried to play Chivalry. 5 of us peasants got slaughtered by an armed guard. Sounds about right for accuracy, but it was not much fun at all.
The only rational way to interpret D&D is not as medieval, but as a distant far-future post-post-industrial setting.
Magic spells as ambient nanotech that's poorly understood and difficult to invoke -- hence the "Vancian" system which comes from Jack Vance's "Dying Earth" series.
Magic items as remnant tech.
Different "races" as the vast gulf of time has led to speciation.
Gods as posthuman or artificially intelligent entities that have transcended the world but still keep an eye on it from time to time.
And so forth. There's literally nothing medieval about it, but it could be 1,000,000 AD. Just think of their medical technologies in light of our era's!
(All assuming, of course, that it's "baseline reality" and not a sandbox, as it was in Neal Stephenson's The Fall.)
A very fun example of this theme is in the franco-belgian fantasy comic series Thorgal, which is set in a Conan-esque fantasy world with all the expected trappings, but in which the gods are highly advanced alien entities and magic is often framed as manipulating extremely complex and powerful heirloom technologies that the living have no frame of reference for as anything other than magic.
The titular outsider hero falls from the stars in a little space pod as a baby and is raised by the local Viking-proxy culture ala Superman or Goku. Quite an engaging read if you're into this blend of sword and sorcery with background sci-fi elements.
That is similar to the concept of Numenara - which is set in the future 4 billion years from now. At that point in time, the earth no longer geographically resembles anything current and has been repopulated a couple of times by disparate races of non-human sentiences. The current population (as of the the beginning of Numenara) are yet another group of humans transplanted or created in-situ and living in a world where the technologies of the past resemble magic. It seemed pretty clear that, from the background, there clearly is not a thing that is magic, but its stand-in is unknown and sometimes, unknowable, creations from a lost past.
I read "The Archers" as a kid, and really liked it, but it was the only one I had access to. I recall it was a pretty straightforward adventure, set somewhere around northern Europe in the 10th century, without any sci-fi elements... Now I'll need to revisit it and find the others. I've got a young son who would also be interested, so perhaps that's something we can do together. Thanks, man.
Honestly, "magic is ambient nanotech that's poorly understood and difficult to invoke" is a rather tired trope, because it's an instantly obvious approach one can take. Doesn't stop people from re-using it over and over, take e.g. "The Lord of the Ice Garden" by Grzędowicz: this twist is so obvious that all the build-up feels kinda insulting to the reader's intelligence.
A lot of Japanese video games lean into this idea pretty heavily, too. It's kinda funny how the Zelda series just can't get away from it—no matter how far into the past they go, the magic is always technology from a previous civilization. Skyward Sword was supposed to be the Zelda origin story, and yet the Master Sword still has an AI companion in it from who knows where.
As far as I remember Fi is not an AI companion, she was put into the sword by Hylia. There is all the tech in the Lanayru desert though, that is most definitely tech from an ancient civilization.
It points out "the dungeon builders were part of a coinage economy just like the current one. There hasn’t even been significant inflation or deflation since the dungeons were built.", which doesn't seem compatible with a far-future post-post industrial setting interpretation.
I think "fantastic American history" is a rational description.
Not American history- set so far in the future that the idea of 'America' is as widely understood as we currently understand 'Sea Peoples'. Think Gene Wolfe's 'Book of the New Sun'
Funny thing, the price of silver is pretty closely pegged to the amount of labor needed to dig it out of the ground and smelt it, and that doesn't change too much without late 20th century technology being involved.
This is pretty much canonical. Gygax didn't lean into it as heavily as Arneson did, but Blackmoor was pretty explicitly a post-apocalyptic setting, with remnants of advanced or alien technology being ubiquitous. Flying cars, laser guns, androids...
Does D&D even plays on earth? I remember, there are several different worlds and realms and forces travelling between them, but nothing specifically about earth. So it can play at any time, it doesn't need to be a distant future.
... Why would people be fighting with swords and maces in such a setting? And why would the rulebook present a clear dichotomy between arcane and divine magic? Or suggest bringing in Tolkien references?
The author might make broad sweeping generalizations but the main point is true. A group of PCs is basically a democracy. Such D&D democracy makes roleplaying in strict social hierarchies pretty difficult. PCs will mouth off to kings or wizards or even deities.
I clearly remember how such "D&D PC-ism" influenced the relative flopping of the early Star Trek RPG [FASA, 1982 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Role_Playing_Ga...]. The main reason? No one wanted to be ordered around by a Captain PC, or by other PC officers that outranked them. Players wanted to be "equals." (While Star Trek TTRPG did have fans and survived for a long while, it never really took off as many hoped it would.)
Another reason, though, is that it did not satisfy the bloodlust of the typical "hack and slash" D&D fans (what are now called "murder hobos" — wandering bands of characters with no allegiances, no lords, no loyalties). These types of players couldn't just use the Enterprise's phasers to hold planets hostage and take all their loot. They couldn't just be space pirates. They thought the universe of Star Trek was "boring." In GDW's Traveller, by contrast, you could definitely (in due time) get a ship capable of hurling nukes at planets. You could be space pirates! Now that was "fun!"
It is often difficult to get many D&D players outside of their modernisms and into a medieval mindset, or into any sort of realistic strictly hierarchical society (as shown, even in Science Fiction).
I've run Pendragon for decades. It can misfire spectacularly if players refuse to put aside their modern mindsets and adopt the concepts of chivalry, feudalism, courtly love and faith (Christian or otherwise) that are central to its themes and historical source materials.
I had a whole session in this past year where I went through the ancient Brehon marriage laws under late pagan/early Christian Ireland. (btw: It's a far cry from "Say Yes to the Dress.")
D&D is more like a typical Renn Faire. A motley assortment of anything from ancient to nearly modern dress. A cross-time saloon of attitudes, weaponry, cultures and so on. What passes for society is made up from kit-bashed models. It rarely makes cohesive sense.
The Star Trek RPG might have done better if it was released today than in 80's. YouTube pen and paper role playing shows have lead to more people being interested in the actual role playing aspect and not just murder hoboing.
One factor in the emphasis on role-playing is that "kill monsters and watch numbers go up while navigating a mostly linear narrative" is quite well addressed by video games... We go to the table to do things we can only do at the table.
I would put the gradual failure of the FASA system more on the same basic problem a lot of licensed RPGs have: it's an elaborate simulation wargame that happens to use the same setting, rather than a game designed to actually feel like the experience of the show. This is extremely common to the point of absurdity, to the point that even official Doctor Who and My Little Pony RPGs have done it.
They've demonstrated an interest in watching talented others do serious role-play (and also acting, which is largely orthogonal); but does that really translate into a desire to try it themselves?
> The author might make broad sweeping generalizations but the main point is true. A group of PCs is basically a democracy. Such D&D democracy makes roleplaying in strict social hierarchies pretty difficult. PCs will mouth off to kings or wizards or even deities.
But D&D (and its descendants) make this particularly likely to happen, right? Take Paranoia as a different extreme. You cannot mouth off to authority figures in Paranoia because it will get you killed in a second, and the rules encourage making you trip and get killed because you said the wrong thing to the wrong person (or Computer).
Note: I was there at West End Games when we launched Paranoia. In fact, I drew the original computer illustration as well as the secret society logos (they were inked by another artist).
A little known story: there was a player in Dan Gelber's social circle who was a total rules lawyer. He annoyed Dan & crew immensely. So Dan created a game where it was treasonous — reason for summary execution — to show any knowledge of the rules. They had a lot of fun killing that player's character over-and-over.
Yeah but then you see how the historical unconscious reveals itself: not in the “true” history trapped in books but the lived memory in the world. Of course modernity has infested all historical understanding, but it also reveals things, unconsciously, about history that a rigorous analysis could never show: and thus to redeem true history is also the bring it to a point beyond historical recognition.
You need both: you need to critical historical understanding, but you also need the real world exercise of collective memory, so that you can break through history to bring about something entirely novel.
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One might as well refer to my garage toolbox as "anti-Cabinets" for containing no hinges.
And these anti-Medieval fixtures from the text aren't even necessarily central to the experience. Hiring retainers is a hand-wave, a way to get back to the meat of the game: prying gems from the eyes of enchanted statues.
I guess my point is that the most accurate possible exegesis of the Gygaxian canon misses, almost entirely, the heart of the game, which exists overwhelmingly at the table, and not in the book.
The meaning of MEDIEVAL is at the heart of this. D&D is Medieval, as it has markedly and prominent medieval world characteristics.
When the game world clashes with what narrative is being presented, they retreat to minutia. When the game world makes no reference, a reasoning is constructed without reference. Topics are repeated - eg no feudalism and no vassals and no kings (which is incorrect and handwaved away as it serves them).
I think it's empty prattle, reeking of being edgy, and seems more than a little strange to show up on HN.
Every version of D&D contains the idea that a random peasant can go make a name for themselves as a monster-slayer and become a baron. Land is literally free for the taking if you can just clear out the beasts. That seems much more American Dream / Colonialism, and not at all European / Medieval history.
That's the important part for me, too. The general idea I always ran with was that "medieval" in the context of D&D (and most role playing games with that setting) referred to the environment (castles, villages, etc) and technology level (swords, bows, etc; sometimes early firearms).
As a general rule of thumb, it didn't go into government at all, because that's a aspect of the campaign setting. The actual campaign settings (Greyhawk, etc) defined various governments, everything from kings/emperors, to mage groups, to dragon kings.
D&D has the swords and castles which makes it look somewhat medieval on the surface, but the culture of the world does not resemble medieval times at all.
You can barely call D&D anti-medieval; it isn't from a world of obsessing about Tolkien-style fantasy. It's Gygax coming up with rules for miniatures wargaming where players are individuals within a group rather than being entire sides of a war and moving armies, or being squad-level and choosing how to move squad members. That was the important part that influenced the entire world. All of the players were part of a single squad, and working (and cooperating) as individuals for their own benefit.
These rules were then applied to Gygax's (and everybody else's) favorite fantasy novels. The thing that varied most about those novels was the idea of magic, so the only influence on his system from fiction that I recall is the stat-friendly Jack Vance magic, which would end up imposed onto other settings.
But it's still fair to call the system anti-medieval as the article does because it was made for a competitive multiplayer tabletop game which was meant to progress over sessions, and the main aspect of its progression are stats. So it has to be as fair as possible, and you have to be able to accumulate indefinitely rather than die in the same place you were born with no more than your parents had. That's American myth, not medieval reality. There can't be a medieval system, because that would crush all of the characters, starting by burning all of the witches. If every character were a fighter trying to get ahead by fighting in an army, there's no D&D, because D&D is individual, not squad or army.
The medieval era actually had a pretty decent number of wandering mercenaries and adventurers, many of whom were displaced people from the neverending ongoing local wars across the centuries. (Of course, these groups were also basically interchangeable with bandits if they were broke.) Just look at the Varangian Guard, which recruited itinerant soldiers from all over Northern Europe from the 900s pretty much right up until Constantinople fell to the Ottomans.
This all kicked into even higher gear in the Renaissance and later. As central monarchical control grew, so did army sizes and the impacts of those armies, leading to entire villages being wiped out or displaced entirely as a side effect of being in the way of an army passing through. Conflicts like the Thirty Years' War led to immense numbers of deaths and famine (current estimates say 4-8 million deaths just from the Thirty Years' War, for example), and consequently to immense numbers of migrants looking for work anywhere they could.
The part that didn't exist was, of course, the dungeons. There was no nominally ethical-concern-free money sitting around underground; the source was other people, willing or not. But the whole point of D&D was to have a small-scale alternative to the "armies or mercenary companies fighting each other" gameplay that it originally sprang from, so I can give a pass on that, even if the writers never actually figured out any coherent setting explanations for it.
Sorry, I'm not sure if this is specifically referring to Chainmail or early D&D. If the latter, this is explicitly not how Gygax (and Arneson) ran their campaigns back in those days, though. They had groups of people playing that fluctuated in the 30-50 player range, and people often had multiple characters specifically because they frequently did not have the same people at the table each session. They were in the same shard, persistent world, but there were many different parties, and they all decided on their own goals. These often conflicted - adversarial interactions between groups were things that happened! B2 - Keep on the Borderlands - even includes a lot of details around how the DM should handle such situations, how the players can protect their treasure from other players, etc.
There were ways people could advance in medieval society: https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/people-social-m...
No doubt more in some places and times than others: there is a lot of variation over a thousand years and an entire continent or more.
On top of that the player in D & D are not playing very low ranked characters (they have weapons and money, are free to adventure, etc.) and are adventurers of some sort so are exceptional to start with. Clerics even belong to a group that could rise a great deal through ability (albeit by showing administrative or leadership ability within the organisation rather than by going off on adventures).
> sarting by burning all of the witches
Witch burning was more of an ancient and early modern phenomenon than medieval.
To an extent, yes, but while, as I responded to the GP just upthread, I think Gygax's view, at least with AD&D, was that every game should be played a certain way, I don't think that's what actually happened. Every D&D campaign I have been in has had plenty of house rules, ignored some of the standard rules, and in the end, if what the rules said didn't make sense at the table, the rules got thrown out and everyone just roleplayed what made sense at the table. So in the end, I think the heart of the game is at the table; that's where the actual stories are made. The rules are a helpful framework for cooperative storytelling, but they don't and shouldn't be the final determiner of what happens in your world.
(1) The players take turns. They describe what they want to do, and the DM narrates the outcome, incorporating a dice roll into the process if needed, because:
(2) Any significant action requires a dice roll, which cannot be re-attempted if failed.
(3) A roll of a 1 is a critical failure (a guaranteed failure even on an easy task such as cooking pancakes), and a critical failure during combat causes accidental self-injury. A roll of a 20 is a critical success, which always succeeds (e.g. a level 1 archer can destroy a level 18 Elder Dragon if they aim for the eye and roll a 20). Any roll between 2-19 is compared to the difficulty level of the attempted action. Difficult actions require a roll of around 16 to succeed; easier ones, perhaps around 12. The raw dice roll (if between 2-19) is supplemented by adding around +1 or +2 if the player has invested skill points into the relevant skill, and by also adding around +1 or +2 if the player is using high-quality specialized equipment for the task.
That's it! Of course you probably also want to incorporate standard gaming tropes such as levels, gold, HP, MP, weapons, armor, and such, but all of that is not meant to be set in stone within this system - e.g. if you want to try using a pair of sapplings and some rope as a giant improved slingshot weapon, that's meant to be allowed to work, in this system (albeit maybe with a -3 adder to dice checks, since the weapon's quality is probably total crap). It's about being nice to each other and encouraging each others' creative ideas, so the team + DM can tell a totally new and perhaps unexpected story together.
When I explain DND-like games to people, I usually tell them about this system, because it's very welcoming, and encourages people to try out new ideas and find creative solutions to big tasks. A campaign can be super open-ended; e.g. "Destroy Sauron's ring - by any means - open world". With these rules, all sorts of creative ideas (such as the classic idea of asking one of the giant eagles to fly over Mt. Doom and simply drop the ring into the open caldera of the volcano) can be attempted, and can succeed, if the players are plucky and resourceful!
Original D&D may have been more or less that way, but anyone who read the AD&D 1st Edition Dungeon Master's Guide will see the opposite: a profusion of detail laid out by Gygax himself, with strong implications all over the place that this was The Correct Way to run a D&D (or at least Advanced D&D) campaign.
> the heart of the game, which exists overwhelmingly at the table
I agree with this, and I think Gygax probably would have said the same if asked, but at least as far as AD&D is concerned, I think what Gygax meant by "at the table" was "at the table as long as things are run the way I think they should be run".
And of course no discussion of D&D and Gygax would be complete without the classic XKCD requiem:
https://xkcd.com/393/
In fact, he's always known that the overwhelming majority of players have not ever played D&D the way that he did during the OD&D/AD&D 1e days. You have to remember that Gygax and Arneson's campaigns were much more like a tabletop precursor to MMOs than what we think of today when we talk about TTRPG campaigns. Both of them were running persistent worlds where 30-50 players were dropping in and out constantly, often with multiple characters involved in different things, multiple parties, etc. Time ingame ran linearly with time in the real world (thus Gygax's repeated insistence that strict time records must be kept), things happened in-world even when no one was playing, etc. But it's always been a tiny minority of games that were run this way, and Gygax knew it and knew that most people playing would have difficulty doing it the way he did.
You also have to remember that Gygax explicitly states in the DMG that players should not know all the rules and that you should distrust any player that has a copy of the DMG, and has many places where he recommends the DM adjust things as they see fit for their situation and table. He also was in favor of DMs fudging rolls when they believed it to be the right thing to do! And there's also his quote of “The secret we should never let the gamemasters know is that they don't need any rules” - to me, all evidence points towards Gygax believing that the heart of the game really was at the table.
[1]: https://acoup.blog/2024/07/12/fireside-friday-july-12-2024/
As a case in point, there was a recent conversation I was having with someone kvetching about modern-day feudalism, and when I asked them what they thought feudalism was, they were modelling it after Louis XIV's absolute monarchy. Louis XIV was the king who abolished the last vestiges of feudalism in France. (To their credit, after I explained the history of feudalism and absolute monarchy, and why absolute monarchy is almost the complete opposite of feudalism, they did understand the mistake they were making.)
As Bret Devereaux points out, I think a large part of the problem is the sheer compression of history. We take about 1000 years of history and compress it into just a few events: the Fall of the (Western) Roman Empire, Charlemagne crowned Holy Roman Emperor, the Viking Age, the First Crusade, (maybe) the Black Death, the Protestant Reformation, and two of those are bookends for the period.
And many get similarly spun up about the term "feudalism" as well.
Has anyone written about this?
The original D&D books (before the Advanced series) did not describe a combat system. Instead, the rules of the wargame "Chainmail" were recommended (as was the map from Avalon Hill's Outdoor Survival for adventuring between dungeons).
Which is to say, the context of Gygax's remarks was gone by the time D&D books showed up at the Waldenbooks in every local mall. D&D was literally a different game in the 1970's.
I remember being disappointed with AD&D as it was just the same old shit rules, with Dave Arneson's name cynically removed from the copyright. The next year I discovered Runequest, and later in College, Champions, and never looked back.
I think by the 80s D&D was well known, and not just because of the TV show. This was before 2nd edition, which came out in 1989.
I vaguely remember looking over 2nd edition, they tweaked a few things, but the core mechanics were the same.
3rd edition did shake things up a bit, and were the first version I considered worth playing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons_(1974)
For recent examples, Dragon Age, Warcraft, and D&D itself are pushing further and further in this direction lately.
https://www.amazon.com/Legends-Lattes-Novel-Fantasy-Stakes-e...
I haven't read it myself, but apparently it is big on TikTok. Perhaps for some HN readers this is the sort of thing they are looking for ;-)
There's a huge retrojection problem going in a lot of fantasy right now.
I really wish authors would write books that authentically described an alien society, rather than wish casting "vague liberal fantasy with different clothes"(usually liberal, but libertarian authors do it too, same problem, different lumps under the clothes).
Now, I wonder: would that sell? I dunno.
But I might scream the next time I read or see an "other" society dumping duty for individualism as per European upper crust romanticism. Again.
Art, inclucing fantasy, always has been a mirror to reality (not 100%, of course). Otherwise, nobody would understand it, it wouldn't move them, and they wouldn't care.
Also, it would be very hard to write well. People write well about what they know. Hemingway famously advised that you need to know the entire iceberg to write convincingly about the tip.
How does one "authentically" describe something no human has ever encountered?
D20 rules applied, usually, to "slice of life" situations and mixing in four strong personalities, with zero production values, just talking heads around a table, rolling dice.
Expecting "realism" and coherency from a fantasy world destroys the fantasy. But somehow projecting realism onto fantasy is a popular activity for fans.
I don't know about realism, but coherency is absolutely required for any fantasy world(imho).
As long as everyone is on board you can kind of do whatever the hell you want, like playing with legos and toy cars and whatever else is on the ground as a kid. I’d venture to say it’s also why “rule of cool” is so popular. Sometimes you just want to do cool/funny/etc. stuff and D&D told a lot of people “hell yeah get after it.”
https://www.filfre.net/2012/02/ultima-part-3/
But of course if you expect consistency where there is none to being with you will likely be disappointed.
Perhaps that's partly why the attempt by a different author to build prequels failed so spectacularly, too, because it assumed too much the world was internally consistent and so was boring and didn't reveal anything truly new because it wasn't really trying, it was just playing out the obvious consequences for if you believed in some of the consistency of the previous books. I suppose that it didn't really understand the onion it was trying to emulate and that there should have been a lot more lies and a lot less consistency.
(ETA: It's also why sadly it felt like the last five books were all gearing up [often literally, new equipment every stage like levels in a videogame] for a war that will now never happen, because we don't know with who and for what reason or why because the lying protagonist wouldn't tell us, probably because Zelazny hadn't yet figured it out either and was waiting for the right moment to strike in the books that would have followed in some other timeline freer from cancer. I do still wonder where those books would have been leading. I don't know the author that could answer that definitively for us other than Zelazny.)
What don't you find internally consistent about Discworld?
Yes, it's full of gags and references to the modern world, but is that inconsistency? Or do you mean something else?
That certainly isn’t the case for The Lord of the Rings and the rest of Tolkien’s development of his world.
Magic spells as ambient nanotech that's poorly understood and difficult to invoke -- hence the "Vancian" system which comes from Jack Vance's "Dying Earth" series.
Magic items as remnant tech.
Different "races" as the vast gulf of time has led to speciation.
Gods as posthuman or artificially intelligent entities that have transcended the world but still keep an eye on it from time to time.
And so forth. There's literally nothing medieval about it, but it could be 1,000,000 AD. Just think of their medical technologies in light of our era's!
(All assuming, of course, that it's "baseline reality" and not a sandbox, as it was in Neal Stephenson's The Fall.)
It takes place billions of years in the future in what it calls the "9th World", when some mysterious beings just went away.
The titular outsider hero falls from the stars in a little space pod as a baby and is raised by the local Viking-proxy culture ala Superman or Goku. Quite an engaging read if you're into this blend of sword and sorcery with background sci-fi elements.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorgal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_4HBH6Z-Iw
It points out "the dungeon builders were part of a coinage economy just like the current one. There hasn’t even been significant inflation or deflation since the dungeons were built.", which doesn't seem compatible with a far-future post-post industrial setting interpretation.
I think "fantastic American history" is a rational description.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=k5ulTt5Km3Y
I clearly remember how such "D&D PC-ism" influenced the relative flopping of the early Star Trek RPG [FASA, 1982 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Role_Playing_Ga...]. The main reason? No one wanted to be ordered around by a Captain PC, or by other PC officers that outranked them. Players wanted to be "equals." (While Star Trek TTRPG did have fans and survived for a long while, it never really took off as many hoped it would.)
Another reason, though, is that it did not satisfy the bloodlust of the typical "hack and slash" D&D fans (what are now called "murder hobos" — wandering bands of characters with no allegiances, no lords, no loyalties). These types of players couldn't just use the Enterprise's phasers to hold planets hostage and take all their loot. They couldn't just be space pirates. They thought the universe of Star Trek was "boring." In GDW's Traveller, by contrast, you could definitely (in due time) get a ship capable of hurling nukes at planets. You could be space pirates! Now that was "fun!"
It is often difficult to get many D&D players outside of their modernisms and into a medieval mindset, or into any sort of realistic strictly hierarchical society (as shown, even in Science Fiction).
I've run Pendragon for decades. It can misfire spectacularly if players refuse to put aside their modern mindsets and adopt the concepts of chivalry, feudalism, courtly love and faith (Christian or otherwise) that are central to its themes and historical source materials.
I had a whole session in this past year where I went through the ancient Brehon marriage laws under late pagan/early Christian Ireland. (btw: It's a far cry from "Say Yes to the Dress.")
D&D is more like a typical Renn Faire. A motley assortment of anything from ancient to nearly modern dress. A cross-time saloon of attitudes, weaponry, cultures and so on. What passes for society is made up from kit-bashed models. It rarely makes cohesive sense.
I would put the gradual failure of the FASA system more on the same basic problem a lot of licensed RPGs have: it's an elaborate simulation wargame that happens to use the same setting, rather than a game designed to actually feel like the experience of the show. This is extremely common to the point of absurdity, to the point that even official Doctor Who and My Little Pony RPGs have done it.
> The author might make broad sweeping generalizations but the main point is true. A group of PCs is basically a democracy. Such D&D democracy makes roleplaying in strict social hierarchies pretty difficult. PCs will mouth off to kings or wizards or even deities.
But D&D (and its descendants) make this particularly likely to happen, right? Take Paranoia as a different extreme. You cannot mouth off to authority figures in Paranoia because it will get you killed in a second, and the rules encourage making you trip and get killed because you said the wrong thing to the wrong person (or Computer).
A little known story: there was a player in Dan Gelber's social circle who was a total rules lawyer. He annoyed Dan & crew immensely. So Dan created a game where it was treasonous — reason for summary execution — to show any knowledge of the rules. They had a lot of fun killing that player's character over-and-over.
I feel like a Troubleshooter that mouthed off to Friend Computer!
You need both: you need to critical historical understanding, but you also need the real world exercise of collective memory, so that you can break through history to bring about something entirely novel.