OD&Documentary Hypothesis, Part 2: Characterizing G&A

(Previous Post)

I’m going to invoke the death of the author here before anyone else does (never mind). It’s easy to talk and argue about intent when discussing texts, especially when the question is whether a text contains contradictory perspectives or priorities. At least we don’t know what either author thought on the topic, so we can’t take that as a faulty basis. Anyway, when I refer to authorial priority, I want to determine if the passages attributed to either author have different notions of play or its telos—or perhaps, if we didn’t know which passage could be attributed to which author, if such differences in the text would still be manifest in predictable ways. Any reference to intent per se here is a heuristic for the text’s own significance (in the Lacanian sense, of a meaning generated rather than given).

Hypothesis I: Differing Priorities

Now that I’ve cast this protection spell against bullshit lit-crit pedantry, I can submit my hypothesis that OD&D alternates between two tendencies: one of a highly stratified and tournament-style¹ adventure-game, which prioritizes high-level (i.e., overarching) play procedures and systematic data structures at increasing levels of difficulty, which challenge the players with respect to their system mastery; and another war-game of bespoke (i.e., ad hoc) models for various situations which compartmentalize the play-conversation and challenge the players through novelty of situations rather than necessarily through heightening stakes. That’s just my hypothesis based on my memory of what passages were Gygax or Arneson, and it’ll take interpretations of readings to try to (in)validate it.

Let’s cheat by starting outside of the core three volumes of OD&D. Gygax and Arneson each released their own supplements to the game based on their home campaign, each expanding upon (or transforming) the originally published rules differently. Greyhawk sees Gygax revise the core chassis of D&D by introducing ability bonuses, implementing both variable damage for weapons and unique attacks for monsters (in a standardized format, unlike Arneson’s giant sea creatures in U&WA—oh wait, those are Arneson’s, aren’t they? fuck! where did I get that idea? maybe because they first appear insubstantively in U&WA, and then they reappear in Blackmoor where Dave implements Gary’s new attack scheme except adding random Dave-style bullshit like giving the monsters random numbers of attacks or likelihoods of attacking one way or another… but I swear I had read someplace that they were not only certainly Dave’s, but that they were in U&WA because it was too late for them to be included in M&T). Thank God that tangent train went back to where we started. Whereas Gygax’s revisions try to complete the D&D system via typical Gary-style totalist bullshit, Arneson in Blackmoor introduces extra Dave-style random bullshit like hit location procedures and rules for catching diseases, meant to model high-context situations, which would be overwhelming if they were constantly in play; this implies that they are either meant to be used sparingly when situations called, or were written as what might lovingly be called theory slop.

But that’s cheating: both on the principle of criticizing texts immanently, and also because it’s reasonable that those two authors saw the final draft of OD&D as lacking in different ways. That does not necessarily speak to their different priorities of play on a deep level, or that such priorities are manifest in OD&D itself. But I think I do see those tendencies in the core text, of overarching procedures and stratified content integrated with compartmentalized models or mechanics. We can see this difference between the underworld and wilderness adventures. The former is highly systematized and stratified to challenge players quantitatively rather than qualitatively, with little stoppage in the overall flow from going room to room, dealing with level-appropriate monsters, and pocketing level-appropriate treasure.² Once the characters reach the Great Outdoors, as Arneson puts it in FFC, the nonstop leveling grind of the underworld is replaced with an overwhelmingly vast world of possibilities for the players to explore equally harsh (i.e., imbalanced) landscapes, compete with major world players in social intrigue, manage their own domains, and wage outright war³—each of these situations having their own bespoke rules, and occurring intercontextually according to the fictional world’s timeline rather than that of an overarching play procedure which commandeers the passage of fictional time (i.e., what The Retired Adventurer calls procedural rhythm).

Not only that, but there’s a more subtle axis of difference within the text: between what content was written for the new D&D system as was codified in the first volume, M&M, and what was written for Chainmail as if ignoring the M&M system. People talk like Gygax had inserted Chainmail references into D&D in order to sell more copies of the former—and maybe that’s why he retained those references, but he didn’t seem to originate them (and, outside the text, he seemed to insist that he personally didn't like playing D&D with Chainmail). M&M is a simplified, D20-based version of the Chainmail single-combat rules, and it was implied to be the primary rules for smaller-scale (likely underworld) encounters. Chainmail on the other hand is integrated mostly in contexts of mass combat, especially wilderness encounters and army composition as per M&T (of bandits, nomads, orcs, etc.), which all have a common basis with the material in FFC; U&WA even explicitly tells the reader to use Chainmail for land combat, implicitly as opposed to M&M. In other words, the earlier axis of difference between the more gamey underworld adventures and the simulated⁴ (or at least heavily compartmentalized, dare I say fiction-first) wilderness adventures aligns with the axis of difference between D&D by way of M&M and D&D by way of Chainmail; these axes seem parallel rather than orthogonal, so to speak.

I feel comfortable tentatively aligning each pole of those parallel axes with Gygax and Arneson respectively, both because we know what Arneson contributed and because we can identify in Greyhawk how Gygax prefers his own contribution and attempts to expand it into its own beast independent of Chainmail. If this is true, this isn’t just a mechanical difference of implementation: it’s a matter of what aspect of OD&D is considered primary (the procedural adventure-game or the simulated world-game, notably both being war-games albeit of different stripes). This difference in priority emanates from the larger play-structures to the minute bullshit of the game: Gary-style totalist bullshit, in its vast enumeration of granular but systematic models and mechanics; and Dave-style random bullshit, in its hodgepodge of bespoke rules to handle situations on an ad hoc basis. You can’t have OD&D without both tendencies—it would have fallen on its ass if Arneson or Gygax didn’t account for each other’s bullshit—but they represent an uneasy contradiction within OD&D, and how it is primarily conceptualized (as small-scale adventure-game or mass-scale world-game; either the latter is the former’s end-game, or the former is the latter’s onramp), rather than a stable harmony.⁵

Hypothesis II: Reconstructing Blackmoor

But let’s enjoy a counterhypothesis: rather than these differences in character resulting from the two authors’ different perspectives, maybe that’s just because Gygax wrote the core of the game while incorporating specific content from Arneson’s play materials (the initial 18 pages or whatever suggestions, like aerial combat, he wrote later). If you look at the full 63-page FFC, it lacks a scheme (or at least an explanation) of how characters and combat work except that they interface with somewhat discrete Chainmail categories like hero, superhero, and wizard (as opposed to M&M where class levels are retranslated into Chainmail more granularly by counting how many men a character is equal to in combat at each level, which he also initially standardized from levels 1–10 in the source of BTPBD). This means if Gygax were essentially writing a guide for how to run your own Blackmoor, he would have had to write the core rules based on his memory of playing under Arneson (if informed by his own preferences)—and almost certainly that was a modified version of Chainmail with twenty-sided dice for single combat, with Chainmail being used directly for mass combat. That would by itself align textually with OD&D as received.

I think that counterhypothesis does explain the difference in distribution and function of the play-concepts written (or conceptualized) by Gygax and Arneson: that Gygax served as a more-or-less faithful interpreter of Blackmoor, and any differences between Gygax’s written rules and Arneson’s unwritten rules are incidental rather than expressive of some paradigmatic difference between the two authors with respect to how they played or just perceived the game. It also bypasses the tendency to caricature Gygax and Arneson as an innovative system-builder versus a schizoid savant, or as a joyless hack gamer versus an enlightened anti-system oracle. Both were war-gamers, after all, who participated in the same cicles, read the same literature, and played the same games. They surely could not have been all that fundamentally different from each other. Could structural differences between the underworld and wilderness be different game modes of Blackmoor, or even just Arneson preferring one orientation at a certain time or within certain game contexts (if, after all, he could be said to prefer highly contextual rules to model specific situations: why wouldn’t that apply to such a difference?).

I don’t think there’s much more to say about this hypothesis because it’s straightforward and, barring other considerations, it seems like an Occam’s razor type-thing. The question is whether it’s that simple.

Conclusion

I think both hypotheses, taking OD&D as a walled garden, seem equally valid and they may in fact differ quantitatively rather than qualitatively. Since we know more-or-less what content originates from Arneson’s campaign, the question becomes to what extent the remaining content was informed by Gygax’s experience or memory of Arneson’s game (certainly impacted by organic developments over the course of Gygax’s own campaign), as opposed to his own original interpretation of the fantasy adventure game. It’s easy by extension to say that the truth lies somewhere in the middle, and that the discourse is subject to whether a participant believes one author or another exaggerated his particular contributions to the game. Certainly Gygax believed or purported to believe that his contributions were primary (or at least necessary to reproduce Arneson’s game), whereas Arneson believed that his contributions were primary (or at least necessary to animate Gygax’s system beyond formal mechanics).

However, I think when expanding the scope of the texts considered from OD&D (and its source materials and earlier drafts) to the larger universe of D&D, the authorial tendencies become more apparent. Whether or not Gygax mostly reproduced what he experienced as a player in the Blackmoor game (i.e., whether or not the core chassis and underworld adventure rules resembles the unwritten rules of Blackmoor or is a reinterpretation of a memory, with intentional or unintentional differences), he perceived flaws in OD&D that he attributed to its ad hoc tendency and tried to resolve in later publications, in particular Greyhawk and AD&D. We might as well hear it from the horse’s mouth, not because the author isn’t dead but because (to appropriate a certain remark and rationale from Lacan) AD&D doesn’t need textual analysis, as a literary toilet clogged with signifiers; we can also suppose Gygax as a fellow reader of D&D, both in as much as authors function as readers when interpreting their own compositions, and in that his complaints seem to arise from the non-systematic aspects of D&D which he did not generally originate (despite compiling the overall work):

Where D&D is a very loose, open framework around which highly imaginative Dungeon Masters can construct what amounts to a set of rules and game of their own choosing, AD&D is a much tighter and more structured game system. […]

Because D&D allowed such freedom, because the work itself said so, because the initial batch of DMs were so imaginative and creative, because the rules were incomplete, vague, and often ambigious, D&D has turned into a non-game. […] Without destroying the imagination and individual creativity which go into a campaign, AD&D rectifies the shortcomings of D&D. There are few grey areas in AD&D, and there will be no question in the mind of participants as to what the game is and is all about. There is form and structure to AD&D, and any variation of these integral portions of the game will obviously make it something else.

Gary Gygax, Dragon 26.29–30

What a fucking freak lmao! I want to take this time to stake out my bias here: that I tend to dislike both Gygax and Arneson. and I think that they’re both insufferable in different ways at their worst (i.e., if we take AD&D and FFC as Gygax and Arneson respectively at their most unconstrained, both are unappealing to me as such). So, when I say I prefer the differing priorities model to understand the character of either author’s contributions to OD&D, it’s not because I want to prove that one of their two tendencies actually takes primacy or is more D&D than the other. As such, I don’t think we should abandon that understanding to Garyheads or Daveheads whose treatment of the text would be more biased towards one author or the other. I like to quote Georgian philosopher Ioseb Jughashvili who says, “Both are worse!”, and so appreciate how the authors negate each other’s worst excesses. Overall, then, I prefer this model because supposing a conflict between the two is more interesting than supposing a harmony, and I think it produces a more fruitful analysis of OD&D which predicts how it is interpreted by readers post-publication.

But maybe let’s refuse to identify either tendency with one or the other author. Will those tendencies, which seem to manifest in the text, also be exacerbated in other works which respond to and reinterpret OD&D (excluding the authors’ own independent works)? Does OD&D contain the seeds of its own multivarious successors, and do those seeds correlate with conflicting tendencies within itself?

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1. By “tournament-style”, I don’t mean that Gygax’s play-style was meant entirely for tournaments or that his campaigns lacked non-formal, non-stratified aspects—but I do think he has a tendency towards formal, stratified play. ↩︎

2. Interestingly, Boggs attributes this to David Megarry in his board game Dungeon!, which may have been adapted by Gygax into his campaign; and regardless, Boggs argues, it is not Arnesonian because Dave was not into difficulty-scaling his world, whether under or above ground. ↩︎

3. I don’t think overworld exploration and domain management are different games; there’s slippage between them and not a strict quantitative-to-qualitative evolution as from under to above ground. I’d further argue that Arneson’s play style is, in contrast to Gygax’s play, non-stratified with respect to player levels and allows both inter-level interactions and social mobility at different levels. ↩︎

4. Anytime I use the word “simulationist” here, I know it comes from the Forge, but I’m not aware of what specific meaning it has in that context and I’m not attributing to Arneson a particular modern telos of play. I mean “simulationist” in the sense that his rules are highly contextual to specific situations and are meant to model them rather than impose overarching game structures (e.g., difficulty progression) onto them; compare to immersion sim digital games. ↩︎

5. Though it’s easy to say one vision won out in the end, one can also argue that AD&D internalizes Arneson’s own tendencies except with a view to totalizing D&D’s system rather than handling potential situations on an ad hoc basis. ↩︎