"Folk D&D" is not a bulwark against the "predation of the brand" as you put it. The weirdly self-evident kid/druggie derived game that people frequently spontaneously invent on their own is the lynchpin that *enables* the predation of the brand.
Meanwhile, Gary Gygax's remarks in Alarums and Excursions issue #2 is not an endorsement of what we call "folk D&D'. When he says the word "campaign" repeatedly there, he means something entirely different from what folk D&D players would imagine he means. It is dishonest to impute their definitions upon Gygax's statements when he clearly could not yet grasp that these people were going to take his magnanimous-sounding permissiveness and use it to redefine D&D into a nongame. Not just for their own individual tables, but for everyone.
Gary later comments on this, but I don’t have the reference, that essentially he had tried to work with independent gamers of various sorts and it didn’t work out. I can’t remember if that was in Dragon or elsewhere.
What seems clear to me in reading this zine, and through repeated experiences, is this folk D&D game arises spontaneously.
Yes, I disagree about the brand and this folk expression being the same thing, and yet, they are related. A thing can be two things at once, as I’ve mentioned here.
First, that brand control is limited because of this phenomenon.
Second, that this phenomenon exists as a prevailing orthodoxy.
Looking through the play examples in that zine, and thinking about my own experiences, that part of 1984 comes to mind where Winston observes the freedom of the Proles (indeed, even to criticize The Party) and at the same time how that freedom enables the existence of The Party. And yet, the yin yang of it is, the same freedom is the only hope of ending The Party. I observe a similar power dynamic here.
You keep making cool stuff and driving change, and it won’t matter. Actually threaten the status quo, really do it, and there will be a new orthodoxy. I am just not threatened or bothered by this phenomenon.
I think the heart of this Folk game, and make no doubt RPGs are a folk tradition, is simply making what you think is cool. You make make it something for the market, or for yourself, or somewhere in between - but if the ethos of “I think this would be neat” is at the forefront of the design then you’re actively engaging with the tradition. People just have different definitions of cool and Gary, being the “first among equal” probably struggled with that.
The "folk tradition" that sprung about around D&D is not a game. It is a failure to play a game.
There is of course a modest range of well established variations within the tradition. You have innocent children who play pretend while occasionally roll dies or make rough sketches of monsters and wizards. You have unimaginative adults who hide behind a screen and pretend that the players have only just barely managed to beat the big bad evil guy with their last hit point. You have paid actors that pretend to be amazed and utterly dismayed with their coworker improvises a brief soliloquy while their PC bleeds out in a pivotal scene. But these diverse manifestations of the folk tradition have one thing in common: they are not games. Some people are explicitly pretending to play a game. Others are clumsily or perhaps sometimes charmingly tinkering with and playing WITH the pieces of an actual game and occasionally dabbling with some actual procedures from a game. But the activity they are engaging with is not itself a game.
Now, one might be inclined to raise any number of objections at this point. Most of us are familiar with the passages from the rules texts and the accounts from the bad old days that are appealed to in this context in order to lend an air of legitimacy to this "folk tradition". This is of course in vain. Because anyone that is committed to this activity to any degree will tell you that the first rule of this "game" is that there aren't any rules to this game. Only the most imaginative sort of people, they assure us, can look at a relatively complex game, ignore 80% of it entirely, change the rest at will, and then throw out all of the rules entirely during the heat of play because, after all, why would you want to "break immersion" and "kill the sense of dramatic tension" by pausing play in order to consult a rules manual?
This is very persuasive to some, I suppose. And sure, the phrase "playing D&D" is of course today synonymous with all of the hokum and balderdash I have alluded to above. And all of the people that pretend to actually believe these things insist very loudly that they are having a great deal of fun. Nevertheless the fact remains they are not playing a game. And the disciplines of game design and game development have nothing to do with what they are doing and what they advocate for.
The people that make products to sell to such people could be called any number of things, but in no world could they honestly and accurately be described as being game designers. The correct term, I think, would be "hacks".
Good post, but Troy's survey was made specifically to avoid sampling bias, that you put much emphasis on. It was made with propability sampling (the survey comes to a completely random user that has to fill it out) instead of convienience sampling (the user comes across a survey and decides that they will fill it out). This shows by the fact that out of the 1200 people that filled out the survey, only 16% had ever played D&D. This is far from a passionate survey population. For an example of a survey made with convienience sampling and therefore bias, check out Bob Worldbuilder's survey.
Should the entire goal of Calvin’s play be fun alone? He is a child, does love look like simply reflecting the ambiguous or pointing toward the world? Can uncompelled play reveal reality and exist within limits? Can imagination be integrated with what is around us or is it dissociated in individual nihilism?
Yeah the point of Calvinball is to have fun through imaginative play. This all gets to the tension that Jon Peterson wrote about. It's a conflict between the Calvin's and the Susie's of the world. But it's also a completely natural process to add rigor to a mushy creative process. There's no right answer.
I agree with your points up to the last. Just because what is good and beautiful is paradoxical does not mean it isn’t “right.”
What is right can be known and understood by its results “you shall know them by their fruits.”
There is rotten fruit in D&D, and good fruit. Furthermore, those things which are good de ontologically regardless of sentiment.
It is within the person to not only experience play, but also see what is good in it.
The best that can be said for “there is no right answer” is that someone can observe the paradox without opinion. That doesn’t deny the child the ability to know what is good.
And besides that, operating from this platonic basis, we have already seen good fruit.
Furthermore, that which is right for Calvin is right for Suzy. For there is no good reason for a bad thing, and no bad reason for a good thing.
I never said there weren't wrong/inferior/substandard ways of playing, there absolutely are. But that doesn't settle the rigor versus creativity tension.
I observe this paradox, yes. Sometimes it is constructed on a false premise which creates a false dichotomy. For example, “because I cannot know what the best thing is, there is no best thing, because knowing through the intellect is the only reality.”
That is one of the basic, underlying falsehoods which create “you do you maaaan” which imnho has not gone well for D&D.
In other cases, there’s nothing wrong with having a “pro league” and a “junior league”, because heirarchy does not imply lack of equal dignity.
Really, the ideal form of this folk imaginative play I think is the latter. In my current gaming it reminds me of the difference between these spreadsheet wargames and diplomacy.
Look I have no control over what people run off and do. I'm just making an observation. I know a good game, a good campaign, a good GM, or a good player when I see one. And the issue that everyone has today is the exact same issue they had back in the 70s when Gary and Dave were cold approaching dudes in bookstores or looking people up in phone book because they checked out a book on medieval weaponry. It's a lack of quality gaming companions. I see a lot of straw being passed off as first cut hay.
Theoretically, could a group sit down and come up with rules they then use to play? The importance of rules seems to be their binding quality. Obviously, this as-built system would be simple, at least at first. But all games grow with time. As long as all parties agree (in the same way that one agrees on poker rules), the game can continue.
You’re not wrong that a group of friends could make their own rules. It happens at many tables and since 1974. Heartbreakers and not-DnD games litter the hobby.
In the clubhouse setting, there are more people involved than just a handful of people. The rules of 0e and 1e mention games of up to 50 people. In order to facilitate this larger group of players _and_ potentially play between multiple clubhouses, a common standard of rules and a competent referee becomes necessary to settle disputes at the table.
The original game(s) captured the lighting in the bottle for a lot of reasons that were not passed on by those who understood them in their time. The evolution of those rules doesn’t hold the same power as the original game(s). Exploration of the rules, by following them _as written_ is revealing what had been lost. The people engaged in this bizarre form of archeological gaming will carry the torch of the hobby as the commercial success of 5e winds down. But just as Monopoly hasn’t changed the rules in many years, Hasbro doesn’t need to change the rules of DnD either. In fact they are now reprinting the B/X red box from the early 1980s.
Every version of DnD is an experiment, and mutable. But there is something interesting, enchanting, and captivating about following the original rule(s) with as little mutation as possible.
It’s worth conducting similar experiments at my own table. I encourage others to try it as well.
Thank you for responding so thoroughly. I’m still learning about folk gaming and I really appreciate the historical perspective whenever I can find it. It seems to me that play reveals rules in what might be called their height and their depth. That is, only in long term interaction with rules can they craft the sub-created world. In my own games, I have found that rules reveal themselves. This might sound pretentious or even mystical, but I can’t think of another way to describe it. The rules appear at the table when they are needed.
The “mystical” effects are normally referred to as second and third order effects.
Jeffro Johnson and the BrOSR have done the heavy lifting in AD&D 1e to reveal the necessary details to further understand 0e.
Griff Morgan produced the Secrets of Blackmoor documentary that revealed much of the context behind the creation of 0e.
Calvin Ball is only good in the comic strip and at the conventional TTRPG player’s trap house table. It’s gross and sticky and perfect for a cartoon boy and his stuffed tiger.
My first ever game, over lunch during high school, was just this -- a freeform storytelling session in the faux medieval fantasy tradition, with no dice or rules at all. I had read some novels over the summer -- Donaldson, Beagle, Alan Dean Foster. We had seen the cartoon and the ads in comics, but we had no books and no real idea what we were supposed to be doing.
It was interesting, but it wasn't as good as reading. We didn't try again. This was in Rockcastle County, by the way. Just noticed the Berea connection on the About page.
Then I got to college at UK, with a larger group who had been playing for years, and realized how it scratched the fantasy itch AND the agency itch AND the communal itch at the same time, which was something a novel could not do (for me).
"Folk D&D" is not a bulwark against the "predation of the brand" as you put it. The weirdly self-evident kid/druggie derived game that people frequently spontaneously invent on their own is the lynchpin that *enables* the predation of the brand.
Meanwhile, Gary Gygax's remarks in Alarums and Excursions issue #2 is not an endorsement of what we call "folk D&D'. When he says the word "campaign" repeatedly there, he means something entirely different from what folk D&D players would imagine he means. It is dishonest to impute their definitions upon Gygax's statements when he clearly could not yet grasp that these people were going to take his magnanimous-sounding permissiveness and use it to redefine D&D into a nongame. Not just for their own individual tables, but for everyone.
Gary later comments on this, but I don’t have the reference, that essentially he had tried to work with independent gamers of various sorts and it didn’t work out. I can’t remember if that was in Dragon or elsewhere.
What seems clear to me in reading this zine, and through repeated experiences, is this folk D&D game arises spontaneously.
Yes, I disagree about the brand and this folk expression being the same thing, and yet, they are related. A thing can be two things at once, as I’ve mentioned here.
First, that brand control is limited because of this phenomenon.
Second, that this phenomenon exists as a prevailing orthodoxy.
Looking through the play examples in that zine, and thinking about my own experiences, that part of 1984 comes to mind where Winston observes the freedom of the Proles (indeed, even to criticize The Party) and at the same time how that freedom enables the existence of The Party. And yet, the yin yang of it is, the same freedom is the only hope of ending The Party. I observe a similar power dynamic here.
You keep making cool stuff and driving change, and it won’t matter. Actually threaten the status quo, really do it, and there will be a new orthodoxy. I am just not threatened or bothered by this phenomenon.
I think people making cool stuff and driving change does matter.
I think the heart of this Folk game, and make no doubt RPGs are a folk tradition, is simply making what you think is cool. You make make it something for the market, or for yourself, or somewhere in between - but if the ethos of “I think this would be neat” is at the forefront of the design then you’re actively engaging with the tradition. People just have different definitions of cool and Gary, being the “first among equal” probably struggled with that.
The concept of design is incompatible with the folk tradition.
How so?
The "folk tradition" that sprung about around D&D is not a game. It is a failure to play a game.
There is of course a modest range of well established variations within the tradition. You have innocent children who play pretend while occasionally roll dies or make rough sketches of monsters and wizards. You have unimaginative adults who hide behind a screen and pretend that the players have only just barely managed to beat the big bad evil guy with their last hit point. You have paid actors that pretend to be amazed and utterly dismayed with their coworker improvises a brief soliloquy while their PC bleeds out in a pivotal scene. But these diverse manifestations of the folk tradition have one thing in common: they are not games. Some people are explicitly pretending to play a game. Others are clumsily or perhaps sometimes charmingly tinkering with and playing WITH the pieces of an actual game and occasionally dabbling with some actual procedures from a game. But the activity they are engaging with is not itself a game.
Now, one might be inclined to raise any number of objections at this point. Most of us are familiar with the passages from the rules texts and the accounts from the bad old days that are appealed to in this context in order to lend an air of legitimacy to this "folk tradition". This is of course in vain. Because anyone that is committed to this activity to any degree will tell you that the first rule of this "game" is that there aren't any rules to this game. Only the most imaginative sort of people, they assure us, can look at a relatively complex game, ignore 80% of it entirely, change the rest at will, and then throw out all of the rules entirely during the heat of play because, after all, why would you want to "break immersion" and "kill the sense of dramatic tension" by pausing play in order to consult a rules manual?
This is very persuasive to some, I suppose. And sure, the phrase "playing D&D" is of course today synonymous with all of the hokum and balderdash I have alluded to above. And all of the people that pretend to actually believe these things insist very loudly that they are having a great deal of fun. Nevertheless the fact remains they are not playing a game. And the disciplines of game design and game development have nothing to do with what they are doing and what they advocate for.
The people that make products to sell to such people could be called any number of things, but in no world could they honestly and accurately be described as being game designers. The correct term, I think, would be "hacks".
Try Dragon 26 where Gary tries to put the AD&D horse back into the RAW-by-TSR-only barn.
Sorceror’s Scroll column: D&D, AD&D AND GAMING by Gary Gygax
Excellent thank you!
“Erase tableau” Were you trying to say tabula rasa?
thanks
Good post, but Troy's survey was made specifically to avoid sampling bias, that you put much emphasis on. It was made with propability sampling (the survey comes to a completely random user that has to fill it out) instead of convienience sampling (the user comes across a survey and decides that they will fill it out). This shows by the fact that out of the 1200 people that filled out the survey, only 16% had ever played D&D. This is far from a passionate survey population. For an example of a survey made with convienience sampling and therefore bias, check out Bob Worldbuilder's survey.
Oh well great!
Would Calvin have had more fun playing whatever game he had the equipment for, by the rules, or calvinball?
Should the entire goal of Calvin’s play be fun alone? He is a child, does love look like simply reflecting the ambiguous or pointing toward the world? Can uncompelled play reveal reality and exist within limits? Can imagination be integrated with what is around us or is it dissociated in individual nihilism?
Yeah the point of Calvinball is to have fun through imaginative play. This all gets to the tension that Jon Peterson wrote about. It's a conflict between the Calvin's and the Susie's of the world. But it's also a completely natural process to add rigor to a mushy creative process. There's no right answer.
I agree with your points up to the last. Just because what is good and beautiful is paradoxical does not mean it isn’t “right.”
What is right can be known and understood by its results “you shall know them by their fruits.”
There is rotten fruit in D&D, and good fruit. Furthermore, those things which are good de ontologically regardless of sentiment.
It is within the person to not only experience play, but also see what is good in it.
The best that can be said for “there is no right answer” is that someone can observe the paradox without opinion. That doesn’t deny the child the ability to know what is good.
And besides that, operating from this platonic basis, we have already seen good fruit.
Furthermore, that which is right for Calvin is right for Suzy. For there is no good reason for a bad thing, and no bad reason for a good thing.
I never said there weren't wrong/inferior/substandard ways of playing, there absolutely are. But that doesn't settle the rigor versus creativity tension.
I observe this paradox, yes. Sometimes it is constructed on a false premise which creates a false dichotomy. For example, “because I cannot know what the best thing is, there is no best thing, because knowing through the intellect is the only reality.”
That is one of the basic, underlying falsehoods which create “you do you maaaan” which imnho has not gone well for D&D.
In other cases, there’s nothing wrong with having a “pro league” and a “junior league”, because heirarchy does not imply lack of equal dignity.
Really, the ideal form of this folk imaginative play I think is the latter. In my current gaming it reminds me of the difference between these spreadsheet wargames and diplomacy.
Look I have no control over what people run off and do. I'm just making an observation. I know a good game, a good campaign, a good GM, or a good player when I see one. And the issue that everyone has today is the exact same issue they had back in the 70s when Gary and Dave were cold approaching dudes in bookstores or looking people up in phone book because they checked out a book on medieval weaponry. It's a lack of quality gaming companions. I see a lot of straw being passed off as first cut hay.
That same faculty which can identify reality via what Tolkien called “fantasy” is in fact, the same organ which can see reality.
In fact, the two are the same, and the great lie is that one or the other doesn’t exist or that they must at least be seperate.
Dimmed though that organ is, they are the same.
“attachments aren’t allowed on this comment”. Search on YouTube for “You Can’t Change the Rules, Coco! | Shadowlands | Bluey”
Theoretically, could a group sit down and come up with rules they then use to play? The importance of rules seems to be their binding quality. Obviously, this as-built system would be simple, at least at first. But all games grow with time. As long as all parties agree (in the same way that one agrees on poker rules), the game can continue.
You’re not wrong that a group of friends could make their own rules. It happens at many tables and since 1974. Heartbreakers and not-DnD games litter the hobby.
In the clubhouse setting, there are more people involved than just a handful of people. The rules of 0e and 1e mention games of up to 50 people. In order to facilitate this larger group of players _and_ potentially play between multiple clubhouses, a common standard of rules and a competent referee becomes necessary to settle disputes at the table.
The original game(s) captured the lighting in the bottle for a lot of reasons that were not passed on by those who understood them in their time. The evolution of those rules doesn’t hold the same power as the original game(s). Exploration of the rules, by following them _as written_ is revealing what had been lost. The people engaged in this bizarre form of archeological gaming will carry the torch of the hobby as the commercial success of 5e winds down. But just as Monopoly hasn’t changed the rules in many years, Hasbro doesn’t need to change the rules of DnD either. In fact they are now reprinting the B/X red box from the early 1980s.
Every version of DnD is an experiment, and mutable. But there is something interesting, enchanting, and captivating about following the original rule(s) with as little mutation as possible.
It’s worth conducting similar experiments at my own table. I encourage others to try it as well.
Thank you for responding so thoroughly. I’m still learning about folk gaming and I really appreciate the historical perspective whenever I can find it. It seems to me that play reveals rules in what might be called their height and their depth. That is, only in long term interaction with rules can they craft the sub-created world. In my own games, I have found that rules reveal themselves. This might sound pretentious or even mystical, but I can’t think of another way to describe it. The rules appear at the table when they are needed.
That really sounds crazy, doesn’t it?
The “mystical” effects are normally referred to as second and third order effects.
Jeffro Johnson and the BrOSR have done the heavy lifting in AD&D 1e to reveal the necessary details to further understand 0e.
Griff Morgan produced the Secrets of Blackmoor documentary that revealed much of the context behind the creation of 0e.
Calvin Ball is only good in the comic strip and at the conventional TTRPG player’s trap house table. It’s gross and sticky and perfect for a cartoon boy and his stuffed tiger.
Loved the Blackmore documentary. I never got into AD&D, probably because none of the various D&D editions were my gateway to RPGs.
Second and third order effects is a good way to describe what I’m thinking about. Thanks for the nomenclature!
My first ever game, over lunch during high school, was just this -- a freeform storytelling session in the faux medieval fantasy tradition, with no dice or rules at all. I had read some novels over the summer -- Donaldson, Beagle, Alan Dean Foster. We had seen the cartoon and the ads in comics, but we had no books and no real idea what we were supposed to be doing.
It was interesting, but it wasn't as good as reading. We didn't try again. This was in Rockcastle County, by the way. Just noticed the Berea connection on the About page.
Then I got to college at UK, with a larger group who had been playing for years, and realized how it scratched the fantasy itch AND the agency itch AND the communal itch at the same time, which was something a novel could not do (for me).
Every D&D party has that one player who somehow turns a simple quest into complete chaos.
the hyperlink for "omnibus survey" points me to http://www.researchscape.com/, which i don't think is correct