This is the semi-birthday of Dungeons & Dragons, to the extent that we can even know when the birthday was. It’s over fifty years old now, and we have already lost many of the pioneers of the game. Every year that goes by, we lose more pioneers and more players. With them go what in business we’d call the “institutional knowledge” they carried. That knowledge isn’t just about rules and rulesets, but about why these rules and rulesets were created. It’s not about a particular game but about the whole milieu in which the game was created.

I wrote about how the way that fans and readers interacted influenced early games in On a Cult of Gygax. But just as important is how and why the entrepreneurs did what they did. Take the best of today’s creators, your-favorite-osr-creator-here, and even if they never created their product they’d still be able to game. They could still play Dungeons & Dragons, or Traveller, or Tunnels & Trolls, or Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, or Villains & Vigilantes… the list goes on, and what each of those games have in common is that if their creators had never created those games, their creators would never have been able to play.

Dave Arneson, Gary Gygax, Mark Millar, and even Ken St. Andre, were creating games not to market them but because they couldn’t play that kind of game without creating the game first. They were players before they were businessmen—and it showed in everything from how they marketed the game (marketing often came after playing) and in how they talked about the game.

It’s very strange to me, having grown up soaking in the free-form rules style of AD&D play, how attached some players are to a Cult of the Cult of Gygax™; and to complaining about a supposed hardline by TSR against house rules. My memory of that period, at least through the late eighties, is one of “make it your own”, advice straight from the rule books and from outlets such as The Dragon.

We always knew that Gygax and other TSR luminaries used different rules. And it made sense for them to do so even outside of a “make it your own” mentality: where could we expect new rules to come from, if not from the campaigns of the author and other employees at TSR? We assumed, and it appears to be true, that the people at TSR were gamers, that they played the game, too.

Which makes questions and answers like this one from Polyhedron far more understandable to me than to adherents of the Cult of the Cult of Gygax™.

ADQ: One point in the “Rigby’s Tomb” module in POLYHEDRON™ Newszine #19 has me confused. Wouldn’t Bigby have needed an 18 intelligence to create the Bigby’s Crushing Hand spell? He would need that to use it according to the rules.

ADA: First, Bigby is one of Gary’s characters, and Gary doesn’t use strict AD&D® game rules in his campaign. You don’t have to, either; the object is to have fun, not to be a rulebook lawyer, and if you can modify the system to your taste without damaging its integrity (quite a trick, at times), go to it. Furthermore, the published statistics for Gary’s characters do not match the real ones. Each player is entitled to privacy when it comes to character details, and Gary is no exception. So change Rigby’s intelligence to 18 (or higher, possible through the use of a tome of clear thought).

James Maliszewski at Grognardia (a great blog, by the way; the reason I keep picking on him is that I keep reading him) was confused and frightened by this official support for modifying the rules:

I have to admit that this answer surprised me—not because I didn’t already know what it would say, but because I didn’t imagine I’d ever read such a thing in a TSR periodical. In the past, these magazines tended to advance a very strong “by the book” line when it came to the rules, as evidenced by the fact that there’s an official column for questions and answers. I can’t help but wonder if perhaps this represented a change in thinking during the final years of Gygax’s time at the company (he’d leave for good October 1986—about a year and a half into the future).

I think what James sees as a “by the book line” is a natural response to having people send in questions. Of course people will send in questions. Should they ignore questions? And if they shouldn’t ignore questions, where else would an answer to a rules question be if not in the book? The actual wording of the Dispel Confusion answer doesn’t surprise me: it’s the way Gygax and others always said to play the game throughout their time at TSR.

What plane does this take place in?

Use the written material as your foundation and inspiration, then explore the creative possibilities you have in your own mind to make your game something special.—Mike Carr, Advanced D&D Dungeon Masters Guide, p. 2

As the creator and ultimate authority in your respective game, this work is written as one Dungeon Master equal to another. Pronouncements there may be, but they are not from “on high” as respects your game.—E. Gary Gygax, Advanced D&D Dungeon Masters Guide, p. 7

While the material in this booklet is referred to as rules, that is not really correct. Anything in this booklet (and other D&D booklets) should be thought of as changeable—anything, that is, that the Dungeon Master or referee thinks should be changed.—Tom Moldvay, Dungeons & Dragons Fantasy Adventure Game Basic Rulebook, p. B3

You may use all or part of these rules. They often include several ways of playing and running the game. You may create new rules, monsters, and magic, using these rules as guidelines.—Frank Mentzer, Dungeons & Dragons Fantasy Role Playing Game Players Manual, p. 0

I call this a sort of Cult of the Cult of Gygax™ because it’s very difficult to counter—in the same way that cults are difficult to counter. Any evidence against it (Polyhedron literally recommended against a strict rules interpretation) is taken as evidence for it (they must have been changing their mind!).

It reminds me a lot of a very common method of news reporting. On Monday, a news outlet will report that Public Figure said something totally out of character for Public Figure. On Tuesday, the same outlet will report that Public Figure is trying to walk back Monday’s statement. Almost always, when I go to the source, I find that Monday’s attribution was not only out of character, Public Figure never actually said it. The news outlet was reporting an interpretation as if it were fact, and when evidence came in countering their interpretation, it became, not evidence that their interpretation was wrong, but further evidence in support of that interpretation. They’re walking it back!

What I see as interesting about this from a thousand feet up and forty years gone is that the people running the company when that question was asked were still playing the game. There’s no expectation that Hasbro executives play the games they produce; nor even that their employees at imprints such as Wizards of the Coast play their games. Hasbro is a company that exists to publish games in the same way that Random House exists to publish books. There’s no expectation whatsoever that Random House executives, for example, read the books they publish.

Like the RPG industry, there used to be very successful publishing companies and imprints run by readers; at least in the science fiction realm many of them still exist as imprints with the name of the original founder. Ballantine Books was founded by Ian and Betty Ballantine. Del Rey Books was started by Lester and Judy-Lynn del Ray. They were readers, and they saw a commercial opportunity in producing more books for people with tastes similar to their own. In a very real sense, they started a publishing company in order to ensure that they had more books to enjoy! They were very prolific readers.

That’s the era TSR came from, and TSR at the point this question was asked was still run by gamers. The game was a community. Much of what gets described as cultish was really an attempt at being able to join any game with any character. So that when Gygax hesitates to call, say, Roger E. Moore’s astral planes article official, it is this: there are no official rules, at least not outside of the context of tournament play. What there are, are community rules.

Outside of the rules it’s even more amorphous. If a player character happens to encounter a different version of the planes in one group than in another, so what? That’s not even what a community ruleset was meant to cover. The complete anarchy of physical laws between levels of, say, Castle Greyhawk, was never hidden from us, and, in my case at least, it was always a chaos to aspire to.

All the evidence I saw back then is that this was deliberate on TSR’s part.