D&D for Cash & Prizes!

The Advanced Game: Gygax assumes command

Gary Gygax took Dave Arneson’s dungeon exploration idea, with hidden maps and characters that continue from session to session, and developed it for marketing. The new kind of game was so exciting that it took off everywhere despite the extreme shortcomings of the D&D rules, acknowledged both by Gygax at the time and by players everywhere forever since. The shortcomings are demonstrated by the spontaneous genesis of house rules and variant games in every individual campaign everywhere.

When they were still collaborating, Gygax harangued Arneson to turn out new material, but Arneson evidently was not enough of a motivated worker to turn his hobby into a money-making enterprise without Gygax. This gave Gygax an opportunity to cut Arneson out. He rewrote the story of D&D’s origin to make himself appear as the sole creator.

In June of 1977, not long before the emergence of the first AD&D book, Gygax gave himself sole credit for D&D. He wrote,

Although D&D was not Dave’s game system by any form or measure, he was given co-billing as author for his valuable idea kernels. He complained bitterly that the game wasn’t right, but the other readers/players loved it. In fact, the fellows playing the manuscript version were so enthusiastic that they demanded publication of the rules as soon as possible. Thus, D&D was released long before I was satisfied that it was actually ready. I am not sorry that we decided to publish then instead of later, even though I’ve often been taken to task about it since, and I hope all of you feel the same way too. You can, however, rest assured that work on a complete revision of the game is in progress, and I promise a far better product.

This telling of the story has it that Arneson just provided seeds of ideas; Gygax is really the sole creator; the shortcomings in the game were the fault of enthusiasts who rushed him, not the designer's. He would cement his reputation as sole master of D&D through the creation of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, which was published in three books: The Monster Manual (1977), The Players Handbook (1978), and the Dungeon Master’s Guide (1979). Gygax’s grandstanding worked, as authors of articles in early FRP zines responded to Gygax, not Arneson, when they questioned the rules and their rationale. (Gygax hated those enthusiasts publicly.) AD&D was now, for an unforeseeably short span of years, Gygax’s own thing, a game that allowed him to sell D&D products without acknowledging Arneson or others.

Already in the PH (p. 5), Gygax described himself as “the individual responsible for it all,” “the first proponent of fantasy gaming,” and “the last authority” on the hobby. In this passage he mentioned books he co-authored with Arneson without crediting him. He mentions Arneson only when he comes to a long list of names of people he thanks for “comments, criticism, and contribution.” He treated Arneson like a playtester.

Besides the self-aggrandizement, which Gygax naturally enjoyed, he also had a goal in creating a unified D&D under one authority. Other steps in his master plan would follow.

A game with the same rules everywhere

Gygax wrote (PH, p. 6) that “There’s a need for a certain amount of uniformity from campaign to campaign in D&D.”

He was explicit about what that would require: “Uniformity means that treasure and experience are near a reasonable mean. Uniformity means that the campaign is neither a give-away show nor a killer,” and that “intelligent play will give characters a fighting chance of survival.”

These words, taken out of context decades later, probably sound quite reasonable to most players. Most gamers feel that in-game rewards should feel earned. That is part of the ongoing discussions about what in-game events and actions should result in experience points for player characters. How fast should characters advance? How much work do players need to do, or how much time should they put in, to experience the vicarious thrill of imaginary power?

Gygax looked down on Monty Hall gaming, a style in which players collect loads of treasure and magic items, like winners at a game show, and become godlike in their power. He thought that this kind of imaginary game was not reasonable. He was also worried it would break the game, removing all challenges.

When I got a copy of Deities & Demigods (1980) as a kid, I could not figure out why D&D would assign armor class and hit points to gods like Zeus and Thor. Jon Peterson’s book Playing at the World (pp. 566-7) made sense of this for me. The first “gods” supplement for D&D was Gods, Demi-gods, & Heroes (1976). It was specifically designed as an indicator of power-scale for godlike PCs. If your PCs have god-like hit points and magic levels, then you could now see they were “unreasonably” powerful! Gygax and his TSR employees believed that too many players were playing godlike characters.

In other words, giving stats like hit points to gods was an attempt at standardization of power scales in D&D.

This is the very same concern expressed in the excerpts above from the Preface to the Players Handbook.

Why did D&D need a standard, which was relatively equivalent from campaign to campaign, from DM to DM? It was part of a specific plan of development of the hobby.

One D&D to rule them all

The most obvious reason to have a D&D standard was financial. Gygax’s business was booming but new games like Chivalry & Sorcery (1977) and RuneQuest (1978) kept appearing to compete with D&D. Gygax railed against games that tried to be more realistic. He had to put his foot down and keep control.

In February of 1979, Gygax wrote in Dragon magazine that “Fanatical game hobbyists often express the opinion that DUNGEONS & DRAGONS will continue as an ever-expanding, always improving game system. TSR and I see it a bit differently.”

Today, while there are rumors of a sixth edition of D&D in planning, this sounds astonishing. Gygax wanted a final standard D&D with no major rules changes in its future.

Gygax added, “I envision only minor expansions and some rules amending on a gradual, edition to edition, basis. When you have a fine product, it is time to let well enough alone. I do not believe that hobbyists and casual players should be continually barraged with new rules, new systems, and new drains on their purses.”

This might seem today like an OSR rallying cry, but it’s the opposite. When he wrote AD&D, Gygax absolutely did not want you to have widely varying house rules. He would not have sanctioned your D&D clones at that time. If he was still in charge, Gygax would never have condoned the Open Game License. He would have sued every “OSR” game company. We know this because that is actually what he did when he was in charge of D&D. He threatened any game company with “cease and desist” legal orders if they infringed on his product.

It’s clear from his statement that Gygax looked down on the tendencies of “fanatical game hobbyists.” This meant players who played their own way, not his way. He should be “the last authority,” as he said in the Players Handbook. If you were going to play correctly, and if you were serious, you played Gygax’s AD&D, full stop.

Gygax hated published house rule sets like the Arduin Grimoire. He scoffed at DIY amateur fantasy games like Tunnels & Trolls that took the basic concepts and ran in other directions. They undercut his personal fortune.

In the first years of Dragon, TSR’s magazine to promote its products, issues included notes about D&D rules variants. When AD&D was published, the articles about D&D variants soon ceased appearing, to be replaced by modular rules, new classes like the Barbarian, and other features that could be added on to AD&D but not replace its features.

He saw D&D as a classic that would stand the test of time, like chess or Monopoly. Yes, he actually wrote that.

AD&D: no more give-away shows

In August of 1979, Gygax said in an interview, again in Dragon, that players of older D&D who move to AD&D should know that “the party is over.” “Things are tougher, more controlled.” “The DM is far more able to handle situations as they arise.” AD&D has “a tighter structure, “a much stronger, more rigid, more extensive framework.” “Growth [of character power] is slower.”

Gygax expressed his concern that campaigns too liberal would max out in a mere six months. AD&D was supposed to enable much longer-running campaigns. How would AD&D do that? It’s connected with the issue of character power bloat. In AD&D, character growth is supposed to be “controlled.” Regular D&D, he thought, allowed advancement too rapid. It had to be regulated and that was part of the idea in AD&D.

Partly this is an aesthetic matter. He simply didn’t like super-powered characters. One the one hand, they could too easily foil any dungeon. On the other hand, this is clearly a matter of strategic marketing. He didn’t want players to exhaust the promise of character advancement and to get tired of the game. He thought you’d use up D&D in six months, but an AD&D campaign might take six years. He pitched it as something that DMs would be grateful for because their work in developing a campaign would not go to waste quickly. (As if DMs would run out of new ideas!)

He wrote that further expansion of the game would come through modules, not new rulebooks, except the deities book and maybe more monster manuals.

Always the businessman. The model still works today: once players buy the core books, you cannot keep your company going without selling must-have expansions.

D&D for cash and prizes!

In the same interview (1979), Gygax explained a further ambition in having an immutable set of standard AD&D rules.

This will give fellowship to all the AD&D players, and also enable us to do something  that I’ve wanted to do for a long time, that is to establish an international tournament for AD&D, which  will allow players from all over the country and maybe even the U.K. and Australia and everyplace else it’s played to get together and compete in a recognizable game where they’re on relatively equal footing for—someday—substantial prizes, perhaps.

It’s amusing to see the man who criticized Monty Hall play styles dreaming of a D&D game in which the most knowledgeable players win cash and prizes, just like a competitive game show.

Players today, who are in it for the role-playing experience at least as much as anything else, may wonder how you can compete at a game in which the rules state that there is no winner. Yet this ambition illustrates Gygax’s wargame roots. For him, D&D was always a game in which high intelligence in the real world should be rewarded, just as he wrote in the Preface to the PH (“intelligent play will give characters a fighting chance of survival”). There really always was a winner.

For Gygax the wargamer and entrepreneur, there were skilled players and unskillful players. It is in this concept that OSR gamers who insist that the game is about “player skill” seem to overlap with Gygax’s wishes, even if they are in many ways antithetical to each other.

So how would Gygax find out who the best player was? You could figure out who was best if you got ranked. For this purpose, TSR came up with a National Player Rating System to rank who was the best at D&D.

National Ranking in D&D

The March 1980 issue of Dragon (#35) included an article called “The AD&D National Player Rating System, Developed and tabulated by TSR Hobbies, Inc.”

As the article, which has no named author, states, “By using this framework, it is possible for players as far apart as New York and California (for instance) to be rated by a universal standard and get a concrete idea of how their abilities and achievements compare to one another’s.”

This is exactly what Gygax was alluding to when he discussed the rationale behind AD&D the year before: a universal standard D&D that was the basis for competition and prize awards.

The National Player Rating System, upon inspection, is opaque. It is manifestly a TSR marketing scheme. A player’s rating is multiplied if he plays in a tournament “controlled or closely supervised by TSR Hobbies, in addition to that tournament’s being approved and sponsored by TSR Hobbies.” If you did not play TSR’s way, you were playing wrong. You could not be the best at AD&D if you were not part of the club.

The top players were listed in the same article. The thirty “best” D&D players included D&D contributors like Len Lakofka, Jim Ward, Rob Kuntz, Mike Carr, Erol Otus, and, wouldn’t you know it, Gary Gygax. Ernie Gygax was not far behind. Good going, guys.

This kind of rating of players was, for a time, normal, but—no surprise—it became a source of fuss and bad feeling among players within a year. The May 1981 issue of Dragon (#49) featured pages of complaints about the rating of D&D players at tournaments. Dr. Allen Barwick railed against the unfairness at the tournament he attended. What kinds of things should disqualify a player, according to Dr. Barwick? One was “Peeks in the book.” That is, if you consulted the rules instead of memorizing AD&D’s contents, you should be disqualified. The kind of play fostered by competitive D&D must have been a rules lawyer paradise.

In the same issue, Philip Meyers complains, “Let’s face it, your average AD&D Open entrant does not have the ability to play an 11th-level character well.”

You can imagine the catty scoffing and eye-rolling between players competitively playing D&D. “Ugh, you have no idea how to play a ranger, do you?” “Oh, you are still playing the Basic game? I play Advanced.”

D&D was promoted as a matter of competitive AD&D rules mastery. Rules mastery enabled players to overcome the dungeon threat strategically in rapid time.

Frank Mentzer replied to Meyers’ complaint in an article in the same issue. He wrote to advocate a system that ranked players only against those in their own player group. “Any system used must depend on the Dungeon Master and a scoring system to select the best players from any given group. The only effective rating system from a single DM, considering the wide differences in styles, temperament, and knowledge of rules (which directly affects speed of play), is one in which the DM compares the players he or she actually observed. Therefore, the DMs should select the best players in their own groups, without using a broad point scale to pick the ‘best players’ (often not) in a huge mass.”

In other words, Mentzer thought you should be competing against your own party members to be the best player in your group.

This was tournament play. Of course, D&D’s designers knew that most players were not playing in tournaments, but this was evidently Gygax’s dream for his game: international D&D competitions. Ambitious players might aspire to be among the very best.

I don’t know what happened to the dream of a competitive league of D&D players. We have humbler aspirations to adjudicate experience points. We do know that Gygax soon turned his aspirations toward Hollywood. He left Wisconsin for California where he attempted to foster a big-budget D&D film. Luckily, it was never produced. You can read a summary of the screenplay for yourself to understand why. His time away from TSR headquarters, searching for a California fortune, seems to have been the period in which he began to be displaced from the leadership of the company he co-founded.

D&D for cash and prizes, finally realized

It took the passage of decades and the medium of the Internet to make Gygax’s wish of D&D for cash and prizes into a reality, but the way it works is not what he imagined it would be. Instead of player intelligence and rules lawyering employed competitively to outdo the DM’s dungeon challenges, D&D is played for cash and prizes by likeable down-to-earth voice actors who become microcelebrities by broadcasting their entertaining “actual play” live on video. Players and DMs have thousands of fans who donate money to their games to keep them going at a high level of production for fan entertainment. Spin-off products keep the cash coming. Audiences and commercial production have combined to give elite D&D players an income. It’s more soap opera than wargame, but I bet it makes a lot more money than Gygax’s prizes were envisioned to be.