Gygax 1979 on Random Monster & Treasure Tables

Gary Gygax has become a figure of legend for many gamers today. So-called "old-school" gamers and others can be adamant that the true way to play D&D is Gygax’s way. The think that the "right way" to play is to recapture that.

This means a lot of different things. One of them is to embrace caprice in planning. A DM is supposed to use randomly rolled monsters and treasures. We are living in an age of innumerable random charts for random fantasy requiring only the imagination to link randomly generated stuff together, not to come up with new stuff oneself.

It’s interesting to note that Gygax thought lowly of randomly designing adventures. Here’s what he said in an interview published in Dragon magazine, reflecting on the publication of his AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide, in August 1979 (Dragon #28, p. 46).

I’ve emphasized some of his statements to draw your attention to the point here.

All of the tables and so forth went very easily, except the things I really put off to the very last; the details of massive combat, in the air, on land, or in the sea, and encounters, and so on, because many of these things don’t lend themselves to chance. In other words, much like monster or treasure placement, they just really shouldn’t be rolled up on a chart. I was loathe to prepare the charts to do all these things, but finally I did, and so, OK, if you don’t take the time or the care, or don’t have concern for your campaign to sit down and really look at your map, whether it’s a dungeon map or an outdoor map, and place these monsters for yourself, in some sort of a sensible order, and just want some sort of an off thing . . . OK “Disneyland” campaigns can be fun — you never know what spook is going to pop out from around a comer — here are the tables to do it. It’s kind of like Disneyland, you know, and the old fun houses. I can relate to River-view because that’s what was in Chicago when I was a kid, and you stepped on a little board and something went “bleeh” and would pop up and you never knew what it was going to be. And it was fun. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s difficult for me to get too up-tight about making a lot of sense, because I don’t really see much sense in fire-breathing dragons and giants 20 feet tall, and things like that, but the game sense within the whole thing: we can talk about that. And we want to look at some sort of a reasonable ecology and a reason for something being there. So I approached that all with great trepidation, and after much work, I hope I got something that would fit within the confines of the book with respect to its size and its page content, that would answer the need.

According to Gygax, you certainly can roll up dungeons on random tables and put monsters and treasures at random if you just don’t care that much, and you just want a silly game, but that doesn’t make game sense and it’s not reasonable. Yet he recognized that some DMs, those without the time, concern, or care for their campaigns, needed charts. He provided them for these individuals.

Readers of what I write here will know that I am critical of Gygax his products, but I am even more critical of gamers who ignore history to claim that they have "the right way to play" in the name of figures like Gygax.

He could not be clearer. Gygax held that the placement of monsters and treasures “just really shouldn’t be rolled up on a chart.” He thought method that led to a Disneyland campaign, a term he clearly intends as negative.

I would be interested to know if anybody has an earlier published reference to the idea of a "fun-house dungeon."