Gygax (July 1978) would have hated the way you play D&D today.

In the July 1978 issue of Dragon, Gary Gygax expressed his outrage and anger at D&D variants. He did not like competitors to D&D.

What would he say to today’s innumerable retroclones that tinker with his original rules? What would he say to the latest generation of genetically modified varieties of D&D? Let’s look at his tirade from the summer of ’78.

Gygax thought attempts at realism in RPGs were stupid.

Gygax believed that fantasy role-playing games should be “balanced and cohesive” foremost. Already in 1978, four years after the publication of D&D, while he was in the thick of developing AD&D, new fantasy role-playing games were being published with rules that aimed at more realism. Gygax argued that a fantasy game about elves and wizards should not waste effort on realism. It was a game; to expect realism from that was, in his view, basically crazy.

“The sheer magnitude of the misconception absolutely astounds me!” he wrote in a fascinating and extremely defensive column in the Dragon magazine issue of July 1978.

I previously remarked how Gygax failed to distinguish between two fundamentally different kinds of realism relevant here: realism within a fantasy (which includes genre features like elves and magic) and realism within a system of rules designed to support the fantasy. The rules that make the fiction come to life are different from the fiction. Even the fantasy requires its own kind of verisimilitude. Here again we encounter Gygax’s misunderstanding of this basic distinction. His fixation on “game balance” meant little more than sticking to the rules he that he was selling.

Many players wanted more “realistic” combat. They wanted a combat system that felt like more than an alternation of blows. It bothered Gygax a lot.

Pulling this or that section from the body and criticizing it is totally invalid unless the workings of that particular segment do not harmonize with the whole, thus causing the entire game to be unenjoyable.

He went on.

With the popularity of DUNGEONS & DRAGONS increasing so dramatically, I fervently desire to put the matter of variants, particularly “realistic” variants, to rest once and for all, so as to get on to other more important things, but it keeps springing up every time a sound stroke is dealt to it. Additions to and augmentations of certain parts of the D&D rules are fine. Variants which change the rules so as to imbalance the game or change it are most certainly not. These sorts of tinkering fall into the realm of creation of a new game, not development of the existing system, and as I stated earlier, those who wish to make those kind of changes should go and design their own game.

What kinds of D&D rules were gamers complaining about? Gygax mentions a few. Some players wanted magic-users to be able to use swords and fighters to be able to use wands. Gygax was certain that this would create super-characters who would ruin everything he had so carefully balanced:

… it would spoil the game! Each character role has been designed with care in order to provide varied and unique approaches to solving the problems which confront the players. If characters are not kept distinct, they will soon merge into one super-character. Not only would this destroy the variety of the game, but it would also kill the game, for the super-character would soon have nothing left to challenge him or her, and the players would  grow  bored and move on to something which was fun.

The passage just quoted is, in effect, a defense of character classes. Apparently, abandoning character classes kills the game. This strikes me as profoundly unimaginative, especially considering how many successful role-playing games do without character classes. Could Gygax and his friends conceive of no challenges for a sword-wielding wizard?

Gygax 1978 hated amateur creativity by D&D fans.

If you publish a gaming zine or blog with house rules today, chances are Gygax of 1978 would have been disgusted with you. He wrote that he despised

the fringe group which haunt the pages of “Amateur Press Association” publications. Now APAs are generally beneath contempt, for they typify the lowest form of vanity press. There one finds pages and pages of banal chatter and inept writing from persons incapable of creating anything which is publishable elsewhere. Therefore, they pay money to tout their sophomoric ideas, criticise those who are able to write and design, and generally make themselves obnoxious. While there are notable exceptions, they are far too few to give any merit to the vehicles they appear in.

These APAs were the earliest venue for the publication of D&D house rules (besides Gygax’s and own house rules, which we call OD&D).

To be fair, a few authors of articles in zines had attacked Gygax for his shoddy and unclear rules, but the man took it pretty badly. All the same, these were the people buying and playing his game. He responded to them with flamboyant vitriol.

What would he have said about your blog?

Gygax hated spell points.

Gygax went on to add, “From this morass [of amateur publications] rose the notion that a spell point system should be inserted into D&D.” He spits on spell points in the ensuing discussion.

I suppose that is because the main competitor games all used spell points.

Tunnels & Trolls (June 1975) was the first role-playing game to use the Strength stat as the basis for points used to cast spells, but it existed as a D&D variant in California from the beginning of D&D’s reception there.

From T&T, other games copied the idea. The “Warlock” variant rules, published in a California zine in August 1975, introduced spell point rules. You can learn about it here and here. (I suspect that Ken St. Andre, the author of T&T, had been introduced to spell points from a Californian source, along with terms like “Dungeon Master”--which originated in California in February of 1975.) These variants were reprinted separately as The Complete Warlock in July 1978, the very time that Gygax wrote his angry screed. In the long run,

Warlock introduced a number of novelties that are well regarded today by players, and it has had a lasting impact on the game, as shown by DM David.

These new takes on D&D or the concept of D&D prompted TSR to focus on “authenticity” of their original. See, for example, this ad, posted by Zenopus Archives.

The Fantasy Trip: Wizard (1978) uses a slightly modified version of the T&T spell system, whereby there is an Intelligence stat prerequisite for each spell, and each spell is powered by Strength points spent (fatigue). GURPS, Steve Jackson’s much more complex sequel to TFT, powers spells just the same way. Chaosium’s games, starting with RuneQuest (1978), added a Power stat which was the basis for magic points. One of the two magic systems used in the British Advanced Fighting Fantasy game (the magic system called “sorcery”) likewise uses Stamina points to power spells. DragonQuest (1980) uses Fatigue points, a secondary stat derived directly from the Endurance stat, to power spells.

In short, plenty of successful role-playing games with large followings use magic points. Why did Gygax hate them so much? I really can’t say. Maybe it’s just because it wasn’t his AD&D system.

If you think about it, though, there is only a small difference between D&D’s magic system and spell points. The main difference is that in D&D spell points (in the form of “spell slots,” in the terms of 5e) are not based on a stat but on the level of the spell-caster, and must be spent before the adventure begins. Also, they are given out in such small numbers as to make beginning spell-casters nearly useless. Anybody who has played a level-one Magic-User knows what I’m talking about.

Gygax imagined first-level characters as “elite.”

He wrote that “D&D presumes that the adventurers are the elite, the cream of the cream. Each is a potential Hero, Archmage, and so on.”

OSR players today uphold the idea that first-level characters are really nothing special and are fit to die on a flip of the coin. That wasn’t Gygax’s idea in 1978.

Gygax hated the idea that your fighters would have bonuses with certain weapons.

The idea that fighters could specialize in weapons, in which they would have bonuses to hit, riled Gygax. The reasoning is bizarre.

For those who insist on giving weapons expertise bonuses due to the supposed extra training and ability of the character, I reply: What character could be more familiar and expert with a chosen weapon type than are monsters born and bred to  their fangs, claws, hooves, horns, and other body weaponry? Therefore, the monsters must likewise receive weapons expertise bonuses. While this does put part of the system into balance again, it moves player characters closer to situations where they can be killed before they can opt to follow a course of action aimed at extricating themselves. Again, this feature is undesirable and must be discarded.

So… player characters can’t specialize in weapons because that would mean that monsters with claws and horns would specialize in claws and horns? That’s just odd.

Players of the any edition that uses weapon proficiencies should beware of Gygax’s curse. You’ve spoiled the game!

Gygax was ambivalent about rules for character backgrounds.

One of the features of games like RuneQuest (1978) and Chivalry & Sorcery (1977) was that player characters should come from some kind of background. They belonged to a society, had family origins, and had cultures. This was “realistic.” (It’s just the kind of realism that Barker cited in his game Empire of the Petal Throne [1975] for introducing the first RPG skill system.)

Gygax thought that this was okay as an optional thing because it did not upset the “power balance” of his game. That said, he argued that it was not directly relevant.

Basically, social level means nothing to adventurers such as Conan, Fafhrd and Gray Mouser, Elric, Kugel the Clever, etc. Yet in a game, it can be a handy referee’s tool for setting a stage or rewarding player characters. It does not pervert the intent of the game, it does not destroy game systems.

I’d venture to say that one could argue that social level meant something to Elric and Conan. After all, both rose and fell during their fictional careers, and that mattered in their stories.

I note in passing that Howard and Leiber remained the basis for the kind of fiction that Gygax wanted to emulate with D&D. Moorcock shows up instead of Tolkien probably because Tolkien’s Middle Earth would not be a good example of fiction in which social level does not matter.

Gygax thought critical hits on natural 20 “perverted” the game

It is especially hilarious, in hindsight, that one of the combat rules innovations developed by the D&D mavericks that Gygax despised is now a canonical D&D rule! He wrote,

The “critical hit” or “double damage” on a “to hit” die roll of 20 is particularly offensive to the precepts of D&D...

He also hates the concomitant rule that a natural 1 on a d20 means a fumble or broken weapon. By these innovations, such as the critical hit on a natural 20,

[the] whole game system is perverted, and the game possibly ruined, by the inclusion of “instant death” rules, be they aimed at monsters or characters. In the former case they imbalance the play and move the challenge which has been carefully placed into D&D.

The Warlock variant from 1975 first introduced critical hits and fumbles.

The recent OSR movement has fostered a style of play in which players relish the possibility of a random and ignominious instant death. Gygax explicitly hated that. He thought it that high death rates would ruin D&D’s popularity.

Protracted combat situations which stress “realism” will destroy the popularity of the game as surely as would the inclusion of creatures which will always slay any characters they fight. The players desire action, but all but the odd few will readily tell you that endless die rolling to determine where a hit lands, having to specify what sort of attack is being made, how their character will defend  against an attack, and so on are the opposite of action; they are tedious.

Besides the Warlock variant, I think that Gygax had two specific new competitors in mind in this passage, talking about game systems like this.

RuneQuest was published by Chaosium in 1978. It was released at the Origins convention, held in Ann Arbor that year in July, not many days after the publication of Gygax’s column in the July 1978 issue of Dragon, the column I’ve been quoting. (This issue of Dragon contains a full-page ad for Origins that month.) The RuneQuest rules were written by Steve Perrin, known among early D&D players for “the Perrin Conventions,” an early set of D&D combat rules widely accepted as alternatives to the rules as written by Gygax. DM David shows on his blog how the Perrin Conventions survived to become part of canonical D&D rules. I can only assume that Gygax had information about the nature of RuneQuest’s forthcoming rules, written by a former D&D player, which would be a strong new competitor game. RuneQuest included more detailed and “realistic” combat rules including random body hit locations: “where a hit lands.” It is as if Gygax was trying to ward off RuneQuest from D&D players before his audience saw it at Origins.

The other game that comes to mind is The Fantasy Trip by Steve Jackson (the American one who founded Steve Jackson Games) and published by Metagaming. Jackson wrote in The Space Gamer 27 (July 1980, page 9) notes in hindsight about the design for his game The Fantasy Trip. He wrote that in 1977,

the game I was playing a lot myself was Dungeons & Dragons. And like everyone else who tried an early version of D&D, I wanted to make some changes. … the biggest problem was combat. The D&D combat rules were confusing and unsatisfying. No tactics, no real movement – you just rolled dice and died. T&T was the same way… So I did something about it. My original idea was to design a game that would accurately simulate medieval sword-and-shield combat. It would have to be simple and fast, and FEEL accurate.

Anybody who has played Melee (1977), the combat rules for The Fantasy Trip, knows that it is not strictly “realistic.” But the factors involved in combat and the kinds of decisions that players make in combat are certainly more realistic than those in D&D. There are tactical choices built into the combat system. As Jackson said, it was about feeling accurate. There are also critical hits and fumbles in TFT. Combat in TFT is indeed “clean, fast, and deadly,” just as it says on the box in the new release (2018). Jackson went on to say in his notes from 1980,

When I designed Melee, I wasn’t going for anything but a quick, somewhat realistic game that could be played by itself or used to fight battles in a role-playing adventure. It wasn’t long, though, before I realized that the Melee system could be the basis for a whole new role-playing game.

This is how many of the early competitors to D&D came into existence. House rules accumulated until the ties to D&D could be cut. One of the goals was a feeling of realism (not realism itself).

Quite usefully, Jackson provides a timeline for the release of TFT. The Melee rules were out by July 1977. The companion Wizard rules were out by December 1977. Jackson struggled to get In the Labyrinth, the full role-playing game materials to accompany the tactical combat and magic systems, out in time for Origins 1978, but he did not make it. Jackson reports that ITL was delayed by his “perfectionism.” (It came out in 1980.)

The Melee rules were alternative combat rules sold in a small, inexpensive minibox set. Surely Gygax had these in mind in 1978.

From these comparisons, one can get a sense of the stakes for role-playing games in 1978. There was the real potential for a new game to take over and replace D&D as the rule set of choice. Gygax was obviously scared of this. His vitriol shows it. Fans of D&D and other game designers alike saw the inherent weaknesses of D&D and vied to come up with something more competitive. It was no longer just D&D. There was now a role-playing game industry.

Gygax 1978 basically just hated other people’s fantasy role-playing games.

Gygax is revered as the founder of the role-playing game hobby (even though he was one of many originators). At the time, he was not particularly gracious about it. He was upset about anybody else’s game, be it a variant or an independent game system outside of his control.

Just as we must prevent the ignorant and inept from spoiling the game by tinkering with the integral systems, we also take every possible step to prevent exploitation of D&D enthusiasts by publishers who hide shoddy products under a fantasy role playing guise. We cannot stop them from putting worthless material into print, but we can certainly make it clear that it is neither recommended nor approved for use with DUNGEONS & DRAGONS. As long as these worthless goods do not trade on the good name of D&D, we can only tell our readers that they should beware of the products they purchase, so read before you buy!

If you have a system of rules alternative to Gygax’s own AD&D, then the man of 1978 neither recommends nor approves of your shoddy, worthless game. It’s not the real thing.

Luckily, his point of view soon became completely irrelevant. You should have fun with your own house rules, just as all the original old-time role-players did! House rules will always be part of the fun.