Gygax said your D&D is fake and inferior (1982)

E. Gary Gygax deserves credit for launching D&D as a commercial enterprise in the ’70s, but he probably also did more to impede the development of D&D than any other.

I started playing D&D in 1981. I soon moved on to other games, enjoying the first big explosion of role-playing publications, when every month saw a new role-playing game on the store shelves. I’m an old-time player, not an old-school player. Based on my memory of those times, and Gygax’s published words, which I’ll discuss below, I think that gamers today have made a mistake in identifying Gygax as their hero. This is especially so for the OSR. Gygax was against much of what the OSR claimed to stand for, especially DIY rules creativity.

To new players who want to “get it right” by hearkening back to “old-school” ways of play, I testify, as someone who was playing in the early ’80s, that you have not heard the full story. Nobody I knew, during the fifteen years that I played as a young person, thought that Gygax was a force of good in the hobby.

The latest entries (like this one here) I wrote were commentaries on Gygax’s own words. They showed how peevish and possessive Gygax was about D&D and how strictly he wanted to control the rules of the game. He wanted to keep it as his own personal domain. He excluded other contributors and even Dave Arneson, from whom he took the idea of the game, to pose himself as “the individual responsible for it all” (as he said). He wanted there to be one standard D&D for which he alone assumed the role of “last authority.” He wanted D&D to be the vehicle for a competition over who was the smartest rules lawyer in the world. This was not a passing fit of mood. He kept this attitude over many years, and he was known for it among gamers at the time.

I’m not making this up out of my distaste for AD&D as a set of rules. Gamers commented on this a lot in the late ’70s and early ’80s, the years that are the supposed model for the “Old School” gamers today. For example, game designer Ken Rolston noted in 1981 that “D&D, in particular, has acquired the reputation of a One-True-Way system—that is, a standardized and authority-centered rules system” (Different Worlds 18, Feb/March 1981). He didn’t have to name names. Everybody who followed the hobby then knew that he was talking about Gygax’s patronizing and controlling persona.

After the publication of his AD&D, even after several years of further effort to impose standard rules for one and all and to drive out competition, Gygax was struggling to keep control over how the game was played. New role-playing games were appearing regularly. Most players who stuck to D&D used house rules and mixed the system with innovations that they found in amateur publications, learned from their friends, or invented themselves. This is how the hobby had evolved organically and locally in actual play.

In 1982, Gygax was willing to concede that people would, in fact, play other ways besides the one true official way that he alone dictated. He declared, however, that if you did play differently, you were no longer playing his game but something inferior. In effect, he excommunicated such D&D players.

Gygax hated house rules, like the ones you probably use today. Every retroclone of D&D was something that he would have detested and derided. I hesitate to imagine what he would say about the Fifth Edition.

Don’t believe me? We can let him speak for himself. In Dragon 67 (November 1982), he wrote a long article called “Poker, Chess, and the AD&D^TM System: The Official Word on What’s Official.”

As Gygax suggested in the title, he saw AD&D, the official complete version of the game, as like chess and poker: there are fixed rules and there are variants, but the variants are not the real thing. If you use variants, it’s not D&D or AD&D and it is not sanctioned. If you play chess but give different rules to the movement of chess pieces, such as allowing a queen to move as a knight, then you have broken the game. You may find it fun but that is not serious. It’s just goofing around. The same thing, he says, applied to house rules for D&D and AD&D. He wrote,

Since the game is the sole property of TSR and its designer [Gygax], what is official and what is not has meaning if one plays the game. Serious players will only accept official material, for they play the game rather than playing at it, as do those who enjoy “house rules” poker, or who  push pawns around the chessboard [without following the rules of chess]. No power on earth can dictate that gamers not add spurious rules and material to either the D&D or AD&D game systems, but likewise no claim to playing either game can then be made. Such games are not D&D or AD&D games — they are something else, classifiable only under the generic “FRPG” catch-all. To be succinct, whether you play either game or not is your business, but in order to state that you play either, it is obviously necessary to play them with the official rules, as written.

D&D is the sole property of E. Gary Gygax and his corporation, got it? What this means is that if you play any form of D&D with your own rules, it ceases to be D&D, and the designer claimed the right to tell you that you are not a “serious player” any longer. Your rules are “spurious” additions that mess up his property. Your game goes in a bin of “catch-alls.” You cannot even state you play D&D, because Gygax declared that it is not official. He wrote,

The AD&D game system does not allow the injection of extraneous material. That is clearly stated in the rule books.

(Even though it’s not stated in the books.)

Those gamers who “adhere strictly to the rules” but add some small extensions to the rules are allowed into the fold. Gygax says that “They play D&D or AD&D games and fully understand what that means.” After all, they buy Dragon magazine, TSR’s publication, the venue for official rules extensions!

Gygax explicitly dismissed all other fantasy role-playing games, including D&D variants.

Far too often, extraneous material tinkered onto the existing D&D or AD&D campaign will quickly bring it down to a lower level at best, ruin it at worst. Fads and “new, state-of-the-art” games come and go, but the D&D and AD&D games keep on growing and improving. The choice is yours.

In other words, you made your choice (wrongly) when you allowed house rules to invade. Now your house rules have debased and ruined the creator’s game. Your game is at a “lower level”! If, however, you follow the official developments of the official game in Dragon magazine, that is okay.

I’m not making this up, as you can see by the quotations from the man himself. He saw AD&D as eternal and everything else as a fad.

This should arouse the attention of players of the recent OSR gaming movement who idolize the man who wrote these things. The OSR was founded on a vast array of playfully tinkered D&D rules facilitated not by Gygax or TSR but by another company, Wizards of the Coast. The OSR games are just the kind of rule sets Gygax vehemently despised during the period when he was in a position to say so. Retroclone designers leave offerings of pious words at an idol of the Gary Gygax who condemned what they went on to do. By his own words, during the years that the “Old School” fantasizes as the pure, gold old days, Gygax would have expelled OSR players from the fold of D&D for playing anything but the rules he wrote (however vaguely and unclearly he stated them).

Of course, this upset a lot of D&D players at the time, as he must have expected and planned to do. For example, one group of thirteen players wrote an open letter to E. Gary Gygax which appeared soon thereafter in Different Worlds 23 (April 1983)—presumably, Dragon magazine would not print it—in which they responded to Gygax’s pronouncement on gaming orthodoxy with indignation. They had been playing, they wrote, AD&D every Friday for two years, and they had house rules. Now Gygax has deigned to inform them that they were not playing AD&D at all, but merely a “Fantasy Role-Playing Game.” They remarked that they found his article “bombastic, self-righteous and condescending.” They realized that Gygax was saying that they were not “serious players.” They quoted his own words back at him to refute him, such as when he specifically said that D&D was not like chess (in his Players Handbook published four years earlier). The letter ends with the players saying that they would no longer call their game D&D, as directed by Gygax, and that they would no longer give free advertising to TSR (by advocating for TSR’s D&D).

These were not the only players that Gygax turned off. To my memory as a player in the early ’80s, Gygax was best known among players I knew for this kind of authoritarian attitude and obnoxious statements. I don’t know why this part of his career has been completely forgotten today and replaced by founder veneration. At the time, his rules authoritarianism was at least as meaningful as his successful marketing of D&D had been.

Conclusion

Simply put, “Old-School” Gygax (1982) would have disdained your current D&D or retroclone game and told you that you had something inferior and unsanctioned. If he changed his tune later in life (and I don’t know whether he did), it would only be because he lost control of TSR in ’85, quit TSR in ’86, and was forced to design other games if he wanted to keep his pundit status. In that, too, he was unsuccessful.

His own ungraciousness haunted him thereafter.

What would D&D look like today if Gygax had encouraged variants and allowed them to be used officially and to flourish where players enjoyed them? What if Gygax had exhorted the gaming community to decide for itself what varieties were most fun and to contribute to its growth? D&D might have been a lot bigger, because fewer players would have broken away with their house rules evolving into new and different games, some of which were then published as competitors. But we will never know.

Gygax’s attempts to promote D&D stunted its growth. Maybe, in an unintended way, this was his contribution: he drove players away from the One True Fantasy Game he had in mind and spurred them, inadvertently, to design completely new games with other emphases. But it was at the price of splitting the hobby. If players in the ’80s increasingly looked down on D&D, Gygax had much to do with that.