Gygax was “too creative” to play AD&D by his own rules (circa 1982/1983)

In some recent entries (here and here) I have lingered on what E. Gary Gygax said about D&D and how it should be played.

In 1976, Gygax called D&D a “free form” game open to modifications in the rules. By 1977, his attitude had changed. He had come to hate house rules that modified the game he claimed as his personal property. We know he took legal action against any company that came too close to D&D. In 1982, Gygax stated officially (in Dragon) that if you modify his game, you are no longer playing D&D and you can’t even say you are a D&D player, but you are rather playing something inferior.

Some players got in line and accepted that they had to memorize the AD&D books to play by the “official” rules.

Others, who were playing their own way and had used house rules for years, became indignant at being told by the man credited with creating the game that their game was not “serious,” that it was at a “lower level,” even “perverted.”

The development of Gygax’s attitude by 1981 becomes clearer if we look at Polyhedron, the official newszine of the Role-Playing Games Association. The RPGA was fostered by TSR in 1980 when they put Frank Mentzer on the task of creating an international league of tournament play. They focused entirely on TSR games. It was a TSR organ posing as something for all role-playing games. Frank Mentzer was in charge of Polyhedron at first. Gary Gygax was nevertheless listed as the “Publisher” for the first eleven issues.

Gygax did not mind obsequious deference from people who worked for him on Polyhedron. As Publisher, he countenanced it when his writers referred to him as “the Master of Fantasy himself, E. Gary Gygax.” (Polyhedron 11, early 1983, p. 21). You can almost hear the applause. This suited the persona he adopted.

An interview arranged with the Publisher in Issue 1

Gygax used Polyhedron to spread the word on how he wanted D&D to be played by the hoped-for international league of AD&D and D&D gamers. Mentzer included a big interview with Gygax that had to be split between first two issues (1981). In the first part, Mentzer explained that Gygax “was willing to be interviewed if time could be found.” “We managed to catch Gary in the right mood and with a little time. … we proudly present this profile of E. Gary Gygax, President of TSR Hobbies, Inc.”

The first question of the interview was how D&D was created, and why. Gygax carefully omitted reference to Arneson and other creators in his simplified account, even when asked specifically about his collaborators. Then Mentzer asked if he was happy with the way D&D was going. Gygax’s response concerns AD&D. I have underlined some key terms and phrases. Gygax said,

One of the reasons that I was able to throw myself into the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons® project with such vigor… is that I felt that a game was needed that would have more control over its audience, and one that was not so open-ended and one that was going to have more uniformity of play, and yet retain the sense of wonder and imagination and creativity that the Dungeons and Dragons system, as a game form, had produced.

He adds,

Unfortunately, it seems as though [the AD&D rules are] still being perverted, although not as badly. I believe that the RPGA is going to help to raise the level of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons play by forcing a little more conformity. I don’t mind creativity, I don’t mind mutation, if it brings out better game play, and superior gaming in general. Buy from everything that I can see, all the changes that are made are usually foolish and meant to either baby players or kill them off, one way or another. They’re destructive, rather than creative.

He lists some of these “destructive” innovations. They include “double damage on a natural 20” (today a standard D&D rule), critical hits, weapon expertise rules, the spell point system “which allowed magic-users to become veritable machine guns of spells without ever having to seriously consider what they were going to take and just shoot everything down.”

Spell points, he argued, “made the magic-user the only character worth playing.”

Game balance was for players playing to win.

Ah-ha! Now we are coming to the rationale for Gygax’s disgust with spell-point systems. He says the same things about the barbarian or the knight character classes of characters he’s heard about.

If you allow a character class like that, Gygax thought, “it was the only one worth being,” because he thought they had more power.

Gygax thought that players would choose a character to beat the game rather than a character that would be fun to play. If one class seemed more powerful than the others, all players would play that class.

Coming from the “Master of Fantasy,” this seems like an astonishing, and inadvertent, show of ignorance about why gamers like me and the players I knew were playing role-playing games at the time. Gygax was thinking of those who played D&D as tacticians, overlooking what I’d guess was at least half of the players in the hobby, and maybe most of the younger players.

For Gygax, you chose a character class for its abilities to defeat the dungeon. Magic-Users with spell points and barbarians with high hit dice would be more powerful than the others. The feared result would be, Gygax said, that “everybody is one thing. These are usually the Monty Haul games.” That is, everybody would belong to the same character class.

Let’s linger on this for a minute. Gygax did not think we chose character classes because we thought they would be fun to try. Personality, creative impulses, emulation of fiction—none of these were factors he had in mind. He did not think we chose character classes with role-playing in mind or a concept of a fantasy alter-ego.

He thought we chose character classes for tactical reasons alone: to win the dungeon game.

It’s as if he did not know what players who bought D&D were doing with it.

Or that’s what he said. But he must have known that plenty of us players used spell points and barbarians without ruining our game. We kept playing. Plenty of game systems exist with those features, and players use them and have fun. He must have known that spell points can be arranged so that they do not give powers too high for one’s tastes, and that the barbarian’s abilities can be trimmed down likewise.

Of course, there have been plenty of games since then that focus entirely on one character type. Look at Pendragon, about medieval knights, or Ars Magica, where the main characters, at least, are medieval wizards. There are others. Of course, you can even have a D&D game just about fighters or just about clerics. It doesn’t break the game. It might not work with certain scenarios, but the DM’s job is to work with the players to make an appropriate scenario, not to run a generic dungeon for a party with Gygaxian balance.

Try as I might to understand this, I have to conclude that Gygax’s idea was extremely shortsighted. I even find it hard to believe that this was actually his complete view. If Gygax could “balance” illusionists and assassins with other character classes in his AD&D, why could he not deal with barbarians or spell points?

The interviewer (Mentzer, I guess) rightly asked him how new monsters and other items could be invented for D&D, in that case. Gygax answered that everything had to be scaled with what already existed.

That is, Gygax actually had a workable answer. But he would not apply it to rules innovations like spell points.

So what was the motive in shaming gamers who played using those house rules?

I assume Gygax wasn’t stupid. Therefore, I can only conclude that his motive was not merely that he was incapable of balancing innovations in the rules. Maybe it was a factor, but I think the motive was more personal.

I think he was actually against including ideas for which others might take credit. He had to keep D&D as his baby. That meant excluding any variants from the early zines, no matter how popular they were. The zines had criticized his game, had criticized Gygax himself for the badly written original rules, and he had decided to refuse to engage with their contributions. If he accepted the fan-based rules contributions, he would have to share credit, and that went against one of the highest priorities he’d held for years: to be the sole Master of Fantasy, the Master of the Game, “the individual responsible for it all, “the first proponent of fantasy gaming” (terms he used for himself: Players Handbook, p. 5).

This motive accords with other testimonies.

But Gygax was “too creative” to play by the rules he mandated for others.

Mentzer had a column in Polyhedron called “Notes for the Dungeon Master.” In issue 9 (1982), Mentzer explained that he, as a DM, did not bother to keep track of “minutia” like encumbrance, movement, spell components, and the like. “It takes a good DM to keep track of all that stuff, and incorporate it without boring the players. But it also takes time, which I’m sadly short on, so I skip it.”

He thus revealed that he ignored a lot of the AD&D rules in actual practice. No big deal, right?

Then it gets weird. Mentzer added that even Gygax did not play the complete AD&D, either, and excused him for this by saying, basically, Gygax was allowed to go against his own admonitions because he was more creative than “you,” the reader.

An emphasis on role playing comes closer to the original concept of the game than does an obsession with details. Gary doesn’t run a straight AD&D^TM campaign; he’s too creative to feel comfortable in that rigid system. You say you are, too? How many games, modules, and articles have you written lately? Have you given the system, as published, a chance? Have you tried the D&D® game, a flexible and adaptable framework, instead of the far more complex and regimented AD&D system?

So… if you have published game stuff, then that proves you may be “too creative” to use a “rigid” system like AD&D.

But you ordinary players: you had better stick to the rules as written. You’re not creative enough!

Right.

The Master of Fantasy didn’t have to follow the rules that he required everybody else to follow if they wanted to play “serious” (A)D&D. He was just too creative to follow rules he insisted on for others. Uh huh.

Note Mentzer’s tone. He mocked those who used house rules for thinking that they could live up to Gygax’s greatness. The Master made the rules for you because you need them, but the Master himself was far above having to follow them. You, peon gamer, do not get to try house rules at home… unless you want to play something inferior.

Nobody played AD&D by the rules.

Not everybody was going to drink the Kool-Aid as Mentzer did.

Roger E. Moore was a contributor to Dragon at the time. His long letter to Polyhedron, appearing in issue 11, was triggered by Mentzer’s remark and his upset seemed to take the new editor, Kimber Eastland, by surprise.

He began his letter expressing alarm that Gygax did not run a “‘straight,’ by-the-rules game,” because he had never seen anybody run such a game, but had told others that Gygax was probably the only one to play “by-the-rules AD&D.” Moore felt confused by this.

His next point deserves quotation in full.

What I would like to do in this letter is to lay to rest, forever, the rumor that official AD&D games are common, or even occasionally seen. I have been playing AD&D and D&D games since 1977, and in all those years have never seen an AD&D game that did not include at least small amounts of ‘unofficial’ game material. There have been critical hit charts, critical fumble tables, double-damage-on-all-20’s rules, new character classes, new character races, new weapon types, new magical spells, new monsters, altered level-progression systems that let dwarves be paladins and the like, games in which everyone had an artifact, and games in which there was no magic. Melee has been restructured for segment-by-segment play or streamlined to dump things like speed factors and armor-class adjustments for weapons. Magical systems—I could not count all the new magical systems I’ve seen. Elements from other games have been included on top of all this. Some characters have been allowed to reach levels over 20 (some up to 100); some games have no one over 1^st-level.

He went on, finally emphasizing that players change rules because it’s fun that way!

And he continued (underlining added by me):

They alter their own AD&D games and they like it, and so do their players. … Are there more people who play ‘straight’ AD&D games than there are who play variant AD&D games? I wouldn’t want to put it to the test if I were you.

What’s the point of all this? The point is that someone doesn’t have to be as creative as Gary Gygax to be ‘allowed’ to play variant AD&D games. By ‘allowed’ I mean freed from criticism.

Moore continued to testify that everybody just plays their own way, and that he and his wife have never seen even a tournament without house rules that altered the system in some way. He added,

Games are meant to be fun—a shared experience for a small group of people who just want to have a good time. I will defend to the death of all my player characters the right of anyone to play whatever they want, provided it doesn’t harm anyone, and Heaven knows, the AD&D game is as harmless as they come.

At the end, he said that he would appreciate it if they would publish the letter in Polyhedron. Clearly, he doubted that they would, but they did. I think they did because he was a contributor to Dragon.

The editor’s response

Kim’s uncomfortable response said that he had seen “straight” D&D games by the rules, but he did concede that they were “not common.” But he thought that was bad. The problem was that new gamers “don’t even try the established, balanced system,” or even the more “flexible” (non-Advanced) D&D, as intended.

The amount of mail I read from Refs who have strayed from the game … and whose games are now completely out of control is staggering. The usual reason for this is that they didn’t even try to balance the game as it is constructed.

In response to Moore, he pleads ignorance.

I am a bit confused when I see the phrases, “allowed to play,” “defend to the death of your player characters the right of anyone to play whatever they want, permitted it doesn’t harm anyone,” and putting the two different theories “to a test.” Where did this all come from? Who said anything about anyone attacking players or their rights?

Either Kim was being disingenuous, or he was not paying attention to what the Boss had been saying since 1976. I am going with the former, because even I can see clearly from thirty-eight years later, with little more than some old magazines at my disposal, that Moore was upset about Gygax’s pronouncements in Dragon and elsewhere about the “inferior” games on a “lower level” that did not even count as D&D because they used house rules.

Moore was addressing the legitimacy of variant rules and house rules, which Gygax had attacked over and over. Moore specified that he meant that gamers should be allowed to play “freed from criticism.” The criticism was coming from the game designer himself, Gary Gygax, who belittled players who did not follow his game rules closely.

What he meant is beyond any doubt because Moore listed the exact variants that Gygax always disparaged (critical hits, spell points, etc.). Gygax had said over and over that these variants were not legitimate.

Moore felt outraged when Mentzer revealed that even Gygax did not play by the rules as written, but he justified it by alleging, in effect, that Gygax was a being of superior creativity. Moore was calling out hypocrisy. For me, it is especially interesting as a testimony to the fact that probably most people still did not play D&D by the book, whatever TSR mandated, even in 1982.

Within a few years, it would not matter, because Gygax lost control of TSR in 1985 and quit in 1986. Roger E. Moore would become editor of Dragon from 1986 to 1993.

Conclusion

The harder Gygax tried to enforce a universal set of rules, the more it became clear that people were going to tinker with the rules and play their own way. It only damaged Gygax's legacy that he put down players who did that, possibly because he could not imagine how to balance the game, possibly out of spite against the earliest D&D players who came up with rules they liked better.

If you play, or have played, Gygax's AD&D strictly by the book, I would love to hear from you. Maybe you can put what Roger E. Moore wrote to the test!