Gygax wrote in Dragon #16 (July 1978) that “the ‘critical hit’ or ‘double damage’ on a ‘to hit’ die roll of 20 is particularly offensive to the precepts of D&D.”
I think I found your problem right here. There’s an asshole in the works.
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I remember having a train of thought, that the lawful/chaotic axis would actually make sense, if you imagined it as an index of how one related to feudal class relations. Assume that feudalism is still strong, but there is some room for independence from it, such as free towns, and some outright outsiders. A lot of character archetypes seem to imply something like that – paladins are upholders of the traditional feudal order, bards flit from town to town and refuse to be tied down anywhere, and so on.
Part of this would require some assumption that there was actual scarcity – i.e., most people are working hard to grow crops. And sure, Mr. Freebooting Rogue, you can mock the nobility for dominating the peasants, but you didn’t grow the wheat for that bread you’re eating, did you? Well no, Mr. High-and-mighty Paladin, but life would be a lot easier for peasants if they weren’t giving half of what they grew to the nobility, wouldn’t it?
Unfortunately, D&D pretty much never took feudalism seriously.
EDIT: Reining in a run-on sentence.
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+10 for mentioning Rolemaster.
Indeed, the best tables anywhere. And the game is actually and totally playable. Forget the nay-sayers. Had some of my best experiences playing it … as player … not GM. That was left to my computer-instead-of-a-brain friend ; )
Anyway, very interesting article. Also, I always get a little kick in the excitement bucket when I read anything mentioning Tekumel: Empire of the Petal Throne.
Quite so.
For the extreme case - if you’re wearing full harness, any hit that does damage represents a “critical” hit, since it represents hitting one of the key target points that the armour doesn’t fully protect.
Gygax’s determination to protect his game design from the vagaries of “realism” seems interesting in part because he defended this specific area so thoroughly, as opposed to others… a policy that was patchwork at best.
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…ah, another candidate for the Badly Played Paladin survivor support group.
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Well, the Paladin concept was based heavily on the Templars. Maiming and decapitation was about right for the medieval combat style. (Anything short of maiming or decapitation leaves an opponent who might still hurt you…)
I heard about a game of Paranoia where one of the idiots (um, ‘players’) had decided to fire the ‘Tactical Nuke’ he had been assigned. The player had decided to fire it, without reading the instruction manual (of course, that manual was not available to him as it was, like almost everything in the game, “above your security clearance level”).
Ahem, quoting from memory:
Shoulder-fired Tactical Nuke:
Effect: Complete destruction in a 150 yard radius from the point of impact.
Range of missile: 100 yards.
About a third to half of the game master’s yet-to-be-explored layout had just disappeared. Heh.
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one of my favourite monty python skits.
The published rules were a starting point, to be modified -- and more importantly, to be ignored -- at the gamemaster's whim in the interests of making the joint storytelling exercise as creative and entertaining as possible.
In every roleplaying game I ever played, including at gaming conventions, this was the only rule that was strictly followed. The rules were there to provide a framework, not act as a cage. Maybe those at TSR thought it would undermine the sales potential if they said this, but following this philosophy never discouraged anyone I knew from buying the books, manuals, and assorted paraphernalia. If anything it probably encouraged them. The rules were a starting point, not an end to themselves.
An extremely long list of polearms, yet, somehow, like all the other fantasy games since, don’t they ban the simple one-handed, eight-to-ten-foot spear, probably the most common historical polearm?
No ban. They did a pretty good job in 3rd Edition with spears and maces by making them somewhat underpowered compared to other weapons (e.g. axes and hammers), but making them more accessible and easier to use, which is about right.
This story of critical hits is just one example of how the tension between control and creativity played out. The book Playing at the World which this blog post riffs on (and yes, which I wrote) shows many more angles of this whole narrative arc of how TSR emerged from the fan community, used fan energy to popularize the game, but then at a certain point, decided they knew best and tried to curtail fan creativity.
You can find Gygax himself saying that the rules are just a starting point, but then by the late 1970s, he began judging which changes were “perverted,” which ones meant that you weren’t playing D&D anymore but some other twisted game, and so on. The cherry on the cake is that it was exactly by drawing these lines in the sand that TSR created the RPG industry, a set of competitors all too happy to agree they weren’t playing D&D any more. So if you love your Runequest, you can thank TSR for pushing a D&D fan named Steve Perrin away when he approached them with ideas, among countless other cases.
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Wow. Your paladin player assumption list is identical to my republican profile list!
- Republicans* are, by definition, the most “good” it’s possible to be;
- Good always wins;
- Winning is defined as getting what the character wants;
- Any time a Republican is confronted with a difficult choice, it
contradicts the preceding points, and is therefore an intolerable
outrage.
- Republican may also be replaced by the term “conservative”.
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Okay, so when did the ban appear? Pathfinder has it, and I sorta assumed that they had inherited the mistake instead of adding their own.
Though I’ve played Pathfinder a couple of times, I didn’t realize it was missing the long spear. I think that’s all Pathfinder as I believe it existed in D&D 3.5 (it certainly did in 3.0).
I always found the lawful/chaotic axis more interesting too. I sometimes framed it as state vs. anarchy (with benign and unpleasant versions of both) but it could also just be a personal trait. For example, the orderly wizard in his isolated tower, having no interaction with the laws of a nation, vs. the quick to anger and unpredictable barbarian, who may very much uphold the rules and norms for a warrior of his tribe.
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They were trying to protect their copyright and trademark. That required that they make at least an attempt to clearly define what was their product and make sure the term “dungeons and dragons” referred to it and only it.
They were also worried about protecting it from the folks who were accusing roleplaying games of leading to everything from demon worship to mass murder/suicide to everything else that’s wrong with Those Damned Kids These Days. Which caused them to shy away from some topics.
And they were trying to run what amounted to an open-source product before the concept existed, starting from the marketing model of a traditional game publisher. (Remember, D&D originated as an almost accidental spin-off of non-roleplaying wargames.
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I personally quite like the approach the White Wolf tabletop games take - there is a cardboard shield behind which the GM rolls their dice. The GM can allow fights and skill tests to proceed randomly as long as it’s not catastrophic to the story. But, if the progress of the whole story arc requires that the characters outwit rather than outfight an opponent, or that they successfully sneak past a guard rather than wake the whole camp, then the GM can ‘cheat’ and make it happen.
Interestingly I met Gygax at a gaming convention I went to in the late '80’s. My friends had just arrived. He was sitting in the lobby, and we didn’t recognize him. For some reason he walked over to us and said, “Boys, let me give you some advice. Do what you want. Don’t let anyone else tell you what to do with your lives.” Then he walked away. It seems like rather ironic advice coming from a man who, a decade or so earlier, was calling changes to D&D “perverted”.
Now if you’ll excuse me I’m off to find a copy of Playing at the World.
Very traditional. There’s a lot of information that the players aren’t supposed to have directly – like how hard their opponents are having to work to hit them – which requires that the GM’s dice not be visible even when they aren’t manipulating the odds.
