The Elusive Shift by Jon Peterson

Author:Jon Peterson [Peterson, Jon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Role-playing games; Dungeons & Dragons; fan culture; theory; philosophy; Gygax; Arneson; Blacow; Pulsipher; Lortz; Simbalist; fanzine; zine; Tunnels & Trolls; Chivalry & Sorcery; abilities; alignment; progression; experience; stories; narrative; in character; out of character; dungeon master; referee; role-playing
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2020-11-27T00:00:00+00:00

Figure I.1

Digest-size unofficial supplements sized for inclusion in the original Dungeons & Dragons box. Shown: The Book of Monsters (1976), The Arduin Grimoire (1977), The Wizard’s Aide (1977), and E’a: Chronicles of a Dying World (1979).

Even a title as far removed from fantastic medieval dungeon exploration as Superhero ’44 claimed it originated as a D&D variant. The designer, Donald Saxman, explains how local campaign referee Mike Ford had introduced into his D&D game “a device which allowed the players to travel to over two dozen alternate universes, each with its own natural laws and historical motif.” Among those parallel dimensions was one “populated with comic-book and pulp-novel characters,” where “the party of magicians and swordsmen met Batman and Doc Savage, and ultimately fought Doctor Doom and Darkseid with the help of Luke Cage and the Phantom Stranger.”4 This naturally occasioned the development of variant systems for those comic-book entities, which in turn spurred Superhero ’44. But what was left of D&D in it? Who’s to say if it was or was not D&D at that point?

At that extreme, to Costikyan’s point, we might say that D&D had effectively dissolved in its own plasticity. What remained was a hobby, floating atop a more fluid implementation of the role-playing experience, which called itself “FRP,” for “fantasy role playing,” but moored itself to no design. As alarming as the notion that “there is no such game as Dungeons & Dragons” might have been to Gygax and his colleagues, it also boded poorly for any competing designs as well. The sheer prevalence and scope of variant implementations of D&D deflated any presumed urgency to base a campaign on any “next-generation” system published outside the D&D franchise.

Jim Thomas, writing in Wild Hunt 22, weighed the advantages of switching to one popular competing game system: “I, too, think that Chivalry & Sorcery is a neat book, full of all sorts of dandy ideas. It might well be a better starting point for a fantasy role-playing ‘game’ than Dungeons & Dragons was. And I have a strong hunch that nothing’s ever going to be more than a starting point.” If every published design represented only a starting point for a lengthy and open-ended process of patching or extending rules, then how much did it matter whether the referee based a game on D&D or on any of its competitors of the era?

Whether a set of variant rules had achieved sufficient autonomy to warrant designation as an independent game also had no objective markers: as Lee Gold would advise in 1977, “If your house rules run more than thirty pages, I suggest you consider you’ve invented a new game and copyright it” (AE 29). It was not hard to hit that mark because everyone was constantly hacking the system. Kevin Slimak, feeling “tired of trying to kludge a good game out of Gygax D&D,” decided on a solution: “Stop pretending to be playing D&D; call the game something different and rework/rewrite the rules to my own taste” (WH 5).

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