Creating a Movement About Gaming

 

I have felt a little down for the past year or so. My regular gaming group was family based. We had a friend who gamed with us, but the rest were me and my three kids. However, kids grow up, get jobs and significant others. Life changes. Seems the story of my gaming life. 

I grew up gaming with the same core group of three or five friends. I had been the first to find AD&D, and I sort of did exactly what Derek Sivers talks about in the video. I stood up at our junior high bus stop and did the crazy gamer dance, and I had them hooked before we were driving out of my block to school. That first group of friends carried me through almost a decade of gaming. 

Of course those were tempestuous times. I was not the most level headed teenager, nor common sense young adult. Things changed. We got lives, jobs, significant others, and things change. Which for me meant a hiatus from gaming from about 1995 to 2005. Oh, I missed it, believe you me. But things happen when the time was right, and enter 2004 or so and I realized the kids I was teaching at my new junior high were playing third edition. I didn't know much about it, but I knew how to start a movement!

I put up flyers, did my crazy gamer dance, and thus entered into the second best gaming time of my life: running the junior high school gaming club. We ran through 2012. I had as many as 30 students in the club at one time, many of them first time gamers. I would say the club introduced gaming to literally hundreds of kids, many of which I still see today as adults who still game, or remember it fondly and wish they could start again. 

In 2012 I took a job as a school principal and the sheer investment in time was too much to try and run a game club. So my gaming was seriously curtailed. However my kids brought me the 5e books the Christmas after its release. Thus was born our home game which continued for some years afterwards. We gamed more or less through until 2018 or so when my oldest went off to college. We didn't stop entirely, gaming a lot with her over Roll 20 or the like. But as she graduated and job a full time job, and also her own gaming group closer to her home, things slowed down. My other kids grew up, got jobs, and the gaming slowed to a trickle. So our family friend found other gamers to play more regularly with. 

And here I am today. The last year seeing very little in the way of gaming. I have reached out to a few online, but I just can't get into a full online game. Maybe I'll resign myself to that one day, but not yet. Thing is I do remember how to start a movement. It's really not the hard. I just have to have the courage to get up and risk being seen as silly until I find some friends who want to be silly with me. 

KODT, HackMaster 4e and the TSR Ethos

 

If you haven't read Knights of the Dinner Table, or HackMaster 4e/1e (and to a lesser extent HackMaster 5e/2e), you likely aren't familiar with the over the top, tough as nails, unapologetic Gary-Speak that is at least a part of it's success. And if you weren't gaming during the AD&D first edition hey day of the 80's  era, you are less likely to realize how much KenzerCo got it right.

Back in 1996 when KODT first appeared in Dragon Magazine I was taking a break from gaming, had been for about two years. I never ran into the strip in the intervening years between then and 2004. It was about then that I got back into gaming and discovered first KODT and then HackMaster. At that time, I was deep in the throes of nostalgia for the lost age of TSR. I was aware of 3rd edition and even tried to play it for awhile, but everything seemed to have changed, and for the worse (at least in my opinion at the time). 

Dragon Mag 226, First KODT strip

Knights of the Dinner Table spoke directly to my soul. It's funny that this was the case, as I always took my gaming so seriously. What was in essence a cartoon (at least initially) had managed to speak directly to what I so longed for in my gaming. It as as if it spoke out of the past to my gaming heart. The adversarial approach between GMs and players, the hard nosed competition to outdo each other, out think each other. The high stakes, the danger, the strategic maneuvering in the game to get what you wanted. The death trap dungeons, let the dice fall where they may, and the sweet scent of player death on the air. I can't even really capture the essence of what it was, but Gary Speak had a lot to do with it.

This was what it felt like back in the day. All of these things--it was a very real ethos. Hard Eight and their cut throat tactics and from on high pronouncements. KODT captured it perfectly. I mean it was clear it was satire. The jokes were all the more funny because they were true! Yeah, they were occasionally amped up to eleven, as Spinal Tap would say, but they were soundly based in real gaming truth of the time. 

I was so excited to learn about HackMaster I nearly wet my gamer smock. It was an amazing effort to not only capture the game that the Knights played, but to also create a homage and natural successor to first edition, that should have, in truth been the 3rd edition we all wanted. Second edition AD&D had been so sanitized and made pretty for the BADD moms and Satanic Panic mongers that it had strayed from the original soul of the game. Though truthfully, that era of TSR as emperor of the gaming world persisted through at least the mid 90's. 

What we really needed was a return to the glory days of hardcore rules and hardcore play. We needed HackMaster to be the next iteration of the game. an innovative return to the glory of yesteryear. But the IP passed onto WoTC and other things were to be. In fact we owe a huge debt of gratitude to WoTC (preHasbro) to allowing KCo to produce the game in the first place. It could have never happened otherwise. 

But my point today is just this. If you really want to get a taste of what a certain phase of D&D, and gaming generally, was all about pick up an issue of Knights of the Dinner Table. Or give HackMaster a read. -- preferably the 4th edition as it is a real attempt to recapture what AD&D was. 5th edition still has lots of classic GarySpeak, but so innovative rules developments that it steps a bit further away from a strictly AD&D chassis. 

Dungeons & Dragons: Changing Views

 Long ago in the saga that is this blog, a fellow gamer once told me that D&D is whatever the owners of the IP say it is. I heartily disagreed, and did so with numerous self assured reasons why. I have also been a staunch defender of Gygaxianism in seeking to know what the spirit of the game truly is. I am as guilty as any for taking Gary's words as scripture, and quoting them as definitive pronouncements. Even when they appeared contradictory, I was the first apologist to point out that apparent contradictions were just that apparent.

 I wouldn't say I totally disagree with my previous positions. I still hold to them by and large. But I have come to the point where certain personal interpretations should be admitted as such, personal. As well as make admission that much of what I confounded with the idea of the game was a gestalt of a certain confluence of events that simply can't be replicated. No matter how hard I may try 1981 aint coming back. The folly of men to replicate past ages is always shot through with anachronisms and perspectives that didn't exist in those same past ages. Hindsight is, as they don't say, faulty--not 20/20.

So I now recognize a few things. 

1. AD&D is not the game I played back in the day. I mean it was, but it really wasn't. I have written about this before but it bears repetition. We didn't use all the rules, or even most of them actually. While we rested assured that the Golden Trinity could answer any question that might come up, we didn't resort to them all that often. The hindsight of years poring over the rules make it clear that there is almost too much to play with here. Watching groups try and play RAW AD&D is at times laborious--especially for those who have not mastered the intricacies. We played a rough approximation of something resembling Original D&D (0e) with rules add ons (that were actually material from the Greyhawk and other supplements) but more codified in AD&D. And that made sense as I was taught to play by guys who had started with 0e, and I taught most of my friends to play. 

2. AD&D was not the game Gary played. Though I have been loathe to admit it, evidence and personal testimony make clear the unmistakable fact that Gary was running a very "loose" game, and rarely referred to rules details in the books. 

3. AD&D was the official version of D&D for going on 10 years (circa '80 to '89). Which meant that it became increasingly so, and in official pronouncements the pinnacle of "how the game should be played." It was set up as the final pronouncement on what D&D was in as much as it covered a topic. Gary himself admitted this much in his foreword. It was also the game most played at the Dungeon Hobby Shop and TSR as well, at least in name--interview evidence has also born this out. However, in practice something very different occurred. The real spirit of D&D couldn't be confined to the bottle and most AD&D games ran wild with untied shoelaces for most 1e groups everywhere. 

4. The spirit of D&D was elusively pointed at by those three little brown books back in 1974. The resulting creative explosion can not be underestimated. Those at the starting gate realized that something magical was happening, Rob Kuntz spoke to this in an interview I had with him. The potentiality of what roleplaying games could bring to the world seemed absolutely revolutionary. However, TSR was a business after all. And the shift from "imagine the hell out of it", to only buy original TSR products was pretty quick. The hunger for product and the need to defined what was what as well as exert final ownership all resulted in the game that was AD&D first edition. It wasn't the pinnacle, so much as it was an expression of of what could be at the time. 

5. The original Wizards of the Coast, KenzerCo, and 3e showed us first what could become of AD&D. The OSR showed us what could become if we went back to our 3 little brown roots. But even then, AD&D made us lose something as well. I do think some avenues of the OSR have explored a bit of space of that original untapped magic Rob and others alluded to, but I believe it is still a largely untapped gold mine. Not even a gold mine really, but an endless energy source available if we only had the eyes to see. But TSR and AD&D actually shut that valve off by the clear definition of AD&D--what the game was and who owned it. The players no longer owned it, the corporation did. 

What this means for me, and my changing views? Well, AD&D will always be my sweet spot. It is my D&D home as it were. But the fact is, I'm not sure how I would even run a BTB AD&D game, or how I would like it. And it would be wrong for me to continue to weight everything against the AD&D rulebooks. Gary's motives were as complex and varied as any human's when he created 1e. I just really wish he had been around to create a second edition and "fix" all the issues that arose with 1e.