C is for Competition

A little housekeeping first. When I started this series of posts, I said that I was following JB over at B/X Blackrazor, with my topics matching his. I still mean for that to be the case, generally. In this case, JB's post C is for Cascades, was very specific to his campaign setting, and because following it with regard to my campaign would be redundant with my B is for Borders post without a lot of creative license I'm disinclined to exercise, I'm diverging from JB this time. I don't know how much that will happen, but I'm expecting not much.

I just watched Coco Gauff win the womens' French Open. I'm not a sports watcher, or at least I wasn't until my daughter became a competitive tennis player. As a high school freshman she played 3rd singles for her team this season and her team has advanced to the regional finals. If they win that, two days from this writing, her team will be playing the northern region champion for the state championship. Besides her team play, she performed well enough to get a by into the top 64 before being eliminated in the first round, the only player on her team to compete individually in the state singles.

I've never been much of a sports player. When I was 9 through 12 years old I played golf with my grandfather (who played 6 days a week in his retirement) and also privately with a coach for a short time. This coach told my parents I was a natural and had a potential that should be developed, but I wasn't interested and they didn't push. And yet, I do enjoy competition. I joined my county's chess team for a short time as their worst player 22 years ago, until my work's increased travel requirements interfered too much with practices and competitions for me to continue even as ineffectually as I started. My racing sail career started earliest of these competitive endeavors, was longest, and was more successful than any. None of these results are truly relevant to the point I'm meandering toward however.

Competition brings out the best in us. We push ourselves against each other's resistance, both of us thereby getting stronger. In the early game, competition in AD&D is against the game itself. The players cooperate to overcome the resistance that monsters, darkness, logistical complexity, and so on offer in order to gain the prize of XP and gold in the game. The rules define how this resistance works for the most part, with the referee primarily providing the fiction around those mechanics. Fighting the rules and the dice, however, is not the same kind of competition as fighting one another. The end game, when the players' characters have achieved name level and compete against one another, is what pushes us the hardest and best.

I've come to the conclusion, at least for the moment, that competition was dropped from the game accidentally with the second edition of the rules. Along with a lot of other mistakes, and a radical, intentional change from being a game to being a pastime.

In preparation for this next part, it's valuable to look at the afterword of the first edition DMG. The whole thing, all 146 words of it, is written in all caps, as Gygax did for things he felt important. The penultimate sentence is what I especially would like to bring to the reader's attention before continuing:

BY ORDERING THINGS AS THEY SHOULD BE, THE GAME AS A WHOLE FIRST, YOUR CAMPAIGN NEXT, AND YOUR PARTICIPANTS THEREAFTER, YOU WILL BE PLAYING ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS AS IT WAS MEANT TO BE.

This is the part where I criticize David "Zeb" Cook mercilessly. It's too bad, because he seemed to have his head on straight when he wrote the Expert rules, but he completely and unreservedly fucked up AD&D with the second edition. I can't say that too harshly. I'd be angrier about it if it wasn't for the fact that once newer players who came into the game in later editions play 1e at my table they are converts. (Well, most of them. Some of them certainly. OK, two of them. So far!)

I'm going to rant about some of the other mistakes after I explain how the competitive aspect of the AD&D game was lost in this edition, but I want to start with the high level, strategic causes of this failure using Cook's own words.

"Bluntly, the first problems are economics and space. There are a limited number of pages that can go into the revised Players Handbook."  

Starting with tight page count constraints meant that the game had to be tightly design and succinctly described. It was neither, and part of that comes from Cook's "design by focus group" approach.

"The changes and advances we make come directly from your ideas and suggestions, so you, ultimately, are the ones making the improvements in the game."

"Of course, my boss, Michael Dobson, keeps leaving notes to make changes here, but the majority will rule." 

"I’'ve heard a lot from you and have learned some things I didn’'t know or hadn'’t thought of. I'’ve had some of my opinions confirmed and some shot down (I do these things by good old gut feeling, you see)." 

Game design by committee and gut feeling doesn’t sound like a recipe for success to me. In my own fields the best designs are the product of a single person, or, very occasionally, a small group of people. They are designs that stand up to rigorous scrutiny, because they are derived from both creativity and solid, mathematical principles. 

Where competition left the game is where Cook forgot or cut domain level play out of the game. The reason I think this may have been accidental is that a little piece of the rules were left in there. On page 26 of the Players Handbook, under the class description for fighters: 

When a fighter attains 9th level (becomes a "Lord”), he can automatically attract men-at-arms. These soldiers, having heard of the fighter, come for the chance to gain fame, adventure, and cash. They are loyal as long as they are well-treated, successful, and paid well. Abusive treatment or a disastrous campaign can lead to grumbling, desertion, and possibly mutiny. To attract the men, the fighter must have a castle or stronghold and sizeable manor lands around it. As he claims and rules this land, soldiers journey to his domain, thereby increasing his power. Furthermore, the fighter can tax and develop these lands, gaining a steady income from them. Your DM has information about gaining and running a barony.

In addition to regular men-at-arms, the 9th·level fighter also attracts an elite bodyguard (his “household guards”). Although these soldiers are still mercenaries, they have greater loyalty to their Lord than do common soldiers. In return, they expect better treatment and more pay than the common soldier receives. Although the elite unit can be chosen randomly, it is better to ask your DM what unit your fighter attracts. This allows him to choose a troop consistent with the campaign. 

Despite his claim that the DM has information about gaining and running a barony, there is no mention of this whatsoever in the Dungeon Masters Guide or anywhere else in the Players Handbook. If Cook meant to remove domain play from the game he failed, and if he meant to include it he failed. The game was done its greatest disservice in second edition by Cook’s failure to include this large swath of rules. He gutted the only competitive component. It’s possible Cook simply didn’t understand the nature of competitive play in AD&D, perhaps because he never had participated in such. His misunderstanding of the assassin class seems to suggest this.

"Assassin --— Still dead. Again, this is more a matter of mindset than a separate occupation. The unique abilities don’t work, in my opinion (the Assassination Table is a crock). The question of “image” that came up had nothing to do with any kind of religious pressure, as some of you mistakenly thought. Sorry, it’s much more mundane —-- a lot of potential players have been turned off by bad experiences with uncontrolled assassins destroying parties, campaigns, and fun for everyone else. No fun at all."

The assassin, as an adventuring class, is a compromise between a fighter and a thief, and that’s how the character should be used in a party. His unique ability, to assassinate, as described by the assassination table, is not a combat action. This is a downtime, behind the scenes sort of action. It’s the dark side of domain play, the assassin being a mere henchman or tool, happy to spy and do wet works in exchange for money and XP. It’s the only class designed to gain XP outside of adventuring because that’s what that class’ place is in the game. I don’t think Cook understood this.

There’s a bunch of other stuff he fucked up, but arguably worse than gutting domain play rules, is his conversion of the game into a make-believe pastime for children. The rule books are loaded with examples of how second edition is not, in fact, even a game. From the same Dragon magazine article in which he reiterates the death of the assassin in second edition, he states:

“Finally, there is combat. There are a lot of things I don’’t like. I don’’t like rules mechanics getting in the way of play and would like to make combat as simple as possible. After all, who uses weapon speed factors or armor class adjustments anyway? Why should we bother with restrictive rules about the size of weapons since rules that people don’t like aren’’t used anyway? I also detest critical hits and hit locations."  

There are a few things in this statement worth noting, but chief among them is a confirmation that Cook does not fully know or understand the first edition rules. Critical hits and hit locations are not in the first edition rules. Gygax directly advises against adding such house rules into the game in the Dungeon Masters Guide. Armor type, not class, adjustments are an optional rule already. Weapon speed factors create interesting trade-offs between employing certain weapons, without which the game contains more weapon choices than have any value. Weapon choices are not merely “color,” the combat rules make having weapons of different speeds and sizes, not just damage dice, useful and a way in which player skill may be gained and expressed.

Why are marathons so long, Mr. Cook, if so many people get tired before the end and many don’t even like to get sweaty? Let’s make it 26.4 feet long instead, that way everyone can “enjoy” a marathon. Listen, if you're not having fun following the rules in a game of chess, why not improve it by dropping the inconvenient rules? I mean, why should the king be slower than the queen? It doesn't make sense, so let's give him the same movement rules as the queen. In fact, let's do that for all the pieces; it'll be so much simpler, we won't have to think so hard, and we can just have fun with our friends. Won't that make a better game? Also, no one likes losing, so anytime your king gets put in checkmate, you can just put him in a different spot on the board. Doesn't that make chess a million times better?

This segues into taking the game out of AD&D with second edition. Consider this from the 2e DMG:

To have the most fun playing the AD&D game, don't rely only on the rules. Like so much in a good role-playing adventure, combat is a drama, a staged play. The DM is both the playwright and the director, creating a theatrical combat. 

Read that again if you’re not angry. The players are puppets in the DM’s play. The rules don’t matter, because players are not playing a game in second edition, they’re acting out the DM’s play. The DM is "playwright," he wrote the story. He's the "director," he makes sure the actors play their parts correctly for his story.

The DM has accidentally pitted his player characters against a group of creatures too powerful for them, so much so that the player characters are doomed. To fix it, the DM can have the monsters flee in inexplicable panic; secretly lower their hit points; allow the player characters to hit or inflict more damage than they really should; have the monsters miss on attacks when they actually hit; have the creatures make grevious [sic] mistakes in strategy (like ignoring the thief moving in to strike from behind).

Just in case you thought I was reading too much in the playwright/director analogy, the above should dispel any doubt the reader has that second edition might be a game, and not a story-telling vehicle for the DM. 

Experience points are a measure of this improvement, and the number of points a player for a game session is a signal of how well the DM thinks the player did in the game – a reward for good role-playing.

Here Cook tells us that the players’ characters’ advancement is entirely at the whim of the DM. Advancement in the game is a function of entertaining or impressing the DM with one’s play-acting. That’s new with second edition.

I've definitely drifted from theme, but clearly, there is no competition in second edition of AD&D. There isn't even a game.

Just to close the loop here, and show the reader that there is, in fact, competition in the first edition of the game, from the first page of the Players Handbook:

Players will add characters to their initial adventurer as the milieu expands so that each might actually have several characters, each involved in some separate and distinct adventure form, busily engaged in the game at the same moment of "Game Time". This allows participation by many players in games which are substantially different from game to game as dungeon, metropolitan, and outdoor settings are rotated from playing to playing. And perhaps a war between players will be going on (with battles actually fought out on the tabletop with minature [sic] figures) one night, while on the next, characters of these two contending players are helping each other to survive somewhere in a wilderness.

AD&D assumed player-versus-player conflict, and mentions this aspect of play in several other locations throughout. It's never mentioned in adventure play, because it's poor strategy to shoot your teammates in the dungeon. Once teammates have become rival lords, however, the circumstances have changed.