D&D After the Eulogies
Eric Sofge (an associate editor at Popular Mechanics) has an anti-D&D piece at Slate.com that rails against D&D’s reputation as an RPG. To me, it reads like the final insult in a petty old gamer-club argument, as if Sofge were spitting on Gygax’s coffin and saying, “GURPS is still better than D&D, old man.” Classy, in other words.
What irks the hell out of me here is that Sofge has thrown away a chance to speak of RPGs beyond D&D, and it’s rare when those opportunities come up in publications outside of the hobby. He had a chance, here, to talk about the larger hobby and instead he chose to waste his time with the oldest, lamest anti-D&D gaming-club arguments. People were looking, and Mr. Sofge (who I’ve never heard of) started ranting. I don’t know why we’re supposed to care what Mr. Sofge thinks, but he’s just wasted some of our airtime.
This was a chance for RPGs other than D&D to get some screen time. D&D is the big dog, the patriarch that overshadows all other RPGs, and that’s fine. But D&D, while the exemplar of RPGs, is not their sole representative. Sofge, when he says “my homies,” may think he’s speaking for those who don’t particularly miss first-edition AD&D. (I don’t.) But he’s taken the stage and blown the opportunity. He doesn’t speak for me. What could have been informative is instead whiny. What could have helped show the breadth of the hobby has instead made it look like there’s a bitter subculture beneath D&D. He went up there and took this opportunity to be petty. Nice work, guy. Thanks for that.
The truth is that I am not a big fan of Gary Gygax’s personal style of D&D. Yet, still, I can honor the man’s work and its legacy of camaraderie, from which I have benefited so often. Even if we’re not his devotees we can celebrate the man’s contribution, can’t we? We can thank him for getting this ball rolling and be thankful that in this moment of rare respectful visibility for him and his hobby, that we all put on a good face and act like grown-ups. We can demonstrate that it’s possible to have a silly hobby and still be ordinary folk, right?
There’s a serious discussion to be had about D&D’s image and the state of modern gaming. I can accept the characterization of D&D as being like a video game, and I can understand how it can be considered “bloodthirsty.” It’s such a shame, though, that Mr. Sofge has written from his bitter experiences with the game and taken up a space that might’ve been used for something compelling instead of embarrassing.
Not being any better than a petulant pedant myself, however, I wrote Mr. Sofge a letter. If you’re curious, I’ve included it here, after the cutaway.
I agree with you that D&D is not a shining example of the roleplaying game’s greatest artistic merits and rich possibilities as a creative pastime. I’m a writer and designer of RPG products. Over the years, I’ve written for games similar and dissimilar to D&D. I was the developer of the popular alternative RPG, Vampire: The Requiem. I’ve played many more RPGs than I’ve worked with professionally.
It’s startling to see you speak to the creative possibilities within RPGs and yet be unable to draw comparisons from anything fresher or more distinctly different from D&D than GURPS. I appreciate that you’re attempting to draw the comparison between early experience systems and, therefore, going to the earliest alternative experience-point system you can find in an effort to spotlight a designer more worthy of founding-father praise than Mr. Gygax. Still, if your experience with roleplaying games is so limited that you cannot reach farther away from D&D than GURPS, then your perspective seems to be nearsighted to the point of myopia. Your argument doesn’t seem to be aware of changes to D&D’s experience-point rules over the past two editions and twenty years—the game you’re crowing about (that is, any version of D&D written by Mr. Gygax) is two generations out of date already, and the game you’re lifting up isn’t exactly cutting edge anymore either. Praising RPGs as something akin to improvisational theater, but being unable or unwilling to find an example more theatrical than GURPS, makes your opinion seem rather less than informed—a particular shame when you seem to be passing off your opinion as expert insight.
You’re welcome to like something else better than the original. (I do.) But your personal taste won’t change the truth about which came first, and that’s what we’re drinking to when we drink to Mr. Gygax’s work. There’s praise enough to go around for multiple designers—oldest, old, and newer. You sound like you’re carrying on a stale argument with some long-gone schoolyard rival. Fine, your dad can beat up my dad. Okay. I appreciate your impulse to draw attention to alternatives, but you’ve sullied your own argument with a petty rant: I don’t like something, so it is bad.
You’re entitled, I suppose, but the man is dead, sir. Faulting his eulogies for eulogizing him is a kind of crazy. There’s a time and a place.
Finally, sir, there’s this: hoard is a verb meaning to amass and hide away a collection of things; horde is a noun, vaguely derogatory, meaning a large group of people. It’s your attention to detail that reveals how you value your own argument.
Sincerely,
Will Hindmarch
Sofge also glosses over a couple of the checks and balances in D&D that are meant to prevent the kind of foolishness he’s talking about. Big ones, like, for instance, alignment – and little ones, like the inherent XP value in gold and treasure.
All that doesn’t even approach the truest maxim of RP gaming: that a game is what its players make it. The mechanical rules are just balancing factors. I’ve played deep, rich, and low-violence D&D campaigns – just as I’ve played unsatisfying bloodfests – and the same is true of every system I’ve tried.
Sofge’s column is really a carnival of stupid.
I mean, start with the brazen historical ignorance/revisionism: him labeling Steve Jackson and Greg Stafford as Gygax’s game-designer contemporaries. D&D was first released in 1974. Jackson didn’t release GURPS until 1986, and Stafford’s sole contribution to the field of game design until the release of Pendragon in 1985 was the RuneQuest engine (subsequently folded, spindled, and mutilated to form Chaosium’s core engine, and used in Call of Cthulhu and Stormbringer) — which in its early incarnations was essentially D&D with variant magic rules and a percentile skill system. In other words, these guys didn’t achieve anything groundbreaking in terms of game design for more than a decade after D&D was released, by which time Gygax was in the process of extricating himself from TSR and moving on to other things. So much for Gygax’s “contemporaries” outshining him.
Then there’s the bizarre whining about how D&D has somehow robbed gamers of respectability and set them up for metaphorical wedgies by Star Trek geeks. Aside from the fact that there’s a fair bit of overlap between sci-fi fandom and gamers, I’m at a loss to understand why Sofge gives a crap what people who dress up as Klingons in public, on days other than Halloween, think of his choice of hobbies.
Next is the Pretentious Wannabe Thespian argument: how good roleplaying games are all about “provid[ing] the framework for a unique kind of narrative, a collaborative thought experiment crossed with improvisational theater”. Which is just unbelievable bullshit: the only people I know who think of RPGs this way are the ridiculous, black-eyeliner-wearing, poseur White Wolf crowd, who imagine that by incorporating elements of drama into their gaming they’ve somehow elevated RPGs to an art form. Ooo-kay, Azrael Abyss; you and Circe Nightshade have fun while the rest of us try not to laugh at you too hard.
Then there’s the nonsense about how GURPS embodies all that is good about gaming, insofar as it incorporates “wring creativity, and possibly even artistic merit, from this bizarre medium”. This would be a humdinger of an argument if it weren’t for the trifling detail that GURPS — itself an imitation of HERO, and one in which creating a character requires approximately the same amount of creativity as doing one’s taxes — is about as distant from “artistic merit” as the Earth is from the galactic core. GURPS is crystal meth for munchkins who think D&D pays too little tribute to its wargame heritage, not too much.
Topping it all off is the nonsensical rambling about the “morally-repulsive experience system”, in which, as Ray points out, Sofge elides past the mechanics (alignment being the biggie) that weigh against hack-and-slash. And, of course, even the earliest editions of the Dungeon Master’s Guide were quite clear on the point that the XP reward for a monster was for defeating it, not necessarily killing it. The rules never mandated hack-and-slash, and claims to the contrary are the product of either profound ignorance or profound dishonesty.
Ultimately Sofge’s entire column can be distilled down to say, “Compared to modern games, D&D kind of sucks.” Wow — startling insight, there. Compared to my apartment, mud huts kind of suck. Compared to my laptop, abacuses kind of suck. And compared to someone with a clue, Eric Sofge kind of sucks.