Building Bhakashal – Game Design and History

Sigh. 

Another day on Twitter, another person dunking on AD&D for “bad design”. I get so tired of this sort of thing, and it seems to be on the uptake. Gygax is a common target, and since he’s dead, its oddly easier and more acceptable to criticize his work. Combine that with his perceived politics and it's a tempting option. 

I think it's fundamentally flawed.

TTRPGs were something new when AD&D was produced, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that AD&D wasn’t as slick and well organized as TTRPGs are today. We’ve had decades of experience to draw upon, Gygax’s work was the first of its kind. Yes, there were earlier iterations of D&D, but Gygax was trying to square the circle, to take both old wargame practices and at-the-table experience and standardize them in some way so they could provide a baseline for convention gaming. And he was doing it in a rush.

He was quite literally doing something that had not been done before and was also adding significant content to the existing game in the process. Looking back on this and calling it “badly designed” is ahistorical and misconstrued. I’m an academic. Academic literature is much like this, initial forays into new subjects are often coarse and somewhat clunky by later standards, because THOSE STANDARDS WERE NOT IN PLAY WHEN THE EARLIER WORK WAS DONE. AD&D is no different.

Also, and this is important context, Gygax was a bit of an encyclopedist, I believe he worked as an actuary for a time, he liked tables and lists, and given that the TTRPG was in its infancy, an encyclopedic approach is not uncommon. Later iterations of the game, and other games had the benefit of time and experience to reflect upon. TTRPG theory developed in the wake of early D&D, and fed into the design process. Gygax did not have the benefit of formalized theory to draw upon.

As a result, the AD&D DMG is hard to read, it’s not just his vocabulary, or his fondness for statistics, the organization and presentation is a challenge. Things are scattered around; you need to use the index and the TOC to find a lot of things. Rules are scattered here and there.

Is it a challenge? Yes! And later iterations of the game worked to present the material in a more intuitive way, and that’s a good thing. But that doesn’t make the older game “badly designed”, it was an early attempt at something without meaningful precedents. Gygax wasn’t TRYING to make the game difficult to understand, he was assuming you had experience with earlier iterations of the game, and that you were familiar with wargames (as, to be fair, many early adopters were) and he was putting together a reference document for your use. Later iterations were designed with newcomers that had little to no experience in mind, this is not uncommon.

People often complain that newer games can seem slick and soulless compared to early AD&D, and I would agree with that. But they are MUCH easier to learn and use. So, as with all things, there are benefits and drawbacks to each approach. But the same logic applies to early AD&D, it is flavorful and enigmatic, it reads like some lost text, just familiar enough to read but different and challenging enough to seem alien, magical and strange. The weird, esoteric bits, the hidden details, they all give the work a feel that newer books lack.

So just like newer games, there are benefits and drawbacks. Learning AD&D was a challenge, but it also felt like an achievement, and the game has an arcane, esoteric feel to it that few games can match. The cost to this is that it is harder to learn and play. The benefit to this is that the game has atmosphere and immersion that few can match.

People on social media are such positivists and presentists about game design, there is a trajectory towards the “ideal game”, older games are further away from the ideal, so they are by definition inferior. BUT YOU DON’T GET MODERN GAMES WITHOUT OLDER GAMES. The present builds on the past, holding up old games and suggesting they are “terribly designed” is just showing your vast ignorance about both game design and history.

To be clear, being able to work your way through AD&D doesn’t make you “smarter” than anyone else.

If anything, it makes you more persistent. You have to be willing to push through and dig deep to be able to get a handle on the rules. Many people don’t have the patience for this, and that’s fine. But to dismiss the work because of it is a mistake.

One last thing, dense, somewhat impenetrable, and encyclopedic work like Gygax’s has another advantage over slick, “intuitive” design: inspiration. AD&D has a lot going on, and all of that content works as a driver to inspire the DM to create. I still find inspiration in it today, after 40 years. No game that provides that much engagement over that many years is “badly designed”. Unintuitive, in need of editing and dense, yes, but there is a ton of good game design in AD&D (see my pinned tweet on Twitter, @blackdragoncan, if you are interested).

I suspect that the real issue here isn’t the design of the game, or the challenging nature of the prose, it’s that modern gamers can’t resist dunking on Gygax and the dense nature of AD&D is an easy target. This is such a weird thing about TTRPGs. I don’t see people dunking on musicians that create new styles of music, or artists that create new styles of art, or authors that write new kinds of stories. They are all lauded for creativity and inspiration, while accepting that things will change over time. For some reason TTRPG pioneers are seen as relics of the past to be mocked and derided.

I’ll leave it to someone more erudite than me to sort that out.