Intermezzo: Transcending Design

It is fitting that Traveller, perhaps the most adaptable of the designs of the 1970s, should exemplify the extremes of both open-ended and closed systems. Offsetting the complex rules in its core booklets, the game’s first supplement, Mercenary (1978), offered referees a few alternative ways of determining the outcome of a mission, including one called the “free-form” system. Mercenary explains: “No precise rules can, or should, be given here, as much of the realism of the system derives from the on-the-spot interaction between the referee and the players.”1 True to its word, the section literally goes no further and allows this “free-form” method of mission resolution to proceed unencumbered by rules. This liberated the referee and player from any dependency on dice or system, leaving only the dialogue between them: the imaginative power of players to articulate intentions and the judgment of the referee to decide their consequences.

It was always a possibility built into the dialogue that events might resolve in this “free-form” way: whenever Dungeons & Dragons players posed statements of intention that could not be resolved by the system that Gygax and Arneson committed to paper, the referee could just determine things by fiat or invent a system on the spot. This quality presumably informed the early reviews of games like D&D, which in 1975 began referring to them with the label boardless, role-playing, free-form system. Metamorphosis Alpha wore that badge proudly, its foreword identifying the game as “a free-form system, giving rules and guidelines for the basics of play and setting up the starship, but allowing the players and the referee unlimited use of their imagination.”2 So even where the system did offer “guidelines,” referees could override them in practice, “shading” rolls or even ignoring them entirely. So what ultimate purpose did the guidelines in a design serve?

Gygax himself acknowledged back in 1975 that his own play of D&D differed from the printed “guidelines,” and he granted blanket permission for everyone to diverge just as radically. “Each campaign should be a ‘variant,’” Gygax affirmed, “and there is no ‘official interpretation’ from me or anyone else” (AE 2). He felt strongly enough about the matter that he even swore an oath to the game’s fans to protect that principle: “As long as I am editor of the TSR line and its magazine, I will do my utmost to see that there is as little trend towards standardization as possible.” It is not clear that Gygax at the time fully appreciated the consequences of his stance. The many variations on system elements such as abilities, alignment, and experience quickly underscored the fundamental disparities in rules that could feature in play still nominally considered to be of the game D&D. So which system did people mean when they talked about playing D&D? Comparing the situation to the dilution of brand terminology such as the verb “to Xerox,” Bill Seligman stated in 1977, “The problem TSR has is that the term ‘D&D’ is starting to refer to fantasy role-playing games in general, and not those just bounded by the D&D official rules” (AE 28).

In some respects, every original D&D campaign was a variant designed by its referee. As early as 1976, Greg Costikyan already identified the way he played as a game distinct from its base design: “As far as I am concerned I don’t gamesmaster D&D. I gamesmaster a fantasy game in which each player takes the part of a fantasy character” (FTA 2–3). Blake Kirk, who met Costikyan at a science-fiction convention in Boston early in 1977, attributed to him the even more radical view that “there is no such game as Dungeons & Dragons, but rather there are umpty-eleven different fantasy role-playing games, approximately as many as there are dungeonmasters.”3 This seems almost a necessary consequence of what Costikyan would call the “open-ended” system of D&D, which encouraged referees to amend rules as they saw fit: to reshape the plastic stuff of D&D in their own molds. You could swap out the Vancian magic of baseline D&D for the spell point system of “Warlock” as early as 1975. Perhaps a dozen versions of the Druid or Neutral Cleric class circulated simultaneously with the “official” version in Eldritch Wizardry (1976.) Players could import classes from the Manual of Aurania, critical hit tables from the Arduin Grimoire, and a skill system from the Wizard’s Aide (1977).

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). Slimak serialized his ideas through a fanzine, but there was no great ontological distinction between that and sharing them through a self-published product. The authors of Mythrules (1978) decided after more than a year of developing variants that “it became apparent that we were no longer merely writing addenda to other authors’ rules but were actually creating an independent game of our own.”5 People seemed to understand that in perspective: by 1979, we can see the author of a self-published volume such as E’a admit that, “basically, I’m just like a lot of you out there, one player with a few ideas and a lot of good friends willing to help me over the rough spots. I believe that by now it’s almost impossible for any system on this type of gaming to be totally different from all the others.”6

We see language everywhere authorizing referees to modify the system. “The essential feature of Chivalry & Sorcery is the flexibility built into all campaign types,” the rules read, identifying themselves as “guidelines by which players may easily create the kinds of worlds they want” though they “may ignore all elements that are not relevant to their needs and aims.”7 Runequest introduces its rules by telling you to “take those portions you can use and ignore the rest. Like any FRP system, these can only be guidelines. Use them as you will.”8 Tradition of Victory “must emphasize to prospective referees: no rule in this booklet is inviolable, and any may be changed or overlooked with the agreement of the referee and the players.”9 And Mortal Combat allows, “It is the umpire’s prerogative to reject any part of the rules that do not fit in with his campaign.”10 This consensus about open-endedness blurred the borders that separated one system from another, raising fundamental identity questions about games: we see someone such as Gordon Lingard say in A&E 50, “I’ve started running D&D using Runequest rules,” though he casually posed that fraught proposition before introducing a system for social skills he had added himself that covered bribery, investigations, influence, business acumen, and so on. Which system was Lingard really using? Was it TSR’s or the Chaosium’s or his own?

With so many system elements floating in the mix, referees bore most of the burden for selecting the right elements à la carte rather than as a prix fixe, and we are left to wonder if the ingredients mattered more than any printed menu. Howard Mahler argued in A&E 46 that “GMs are responsible for systems” and that “if a system produces absurd results, the GM should not be using it.” A given campaign could siphon rules from anywhere—from the D&D rulebooks, from a competing title, from the grungiest fanzine, from its participants’ sudden inspiration—and whether the players deemed the resulting game an instance of D&D or not became a superficial and almost superfluous question. Albeit, many players, like Lingard, seemed more disposed than not to call their campaigns by the name of the best-known role-playing game—the “Xerox” of the young industry. But early critical discussion vacillated between D&D and the FRP hobby in general with little evident distinction—only advocates for particular competing systems, most particularly their authors, would insist on more specificity. While Steve Perrin worked on Runequest, he reported of Ken St. Andre, “he’s of the opinion that, with all the FRP games on the market, only D&D will survive. I, of course, am hoping he’s wrong” (AE 30).

“I don’t think new games/rules are going to make much of a difference in the long run,” Jim Thomas concluded in Wild Hunt 22. “It will probably turn out to be that a DM, or DM coterie, is so good at DMing that the interest of a group of aficionados is maintained, and other good DMs develop within the group, and things perpetuate themselves.” This placed a heavy burden on referees that would surely limit the mass-market spread of fantasy role playing but would not prevent a dedicated community from sustaining the hobby: “The idea’s too good to die out, and it’s too demanding to sweep the world,” Thomas predicted. Ironically, the idea would indeed sweep the world in another couple years, but for reasons that no one at the time could have foreseen.

If nothing would ever be better than a “starting point,” how much system did that starting point really need to furnish? Sandy Eisen might argue that a referee serves to isolate the players from the rules so that they can fully experience the game situation, and thus only minimal rules would seem to be needed, just enough to guide the player into the character’s position. The early D&D community had some consensus that quantified attributes assigned to characters were valuable to the players as cues for role playing, even if it disagreed about how directly the attributes should influence character behavior, much as with alignment. Although the scoreboard of experience points could steer players toward campaign goals set by the referee, systems as early as Bunnies & Burrows in 1976 demonstrated how to use progression without experience points to encourage role playing.

Perhaps some rough understanding of a character’s attributes, accompanied by a clatter of dice, sustained the illusion that the referee was not simply making decisions out of pure fiat. In 1979, Greg Costikyan produced for the second issue of Different Worlds a short and simple game satirizing the extreme of open-ended design: a system he called “Lord of the Dice.” It is predicated upon assigning the referee personal responsibility for virtually all functions that would ordinarily be specified in the system by a designer, and, as such, its rules occupy only around half a page of the issue. “Lord of the Dice” contains an introductory section describing itself much like any other role-playing game, requiring that a “Gamesmaster co-ordinate the Players’ characters within his concept of a fantasy world.” It promises newcomers access to “this fascinating hobby without having to learn extremely complicated rules.”

Character generation in “Lord of the Dice” immediately subverts the familiar design principles of role-playing games. The rules call for each player to roll dice continually until obtaining “a series of die-rolls he feels are esthetically appealing to him,” at which point the gamesmaster “assigns names to the appropriate characteristics, detailing their effects upon the world.” Whereas the game’s designer would ordinarily supply a set of abilities that characters have in common (as D&D does with Strength, Intelligence, and so on), which are determined by die rolls, here abilities and their game properties are simply a matter of referee discretion. Similarly, any time a “Player wishes to undertake an action with his character, the Gamesmaster rolls the percentile dice. If the Gamesmaster rolls a high number, the character has succeeded,” but if it is “a low number, the character has failed in his action.” Because even in a parody it is necessary to resolve ambiguities, the rules helpfully add that “if the Gamesmaster is not sure as to whether the roll is high or low, he should roll again until he decides one way or another.” That is the entirety of the system—no charts, no elaborate taxonomies of equipment or powers or adversaries, nothing but the imagination of players, the discretion of referees, and the occasional consultation of a die roll.

“Lord of the Dice” pares down the system to one where the referee “mentally” calculates the chances of success for any action on the fly. The entire game transpires behind what Kam-Pain calls “the GM’s Cloak,” the principle that the referee can act with total discretion. It is one where players effectively have no insight into how decisions are made—the referee has complete latitude and secrecy. Tongue firmly in cheek, Costikyan promised that in his game “no more will Players be fettered by crotchety old designers, but their spirits will soar as they discover the many facets of the game.” A designer himself, one raised in the strict tradition of wargame simulations, Costikyan surely intended this modest proposal as a thought-provoking reductio. Most readers at the time understood it that way because it contains a few caustic asides corroborating that interpretation, such as the promise that it dispenses with “bullshit sounding fantasy [n]ames.” A letter to Different Worlds 4 calls it “a nice humorous touch” and encourages the magazine “to print more such things.” But as the divisions in the role-playing community grew more profound over the next couple years, some players would return to “Lord of the Dice” in earnest as an explicit source of inspiration for games with a referee-centric design philosophy.

The identification of this extreme position as a “free-form” approach to fantasy role playing runs through its early literature. A gamer named Jeffrey Paul Jones played with Dave Arneson at Pacificon in the summer of 1979. Although Arneson was at the time promoting a new game, Adventures in Fantasy, it does not appear that Arneson played by his own rules, but this was in keeping with remarks he made elsewhere that year about the insignificance of “rules” to the invention of role-playing games.11 Jones reported that “Dave runs a free-form adventure which allows players the freedom to be themselves, and his technique facilitates role-play at its best. In fact, it is virtually impossible to anything but role-play, and this was an achievement I had not thought possible except among fanatics” (CP 94). Here Jones identified that liberating players from the rules makes it impossible for them to approach the game through any other means than role playing, attributing the effect to Arneson’s use of a system that was “as simple as possible,” but with the caveat that “the DM himself can make or break an evening’s activities.”

Although we might think that any free-form game has to depend entirely on the moment-by-moment supervision of the referee, by the end of the 1970s some referees had begun to remove themselves from this most versatile expression of the role-playing game. With a sufficiently large group of players and a bit of initial coaching from the referee, peer interaction could take the place of the centralized dialogue of D&D. Although such games had only minimal need for documentation, a few pioneers still endeavored to explain them in print: a key example of the scenario building required is Greg Stafford’s playing aid “Sartar High Council” from 1979.12

During the course of his Sartar campaign, a section of the Glorantha setting that served as the basis for Runequest, Stafford became dissatisfied with the lack of perspective the player characters evinced when they committed acts that had a momentous impact on world politics. He thus devised a scenario for the campaign in which “each of the players played one or more members of the Sartar Tribal Council, summoned together to discuss the grievous consequences” of the party’s transgressions. As the players would set aside their ordinary characters for this session and instead play the dozen established faction leaders of the setting, Stafford first prepared “a sheet of common knowledge . . . information which all of them had about each other,” and then a sheet of “special knowledge which was focused on each character, and given only to those players.” Armed with that information alone, players took on these new roles and advocated for their faction’s interests in the council. They did so without recourse to a system as such—Stafford explained, “Indeed, we have not even determined the stats or abilities for them!” Instead, it became an exercise in pure role playing.

“The role-playing was an enormous success,” Stafford reported. “Everyone was very true to form, in a couple of cases characters developed a (game) animosity which has plagued the kingdom ever since.” Through the interaction of the council, “the single most evident problem which emerged was that the Sartarites really needed a leader.” This led the council to conduct a spontaneous election, which elevated Kalyyr Starbrow, Queen of the Kheldon, to the position of temporary Princess of Sartar. The overall event was such a success that it became a regular feature of the Sartar campaign: “Whenever major problems now arise which might affect the whole nation, the players get together and summon the council characters for another meeting.” Stafford observed that one fringe benefit of the council is that “I have been relieved of some of the referee burden of determining all of the historical developments in the campaign” because now the council directed world events with which the player characters would later contend. With no need to execute the system, the referee for this sort of scenario becomes a sort of deus absconditus, just setting events into motion by explaining the initial situation and then withdrawing to observe the results, possibly offering a bit of steering and counsel from time to time. Here the bulk of the responsibility for the moment-to-moment operation of the game devolves to the players themselves.

Stafford published his description of the scenario, along with material needed to play—such as the common-knowledge sheet and many of the private-knowledge sheets—in the Chaosium fanzine Wyrm’s Footnotes. He also drew some attention to it through Wild Hunt 42 that same year, where he identified it as an example of a way that he had successfully encouraged role playing in his local group. For the purposes of understanding the implications of role playing, the “Sartar High Council” scenario shows how easily a game can break free of the confines of the dialogue with an authoritative referee and transpose into something more like improvisational theater, where the referee recedes into a position like a director watching a rehearsal from off-stage, only when necessary intervening or fielding questions. Many later live-action role-playing games would build on similar principles.

The emergence of “free form” as a recognized style of game gives us another clear data point on how early adopters understood role playing and the practices that encouraged it. Some, like Jones, clearly thought that when you took away the system, role playing is what remained—that the obliviousness to system recommended by Sandy Eisen was the core of role playing, and it hardly mattered what was going on behind the referee’s screen. But the century-old example of “free” Kriegsspiel illustrates how players can find the lack of system arbitrary and disempowering, to the point where there is not enough of a game left for people to consider themselves players. Predictably, a backlash would follow, especially given how many people stood to lose if it turned out, as Thomas put it, that new rules were not going to make much difference. An entire budding industry depended on him being wrong. But this also had disquieting implications for anyone hoping to articulate what makes something a role-playing game: namely, that those qualities might not be extractable from systems and rulebooks. What makes something a role-playing game might instead live in the state of play. But then the entire project of developing rules to encourage role playing would seem to be in grave doubt.