I Have Never Played D&D

That is, I have never played Dungeons & Dragons the way it was meant to be played.

Many, many moons ago - long before I became aware of the game - co-creator, Gary Gygax, wrote an article in Dragon Magazine in which he basically told players to ignore any product or ruling which was not "official." To true purists, if it wasn't covered by existing rules, then it could not exist.

Gygax meant well. As someone who has designed several gaming systems, sometimes a line must be drawn. Dungeons & Dragons has a unique flavor, even divorced from a setting. Beholders, alignments, the Continual Light spell, and more all lend D&D an unmistakable feel. Once you open it up to literally any interpretation, it loses much of its inherent charm. This is precisely why newer versions are often overlooked by older players; if you can just "do whatever you want" with a game, it's either completely unstable or so perfectly stable that nothing can upset it. If any game has achieved the latter, it has yet to come to light.

I can't begin to tell you the silly, even downright stupid, things I've heard from 3.x players. One had a character who was basically half-everything; his mother had been a half-werewolf, half-vampire, and his father was a demi-god, which made him half-angel, half-demon - and so on in like fashion. I don't remember much else about the whole thing, except him rambling out about 10 different, extremely powerful, races and concepts no sensible DM would ever allow in any campaign.

This guy - and the troupe to which he belonged - was precisely the type of player for which Gygax had written the aforementioned article! I mean, this game was the guy's magnum opus, so it's understandable he would be upset to see players literally spitting in the face of the rules. Except that few were. The articles presented in Dragon prove that. And later in his life, Gygax saluted such enterprising efforts when he wrote the foreword to the Netbook, Unearthed Arcania.

When I first got the game, we didn't bother to read the books; we launched right into our campaign. No maps, no miniatures - nothing more than the PHB and DMG (these were 1^st-Ed., of course; I was all of maybe 10)... neither of which had we actually taken the time to read. Like most, once I did read the material, I over-corrected, swinging the game in the completely "Official" direction. Eventually, through a lot of (thoroughly enjoyable) trial-and-error, we found a way to enjoy the game. But little of what we did was "official."

Further, I have never played an extended campaign. Ever. Never run one, never played a character in one. Yes, we used to game every weekend, but due to all sorts of things, we rarely played the same game, with the same characters, twice. I think the most protracted campaign I ever handled ran about 4-5 weeks. I had two Champions campaigns which lasted longer and a Cyberpunk campaign (featured on the site) which ran about as long.

Now that I think about it, I take it all back: I did play an extended D&D campaign. It lasted a couple months or so and the characters progressed to mid-level (4-5^th or so). But it was Oriental D&D, and that really doesn't count in this discussion.

My new group of neophyte players are moving and I may be moving, too. So, yet again, I got a Dungeons & Dragons game underway only to have it fall apart on me before it ever really got going. This time though, I'm hedging my bets: I'm going to make their characters NPCs and continue developing the world around them. That way, the next time I get the chance to start a D&D game, I'll knock their socks off!

© C Harris Lynn, 2009