“Patron Play” Considered Harmful

By the order of Cardinal Jefforieu: Members of the #BrOSR are no longer to utilize the term “patron play.”

• Independent downtime action creates a Braunstein at first level BY DEFAULT.
• Individual PC’s naturally develop into FACTIONS over time, enhancing the scope of that Braunstein.

If you want to kick off your campaign with a Braunstein scenario the way that Daniel J. Davis has done, that is really cool. If you want to integrate a Braunstein into an existing D&D campaign, you can do that, too. But you don’t need the term “patron play” to describe this.

“Patron play” is a term that was coined when the bros first started experimenting with Braunsteins. “Braunstein” is the actual historic term for the type of gameplay we have been exploring and it is the correct term to apply to it. Identifying the FACT that real D&D is a Braunstein is the salient point here. Using the term “Braunstein” over “Patron Play” emphasizes that we have recovered aspects of D&D play that were not only foundational to how Dave Arneson ran Blackmoor, but that this concept of Braunstein play is explicitly within the D&D rules that Gygax wrote and published during the seventies. It is strong juju– literally deep magic from before the dawn of D&D.

Within the #BrOSR, timekeeping was mastered first and it appeared to us that the 1:1 type rules made Braunstein follow very naturally from that. I believe that in the broader rpg world, the understanding that D&D campaigns were intended to be Braunsteins was lost first. From there, there was no longer a need for the time rules.

Of the two ideas, the multiple independent actors of a Braunstein scenario is more fundamental to D&D in particular and good rpg campaigns in general. Timekeeping turns out to be a tool for managing an ongoing and continuous Braunstein— one more reason why timekeeping is the secondary topic! Finally, the concept of a Braunstein is easier to express and less likely to steer rpg discussions into the weeds. It is also the distinctive of Blackmoor, OD&D, AD&D, and BrOSR play that most clearly differentiates them from Rule Zero and Storytelling approaches to rpgs. Because of all of this, you should not use the term “patron play.” It can be retired now due to the fact that it is less useful, less accurate, less persuasive, and less cool.

For the full argument on how I describe real D&D, see How to Win at D&D.

Appendix N is Essential to Understanding D&D

After playing AD&D almost constantly for three years, I was almost ready to back off on my claims about how integral Appendix N was to understanding the game. After all, the case could be made that game mechanisms such as Braunstein play, timekeeping rules, and 1:10 figure scaling are far more important to anyone looking to master the game.

Fortunately, some rather dimwitted people showed up to set me straight on the matter. Consider the following:

Yes, this is the same guy that has been very aggressive about arguing that D&D is nothing but a rip off from Tolkien’s oeuvre.

But notice the pattern. First, he denies that D&D is comprised of a heterogeneous synthesis of a great many sources besides Tolkien’s famous fantasy works. Next, he comes across a game element that very much contrary to how Tolkien would have approached either storytelling or worldbuilding. Baffled and enraged by the inherent strangeness of the game, he then goes on to conclude that Gygax is a fool– and that he is of course God’s gift to role-playing! (A not uncommon occurrence among role-players it seems!)

Of course, anyone familiar with Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories would immediately recognize that Gygax’s City/Town Encounter Matrix is not an attempt to model anything remotely like a stuffy sort of Minas Tirith city at all. Gary Gygax was not incompetent at presenting a Tolkienesque game setting. He had entirely different tastes and assumptions about fantasy! And anyone that desired a game session that felt more akin to Fritz Leiber’s City of Lankhmar would be more than satisfied with what the tables offered up to him– even if it was a cheap trollop with a 30% chance to know valuable information!

Obviously, the capacity to recognize which sources Gygax is drawing from and which types of fantasy he is simulating not only allows people to play the game as Gygax conceived it, it also saves them from drastically underestimating his intelligence. It pains me to say this as I had really hoped to have grown to be far more open minded on the subject than I was back in 2016 when I was putting the finishing touches on my treatise on the subject, but being familiar with the works in Appendix N really is a prerequisite to both understanding Gary Gygax and to playing the game he co-created correctly.

Matt Colville Gobsmacked by Time Rules

Matt Coleville is gobsmacked by the fact that the old editions of D&D “reference the notion that the game was intended to be played in real time.” I don’t blame him! It’s absolutely foreign to how people have played D&D for, oh… THE LAST FORTY YEARS!!

The really cool thing about this is that he can be sure that this crazy idea really is true because he has a famous module that expressly goes out of its way to arbitrarily protect the players between sessions. It’s almost as if it was commonly understood that game time would continue to move forward between sessions and that things could happen to your characters even if you weren’t actively playing them.

Pretty wild stuff!

Note to everyone that has said I was wrong about 1970s D&D over the past three years here: I look forward to seeing you go into the comments on this video in order to tell him that Gygax didn’t play that way, that nobody used the rule, that he is reading the rules wrong if he thinks that this was seriously the intent of the designers, and nothing that matters about D&D can possibly work if somebody tried to run a campaign in this manner. Good luck!

It won’t do you any good, though. My concept of what real D&D actually is is proliferating. Why is that? Well, one reason is that my view of D&D is derived from the game’s actual rules. Sane people like Matt Coleville are persuaded of the basic idea as soon as it is pointed to them. But there is another reason why timekeeping is back in style. And that is because it really is a fundamental idea that will allow you to experience the kind of successful long-running campaigns you have always dreamed of.

But you won’t hear anything about that in this video. Alas, Matt Colville is still only in the “gobsmacked” phase of rediscovering what classic D&D was really about. But fear not! There are in fact people that have spent countless hours exploring how these strange rules function within an actual campaign. Even better, one of them has written up the definitive introduction to this style of play.

You can get it here.

Arguments D&D Appreciators Should Not Use

These two bogus arguments are commonly invoked when classic D&D is discussed. Here is a recent example:

Chainmail fantasy and OD&D are unapologetically Tolkien derivatives. AD&D had to distance itself from Tolkien (and Arneson) for legal reasons. And Gygax rather maliciously tried to make Elves bad…. I’d accept an argument that AD&D attempts to move the game further from Tolkien and further into pulp. But that doesn’t change the origins of all RPGs are rules for Tolkien’s middle earth wargaming. (Source: here and here.)

These are of course “just so stories” for nerds. They are very handy to people that want to ignore outright what is in the actual rules manuals. And face it, very few people have the attention spans necessary to wade through the text of either the OD&D or the AD&D game books. It’s much easier to appeal to moldy wargames and lawsuits that nobody actually cares about– the details of which are so esoteric that few people are liable to call you on your evident sophistry.

All of this falls into the larger pattern in gross nerd thinking that James Steissand has pointed out whereby people think that if they can give an explanation for why a particular rules element is included within the game rules then they can safely discount it at the table and suffer no ill effects. As such, the use of these arguments are the hallmark of facile and low effort thinking. To paraphrase what they actually signal, it is this: “I have already decided what D&D is and nothing in the rules manuals can change my mind about it.” Thus, the substantiative evidence from the game manuals themselves cannot persuade these sorts of people because they have already embraced an overall tack whose purpose is to dismiss outright what is in them!

Nevertheless, here are facts that they above Twitter denizen leaves out of his gloss on classic D&D:

• Chainmail of course also includes references to both Robert E. Howard and Poul Anderson. Specially, Tolkien’s trolls are dismissed in favor of Anderson’s. Further, Anderson’s rather strange concept of Alignment is a first class element of the game.
• Arneson’s Blackmoor campaign featured a very healthy helping of John Norman’s Gor. Major elements of the campaign such as the baffling Egg of Coot are more in line with some kind of off the wall science fantasy than a straight ahead Tolkien derivative.
• Tony Bath’s earlier fantasy campaign quite obviously built off of Robert E. Howard’s works.
• There is no discernable shift in either the tone or the literary sources used in the D&D rule books as they transitioned from OD&D to AD&D during the seventies. The 1973 introduction to the D&D rules and Dragon articles throughout the period all feature more or less the same authors as those that appear in AD&D’s Appendix N. Indeed, OD&D and AD&D are virtually the same game.
• Classic D&D’s wide range of fantasy sources outside of the “Tolkienesque” wheelhouse is further cemented by the 1980 release of Deities & Demigods which included extensive sections on Lovecraft’s Mythos, Moorcock’s Elric stories, and Fritz Lieber’s Lankhmar tales. If you want to get into lawsuits, then you need to mention how many people besides Tolkien also had a bone to pick with TSR over these matters.

Obviously, a great deal more can be said on this subject. For an in depth treatment of the matter, please see my book.

Discussing John Bellairs with Zaklog the Great

John Bellairs has one of the more surprising entries in the notorious Appendix N list– one which embodies the demented sense of humor common to both Infocom text adventures and my own Trollopulous campaign. On the video below, Zaklog the Great, Hari Seldon, and myself hash out the finer points of his much more famous work, “The House with a Clock in Its Walls”.

Spoiler: while occasionally evocative and charming, the book is a complete cheat. The metaphor presented early on in its pages of a poker game where the adults use sleight-of-hand to ensure that an unlikable fat kid always wins not only presages the ultimate theme and structure of the novel, but also highlights everything that is wrong with rpgs. The book is a great example of how modernists aggressively subvert otherwise harmless looking fairy stories– especially because it is so much more subtle than more over the top efforts to retool figures such as the wicked witch of the West or Maleficent. Perfectly engineered to unravel the fragile culture of an era that Generation X only dimly remembers!