In these days, the word "dice" meant normal, cubical six-sided d6 dice. So when Dave Arneson, the first DM, needed a mechanic to resolve hand-to-hand single solider combat, he needed a way to compactify all of the complicated reality of damage done by a man with a heavy piece of metal in his hand trying to strike another man bound in metal plates, and he had to use six-sided dice to do it.
"A game designer from a parallel dimension with no D&D nor Gygax is tasked with designing a game supporting common OSR principles. What would such a game look like?"The original intent of the question was to remove deadweight mechanics form the game. Ideas that started with Gygax and early versions of D&D, that no longer make sense, but that have stuck around because of their historical inertia.
As an example, clerics as PCs and wizards who can't heal. It would make sense for wizards to have healing magic, and the only reason they don't seems to be to stop them from intruding on the cleric's space. But why is there a cleric in the adventure to begin with? Because one of Arneson's friends wanted to play Van Helsing from the Hammer movies while they were fighting a vampire named Sir Fang (yes, that was really the vampire's name) . That's why there is a cleric class in D&D, and it continues to exist because of inertia.
Remove that history and re-make the game again, and you'd probably drop clerics and give wizards healing spells.
But I was actually more intrigued by the literal wording of the prompt. A parallel dimension with neither D&D nor Gary Gygax. What is this dimension, and what kind of game can come out of it? Let's imagine a universe where we are making the first roleplaying game, where D&D has never existed, and where Gygax also doesn't exist. What does the first roleplaying game out of this universe look like?
I was inspired to finally start writing some commentary by a scene near the end of vol 1 of season 4. That is your spoiler warning.
I remember my first few years as a grad student, a professor reassuring my friend and I that no physicist ever gained true expertise in the topics by taking the classes. We'd learn the subject matter, but the real mastery would come when we had to teach it. Since about January my wife and I have been teaching a Sunday school class on logic and critical thinking, and even though the subject matter is pretty basic, I'm finding more insights into the topic that I just hadn't noticed before.
One of these is with the Law of Identity, which is our next topic. Stated, the Law of Identity sounds really dumb: "A thing is itself, and not anything else." This apple is this apple, and not a banana. This apple is this apple, and not that apple. It applies to claims, as well. The claim that the sky is blue, is the claim that the sky is blue, and not some other color. It's the claim that the sky is blue, and not that my car is blue. And if we disagree on what is meant by "the sky" (do we mean the night sky?) or "blue" (my wife says this color is "blue"), the language disagreement doesn't make the claim itself ambiguous or unknowable. My claim still means what it means.
I was thinking recently how this applies to God.
What do we mean when we say the word, "God"?
I have recently had to write and turn in my dissertation. To do this, I had to adhere, at least somewhat, to the stylistic whims of Kate Turabian. Which has been a painful process.
Who is Kate Turabian? She is a former bureaucratic pencil-pusher who leveraged her tiny bit of control over dissertation layout into a world-wide empire enforcing her anal-retentiveness about margin widths and heading formats through a book she wrote explaining how she liked things to be. Because she had to approve dissertations at the University of Chicago, students had to do whatever she said to graduate. She herself never even finished college, and never wrote a dissertation. She certainly never wrote a college term paper using her made-up style. She just made others follow it. Margins on the left should be 1.25" while the right 1"? Appendix titles are only 1" from the top margin, but chapters 2"? It doesn't matter if it makes sense, you just have to do it, or you can't get your PhD.
And that's all her wikipedia page should say about her.
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| I drew this on a white board at my last school, in 2013. Nine years later and I slayed the dragon. |
The first post on this blog was almost ten years ago, while I was a grad student. Inspired by some of my classes and books I was reading, I had some crazy ideas mixing science and fiction and wanted to post them somewhere. The most famous of those crazy ideas was about the Berenst#in Bears, which is now a meme far beyond my mere tiny blog.
Ten years ago I was a graduate student. One week ago, I was a graduate student. In fact, I started graduate school in 2010, meaning I have been pursuing a PhD for for twelve years (eleven not counting my year teaching high school).
I have been twelve years a grad student.
I figured, given the momentousness of the situation, I would reflect on this overlong time.
I recently reread this favorite of mine. My copy is an old, worn paperback I purchased at a used bookstore in the middle of nowhere in Georgia. The cover art shows the two man characters Hugh and Irena lost wandering in a forest, Hugh dressed in the vest from Tembreabrezi with the ceremonial sword drawn, and Irena in the red traveling cloak the inn lent her. I've seen other covers for the book, and this one blows the others away. It is apparently also the author's favorite, because it's the one she shows on her website.
If you recently read this book and are trying to understand it, or read it long ago but didn't really get it or don't remember much, I'm going to offer an explanation for the story that should help it make more sense. (Spoilers below)
To enjoy this book, you need to understand that it is not the same kind of book as Narnia.
