I don't buy that the "heart of the game" is at the table. It's at the table where the game is being played, by the rules that the game sets up. In a way that no one had ever really played before, and a way everyone ended up playing since.
You can barely call D&D anti-medieval; it isn't from a world of obsessing about Tolkien-style fantasy. It's Gygax coming up with rules for miniatures wargaming where players are individuals within a group rather than being entire sides of a war and moving armies, or being squad-level and choosing how to move squad members. That was the important part that influenced the entire world. All of the players were part of a single squad, and working (and cooperating) as individuals for their own benefit.
These rules were then applied to Gygax's (and everybody else's) favorite fantasy novels. The thing that varied most about those novels was the idea of magic, so the only influence on his system from fiction that I recall is the stat-friendly Jack Vance magic, which would end up imposed onto other settings.
But it's still fair to call the system anti-medieval as the article does because it was made for a competitive multiplayer tabletop game which was meant to progress over sessions, and the main aspect of its progression are stats. So it has to be as fair as possible, and you have to be able to accumulate indefinitely rather than die in the same place you were born with no more than your parents had. That's American myth, not medieval reality. There can't be a medieval system, because that would crush all of the characters, starting by burning all of the witches. If every character were a fighter trying to get ahead by fighting in an army, there's no D&D, because D&D is individual, not squad or army.
> So it has to be as fair as possible, and you have to be able to accumulate indefinitely rather than die in the same place you were born with no more than your parents had. That's American myth, not medieval reality.
The medieval era actually had a pretty decent number of wandering mercenaries and adventurers, many of whom were displaced people from the neverending ongoing local wars across the centuries. (Of course, these groups were also basically interchangeable with bandits if they were broke.) Just look at the Varangian Guard, which recruited itinerant soldiers from all over Northern Europe from the 900s pretty much right up until Constantinople fell to the Ottomans.
This all kicked into even higher gear in the Renaissance and later. As central monarchical control grew, so did army sizes and the impacts of those armies, leading to entire villages being wiped out or displaced entirely as a side effect of being in the way of an army passing through. Conflicts like the Thirty Years' War led to immense numbers of deaths and famine (current estimates say 4-8 million deaths just from the Thirty Years' War, for example), and consequently to immense numbers of migrants looking for work anywhere they could.
The part that didn't exist was, of course, the dungeons. There was no nominally ethical-concern-free money sitting around underground; the source was other people, willing or not. But the whole point of D&D was to have a small-scale alternative to the "armies or mercenary companies fighting each other" gameplay that it originally sprang from, so I can give a pass on that, even if the writers never actually figured out any coherent setting explanations for it.
“But the whole point of D&D was to have a small-scale alternative to the "armies or mercenary companies fighting each other" gameplay that it originally sprang from, so I can give a pass on that, even if the writers never actually figured out any coherent setting explanations for it.”
‘A wizard did it’ is almost always the in-universe reason. Whether it is Halaster Blackcloak or a Red Thayan or Acererak, it is usually a magic user doing it to mess with people.
Which, as I type that out, kinda just seems to be a barely disguised expy of the role of the GM…
> The part that didn't exist was, of course, the dungeons. There was no nominally ethical-concern-free money sitting around underground; the source was other people, willing or not.
I would have said the dragons were a much more obviously non-existent part, but sure.
> All of the players were part of a single squad, and working (and cooperating) as individuals for their own benefit.
Sorry, I'm not sure if this is specifically referring to Chainmail or early D&D. If the latter, this is explicitly not how Gygax (and Arneson) ran their campaigns back in those days, though. They had groups of people playing that fluctuated in the 30-50 player range, and people often had multiple characters specifically because they frequently did not have the same people at the table each session. They were in the same shard, persistent world, but there were many different parties, and they all decided on their own goals. These often conflicted - adversarial interactions between groups were things that happened! B2 - Keep on the Borderlands - even includes a lot of details around how the DM should handle such situations, how the players can protect their treasure from other players, etc.
That sounds amazing!!! I would love to be part of a gaming community like that (in-person I mean) with party vs party interactions in a single unified & fluid unfolding plot. The closest thing I've read about to this (but never participated in) is the "Grand Quest" in Drew Hayes' excellent litrpg series Spells, Swords, & Stealth, which is still being written. The audiobook format version of the series is especially captivating. https://www.audible.com/series/Spells-Swords-Stealth-Audiobo...
No doubt more in some places and times than others: there is a lot of variation over a thousand years and an entire continent or more.
On top of that the player in D & D are not playing very low ranked characters (they have weapons and money, are free to adventure, etc.) and are adventurers of some sort so are exceptional to start with. Clerics even belong to a group that could rise a great deal through ability (albeit by showing administrative or leadership ability within the organisation rather than by going off on adventures).
> sarting by burning all of the witches
Witch burning was more of an ancient and early modern phenomenon than medieval.
> I don't buy that the "heart of the game" is at the table. It's at the table where the game is being played, by the rules that the game sets up. In a way that no one had ever really played before, and a way everyone ended up playing since.
To an extent, yes, but while, as I responded to the GP just upthread, I think Gygax's view, at least with AD&D, was that every game should be played a certain way, I don't think that's what actually happened. Every D&D campaign I have been in has had plenty of house rules, ignored some of the standard rules, and in the end, if what the rules said didn't make sense at the table, the rules got thrown out and everyone just roleplayed what made sense at the table. So in the end, I think the heart of the game is at the table; that's where the actual stories are made. The rules are a helpful framework for cooperative storytelling, but they don't and shouldn't be the final determiner of what happens in your world.
Gygax didn't insist everyone play his way all the time, he didn't even play that way himself all the time. But he did deeply want a "standardized" way to play to exist, for things like tournaments.
The original books missed the idea of initial motivation on the "adventurer" career path. Why and how did even these first level characters end up this way. That makes the rules and settings awkward and necessitates the world to contain bait for first level characters. Like posters seeking guards for (incompetent) caravan escort duty or that kind of thing. Some people noticed that and tried to formulate 1st level adventures or entire world settings which did not start with a fully formed 1st level fighter or mage. Perhaps you start as a bored teen farm hand, or something extraordinary happens in your life but it helps if there is something that kicks you outside of "normal" medieval life and into something far more individualistic.
In my experience, there are an awful lot of people waiting around in taverns for somebody to show up with some sort of quest. Fame and fortune in return for killing the bad guy and returning the crucial artifact he stole.
You can barely call D&D anti-medieval; it isn't from a world of obsessing about Tolkien-style fantasy. It's Gygax coming up with rules for miniatures wargaming where players are individuals within a group rather than being entire sides of a war and moving armies, or being squad-level and choosing how to move squad members. That was the important part that influenced the entire world. All of the players were part of a single squad, and working (and cooperating) as individuals for their own benefit.
These rules were then applied to Gygax's (and everybody else's) favorite fantasy novels. The thing that varied most about those novels was the idea of magic, so the only influence on his system from fiction that I recall is the stat-friendly Jack Vance magic, which would end up imposed onto other settings.
But it's still fair to call the system anti-medieval as the article does because it was made for a competitive multiplayer tabletop game which was meant to progress over sessions, and the main aspect of its progression are stats. So it has to be as fair as possible, and you have to be able to accumulate indefinitely rather than die in the same place you were born with no more than your parents had. That's American myth, not medieval reality. There can't be a medieval system, because that would crush all of the characters, starting by burning all of the witches. If every character were a fighter trying to get ahead by fighting in an army, there's no D&D, because D&D is individual, not squad or army.