This is sort of a continuation of the previous essay on canon. There I touched on the idea of a "canon" for Dungeons and Dragons, and basically said that there isn't one, not even to the idea of a "true" Dungeons and Dragons.
There are a lot of people who say things like "there is no wrong way to play Dungeons and Dragons" or "the most important rule ("rule 0") is that you can override any rule you want at any time." From my discussion of canon you might expect me to agree with these sentiments. But from the title of this essay, you can see that I reject them.
Allow me to clarify. There are two ways that it could be said that you are "playing wrong." The first is to say that you are doing something immoral or otherwise forbidden in doing what you are doing. For example, playing a version of Dungeons and Dragons where you stab your friends with real swords in real life would be wrong. But there is nothing wrong in this sense about making up different rules. The second would be to say that when you "play wrong" you are playing something, and maybe even something fun, but it's not Dungeons & Dragons. And this is the way that using different rules is playing wrong.
Another clarification I must make is that, as I alluded in the previous essay, there isn't one canonical "Dungeons and Dragons." The changes to 2nd edition, 3rd edition, etc. didn't retoractively mean that the old game didn't exist. This even applies to things like 3.5-th edition, which were sold as a "fixed" version of the previous edition. You can keep playing 3rd edition and you will be playing a real version of 3rd edition. But there will be ways to "play" that edition that are wrong, in that you are not playing the same game anymore.
This is obvious if you take the claim literally. If there is really no wrong way to play Dungeons & Dragons, then I could invite a bunch of friends over, start playing Clue, and say "that was a great game of Dungeons & Dragons." For that matter we could watch an episode of Serial Experiments Lain and then say that we were play D&D, or eat a pizza, or whatever. If there's not "wrong" way to play then those are just as valid as anything else, but obviously in those examples we would either be playing a different game or not playing a game at all.
Why the claim does not seem so absurd is that people use it to refer to things like house rules. Even a single change to a rule techically makes a different game, but in a role playing game where so much is necessarily left to interpretation and case by case rulings there is more leeway. However enough house rules will fundamentally change the game to the point where it is something else.
Let's take a different game. Consider Monopoly. This game is probably more commonly played with house rules than without. People usually skip auctions entirely, give lots of money for landing on Free Parking, put restrictions on trading (usually you can only trade on your turn and not at all if you are in jail.) Sometimes they add even more restrictive rules such as only allowing houses to be purchased when you land on the relevant property. People also frequently allow many "mercy" conditions such as "as part of this trade I won't charge you for landing on my property the next three times." A lot of people probably don't even realize that these things are house rules.
If you've never done it, you should try playing Monopoly following the rules exactly as written. Now I'll be honest and say that Monopoly isn't the greatest game in the world when you do this, it's maybe 7 or 8 out of 10, but it is an incredibly different experience. With house rules Monopoly is a game where the action is all in what happens with your die roll, where it is very difficult for the game to come to an end, and where 90% of the time you have nothing whatsoever to do. When you play with the rules you are always active. Early on you are looking for a nice auction opportunity, which could happen on any turn (even your own, if you are trying to buy a property on the cheap.) In the midgame you will focus on trying to make trades to complete your properties, and the end game tends to focus on buying (and selling) houses to maximize the amount of money you can get from others. You can engage in all of this whenever you want, and your decisions will often depend on where people end up on their turns, so you will be very interested in what other people are doing. There's never really a time where you say "okay I rolled, now I'm going to nap until it comes back to my turn." Again the end result is perhaps not something that you would love, but the experience is so incredibly different from playing with house rules that you can't really say that the game is the same. It's almost like claiming that Checkers and Fox and Geese are the same game, because they can be played on the same board with the same pieces (or that Chess and Ultima are the same.)
If you play D&D, talk to others who play, and look at game session reports (or interviews with the old players) you will see that the variation in playstyles is great enough that many people are in fact playing different games. If someone has a game where characters naturally end up leading armies in mass combat and another group never even allows characters to get henchmen, they are playing different games. A game that keeps track of time and either forces the world to advance by a month when a mage does spell research for that long (or forces the player to play a different character while his mage does research) is not the same game as one where the DM just says "Okay, it's a month later. Update your age I guess, but we can keep going directly where we left off." A game where players can run off into the uncharted wilderness and build a castle is not the same as one where they are only allowed to make changes to a pre-planned storyline in pre-planned environments. Even something as simple as removing random monster checks is going to have such a huge impact on what characters experience and how they interact with their world as to arguably make a different game.
Now I should note that none of these playstyles are necessarily "wrong" in the sense that they aren't games or that they are inherently unfun. But they can mean you are not playing the game you claim to be playing. OD&D, 1st Edition and BECMI all assume that players will at least have the opportunity to claim royal (or other official) titles and rule over a domain, complete with castle and army. If you use those rules, but do not allow for this, you are not playing those games. And in fact historically many people were playing 1st edition and the like wrong. (Gygax even makes clear in various places in the 1st edition books that there are ways to play it "wrong.") Where things get complicated is that the inmates took over the asylum. 2nd edition dramatically cut down on many aspects of the game that people were ignoring anyway. (In the later printings of the rules the only mention of strongholds is as a prequisite for gaining followers as a class ability; there is no description of how or why a character actually would obtain such a thing.) By the time we got to 3rd edition those elements were removed completely. Of course, 3rd edition was partially made be people who played 2nd edition "wrong" and so on. In some ways this is just natural evolution. New players will not like everything about a game and they will make changes to it to better suit what they wanted. In some cases, due to their lack of experience with game design, they will make the game worse even for themselves (think of the "money for free parking" rule in Monopoly.) But other times they are merely changing focus. However, in doing so they are creating a new game. In fact D&D itself could be said to have arisen out of playing wargames "wrong," i.e. focusing on characters outside of their appearances in the large battles seen in Chainmail and the like.
But if playing games "wrong" can lead to good things, or at least new things that are neither inherently better nor worse, why I am bitching about it? A few reasons. The first is that when people play games wrong, but do not admit they are doing so, they will give games an unfairly poor reputation. Monopoly is once again a good example. A common complaing about Monopoly is that it lasts hours and hours. Some people even say that it is impossible to complete a game of Monopoly in a single day. But if you play with the rules as written you will find that games almost never take more than two hours, and that if you keep the game moving you can easily get done in around an hour or so. Auctions allow properties to go pretty fast (and any property that isn't auctioned isn't getting landed on, making it largely irrelevant.) Active trading means that monopolies show up much earlier, and the far smaller pool of cash means that once people start buying houses people are going start going bankurpt not long afterwards. While games will not be getting over in fifteen minutes, they are well within the time limits of similar board games. The complaint of the game taking too long only happens because people play it wrong.
The same thing happens with D&D. For example, a common complaint against early editions (especially 1st edition and earlier) is "all the characters are the same; you just roll dice in combat or maybe cast a handful of the same spells over and over again." Now if you are seroius about the rules you will be confused by this. You can build castles, lead armies, order assassinations (or even do the assasinations yourself in 1st Edition), start a trading business, become a pirate, map out the wilderness, pit groups of monsters against each other, etc. Even just in combat and spell casting weapons are more varied than they first appear, there are many combat options to try, and mages will rarely have the same spell list due to the need to struggle for each spell. There's plenty to do and plenty of ways in which characters will be distinct. But of course most of the rules that make all this work are ignored by groups that play the game wrong. If you don't allow for domain level play (with strongholds, armies, spying, assassinations, economics, etc.) you are going to be much more limited. If you don't allow players to find new locations in the wilderness you remove the exploration aspect and take the fun out of things like interacting with villages. Etc. The complaint is only possible because people don't play the rules as written.
Comparisons to other editions often make things easier to misintepret. Because later editions scrubbed out so much of the larger world, they became more and more focused on character builds. By the time we get to 3rd edition and beyond making a build for your character essentially is how you roleplay. If you come from that environment and look back at an earlier edition that allowed only a single "build" per class, varying only by ability scores, spells and equipment, you would naturally think that every game would play exactly the same. But this is not the case. For fairness I shoudl note that it would hardly be fair for old school players to criticize later editions by saying "nothing interesting will ever happen because you can't lead armies" since the games were designed without the expectation that players would get involved in army battles. These sort of complaints are a bit like saying that Risk is a deficient game when compared to Settlers of Catan, since Risk does not allow the accumulation and trading of resources like wood or bricks. Or it would be idiotic for a fan of Risk to play Catan and then house rule out the resource cards (because Risk doesn't have them) and then complain about how limited the game is.
The other reason that it matters to note that it is obviously possible to play the game wrong is to fully understand the dishonesty of people who say that there is "no wrong way to play." They always have styles of play that they object to. For example, these tend to be the same type of people who object to "muderhobo" characters who only do dungeon crawls where they kill the monsters and take their stuff. But if "there is no wrong way to play D&D" means anything coherent at all, it must mean that players playing consistently with a published product are still playing Dungeons and Dragons. If you were to play only with the Red Box Metzner rules (or the later Black Box rules) you would probably have a style of play like this since that is about all the rules support. I would say that this is an extremely limited style of play (it is called "Basic" Dungeons and Dragons after all), but ultimately a type of D&D. (And to be fair, this style of play isn't terribly different from playing Hero Quest or Arkham Horror, so as a game there's nothing wrong with it.) But many of the people claiming that there is "no wrong way to play" will at minimum say that you should try to have more "character interactions and roleplaying," even though if they were serious they would say "do murderhobo dungeon crawls all you want; there's no wrong way to play D&D!"
Where things get more ridiculous is in how they tend to react to elements which were removed from later editions. For example if someone says "Make sure that you know how mass combat works when playing 1st Edition/OD&D/BECMI, because it's in the rules" they do not respond "yes, play mass combat if you want, there's no wrong way to play!" or even "that's one way to play, but if someone wants to ignore mass combat that's okay too!" Instead they will say that even back in the day most people ignored mass combat rules, that they were never an essential part of the rules in the first place, that the game is better when you ignore them, etc. It's like someone saying "When you land on Free Parking in Monopoly nothing happens; that's how the rules work" and getting the response "Well everyone puts money there and that wasn't a key rule in Monopoly to begin with and not putting the money there makes rolls less fun because you get a dead roll which isn't fun when you can't do anything not on your turn..." The second person has a very specfific playstyle in mind, it just happens to not be the correct way (i.e. the way that the game actually works.) Because it would be ridiculous for him to say "you MUST play with my house rules or else you aren't playing the game, even if you play it the way it was written!" he has to instead say that it's always okay to use house rules. But he really wants to make his house rules the default. You see the same thing with strict timekeeping, running multiple parties that make use of henchmen, etc.
Again, you can play whatever the hell game you want at your table. I've played RPGs where we made up the rules as we went along, starting only with "every once in a while we'll roll a d20 and higher numbers mean better things happen." But it would be absurd to call that Dungeons and Dragons, and it would be even more absurd for me to imply that if you didn't allow such fast and loose play that you were the one at odds with the rules or the "spirit" of D&D. Essences are real, even for board games.
August 26, 2022