In my youth I played a lot of RPGs. More recently my involvement has went down, but I've become more of a historian. When it comes to Dungeons & Dragons I've read through:
My knowledge of 4th and beyond is spotty at best, but I think the above bona fides give me a pretty good claim to understanding the early history of the game. The main blind spot I have is for the development of basic in the Holmes and B/X incarnations. This makes things awkward when talking to other people who play D&D because it becomes clear that they do not know the history of the game, despite what they say. For example, I've heard it claimed that in the original rules demihumans were their own classes. (True in BECMI and I believe in the early verisons of Basic, but not the original rules.) I've also heard people go on and on and on about how tremendously confusing THAC0 calcualtions were, when in reality the math is basically identical to modern attack roll calculations (and arguably simpler, since you have a consistent "target number" rather than needing to adjust your die roll with every attack.)
One thing I've noticed in particular is the following sort of narrative: "Original Dungeons&Dragons was good, but way too confusing. 2nd edition was rock solid, but had a lot of rules that didn't make sense. They finally cleared everything up in 3rd edition, which made the game amazing. Then in 4th edition they tried to make it a video game, and ruined the game. They tried to undo their mistakes in 5th edition, but 3rd is still better. Honestly you should just play Pathfinder, since it's like 3rd edition if they kept developing it." Now obviously not everyone believes this, but I do think that it's safe to say that the average D&D fanatic you will meet will say something similar to this. The main exceptions are people who just know 5th edition and nothing else, and "old school" players who tend to focus on either 2nd edition or B/X as the "true" D&D.
Now in my view D&D was fundamentally destroyed in 3rd edition. That's a topic for a whole different essay, but the short of it is that several key points of the game such as Domain level play, mass combat, strict timekeeping and the potential for multiple parties were removed from 3rd edition. The game did become more mainstream at the same time, so most people honstly do not know that this stuff was even in the game to begin with. I also dislike the excessive bookkeeping in 3rd edition, especially as the systems don't work very well for most purposes (to me it feels like a "video game," which has always made me confused about the complaints relating to 4th edition.)
What I want to focus on in this essay is the fact that the destruction that 3rd edition did was only possible due to how 2nd edition messed things up. To explain what I mean, let's hear my narrative of how D&D developed, based on my readings and personal experiences: The original Dungeons and Dragons rules were solid, but they assumed that players knew about wargaming and had a wide variety of experiences in fantasy literature (Vance, Leiber, Anderson, Howard, Burroughs, etc.) Most of the players didn't, so they ended up playing "wrong." This led to broken campaigns, such as ones with god-level characters who never are challenged, or parties pereptually in dungeon crawl mode and didn't really interact with a larger game world. Because of this Gary Gygax became much more authoratitive in 1st Edition AD&D. He is clear that if you do not approach the game in a certain way, your campaigns will fail (in that players will lose interest or everything will become a fight over personal interests.) Of course, players didn't listen to the advice. I know this both from observing D&D players (both now and in peoples' observations of old campaigns) and also in the fact that 2nd Edition claims that the updates to the rules reflect only "what players have been doing for years." As I will get into, what they were doing was not waht is outlined in the original AD&D rules. But out of respect for tradition or whatever else, the rules necessary for the old playstyle still existed in 2nd edition. However, they were usually vague and spread across many books, and the advice given in 2nd edition sourcebooks pushes you away from using them. Thus no one learning the game from the 2nd edition books would adopt the "correct" rules (i.e. the ones intended by previous editions) which led to them being vestigial. 3rd editions "innovations" then consist of sweeping away the support for the old style of play, and thus was well received at the time since 2nd edition had pushed people away from that style already. I don't know the situation from 4th edition onwards, but my impression is that Wizards thought that since they upended the game in 3rd edition, they had a free hand to do that again. What they didn't realize is that 3rd edition's success was only possible due to the subversion carried out by 2nd edition.
Let's get more specific. I'll call something a core part of D&D if it appears in the original rules, 1st Edition AD&D and BECMI. One such feature is the necessity of keeping close track of time. From the original rules we have: "As the campaign goes into full swing it is probable that there will be various groups going every which way and all at different time periods. It is suggested that a record of each player be kept, the referee checking off each week as it is spent."
1st Edition is even more explict. The DMG states (all caps in the original): "YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT." BECMI is less strict about this, but the Rules Cyclopedia does have a section on timekeeping, telling DMs that it is necessary to keep track of time on all levels (rounds, turns, hours, days, months.) Moreover there are many mechanics in BECMI which only make sense if time is being kept carefully, such as income and other events related to ruling domains, quests for Immortality that require time commitments, etc.
You can make an argument that 2nd edition is balanced in a similar way around time. For example, the extreme time commitments for making magical items is going to be the limiting factor on PCs making their own enchanted arsenal. The basic spell just to allow an item to be enchanted takes up 3-10 days, with each actual enchantment requiring days beyond that. However, note that this process is carried over from 1st Edition, in contrast to BECMI's unique mechanics. There are many other such long processes in 2nd edition which could in theory be game breaking if done too often, but they take too much time for that to be feasible. For example, it is possible in theory for adventurers to simply go back home and rest to heal whenever they get hurt in a dungeon, but in practice this would take weeks or months for every delve, far too much time to be practical.
That is, they take too much time if you play by the strict timekeeping conventions that previous editions assumed. What's the advice in 2nd edition for handling time? It splits the discussion betwen the PHB and DMG. Let's start with the Player's Handbook, since this is what informs player expectations and even DMs will probably read this first. The example given is of a mage researching a new spell for three weeks. After the mage's player makes the request, the DM declares that three weeks have passed. One player objects and says that he'd rather go out adventuring for three weeks, and the DM says that the master of his cleric's order pays him a visit to say that he must spend the whole time at church (precisely these three weeks that the mage wanted to research a spell!) The player even says, and I quote: "Marvelous. Subtle hint. I'll stay and be a good boy."
I still can't believe that this is in the book as n exmaple of good game playing. To me it strikes me as a perfect example of why timekeeping is necessary. First of all, note that there is no downside whatsoever to mage doing her research. The DM agrees to skip time forward to the spell being researched and the rest of the party is forced to go along with it. The cleric's player is clearly pissed about this arrangement, but what choice does he have? The only thing that the DM grants to the other players is that they can heal their wounds while they wait. He says that they can "do some stuff they've been ignoring" but the example makes it clear that this is what the DM wants them to do, like having the cleric stay at church the whole time. And of course to make all of this work the DM needs to invent a contrivance of the master of the cleric's order stepping in to force the cleric to do what the DM wants. Anyone who's played an rpg knows that the master of the order isn't really a character, but an extension of the DM, so this hardly adds to the role playing experience. In summary, here's what the DM's forced time skip has done:
The least the DM could have done, if he really thought a time skip was necessary, would be to give the players the opportunity to scout out areas, train, manage a business, spread rumors, etc. That is, if they are forced to go three weeks without adventuring at least let them interact with the world in other ways. The main reason he does not is that it would be too hard to keep track of who is doing what to make sure that no one gets an unfair advantage. But this is exactly what precise timekeeping is meant to solve! This example easily could have been presented as a "here's what not to do" example, followed by a better example with strict time keeping. (Maybe the cleric teams up with a secondary character of the mage's player, or they get involved in domain actions, etc.) But no, the terrible advice is presented as the correct thing to do.
The DMG is better, but not great. To begin with, it presents the idea of strict time keeping as an optional rule. It gives another example where the party is faced to wait in a town for months so that a mage can do research, saying that it is reasonable for such a thing to happen, since in real life armies did stop at safe havens for extended periods. (But what are the other characters doing, just drinking in a bar?) When it gets around to the "option" of strict timekeeping with a calendar it mainly discusses things in terms of worldbuilding. The example given is that if you do not use strict timekeeping you might accidentally have the characters encounter a fantasy vesrion of Thanksgiving even though the last adventure took place in the summer. The horror! It then says that you should probably not use a real calendar, but a fantasy calendar that you make up yourself. This will give you detail to "make the campaign come alive." The only discussion of time interacting with game mechanics is given with respect to game balancing. That is, you can force high level characters to do things the long way and have low level characters cheat on the calendar so that the low level characters catch up. Honestly, I'm not sure how this is supposed to work in the type of game that the 2nd Edition rules suggest. To begin with, it's unlikely to have such an unbalanced party in the first place, as this edition does not like having multiple active characters in different areas (this is impossible to do without strict timekeeping.) But even if you did get a 5 level gap between characters, how are you going to use timekeeping to fix it, given the suggestions in 2nd edition? Certainly one solution would be to say that the high level character must spend a great deal of time training to level up, while the training times for the lower level characters are less. But if you just skip time for long events like training, then what will happen is that you'll skip to the end of when the high level character trained. The lower level characters would have gotten done earlier, but just like the cleric in the earlier example, they would have been forced to sit and wait. Now you could skip only to when the lower level characters are done training and say that the high level character must sit things out for the next adventure. But if everyone only has one character this means forcing a player to sit out too, which the advice otherwise discourages. This section reads as an afterthought, like the designers were vaguely aware that time could be used to balance in old campaigns, but they didn't actually play in ways where that was possible. So they guessed about how it might work, even though the suggestion can't be implemented in the type of campaign they suggest.
In any case, when you put everything together, 2nd edition does not advocate strongly for strict timekeeping. It makes it an optional thing and its examples advise against using it. You certainly can play 2nd edition with strict time keeping, and so many things are taken over from 1st edition that things will stay balanced. But if you are following the advice given to you in 2nd edition, you won't. This has a lot of effects on the game, such as making multiple party play next to impossible, and removing all cost to spending long periods of time on an action. This in turn led to "innovations" or "corrections" in 3rd edition. For example, in 3rd edition creating a magical item will generally require an XP cost, not a lengthy time cost. This is because everyone is well aware by that point that time is meaningless in RPGs (as they were played at that time) but XP actually matters. Ironically, XP is just a proxy for real world time, meaning that the effect is similar to the old time balance approach (if you make in game time take up real world time.) However, the new approach is far less intuitive and causes other issues (such as spellcasters falling behind fighters and the like if they are tasked with making many magical items.) Similarly in 2nd edition the rules will allude to having multiple groups, it's just that there's no real support for running multiple groups or advice given on how to do it. By 3rd edition the game is a one group only affair. That is, 2nd edition's bad advice about time destroyed the old style of play, and 3rd edition just brought the rules up to reality by making the old style of play next to impossible.
This is a story not unique to time, but also affecting many other aspects of the game. However, I did not realize when I started this how long this essay would get. I honestly expected the discussion to be on the shorter time. So for the first time on this site, I'll make this into a multi-parter. Maybe the next part will be the next thing I post, maybe I'll write about something else in between. If I post something else in the interim, I'll put a link to part two here.
July 25, 2023