It's Dave Bone again, writing to you from the Pandemonium of the Internet. This time I'm going to talk about something that's going to become relevant once more at the Wargate, after a long long absence from the table. Of course, I'm talking about that Grand Daddy of all things RPG - Dungeons & Dragons!
It's been a while since we left our D20 Realms, but we'll be reviving that old tradition of classic races and classes with a vengeance! You see, here at the Wargate, we don't believe in "Edition Wars" - arguments over which edition of the game is better. Each edition of every game is different, and in some cases the new editions are better. In others, they are not. Realistically speaking, I think the Edition Wars are fought between an "old school" or "old guard" who are steeped in a current or previous editions and who feel let down that the line is being discontinued and a new one being supported - and the fresh blood of those who aren't as vested (monetarily) in an older edition.
Over the next year, we'll be running through several Dungeons & Dragons games here at the Wargate. A lot of those games will be run by different GM's, and I'll have the schedule for the games and GM's coming soon. However, many of those games that will claim to be Dungeons & Dragons will seem to be very different games to those of you who aren't as familiar with the different materials we'll be using.
To that end, I present to you the Wargate's 2011 D&D primer, packed with plenty of edition history and sneak peeks at what's to come!!
Well, lets start at the beginning. I'm going to run through this briefly, without too much detail.
In the early 1970's, some guys in Wisconsin were playing wargames. They played all kinds of games, from a popular game at the time called Napoleonics to homebrewed rules for medieval wargames. Some guy named Gygax thought wizards would be cool in his medieval wargames after reading the Dying Earth novels of Jack Vance. This was a club of gamers, like our own, but they wanted to make money. They called themselves the Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association, and they developed the game known as Chainmail in 1971. When the club went commercial it changed it's name to Tactical Studies Rules, but would later be known in the gaming world simply as TSR Hobbies, Inc
The creation and demise of TSR, and it's being bought by Wizards of the Coast over a decade ago, is a matter fraught with all kinds of backstabbing, slander, incompetence and general SNUTLINESS. That's another matter however, and not the subject of this article. However, the drama between the shareholders, owners and others who were involved in the industry at it's very start is quite compelling, and I encourage readers to seek out this information for themselves. It's a very interesting, cautionary tale of why you must be careful when "friends" and money are involved.
However all that would turn out 25+ years later, in 1974 Dungeons & Dragons came about as an 'evolved' version of Chainmail that included the fantastic elements we all know and love. This is what I consider to be the beginning of the modern gaming era.
In 1977, TSR got the "great" idea that it would be necessary to adopt a "two-pronged" strategy. That is, there was Dungeons & Dragons, but now there would also be Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. In '77, the Basic boxed set for D&D was published, and from '77 to '79 would see the main rulebooks for the advanced version published for the first time: the Player's Handbook, the Dungeon Master's Guide, and the Monster Manual.
TSR's practices really got silly in the 80's and 90's. Different lines, different editions and the apparent inability of the TSR marketing department to put forth cohesive themes all contributed to the downfall, but the current management at the time was mind bogglingly incompetent. In 1989, the 2nd Edition was published, but the line was still not unified and this confused a lot of prospective gamers. Hell it even confused veterans at times. To illustrate this point, and the fact that TSR was driven squarely into the ground by the management over a number of years, the 2nd Edition books were republished in 1996. These books were the first to have a cohesive design template (they all looked like they belonged together in a set). I bought these because they looked cool, not because I needed them - the 1989 books were the exact same text.
The next year, 1997, TSR was put out of its misery. It and it's intellectual property was bought out by gaming giant Wizards of the Coast.
In the year 2000, the D20 version of the main rulebooks were published. What followed was a renaissance in gaming, and for nearly a decade D&D 3.0 / 3.5 was the absolute ruler of the realm. The Open Game License was put into place, and third party publishers who had no love under the reign of TSR now flooded the scene with all kinds of interesting 3.5 sourcebooks. To this day, I know no other game system which so much material has been generated for.
In 2003 the 3.5 editions of the basic rulebooks were published. I felt like Wizards was trying to rape me, then beat me and take my money. This was when our game club went to town on the first "Edition War" we had to fight. Even today, I feel that this particular iteration of D&D wasn't meant to fix anything wrong with 3.0. Yeah, yeah...I've heard it all before. This is unbalanced and that doesn't work right - but in all our years of gaming I never encountered anything that I felt required a new edition of the game to be built, so that I could continue to game.
No no. What ruined my love affair with the D20 system was Wizards of the Coast's coercion of me to buy new books just a few short years after the publication of a brand new edition. Sigh. That is also a conversation for another topic, but suffice to say that soon after 2003, we quit playing D&D.
Then came 2008.
What was to be the 4th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons didn't even resemble what I knew. Even the D20 system (3.0/3.5) looked more like the game I knew and loved than did - whatever the hell that game was. 4th Edition was universally reviled at the Wargate, and I think I know why.
The artwork and design. The artwork is very anime style and a lot of us don't like that with our Swords & Sorcery, preferring to save that particular imagery for Samurai & Ninjas or Robots & Spaceships. Also, a lot of "sacred cows" had been abandoned during the development of the new edition.
It didn't feel like D&D, so I couldn't play it like it was. However, at the same time, something else happened...
Pathfinder was published. This game, published by Paizo Publishing in 2008, extended the OGL and the 3.5 edition as an entirely different game by a different publisher. Yeah, that's how drastic the 4th Edition transfer was - the Edition Wars spiraled so far out of control another game was created. One game, but now with two different versions. Kind of like Basic D&D and AD&D way back in the 80's and early 90's.
Similar, all of these...but very different in practice. So, we shall ascend above the Edition Wars with the Wargate's new Dungeons & Dragons initiative, spearheaded by GM's Shawn, Skim and Greg!
I can hear you asking, "how are we going to do that, Dave?" or "What Edition will be the official Wargate Edition?" The answers are easy: delineation of tasks!! We've put these editions in their places!!
If you look back through the editions at the massive amount of material that has been published, you can see a lot of stuff only existed for a certain amount of time, or were only recently brought back. To that end, we're going to use the native systems for the campaign settings. There has been a lot of talk about 'converting' material from one edition to another, and I have to say that I really hate doing that crap. However, since we are gamers of the highest caliber and are familiar with most of the material anyway, we will be playing ALL OF THESE EDITIONS.
Each one has a use it is best put to! We've been planning far far ahead with what will be happening at the Wargate, and you'll see that we'll be riding along through each edition in time! Below is what we'll be using different editions to do over the next few years!
- AD&D 2nd Edition will be used to run the Spelljammer setting, as this is the only edition it exists in.
- D&D 3rd Edition will be used to run the Greyhawk setting, as it is the default setting this edition.
- D&D 4th Edition will be used to run the Dark Sun setting, as it has recently been republished.
- Pathfinder will be used to run Pathfinder Chronicles and certain homebrew settings.
We will be able to explore in a full manner the merits of all sides of the Edition Wars. We will explore the worlds of classic and current Dungeons & Dragons as they were meant to be explored - with the original materials for that Edition. By the time this next year is done, you'll all be experts in the evolution of gaming by retroactively experiencing it.
Thanks for reading, and remember: this Sunday (Game Day) is Krampus Day!! So roll on over to the Wargate to get in on our Krampus Day Feast!! Dinner is served at 6:00, so try to be here for all the Krampus Day cheer!!
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