Finished. The last part of the book lent itself to some skimming as there are many, many tables and a long section of alphabetical monster stats. But no matter! This was a fun little project for me. Magic is hard: hard to come by, hard to live with (i.e. you need to live a long time before you can become powerful with its use), hard to fashion, and hard to manage! I was struck by how many cursed items exist in the comprehensive list of magic items; things that are designed to make characters have a very bad day. I was also struck by how weird some this shit is (the Goat of Terror for the win!) These are detailed and exacting processes for the creation of items of power. Artifacts, in particular, are a lot of fun. We used so little of this stuff as kids!
I think it was re-discovering the Appendixes a few years back that got in interested in the old ways of play that are illuminated in this book. There is a guy on Youtube who goes by the name of Mr. Wargames, and he did a video series on playing solo AD&D. I watched a few, then took his advice and started rolling on the random wilderness generator. I was astonished, and delighted, to watch as a world took shape on the paper in front of me. As I said in a previous post, the randomness is a creativity pump. With some dice, a 50 year old book, and a notebook, and entire fantasy region came into existence in about 30 minutes. It was so, so cool...and something I hadn't done since I was 13 years old.
Dungeons&Dragons, in its current form, is an entirely different game. One of the things I was struck by in this book is how Gygax viewed the role of a Dungeon Master: it is his (or her) game and the players are in it. It is his or her decisions that matter, rules be damned. He can change it, shape it, modify it, or ignore it as he sees fit. AD&D is gamemaster oriented: you, the DM, are doing the work and the players are playing the game. While I can see how a bad DM could be a complete asshole and ruin a campaign by being some kind of despot, in my 44 years of play, I have never once seen that happen.
Here is an example:
However, it is your right to control the dice at any time and to roll dice for the players. You might wish ta do this to keep them from knowing some specific fact. You also might wish to give them an edge in finding a particular clue, e.g. a secret door that leads to a complex of monsters and treasures that will be especially entertaining. You do have every right to overrule the dice at any time if there is a particular course of events that you would like to have occur (pg. 110).
And here, from the Afterword (pg. 230; all caps as printed in the book, highlights are mine):
IT IS THE SPIRIT OF THE GAME, NOT THE LETTER OF THE RULES, WHICH IS IMPORTANT. NEVER HOLD TO THE LETTER WRITTEN, NOR ALLOW SOME BARRACKS ROOM LAWYER TO FORCE QUOTATIONS FROM THE RULE BOOK UPON YOU, IF IT GOES AGAINST THE OBVIOUS INTENT OF THE GAME. AS YOU HEW THE LINE WITH RESPECT TO CONFORMITY TO MAJOR SYSTEMS AND UNIFORMITY OF PLAY IN GENERAL, ALSO BE CERTAIN THE GAME IS MASTERED BY YOU AND NOT BY YOUR PLAYERS. WITHIN THE BROAD PARAMETERS GIVEN IN THE ADVANCED DUNGEONS 8 DRAGONS VOLUMES, YOU ARE CREATOR AND FINAL ARBITER. BY ORDERING THINGS AS THEY SHOULD BE, THE GAME AS A WHOLE FIRST, YOUR CAMPAIGN NEXT, AND YOUR PARTICIPANTS THEREAFTER, YOU WILL BE PLAYING ADVANCED DUNGEONS 8 DRAGONS AS IT WAS MEANT TO BE. MAY YOU FIND AS MUCH PLEASURE IN SO DOING AS THE REST OF US DO!
What a different view of the role of a Dungeon Master when compared to the current edition. From D&D Beyond's article How to Be a Dungeon Master:
In basic terms, the main responsibilities of the DM are to narrate the adventure, control the monsters during combat, roleplay any nonplayer characters (NPCs) that the party might encounter, and help move the story along.Gygax did understand that players and DMs are in the game together, and that the best games create a fantastic synergy. For example:
This is not to say that an occult power takes over. It is simply that the interaction of judge and players shapes the bare bones of the initial creation into something far larger. It becomes fleshed out, and adventuring breathes life into a make believe world (pg. 87)
With that said, having cut my teeth on 1e and AD&D, I found that the role of the Dungeon Master in 5e was very, very different than what I had learned back in the day. The player characters are incredibly powerful, and have so many options (classes, subclasses, specialty classes, feats, bonus actions!) that it is impossible for a mere mortal like myself to keep up with all of them. Players just push 'paper buttons' as Mike Shea calls them, and their characters do insane things. A modern DMs job seems to be trying to figure out how to challenge the Justice League party as they stomp the shit out of everything in their path.
"I would prefer not to,' as the Scrivener said so long ago.
Finally, Appendix N: Inspirational Reading. Joseph Goodman of Goodman Games (and creator of the incredibly fun Dungeon Crawl Classics) did something amazing: he went back and read all of the books on Gary's list and used them to create his own game, which is gonzo, weird, and wonderful. Jeffro Johnson wrote a wonderful book called Appendix N: The Literary History of Dungeons&Dragons that argues that the game as originally created was meant to be weird as fuck: dinosaurs, spaceships, mutants, lost cities flying through space, demons,cowboys, and ninjas all mashed together in an insane cornucopia of imagination, fantasy, and fun. This game is based on weird tales, in the best sense of the phrase. "To adventure amongst the weird," as Gygax wrote, "is fantasy enough"(pg. 21).
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