My Life As A Gamer: Showing You All How AD&D1e Is Done (Prologue)

(Today's post builds on this article from Primeval Patterns, which you can read here.)

If you need a summary of the cancer afflicting the tabletop RPG medium, it is this:

"Future TTRPGs must be wargames, and it stands to reason that a combat system supporting all scales of conflict could be the glue that binds their elements together. ATS designs will never be capable of this without relaxing the atoms, the turns, and the structural rules that hold them together. As soon as the scale of conflict overshadows the size of our atoms, the action is lost in a sea of detail and concern over quantities of low relevance.

Whole generations of designers have pursued increasingly atomic systems to the point where it is a cultural norm among tabletop gamers to joke about someone taking 20 minutes to finish their turn. This level of mistake requires very serious reflection on our part.

To avoid furthering this cataclysm, we must reverse course entirely—beginning with the presumption that ATS will not work to model our game systems. Gygax, even at the beginning of TTRPG convergence, warned about the danger of ATS design—and it fell on deaf ears. The time has come for us to listen."

Lest anyone rush down to the Comments, let me head off any objections thusly: there is a place for that design paradigm, and that place is videogames where all of the atomization and the complexity therein can be automated and resolved in milliseconds. There are a plethora of well-beloved, high-quality videogames that employ such design and make the most of them.

What is clear is that this does not work in tabletop RPGs.

There is a cognitive limit in what a common man can process at a given time. What PP identifies as "Atomic Turn Structure" (ATS) always leads to cognitive overload, as I have seen first-hand over the decades.

Like it or not, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition does not do this. The rules of that game are not taxing on the load of the common player. There are defined procedures of play; people, due to reading comprehension issues, have not followed them. Following those procedures produces the results that are promised, and these steps can be stated in Explain Like I'm Five format.

This week shall be me doing just that.

Tomorrow I will start with Character Generation. As PP did in his article, I will include citations as required where they are relevant.