Introducing Gameplay

This is an experimental work, tentatively identified as 1 of 6 volumes, that attempts to provide an explanation of how the rules of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons is understood and played. It is being provided free through this wiki and no other source at this time. The text of this page should be sufficient for understanding the rules; links that appear lead to alternatives of AD&D rules that occur elsewhere in this wiki. This work is meant to take advantage of the still-existing Online Game License, though if the OGL is or becomes defunct, I'm not likely to take this down.

I dedicate this to all the would-be players who find themselves unable to understand the game's rules due to the haphazard and poor way that they have been presented these last many decades. Illustrations are included only to clarify, not as performative material.

FORWARD

From the beginning of my gaming experience in September of 1979, the goal of explaining Dungeons & Dragons to someone who might wish to understand the game well enough to play without needing to observe others has long been the bane of D&D. Arguably, much of the problem is related to the cost of printing books, that requires that the whole of the game be explained within a set number of pages, with a limited number of diagrams, a limited size font for printing and the time required to fully produce a completely comprehensible set of rules. An alternate explanation for the failure these past decades comes from the lack of technical game comprehension within the designing community, which has always allowed itself to chase rabbits down holes that failed to provide contribute pathways to game payoffs, agency, feedback, tension, mastery and many other facets of game creation. In short, many "designers" were, in fact, amateurs throwing soup at a wall hoping it would improve the taste.

Another failing has been to retain aspects of game play that did not work for the sake of nostalgia or frank immovability, believing that change would somehow warp or lessen the effectiveness of game aspects that they preferred to leave warped or disfunctional, as one might with dogma. Also, a pervasive resistance to a logical order, or a resistance to explain ideas as they become relevant, preferring to shift such explanations into glossaries, indexes or other removed parts of the work, forcing readers to jump back and forth throughout the text with growing dispair and frustration. The belief remains that D&D cannot be explained linearly, that because multiple factors of the game influence each other simultaneously, that therefore the game can only be learned by looping through multiple experiences that must then be re-interpreted with later iterations of game play.

For the present, it's not desirable to state to what purpose these rules are designed to serve, beyond game play. Attempts to categorise the game's nature, or to state why the game is played, or to outline the game's organisation structure, only introduce terms that are unnecessary for learning the game's rules. So these will not be invoked at this time, so as not to pollute the discourse with terms that cannot, up front, be understood out of context. Nor would it benefit the reader to be told ahead of time under which headings this book is organised, since that too would only introduce ideas and terms that, again, could not be grasped anyway. Further, the existing iterations of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, of which there are many, would at this time be of no benefit to the reader. Therefore, they can be put aside until later, when their comprehensibility becomes practical to relate.