Dave and I disagree on how to handle any number of things, and both of our campaigns differ from the “rules” found in D&D. If the time ever comes when all aspects of fantasy are covered and the vast majority of its players agree on how the game should be played, D&D will have become staid and boring indeed. Sorry, but I don’t believe that there is anything desirable in having various campaigns playing similarly to one another.

I desire variance in interpretation and, as long as I am editor of the TSR line and its magazine, I will do my utmost to see that there is as little trend towards standardization as possible. Each campaign should be a “variant”, and there is no “official interpretation” from me or anyone else. 

Gary Gygax, Letter to Alarums and Excursions #2

James of Grognardia observes this letter as an example of “Gamer Gary.” In just a few years, at the beginning of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons era, “Corporate Gary” emerges. I agree with that take. You can find a few blog posts about that HERE and HERE.

There are couple of ideas in that quoted text from A&E #2 I want to direct your attention to.

The first sentence of the quote, “…both of our campaigns differ from the “rules” found in D&D,” seems to sum up the way Gary thought about the game at that time. He states clearly that his campaign and Dave’s campaign were different from what was published in Dungeons and Dragons. He was telling everyone, “We don’t play it by the rules.”

The original version of Dungeons & Dragons was open to interpretation and variation. Gary and Dave assumed you were going to do your own thing. Note the quotation marks around the word, “rules.” Gary stated that rules were guidelines or suggestions about how to set up your own fantasy campaign.

He went on to say that enthusiasts creating their own variants of Dungeons & Dragons was desirable! It was characteristic of wargame hobbyists to create a “variant” of their favorite game. Part of the hobby was changing mechanisms or the context of an existing set of mechanisms to create a variant. The many fan variants of the game Diplomacy are an example.

This was how Dungeons & Dragons came to be. Dave Wesley created Braunstein by experimenting with design concepts he had learned from an old army wargaming manual, and refereeing Napoleonic war miniatures games. Dave Arneson iterated on what Dave Wesley had done with his Braunstein games with Blackmoor. Gary did the same with Dave Arneson’s work on Blackmoor. All three were building off of other games they didn’t design but had played over many years in the hobby.

None of them played Dungeons & Dragons

In an interview on the Wandering DM’s Podcast, one of the film makers who made of Secrets of Blackmoor, quoted a gamer from Minneapolis. This particular individual had played in the campaigns of Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson and M.A.R. Barker. He had a view of all three games that not many people had the opportunity to experience.

I’m paraphrasing, “I played Greyhawk with Gary, Blackmoor with Dave and Tekumel with Phil but I didn’t play D&D with any of them.”

They were all playing different games and none of them were the game TSR published! Gary’s game, Greyhawk, was probably the closest thing to the published rules of the three but even that was not quite the same.

Original Dungeons and Dragons was a publication that integrated Gary’s game and Dave’s game into a set of principles and examples of how other people could build their own bespoke fantasy adventure games. It was, as many others have said, a “how to make a fantasy adventure game” kit.

If the time ever comes when all aspects of fantasy are covered and the vast majority of its players agree on how the game should be played, D&D will have become staid and boring indeed.

Each campaign should be a “variant”, and there is no “official interpretation” from me or anyone else. 

Corporate Gary came to express a different opinion just a few years after this letter. I think that was partly because he found many of the variants distasteful. It was also beneficial to the bottom line of TSR when game masters believed that making their game more like the official version of D&D was the best way to run their campaign.

The Big Idea: The specific instance of my campaign is a game and OD&D is a structure for that game. Originally, Dungeons & Dragons wasn’t intended to be a game unto itself but a framework for referees to create their own game.

Every Original Dungeons & Dragons campaign is an expression of each game group and game master. I could say that my group is playing Swords and Wizardry but in reality, we are playing Kaladonia.