Cargos & Cults
Jun. 10th, 2003 11:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robotnik2004This is from an essay on early D&D by Ron Edwards at The Forge. He's talking about the ferment of late 1970s, early 1980s D&D—the way the "red box" and the "white box" and the AD&D hardcovers and Dragon magazine and Chainmail and Arduin's Grimoire all kind of fit together, but not quite. Ten year olds in rec rooms across the continent trying to decipher these terribly organized, yet bizarrely compelling, rulebooks to recreate just whatever it was those bong-hitting grognards in Lake Geneva were on to. (The larger point of the essay is that early D&D had a lot more variety than people remember.)
Rob MacDougall stated it best: we are talking about Cargo Cults. Everyone knew about "this new great game." Everyone had on hand a hodgepodge of several texts, which in retrospect seem to me to be almost archeological in their fragmentary, semi-compatible but not-quite, layered-in-time-of-publication nature. Also, although newly-available texts obviously modified local oral traditions, they also arose from them, generating a seething hotbed of how-to-play instructions in print in other locations. Everyone had to shape, socially and procedurally, just what the hell you did such that "role-playing" happened. How did you know it worked? What did you do it for? All of it, from Social Contract right down to Stance, had to be created in the faith that it worked "out there" somewhere, and somehow, some way, it was supposed to work here.
Looks like my membership in The Cult of Ron is assured. I hope this doesn't damage my membership in The Friends of Jeremiah. :)
Rob MacDougall stated it best: we are talking about Cargo Cults. Everyone knew about "this new great game." Everyone had on hand a hodgepodge of several texts, which in retrospect seem to me to be almost archeological in their fragmentary, semi-compatible but not-quite, layered-in-time-of-publication nature. Also, although newly-available texts obviously modified local oral traditions, they also arose from them, generating a seething hotbed of how-to-play instructions in print in other locations. Everyone had to shape, socially and procedurally, just what the hell you did such that "role-playing" happened. How did you know it worked? What did you do it for? All of it, from Social Contract right down to Stance, had to be created in the faith that it worked "out there" somewhere, and somehow, some way, it was supposed to work here.
Looks like my membership in The Cult of Ron is assured. I hope this doesn't damage my membership in The Friends of Jeremiah. :)
