Please edit this to remove inflammatory language about D&D “lying” and “deceiving.”

I like this answer, however the hard beating you are putting on the more "mundane" D&D aspects are keeping me from giving it a +1. While your experiences were negative regarding this type of gear, mine were really positive. This really depends on the group. I had several really fun games with the more "mundane" stuff. Different people have different playstyles.

Well, I just +1ed this because of that language. Just because you like D&D doesn't mean it has no points at which the system conflicts with the types of stories it purports to tell - either expressly or through implication. Just as oWoD claimed to be about political and interpersonal intrigue and drama, with little-to-no mechanical support for such play, D&D claims (by having such equipment in the lists) to be about that level of mundane simulation but then does not support you in your efforts to use them. Fair criticism.

@BraddSzonye absolutely will not. That is exactly what D&D does. It is a system suited only for a fairly specific, albeit popular, sort of game, that pretends to be stored for more than that for the purposes of sales. I think it is important that this site recognize that.

@ThalesSarczuk I do not think you have understood my answer. My answer is not that it is badwrongfun to focus on those things, or that it is impossible to do so – my answer is that D&D doesn’t actually support you doing so. It says it does, but it only gives lip service to the idea; it amounts to no more than telling you that you can. Carrying most mundane gear, within most of the system, is functionally equivalent to carrying rocks of equal weight and cost. The system does not tell you how they are used or what they do. They are not part of the system in any meaningful sense.

And I think that is deceptive and deeply unfair to the players who actually want to play with those aspects of the narrative. The game purports to include these things, but in reality every aspect of them has to be figured out by the DM – the game system is (nearly) no help, which means that, for those aspects of the game at least, you are paying TSR/WotC for the privilege of doing the work yourself.

@KRyan , you start your post already saying that worrying with this stuff only detracts from the game. I'm saying that this is not the case, you can really have a good experience with those, as it was with my group. I'm not saying that D&D supports mundane gear well. I agree with you on that. Using only the rules as presented, you can go only go so far, but you can always tune things for your group needs.

@ThalesSarczuk Yes, there are kind of two separate ideas going on here. I’ll try to clarify which is which, but not quite now. But again, “well” isn’t even what I’m saying – in many cases, it’s more like “at all.”

When you say "D&D is such-and-such", you appear to mean WotC D&Ds, possibly even a specific one. TSR D&Ds operate—functionally— quite differently in the relevant ways, making a broad unqualified claim like that unjustifiable. If you could edit this to say what game(s) you're talking about instead of breezily equivocating a half-dozen different game systems, I'd be happy to undownvote.

@SevenSidedDie I have not seen evidence to support your claim that there is a functional difference between TSR and WotC D&D with respect to these aspects of the game. As far as I can tell, D&D has always (excepting 4e) paid lip-service to these concepts, but never actually fleshed them out in a meaningful way. As far as I can tell, these aspects have always been the province of houseruling and DM on-the-fly adjudication. That said, I plan to revisit this answer, and I plan to do some more research. Unfortunately, the link you left before has been deleted. Could you share it again?

I think you misunderstand the role and structure of the DM's job in TSR editions. The presumption that adjudication is useless or can only be a disfunctional adjunct to the "real" rules is definitely going to impair any research into TSR D&Ds, as understanding its role and function are central to understanding the games. The Luke Crane account of rediscovering B/X doesn't touch on that point, but it's still a good example of approaching with few preconceptions.

The Old-School Primer is another useful resource to help break up preconceptions in order to better understand the games in Lumpley Principle terms. They key to early D&Ds is that many assumptions were part of the hobby's social fabric and not written down. To understand the games as designed, you must understand what they assumed you'd bring to the game. No interpretation of the texts with an anachronistic set of assumptions will yield a view of how the games actually did/do work.

@SevenSidedDie See, no: I define a game system by its rules. If the system isn't going to tell me when, how, why, and what to do, it is not actually providing me any value or service; in effect, that aspect of the game does not exist as far as the system is concerned, and the fact that the surrounding and supporting materials mention it while the rules do not describe it, is exactly what I mean by lip service. I think it is fundamentally inaccurate to state that a game system supports a given thing, when it gives you no information about that and leaves defining it up to you.

FWIW - I agree that the RAW, while providing lists and costs (gp and weight) for mundane things, actually has few rules that utilize mundane items. Talking about TSR/WotC games here and most others that I'm personally familiar with. The campaigns I've been involved with that [b]have[/b] kept track of the minutia did so at 1st to maybe 3rd level and then it just dissolved into the "background noise" of gaming.

@KRyan That's a lovely ideal, but it's a naively impossible standard. No text in human history meets it; even where we have tried, such as in contract law, a text is still only decipherable with knowledge of its sociohistorical context.

@SevenSidedDie - That's a hard position to hold to given that the rules have been explicitly re-written at least 3 times with the purpose of getting in new gamers who have no experience with "The assumptions that were a part of the social fabric". In fact my personal experience over several years among many different gaming groups shows that @KRyan is closer to describing the situation as it actually plays out on table-tops.

@SevenSidedDie It does not even try. The absence of these rules, the fact that the authors did not bother to design or include them, means that they are not a part of the system. The fact that the items are listed is insufficient if I am given no indication what I should do with them (or with their lack). The fact that the system indicates, through description and such, that it does care about these things, despite not actually backing that claim up, is the central deception that I describe.

@user23715 It's a fact of historical research science, not something that need defending. Any text is inherently incomplete, in that it does not provide a complete or even partial description of the entire world surrounding the text: all relevant assumptions, world knowledge, and culture from which it is derived. Rewrites are necessary for that reason: to rewrite the rules to be understandable in the current set of assumptions.

@KRyan Of course TSR D&D didn't try. It didn't need to. If it told gamers of the 1980s things that were patently obvious, they'd have been insulting their customers.

And the fact that I can, should, could, would, might, or am encouraged to design my own system for them is not in any way improving the situation; if I am buying a rules system, it is so that I do not have to design the system

I am paying them to do that for me

when they claim to do so, and then do not aside from mere lip-service

I have an objection there

@SevenSidedDie patently obvious? I think you insult the question-asker

if it were patently obvious, no one would have to ask

the mere fact that someone has asked indicates that your analysis is inaccurate

@KRyan Again, you misunderstand the role of this lemma that frustrates you so much. It does not mean what it would mean in D&D 3.5; trying to analyse AD&D as if it was written like 3e will only lead to massive misunderstanding.

(and the habit of assuming that your own interpretation or decision is the "obvious" one is incredibly insulting and something of a pet peeve for me with this site)

@KRyan We have a miscommunication here. What are you talking about?

@SevenSidedDie I am paying money for them to design a game system so I do not have to

if they do not do so, I have not gotten what I paid for

if they have indicated that they have done so in the marketing or description, then that is deceptive

I mean, what are you talking about when you apply "patently obvious" to the quesiton asker. That is not connected in the way you seem to think it's connected.

@SevenSidedDie you indicate that TSR did not have to define any such system and that to define something so "patently obvious" would be "insulting" to their customers

Yes. What does that have to do with this question asker.

Note that I see no indication that this question asker ever played AD&D.

@SevenSidedDie the question is literally asking for this very thing to be spelled out

What does that have to do with TSR?

both 5e and AD&D lacked a defined system for dealing with these issues

that being the case, asking how to handle them in each system is an equivalent question

We're talking about three decades of difference. I don't understand why you think that's irrelevant.

it's not less obvious just because the edition is 5e and not AD&D

Would you say that a good game is written to be understood by the people it is to be sold to?

both games are leaving the same area undefined, yet the definition is "patently obvious" in one, but "a valid and interesting question" in another?

You have to understand that roleplaying culture underwent a massive shift in the 90s and then again in the 00s. The RPG world before and after were unrecognisably different.

@SevenSidedDie I'll stipulate that this is one criterion for a good game, yes. And I would argue that 4e is the only edition of D&D to have ever come close to accomplishing that. Only 4e is upfront and honest about what it can and cannot be used for. In reality, no edition of D&D has ever been much better than 4e at non-combat matters, but only 4e was honest about that fact.

I see absolutely no value in the statement that "you could do this! we're giving you no indication about how you should, though."

Do you understand that there was a massive shift in culture between when AD&D was written and when 3e was?

that's not a valid or valuable part of any game system

@SevenSidedDie about what was expected or demanded? yes. But I feel justified in applying a consistent definition of what actually provides value in a game system; the degree to which the game system facilitates the telling of stories you want to tell

@KRyan No, that's a small shift. Massive. The word "crisis" is not unwarranted.

that means it needs to detail and define in a thought-out and designed way the various aspects of the game that are going to be relevant

ok, so AD&D didn't define how this should work: what did it then actually do to support these aspects of play?

what were you paying for?

You're pretty set in believing that the only thing that has change is that people's standards have raised. That's not accurate. Are you at all willing to hear an argument that might open up that assumption and let in other factors?

what was the value?

I have an analogy that might be illuminating, but I'm not sure yet if you'd be receptive to it enough to consider it.

you have been quite skilled at illuminating me in the past

but right now I have an important call

I'll just leave it here in abbreviated form for pondering, then.

But before that... You ask about value. I must respond rhetorically: what value is there in telling someone what they already know? Normally we call that a waste of space. I'm asserting that things were missing not because the writers were inept, but because people already knew the things that were left out. They were in fact so well known that it never occurred to anyone to craft rules to explain it; and had anyone been so odd as to suggest it, they would have been told off for wasting pages.

So, the analogy: Open a modern cook-book aimed at an audience of existing cooks. They don't explain what cracking butter is or how to sift flour, they just assume that you know. And anyone who is in the audience already knows how to read a recipe and what these terms means.

To someone with some knowledge of cooking, modern recipes are easy to follow.

But!

Now open a cookbook from a few centuries ago. Here's an online example. If not for the modern translations, most of these recipes are indecipherable. They're apparently nonsense, even though written in modern English. But they were perfectly comprehensible to people of the time.

Their base of knowledge was different. Things that are incomprehensible to us now didn't need explaining then. They knew what "a graine of musk" means, and I have no idea. (It sounds like something disgusting that should have no place in almond pudding!)

So AD&D: written for a different decade's knowledge base. They didn't need the books to explain what equipment was for, how it is used in-game, and why it matters to carry a sack of pitons and a piece of chalk; they knew how a piece of chalk could be used and make the difference between life and death.

And if you knew these things too, you'd know why there are no rules for them. There can't be rules for these things, and need not be anyway. But why that's true is perhaps hard to grasp without knowing what the AD&D players of 1980 knew.

@KRyan - It bears repeating; "The campaigns I've been involved with that have kept track of the minutia did so at 1st to maybe 3rd level and then it just dissolved into the "background noise" of gaming". Why? Because the RAW focus mostly on combat, a little on RP concerns, and hardly at all on "how PCs go camping".

This is what you are saying, right?

@user23715 There's a difference in the statements "This activity is boring, and therefore not part of our game" and "This activity is not described in the rules, and therefore is not part of the game" though.

All the stuff about roleplaying, exploration, and problem-solving were published by TSR, just not in the rulebooks.

@SevenSidedDie Well, yes but my point is that the group that says "it's not part of our game" is seemingly orders of magnitude larger than the strict/legal position of it technically being part of the game. It might be but nobody I know, or know of, plays it that way.

Traditional RPG systems were not limited to dice and rules.

Much of the system appeared in adventure modules for Gygax’s home table and tournament play, many of which were later expanded and published for mass distribution.

@user23715 Wait, which game are you talking about?

Even more of the system appeared in house magazines like The Dragon.

@BraddSzonye By today's rigid standards of fluff/crunch division, those wouldn't be noticed as relevant material. That's the perception difference I'm trying to tackle.

@SevenSidedDie Yeah but back in the day, the game was taught by word of mouth and example.

We learned to play by playing The Keep on the Borderlands and The Lost City and Castle Amber as much as by the Red Box and the Blue Box.

I don’t know whether that’s clear to somebody who didn’t grow up in that tradition.

@BraddSzonye By word of mouth for some, but not all by far. Many by figuring out the rulebooks on their own, and yes, by actually playing it and figuring out what did and didn't work.

@BraddSzonye It totally isn't. This is the cultural divide I'm looking at.

@SevenSidedDie - Any of the TSR/WotC TTRP games. They all take up room in their PHBs to list mundane equipment but as the game is played it hardly matters. The rules are light-to-non-existent as to what to do with this stuff and once PCs can Fly the CRS entries for mundane equipment get stale fast.

@user23715 No, I mean, which game are you actually talking about in your experience ignoring things after about 3rd level? TSR and WotC D&Ds are only superficially related games, they're actually quite different animals. If you're talking about experience with one, it's not really relevant to the other.

@user23715 If you played an adventure like S1 Tomb of Horrors, it quickly became apparent why all of the little doodads were there in the handbook.

“System” and “rules” aren’t synonymous for a traditional RPG.

@BraddSzonye Yeah, exactly. Today it's acceptable and widespread to try to understand a game just by reading it, and games are often written with that approach in mind, but that isn't how TSR D&Ds were written. They required play to understand. We're agreeing. :)

@SevenSidedDie Yeah, I figured we were in agreement there.

@BraddSzonye Or, arguably, in any RPG. Lumpley Principle and all that.

Actually, there’s a similar thing going on today, in games like Apocalypse World.

People now make a big deal about how AW’s advice to GMs are actually rules and part of the system. But that was also true for traditional games.

@SevenSidedDie - Learned 3E and didn't like, tried 3.5E and liked, tried 4E and liked even less, am learning/liking 5E. Have read some of the gaming material for 1E and 2E. This is a 5E question.

@BraddSzonye Sort of. AW is revolutionary because it aims to explain everything someone needs to know to run the game, including what they need to know without the book telling them. That's novel.

@SevenSidedDie Oh for certain.

But D&D players have long treated Sage Advice in The Dragon as equivalent to AW’s rules for GMs.

@user23715 It's a 5e question but this chat was spun off an objection that AD&D was being lumped in with WotC D&Ds in some statements. So AD&D is actually the topic here, with 5e as an addendum.

Given how D&D5 is a throwback to AD&D and BD&D in many ways, I think it’s appropriate to discuss them in similar terms.

@BraddSzonye The more rules-craving players, yeah. But that's never been the whole player base.

Much of the environment has changed, of course.

@BraddSzonye Yes, absolutely! Which is why ignoring how AD&D does not conform to assumptions forged in 3e- and 4e-land is relevant, because they aren't validly extended to 5e without justification.

But even Wizards of the Coast has kept the idea that published adventures are primarily how you learn the game.

Back in a bit!

@BraddSzonye I think that's new. They tried to get out of adventures in the d20 era and left that to third parties.

@SevenSidedDie - Well, all of my 3E and two of my 3.5E DMs were/are Grognards. Nobody kept track of this stuff after about 3rd level it seems. Even the campaigns that pretended to didn't really. Now the weapon type vs armor type rules were laid out pretty clearly but nobody used those either - too dense for TTRP style.

Both types of rules were "left off the table".

@user23715 Yeah, it's stuff that doesn't work well in 3e. It's essential in earlier editions though, more essential the farther back you go. In B/X D&D, success is all about how you leverage your gear and the situation.

@SevenSidedDie - Did they even use the weapon type vs armor type rules at official sessions at GenCon? 1E and 2E game-days I mean.

@user23715 It wasn't in 2e. But in 1e, it's one of the most commonly ignored parts of the combat system. (Which is ironic in this discussion, which is about the lack of rules for other things.)

@SevenSidedDie - I guess I brought it up because it is the diametric opposite of the mundane equipment issue. What they have in common is that virtually every campaign ignored them. For what the game was about (as actually played) this stuff, while in the PHB/DMG, was almost entirely irrelevant.

@user23715 Except all that gear wasn't irrelevant before 3e, it was quite important and not ignored like AC vs type. So the parallel doesn't really extend that way.

@SevenSidedDie - So you really kept track of how many 1 cp torches your PC was carrying at say 10th level?

@user23715 Yeah, if they were carrying them and hadn't acquired a more convenient alternative yet. There's little motive for seeking better alternatives if the inconveniences of mundane gear are just glossed over as time goes on.

Ditto rations, and waterskins and how/when they got filled.

@SevenSidedDie - But I thought every magic sword glowed in 1E? I can see why that got dropped. Computers are great at keeping track of boring details like that, I can't imagine doing it manually. Except maybe as a Survivor-like episode in the campaign. :)

@user23715 Swords have a 5' glow, which is pitiful compared to a torch, let alone a light spell. Believe me, when you pay attention to the details, they actually make a huge difference. Besides, PC's also didn't have any guarantee that they'd get a magic sword by X level for any given X.

(Gotta go pick up das Kind.)

@SevenSidedDie - k, see ya. New thought - that level of bean-counting would certainly hamper efforts to bring in new players, I would think.

@SevenSidedDie While Wizards did try to get out of the adventure business, they still published the Adventure Path, which had a lot of tutorial elements for GM-as-writer, GM-in-play, and players.

The most memorable example for me was Heart of Nightfang Spire, which not only took into account the players’ newly-earned abilities like teleportation and etherealness, it practically required their use for success.

Which was actually a huge problem for my players, who had an unconventional party that fulfilled all of the basic “roles” in ways that happened to grant no access to transportation magic.

It’s kinda funny, because a lot of the traditional modules were full of puzzles that had long lists of magic that weren’t valid – you can’t fly here, you can’t teleport there. Instead, you had to solve things with torches and ten-foot-poles and obscure clues.

Interesting – Bruce R. Cordell wrote that one. He also did Return to the Tomb of Horrors and Return to White Plume Mountain.

It’s too bad he’s left Wizards, as he seems to really get that style of gaming.

@BraddSzonye - I like the Red Hand of Doom. It explained a ton of stuff (but not misc equipment related stuff).