The integrity of the game

 We use the word "game" in distinct and mutually exclusive ways, and then get confused when we try to equivocate between the two. There are games in the sense of free-form make-believe, such as when children play Cops and Robbers or House, or adults engage in theatrical or comedic improvisation. Then there are games of objective rules, such as chess, checkers, Monopoly, and card games. 

D&D, as originally created and played, is a game of objectivity. It has slowly evolved away from those roots. Many of the old forms have been intentionally preserved, but they are vestigial, and as such, useless and pointless to the way the game is played in its modern incarnations. 

D&D is known for its mathematical rules -- perhaps digital is even nearer the mark. Target numbers and modifiers are precisely defined, and they're intended to be used that way. There are no "fudge factors" and indeed, that would defeat the entire purpose of the digital precision. If these numbers are not applied with diligence and consistency, it makes no difference whether you need a 12 to hit an opponent or a 14. It's irrelevant whether your Open Locks skill is 38% or 41%. There is no point in remembering to add and subtract the prescribed modifiers from among an entire suite of them if you're only going to do it when it serves some predetermined outcome. You're literally doing math just for the sake of doing math, and then discarding the results whenever it might upset your carefully constructed apple cart. 

Imagine playing scrabble or poker the same way. You apply a triple word score when someone plays a word "close enough" to the 3W space, because wouldn't that be cool right now? In the middle of a hand, you decide that hearts are wild, except that ten of hearts you're holding, Bob, because you shouldn't win that easily. Following the rules exactly as written clashes with your sense of the dramatic, or a preconceived story you want to tell. If I were to bet on it, I'd say the other players would probably throw down their tiles or cards and say, "Well, why do we even have rules, then?" And they'd be absolutely right to demand an answer to that question.

The crazy thing is, even the modern rulebooks have pages and pages of mathematically precise rules, many more than some of the relatively lean and clean old editions, and often more than even the baroque and obscure labyrinth that is first edition AD&D. Yet not only are they built to virtually ensure successful conclusions to every adventure (again, why do all that math, when you know what's ultimately going to happen?), the text of the book repeatedly and insistently tells DMs to disregard anything that doesn't "serve the story", to nudge and fudge and tweak results on the fly to make everything just so. The rulebooks are literally at war with themselves, including the mathematical vestiges of old D&D out of a misguided sense of tradition, while vociferously denying their validity.

This isn't entirely new; the seeds were planted way back in the Good Old Days, with gentle suggestions to avoid killing players' characters "through no fault of their own." (I still cringe when I read Moldvay's suggestion regarding the character with 3 hp who's struck by a monster wielding a 1d8 sword, to simply announce 2 points of damage without rolling and let the game go on. At some point in the recent past of that adventure, the player made some decisions which led to being in melee with that monster. Deal with it!) The tragedy is that instead of identifying and destroying those cancer cells, they were allowed to multiply and metastasize until D&D, and its modern players, delude themselves that their game of free-form make-believe is in fact D&D. It is, in the sense that Wizards of the Coast "owns" the rights to the name "Dungeons & Dragons" but as far as being in the intellectual and spiritual tradition of early D&D, it isn't even close. 

I imagine many readers may object -- pun not intended -- to the claim that D&D is meant to be a game of objective rules. After all, a certain amount of the in-game action has always taken place between or outside the formal rules, and there is a certain sense of improvisation. They key distinction, though, is that play is happening in the context of an objective setting. An old school DM isn't just making up everything as he goes along, "collaborating" with the players in some fluid sequence of open storytelling. When the DM describes what the PCs see, hear, and feel upon opening a new door, and the players describe how they're interacting with that or attempting to acquire more information, they're working from an existing substrate, not weaving whole cloth on the fly. It is an analog form of play rather than digital, but with fidelity to the known facts about the setting. This ability to shift back and forth between digital and analog play, and to have recourse to precise mathematical rules and randomization engines (i.e. dice) is a strength of D&D and similar TTRPGs. 

Improvisation does occur at the game table, but it is not fundamental to the game. Rather, it is an aesthetic applied on top of the robust substrate of objective rules (and rulings informed by those rules, using them as a scaffolding from which to adjudicate gaps, edge cases, and creative synthesis during play). The rules and rulings determine what happens, and sometimes the players and DM improvise a narrative emerging from that. There is no great logical difficulty in making subjective interpretations of objective sequences of events. On the other hand, trying to paste a veneer of mathematical objectivity over a fundamentally subjective mode of play is absurd. At absolute best, it's a system of overly complex but non-binding writing prompts. It's literally extra cognitive load that has no effect on outcomes, except in whatever ephemeral and superficial way the DM allows it to. 

So, to all you new school D&D players out there, I'm not telling you you're wrong for playing the way you do, but it might be worth asking why you still cling to the mathematical trappings of old D&D without the substance. And if you're an old school DM or player who sees no harm in occasionally nudging and fudging to produce a "better" story, you might also want to ask yourself what you're really doing when you implicitly declare the rules don't matter. It works a treat on Whose Line Is It Anyway? But does it really work in D&D, or does it undermine what really makes the game worth playing?