When Tabletop Gaming became Unaffordable

I am a second generation D&Der. My son is a second generation edition AD&Der, and a third generation Dungeons and Dragons player. My gaming experience resume is several pages long, running through the D&D boxes (which we own, from a garage sale) from the blue-cover first edition of AD&D, to second edition, which we didn't really see as a new "edition," as we'd been using the optional proficiencies, etc., for a while, and the switch from combat tables to THAC0 is really easy to understand. Every so often when I'm cleaning, I come upon my first character from my High School gaming group...the one who rolled two 18s on her stats and 00 for psionics the first time I rolled a character...the first time I rolled percentiles... I'm not sure how she gets out there...she gets put away, but she reappears...

I still own the second edition AD&D Players Handbook and DMG I bought after I stepped on four stray $20 bills on my way to the mall, just after the books came out. I own about $1000 in gaming books, at cover value, probably several times that in collector's value...about 1/3 of them are AD&D. As a teen, I lived briefly in a homeless shelter, and in my trashbag of stuff I owned was a PHB and my dice. I wrote three high school papers and a college statistics paper on gaming...suffice it to say I am a big, fat D&D nerd.

Since I'm Wiccan, I've been told it's because I'm a gamer. Forget for a moment that I was Wiccan before I was a gamer, and I've taken years off gaming, but I've been Wiccan the whole time. Of the hundreds of people I've gamed with, three were Pagan, and about 30 were atheists. (Two were Mormons, a third a fundie Christian, 10 or so were 'cake-or death' or 'comfy-chair' Christians, but that's just an aside.) If there is a correlation between being Wiccan and being a gamer, I bet it has more to do with the correlation between Wicca and high IQ and the correlation between gaming and high IQ.

I just wanted to get those points aside before I made many of the following observations, because I imagine it will be something seen as terribly socialist, evil, or what have you.

I won't lie when I say that everything after the Tome of Magic and Forgotten Realms Adventures (AD&D 2e) is pretty much dreck to me. I own the "Player's Options" books, and the hardcover ones are such awful abortions that I'm glad they only exist with the red label that looks exactly like 3rd edition... I threw 4e down in disgust after I saw preview copies. The entire reason for 3, 3.5, 4, and however many more, is to make money, not to play the game, and they bog down the game so much as to become unusable... I sincerely believe this is because the game is now managed by a company that makes its money on the need of children to collect things.

I grew up pretty damn poor. If AD&D had required me to collect books to get full functionality out of the game I would have been prohibited from playing. If I had been prohibited from playing AD&D I would not have gotten an S on the writing sample of the MCAT and aced all those standardized tests as a teen. I know for a fact that professor who wrote in a review of my work that I had an "intuitive understanding of statistics and randomness" that made my experimental designs "airtight, and at a level beyond what [he saw] on grant proposals," would not have written that if I had not gamed. AD&D improved my math, reading, writing and even handwriting abilities. It taught me logic, spatial reasoning and more. It got me reading Machiavelli when my character ended up running a town. When I started DMing, it taught me how to think on the fly.

When I later was tested for "problem solving ability," I broke the test. Honey, ain't nobody in Buffalo a better Problem Solver than me, and although they think I'm a prick, you can take those words to our local "Creative Problem Solving" merchants and bank on it. To them, I'm an enigma, wrapped up in a burrito, covered in Salsa Verde. Honey, I've generated so many ways to use a ton of peanuts in 3 minutes that I've run out of post-its and given myself writer's cramp... I have never had more cognitive dissonance than going to school to learn to use a problem solving method that is a thousand times slower and less effective than my own....but this is very much stream of consciousness here, as all good blog rants should be...

AD&D benefited me in hundreds of thousands of ways. It benefited my life, my career and my emotional health. I have never been as physically and mentally ill as when I was working too many hours to game. It keeps my brain fit in ways I only barely understand. It provides social structure I only barely understand...and that bare understanding is with a degree in anthropology and another in psychology.

AD&D encouraged a subgeneration of young adults to create map-making software, art, new spell ideas, new random generators and more when the internet was new. It created a vast wealth of resources and trained a huge group of people in seeing the real world, the one we live in, as something that can be broken into parts and explored. It is a game of scientists and engineers, a game about using all those "products of your imagination." Most of those generators, at least the ones Wizards of the Coast hasn't tracked down and destroyed yet, are still out there on the net, or in the Wayback Machine. AD&D handbooks are the first thing to appear on file sharing services-they were the first things to appear on usenet, or gopher.

Think of an entertainer, author or English-speaking scientist under the age of 50 that you see as witty or clever. Delve into their history...you'll find D&D, and often AD&D specifically. It was something that helped to make the US, and to a lesser extent, the UK, great... well, those of us who were allowed to play.

[This tangent calls for its own rant, but I'll just state the following fact: Between AD&D and "Second Edition AD&D," demons and devils were removed and then restored as deballed figures with silly names. I'm playing a character right now who is a proper summoner, using imps, demons, devils and the rest, and I'm having to look stuff up in books just a little less old than me. During the time from when the demons were removed to now there was an upswing in teen violence, and virtually none of those engaging in teen violence were gamers. You took our demons to punish us, didn't you? End Rant.]

I sincerely feel that allowing kids access to gaming at low cost is as important as providing public access basketball courts and parks. I think a generation of stupid kids-or more importantly, a generation without as many exceptional kids-has much to do with a lack of low-cost gaming resources as a generation of fat kids has to do with a lack of safe public parks and gym classes.

I believe that every gaming manual that is over 20 years old and is currently not supported by a current publication of said system should be considered 100% copyright free and open source, and I don't mean the stupid d20 license. Hell, if I had my way, every time a new edition came out the previous edition of the game would become free...give gamers a reason to support your edition.

I mean that everyone who is interested in gaming should have access to user-generated books, even customizable books of their own creation, as long as the currently published system is no longer supported. You guys know we're already doing this stuff, right? How many people playing mages have a print-out of every spell they use instead of needing to open the PHB? Since most, maybe even all, of said books are 'work for hire' books, the decision to release the books from copyright in toto would be a corporate one.

I say this not because I don't think authors should be paid for their work, but because I don't see value in punishing creativity when the soft-core gamers are still going to buy your big collection... the kids will always want the latest equivalent of Pokemon cards.

Dear Wizards of the Coast-
Free AD&D. Seriously Free it completely. I'm sick of trying to turn the shades of my childhood idols, as I'm clearly not high enough level. Seriously, free it completely. Set it free. Tell us all we have to do is say that we grabbed this from a book from 1989 and let us rip books and publish them via cafepress without fear of persecution. People are doing it already, so make it right.

And, as an aside: When you're ready to make mad money off of it, I mean serious money by creating a world environment game where people interact with human DMs, give me a call, or drop me a line. Give me a decent programming team, let me hire some of the kids I see DMing at tournaments and cons, and I'll give you a MMORPG that will be addictive. Better than life. You'll make a few billion dollars, and probably be sued, unsuccessfully, for providing a game that is as addictive as crack for some people....the first MMORPG where learning to role play is a more important currency than gold...

It will have higher overhead than WOW or SWG, but you'll have people who are willing to pay more by far....

You know how to find me.