1 RT = 1 Law of True D&D

0. D&D, done right, is actually very trad & very based. It’s something I believe all in the rw sphere should be playing, a recreational parallel to the brotherhood of the gym, filling the sorely lacking role of the male social club. The only problem is the D&D you know is wrong.

1. Lets be clear, all editions after AD&D are not D&D. They’re a different game altogether that happened to steal the copyright to the name. If you’ve only played 3e, PF, 4e, 5e, you’ve never actually played D&D. You should try it sometime.

2. D&D started to shift in character towards the nu-skool in the mid 80s, with AD&D 2e, and got totally pozzed by the 90s. The game became the cancer you see today: big rulebooks, elaborate characters, stories, player acting, etc. This is poz, NOT d&d!

3. Real D&D, as it was played in the late 70s thru the 80s, D&D that was a cultural phenomenon, your dad’s d&d, is nothing like the nu-skool. The cringe cancer of the nu-skool destruction of d&d has stolen 2 generations of ppl from their RIGHT to the tabletop communion.

4. This must be by design. You've heard the stories: 2 hours spent reading rules to roll up some lame character & then subjected to autistic story, forced to role-play theatrics. campaign falls apart because everyone couldn't meet at same time. This is WRONG! This is NOT D&D!

5. True D&D is a simulation of dungeon diving for treasure. Killing monsters is not the goal, developing story is not the goal. Treasure is the goal, and the DM's job is to simulate its obstacle course. Monsters are just one obstacle. True D&D gives exp for gold, nothing else.

6. True D&D is not a campaign. It's episodic. Map is a megadungeon, so large & complex it can be dived into in EVERY session without being exhausted. The village attached is merely a base of operations. The setting, the NPCs, all are side flavor for the goal: treasure in dungeon.

7. Parties need not be consistent. They can be as small as 1 and as large as 20 and can change between every game.

8. All sessions begin in the town & end in the town; or somewhere lost in the dungeon - if you don't make it out by the end of the session, your character is dead. Simple as.

9. Characters die easily. Very easily. At level 1, they are considered an average human. At level 2, a strongman, like a body builder. Only at level 3, do they begin to approach a strength of note. And they're fighting horrible monsters in the dark unknown. They die easily.

10. Chargen takes less than 10 minutes. You roll 3d6 down the line, STR WIS INT DEX CON CHA, give yourself a name, pick between fighter, mage, cleric, dwarf or elf. That's it. Your character's "story" is defined by his actions, in a history of play, not a written backstory.

11. The dungeon is a set of labyrinthine hallways rooms containing either monsters, treasures, traps or, most commonly, nothing. Every floor deeper has higher level monsters, and higher level treasure. The players have the agency to risk/reward.

12. D&D play is entirely about 3 things: risk/reward management, resource management, and clever play. The player is a weak human in a monstrous underworld, he is a wimpy grave robber. He must be very resourceful to come out alive with treasure. This is a game of player skill.

13. The DM's only job is to simulate a virtual environment and convey the model accurately for the players to engage with. Everything interesting in the game emerges from this - he should never fudge dice or try to lead a story.

14. True D&D is a game that should only be played with men. It is a rationalist simulation of a tense, dangerous environment that demands high teamwork, minimal ego. New D&D is so drastically different because it is feminized, filled with numales and women.

15. True D&D is a game you can sit own and play with any group of men spontaneously. The only thing you need on hand to run a game is your megadungeon as a set of graph paper, some dice and pencil and paper. New players can learn to play in minutes.

16. D&D is great as a male social club, a weekly gathering of the bros. It should be played with alcohol and cigarettes, with the same buddies you might play poker with. Run dungeon synth in the background.

17. The original D&D comes from a long tradition of white, male wargaming. The original publication is a masterpiece of postmodern fiction, syncretizing various evocative strains of the American pulp imagination - swords & sorcery, westerns, etc. It is bred of Conan, not LOTR.

18. The TTRPG as a concept is perfectly valid today, not a retro nostalgia. What it does is no less than simulate a virtual world. This will be the last game to be digitized. The DM acts as an AI supercomputer, rationalizing any possible action within their modeled world.

19. If you want to play, just google Labryinth Lord PDF. It's a free no-copyright clone of D&D B/X (slightly revised version of first release that fills in some missing rules). Read through the rules, get some graph paper and dice and call some friends over.

20. To build a megadungeon, draw out a series of rooms (or use generator in DMG Appendix A), and key it using the monsters, treasures, traps assortment in your rulebook. Do only level 1 and 2 at first, and add some stairways in-between them. Ensure interconnectivity! Done.

21. Your players do not need any prep to play. Player-facing rules are cancer. Ideally they would never see anything beyond their character sheet and their own drawn map.

22. Players have no skills to learn, or rolls to make using them. They can do anything they can describe reasonably. If involves luck, e.g. shooting an arrow at a distant target, the DM will roll behind the screen to adjunct if it lands. Players only roll for chargen and combat.

23. The DM does not need to guide the players or influence the game towards anything. They'll learn through trial and error. If they run headfirst into unnecessary fights with monsters, they'll quickly realize it's pointless, that the alternative is almost always preferable.

24. D&D is a very elegantly designed system, balancing perfectly an objective gamic goal (gold) with complex concerns to manage. Everything to follow has been a degeneration of its ultimate purity.

25. The character of the D&D is of the scampish grave robber, the resourceful thief, diving into the dungeon and escaping with whatever he can grab - blowing it all in town and doing it again. High risk/high reward/high T adventuring. Not the valiant demigod knight.

26. Groups can get as big as 20. How? Easy, assign a pointman who is responsible for leading the group's actions for any standard move that doesn't call for a debate. The majority of the game should be call and response between DM and point man. "We go left, we open door, etc"

27. Other essential job is the mapper, possibly multiple (the map is a real object in game! if he gets destroyed, the map may be lost with it. It can also be traded between playing groups). If ur players don't use a map and still survive fine, your dungeon isn't maze like enough.

28. The megadungeon is a persistent entity. You can have multiple, random groups enter it; any thing they change or do persist for later groups (obviously repopulate dungeon as time passes). Interesting meta game develops in sharing knowledge and maps of the dungeon.

29. The dungeon SHOULD be brutally difficult, but reasonably so, to force the players to play with extreme caution and resourcefulness. There is nothing else you need to do to extract good play out of players.

30. D&D is for houseruling. Every home game should tack on cool stuff and toy with interesting ideas, classes. This is a natural development of the game - as long as you don't reject the true, eternal principles outlined in this thread. Example - I use ONLY six sided die.

31. Other house rules:
- 1 sentence limit to backstory +1 sentence per level
- Once per session, characters may drink hard liquor to gain 1d6 temporary HP that last for duration of next combat
- M-U get minor free-use cantrips related to their spell, e.g. fireball = flick lighter

32. true D&D can be easily played online, btw. You only need VC for the players, and something to share maps on. Skype, Discord, etc. work fine, the mapper can do it digitally or physically and just upload the current version when asked.

33. I recommend having a FB group or mailing list for IRL play. This way you can simply post saying you want to have a game on this night, and anyone who wants to come can RSVP and show up. Demand they bring either a 6-pack or snacks, also.

34. Nu-skool players are spoiled, bc games are tied to campaigns, you can't simply get rid of a player. You can't even let him get killed. True D&D is an open table. You can, and must, be ruthless with your table. If they're annoying, just remove them from the invite list. lol

35. True D&D is very easy to grok for any newbie, by the way, probably because it's true. You can play with normies, you can play with boomers, you can play with fratboys, stoners, it all flows. Only that have trouble with it are autists bred on nu-skool. Dying teaches them quick

36.

37. There are 2 kinds of roleplay. Nu skool "roleplay" seeks to be amateur theatre, an actor in play, vehicle for some kind of plot. Oldschool roleplay is just realistically embodying a character within his environment, responding as you would if it was IRL. Learn the difference.

38. There is a serious gap today for male recreational clubs outside of physical exercise. No more art salons, no reading clubs, no frequented lounges or bars. Weekly D&D is perfect, as a no-commitment dungeon dive to exercise the imagination & test ingenuity in team sport.

39. The megadungeon IS d&d. Without it there is no episodic play, goal of treasure is obscured, little value to meta world knowledge. But it doesnt need to be a dungeon per se - a castle can be a dungeon, a city, a forest. “Dungeon” is not what’s important - mega is.

40. D&D’s assumes setting is throughly, unapologetically american. It’s fundamentally the Wild West, with fantasy flavor. The megadungeon is the gold mine in the lawless frontiers, the players are adventures are seeking fame & fortune at high risk, assisted only by a pop up town.

41. The dungeon exists in an underworld, where things get weirded. Things don’t need to make sense here. There should be a fundamental aura of otherworldliness, spiritual awe, the unknown, that only increases the deeper you go.

42. D&D is the ultimate game. It’s a virtual reality, simulated by paper, pen, dice and the DM’s brain, projected into a theater of the mind verbally. With such open endedness, its goal must be direct (treasure) and the challenge immense (dungeon) to organically emerge deep play.

Will respond to this - how to keep the megadungeon varied - in following points 43-46:
https://twitter.com/EdwardBChang/status/1206039683635064832?s=20

43. Mundanity is a feature, not a bug. The dangerous dungeon is explored slowly, cautiously. In the darkness, the algorithm is obscured. Simple lines and boxes become a dark, confusing maze in play. Remember - most rooms (1/3) are empty! The ones that aren't, u often wish were...

44. 1/10 or so not empty rooms, should be "unique"; memorable setpieces, traps. Steal liberally - from modules, movies, books, dreams, whatever. I also recommend having one larger, major, dramatic setpiece room for each floor - it serves as major navigational reference.

45. Good practice to give each floor a subtle theme and flavor; gives party a sense of exploring new territory as they go deeper; also hints when the mazes & machinations have unknowingly moved them between floors. Traditionally, flavor stems directly from wandering monster list.

46. The megadungeon's beauty is in repetition. A party's experience with each floor begins nervously penetrating the unknown, but with repeated plays, the darkness is illuminated. Yet, as it becomes known, the treasure is exhausted - pushing the frontier ever further.

47. It's a mistake to think old school style is devoid of the nu skool's flavor or story. Former's is simply emergent, drawn out organically in play, thru players engaging in a simulation; while latter is forced, artificially authored by egos of DMs and players' endless fudge.

48. D&D is a very elegantly designed game, so the subtle manifestations of its deceptively simple systems were often misunderstood and thrown out in exchange for artificial complexity, bloated rulesets which conversely restrict its much deeper possibility of emergent complexity.

49. One example of this is the wandering monsters list. A simple chart for populating a floor or area - but also one that characterizes its entire internal ecosystem, possibly even its factions, politics & history. Prepare a list and an entire natural history unfolds before you.

50. Another ex is defining a PC's personality. The 6 stats are distillations of entire archetypal possibilities of man. What is high STR high CHA low INT fighter, but a heroic brute? & so on. Speculating the abstraction provides much more possibility than the explicitly detailed.

51. Be sure to simulate time passing between sessions, and a living dungeon responding to player activity. Kobolds set freshs traps..walls damaged opening new passages.. decimated nest might result in another monster's rising in population...good haul makes local economy boom...

52. Don't be too autistic simulating a realistic dungeon ecology. Ecology is just a prompt for the imagination; the dungeon is always underworldy, though, and never fully logical to the players. You want a good 20% gonzo - genre mash, time travel, reference pop culture.

53. Faction play is the easiest way to get disinterested players engaged. It's endlessly complex and runs itself.

54. Monsters aren't always hostile. You should always roll on a reaction table to see if they attack, are cautious or neutral/friendly. Fighting is not the answer, it's a last resort to players. They can run, and distract dumb monsters with food, smart monsters with treasure.

55. DM rolls all dice behind the screen. He rolls every turn for random encounters, for triggering traps, finding hidden doors. The only information players receive is the sounds of a roll occurring, and actions that happen in-game. It is a cardinal sin to lie about the results.

56. Chargen should be very simple, bc it's playerfacing. This doesn't mean it needs to be restricted. If a player wants to play random non-human race, u can let him - come up with specifics on the spot, or verbally offer them some options. But don't let them pore over a long list

57. There is no space for "rules lawyering" in true D&D. The players know only the internal logic of the simulation as their PC's experience it. You can and should adjunct freely all edge-cases. Your responsibility is only to maintain its internally consistent logic.

58. A good trap telegraphs its danger. It should punish incautious play, not simply bad luck. Great traps often present good bait, that tests the player's greed against their caution.

59. Puzzle "traps" are essential to a memorable dungeon. Riddles don't count. A good puzzle is a complication which has a large multitude of solutions, not only one. A gold statue on perfectly tuned pressure plate. A Zeno hallway that exponentially doubles in length on each step.

60. A DM shouldn't spend more 30 minutes prepping before any session. A player shouldn't spend more than the time it takes to RSVP. If your game is one that you can't run a bit drunk, or hungover, you need to rethink your approach.

61. The meat of your time with background prep should only be in coming up with cool puzzles and cool monsters. Ideally, you wouldn't come up with anything, and just steal all of it, modified to your own context.

62. I've heard some nu-skool DM's gone so low as to demand money for DM'ing. DM'ing isn't a job, it's not hard, doesn't require creativity or effort (but it helps). All DM's got their start bc they wanted to play the most of their friend group. Suck it up & make them bring beer.

63. A lot of people in the old school community are shocked by this thread's absolutism, worried it will scare new schoolers away with fears of pretentiousness. There is nothing pretentious about pointing out a game claiming to be "D&D" as a marketing gimmick is not actually D&D.

64. Real D&D is not a niche game. Nu-D&D is, probly because it sucks. Consider: D&D was wildly popular in the 80s & culturally prominent in mainstream with every walk of life. Nu skool is exclusively played in self-contained RPG community of weirdo geeks. Who is the strong horse?

65. There's no reason to pussy foot around and let people take claim to what's yours. It's fact of history TSR experienced a commercial takeover by non-gamers, and then the copyright was gnabbed by equally exploitative WotC. The game's heritage & reputation as marketing gimmick.

66. The only reason D&D ever got twisted into the abomination it is now was in commercial pursuit to sell adventure-based modules. Everyone in the old school knows this, they're just too afraid to scare newbies away to say it. 3e+ is not the same game, they just stole the name.

67. Real D&D is niche only bc only people who know it are in the nu skool. nu-D&D is trash & you know it - let em have it. Real D&D is extremely accessible, easily grokked, low investment, its for thousands of kids who wanna play D&D, get stuck with nu skool, & rightfully hate it

68. D&D is for houseruling, but there's a core system, a set of very elegantly defined platonic assumptions that generate the TTRPG experience. Houserules add onto and around them. The nu skool throws them out and replaces them. It's a different game, and yes, it's a bad one.

69. 5e will never be a funnel into the oldschool. Its a funnel for WotC to get kids who want to play D&D throwing $$ at starter sets, some modules, adventures, then realizing it sucks & nothing like what they expected & leaving after a year. You know what they expected? Real D&D.

70. Entry cost to nu "D&D" is dreadful for both DM's & players:
1. buy & read DM guide + Player handbook (~700 pg)
2. find friends to commit 4 hrs/wk indefinitely
3. make them buy & read PHB
4. buy & prep official adventures
5. 2hr's chargen
6. play..and everyone's disappointed

71. Entry cost to real D&D is a couple hours max:
1. download & read Labryinth Lord ruleset (~100 pg)
2. grab graph paper & dice
3. use DMG Appendix A to generate 2 dungeon floors
4. key in dungeon with LL's stocking rules
5. call some friends over
6. play game

72. Only reason we moved from such a simple, elegantly deep game was commercial interest; if people can play for decades with just 1 book, where's the profit? So they pushed linear modules, heroic campaigns, and shit to sell to players. No reason for the "hobbyists" to support it

73. A funny feedback loop occurred in the process of D&D's corruption, with CRPG videogames - e.g. roguelikes, later, Wizardy, Baldur's Gate - trying to capture D&D into a videogame. Then 3e tried to capture the computer game into D&D, producing a PnP Baldur's Gate - "rollplay".

74. This is why, counterintuitively, earliest cRPG's carry more of D&D's true character - exploration and resource management, not simply a killing grind + "plot" - than later ones do, even tho computational limitations limiting player's interactions would've been more prominent.

75. FromSoft's King's Field series, and its next gen spiritual successor in the "Souls" series, are probably the most solid videogame adaptations of real D&D yet, outside of roguelikes.

76. D&D has 4 editions:
1. OD&D aka 0e. The original 3LBB, white box
2. D&D B/X - Holmes, Moldvay/Cook. Cleaned up OD&D with some gaps filled
3. AD&D 1e - heavily houseruled D&D
4. AD&D 2e - Diablo adaptation

Ignore the various later unrelated, shortlived spinoffs branded “D&D”.

77. Modules/adventures are only for stealing ideas from. If u actually run them, except maybe with heavy modification or a tournament context, you're a fool. Modules are fundamentally incompatible with play of D&D, & largely responsible for its distortion, to better sell modules.

78. PC stats represent a PC's genetic heritage, their innate capability - it should never be adjusted except by means of magic, unless you genuinely mean to transmogrify the character. +2 CHA is literally a new face, +2 INT higher IQ, not simply more knowledge.

79. Player Level (HD), increased through XP, is the abstraction of experience gained over time. No matter how much life experience you undergo, your stats - your inborn talent - won't change; though high talen does result in increased rate of XP change - geniuses train faster.

80. Importance of the "Level Title" in adjucating non-mechanically defined "feats" is underappreciated. You must consider the difference of a HD1 "Veteran" Fighter vs a HD3 HERO in all interactions, in their image to NPC's, in their ability to engage in their environment.

81. Nu-D&D's "skill tests" are illogical knowing skills = innate ability. What they mean to test is trained experience, e.g. HD; represented by PC's level title. Moving a boulder is not STR test, but TITLE test. Only a Hero, maybe DEMIGOD can move this, not mere veteran mercenary

82. The DM simulates a virtual world & translate player actions logically within it. Rolling is ONLY ever to 1. model randomness, 2. abstract chaotic complexity. Nu-skoolers use it a 3rd, WRONG, way: to fudge ambiguous DM
adjudications, fundamentally misunderstanding the TTRPG.

83. You can't easily estimate the many complex factors deciding if an arrow hits a target, so you roll, abstracting chaotic simulation. You can immediately know if a boulder of X properties can be moved by a PC with Y properties. No reason to roll, either it moves or it doesn't.

84. WARNING: cannot confirm if unapproved, private congregations of men without government notice are still legal outside America. if you're in the UK or EU, please check with your handlers before attempting D&D - I am NOT liable for any license violations.