Hello there! I’m back with a new installment of my blog series focusing on my particular contributions to D&D over the years. Not much new to report in my day job or my fiction writing, so let me tell you what I’ve been reading lately: The Blue World, by Jack Vance.

In recent years, I’ve been drawn to tracking down old works of fantasy/sci-fi that I’ve missed up to this point in my reading career. I spotted The Blue World in a used book store over the holidays and picked it up.

Vance is best known for his Dying Earth books, but he wrote plenty of other stuff too. I’m a big fan of his lavish dialogue and cynical characterizations—Vance was truly unique, even inimitable. (Although I cheerfully admit my Forgotten Realms novels City of Ravens and Prince of Ravens are a love letter to Vance’s style.)

Anyway, I knew of The Blue World, but I’d always thought the book was supposed to be Vance’s take on Moby Dick. Nope, it’s a very different story. It actually reminded me of Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Both came out around the same time, and both were award contenders/winners. And they’re both about revolutions. The Blue World’s worth a read, if you find a copy.

50 Years of D&D: Player’s Option

My second “significant contribution” entry in the 2^nd Edition era is the Player’s Option series of rulebooks: Combat and Tactics, Skills and Powers, and Spells and Magic.

Last time, I described how the Creative department at TSR met up once a year or so for “pitch meetings” where we threw out ideas for new D&D products. Well, sometime in early 1994, I came up with the idea I half-jokingly referred to “Really Advanced Dungeons & Dragons” and pitched it. I believed there was a segment of our audience that was hungry for big books full of “crunch” (game mechanics). At that time, 2^nd Edition was a little light on crunch—most of it came in the form of character kits or campaign-specific rules in products like Dark Sun.   

The idea was not universally popular among my fellow creatives. Zeb Cook was pretty skeptical—he was the principal designer of the 2^nd Edition rules, and it wasn’t the kind of game he was interested in writing or running. Other people worried that we could fracture the audience. But no one doubted that the books I was pitching would be popular with the more mechanically-minded players out there, and the company leadership loved the idea. The Player’s Option books went onto the schedule.

If you pitched it, you usually wrote it. So, I was assigned to design Combat and Tactics with Skip Williams as my co-designer. I provided some design contributions to Skills and Powers, but that was mostly written by Dale Donovan and Doug Niles. Then I finished the series with Spells and Magic.

So, why do I think these books matter today? Two reasons, really.

First, there are bits from the Player’s Option series that are still rattling around in D&D three editions later. For example, Combat and Tactics dug into using miniatures to run combat on a grid of 5-foot squares. Something like that was in the basic DNA of D&D all the way back to the game’s roots in tabletop miniatures, but it wasn’t explicit in the 2^nd Edition rules. (Credit where credit is due: I took some inspiration from Steve Jackson’s The Fantasy Trip: Melee game, too.) Anyway, grid-based combat became the default in the 3E and 4E rulesets, and Combat and Tactics was a step in that direction.

Likewise, you can find ideas from Spells and Magic that became part of the D&D ecosystem. Spells such as expeditious retreat, detect secret doors, and vitriolic sphere first appeared in Spells and Magic. This was also the first appearance of the Artificer and the Warlock, introduced in a chapter on variant spellcasting systems. I never really followed up on the Artificer, so I can’t claim much credit for the class that’s in the game today. But the Warlock idea—a spellcaster who gets their power from a patron—I definitely returned to. (That’s a topic for another blog.)

Okay, now for Reason #2 why Player’s Option matters: the books *sold*. By the time they came out, TSR was in its final decline. These books were a rare success at a time when the company was desperate to move product. I’ve been told by people who had visibility into the numbers that the Player’s Option books bought time for TSR, pushing back the final collapse for months. Without those sales, TSR might not have lasted until Ryan Dancey could put together the deal with Wizards of the Coast that saved Dungeons & Dragons.

No one plays with Player’s Option rules these days. Along with the good parts, I included plenty of bad ideas, clutter, and complication that didn’t deserve to see a gaming table. But it’s just possible that people got a chance to play 3E, 4E, and 5E because Player’s Option existed.

If that’s what my “Really Advanced D&D” did for the game—and I’ll admit that’s an “if” since I only have the sales impact by hearsay—I’ll call that a significant contribution!