I watched Dan Olson's latest on Decentraland (thanks for letting us quote you in Hard Wired Island btw) and surprisingly, it got to a pretty salient core of what makes tabletop games work...
...and why Gygax's vision of tabletop games was never going to work.
In the 70s around Lake Geneva, play groups weren't little pockets of 5-6 people coming together for their game world. It was Dungeon Masters who ran tables, and players who could migrate from table to table. If a reward was earned at one table, it could be brought to another. If you got your +5 magic sword at Dave's table, Jim the DM might end up having to account for your +5 magic sword at his table a week later.
Almost like... some kind of NFT... you could use in different games...
This isn't a coincidence.
Gygax's AD&D was an attempt to consolidate a ruleset which would not be plagued by the need for "house rules." That you could play competitively. That you could migrate with from table to table with no friction at all. The goal was a shared fictional space of many tables. The most famous modules of D&D were run as competitions. Caves of Chaos. Castle Greyhawk. Tomb of Horrors. You would essentially have "high scores" of how far you got and how much loot you escaped with. The best players were the ones who survived really well.
The first actual tournament, running exciting new module "Dungeon Module S1 Tomb of Horrors," was a disaster that permanently soured the project. DMs ran with whatever rulings they preferred - of which there were many - and the expectations Gygax had from his own table's adversarial and competitive DMing style didn't transfer to any other table at the Tomb of Horrors tournament at all. He was left shellshocked. The dream was of something that would inform and, in a sense, program the social contract, a universal ruleset, to which he owned the copyright. And boy, did he know his copyright. He ran afoul of it multiple times, after all. And it failed utterly and miserably as no one obeyed it, whether from good intent or bad.
In fact, attempts to program social contracts with no moderation tend to fail. You can't make a ruleset immune to bad actors. You can't make Code Is Law, or AD&D Is Law. Whatever magic circle you enter only applies to your table. This is absolute death to large brands, hype, and marketing!
These are lessons I learned reading after-action reports from the 1970s, before the internet existed. I see them play out online 50 years later, with increasingly large sunk cost fallacy holes to fall into.
The lesson is: Make your own magic circle and realize it belongs to you. These large, all-encompassing virtual magic circles don't work. Minecraft worlds and VRChat instances function when platforms fail. As they become platforms, they become more prone to decline and failure.
But you can still play AD&D, 50 years later, at your table. It just won't be Gygax's vision. And that's a good thing.
