Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition

THAC0, or: How a Generation of Teenagers Learned to Love Paperwork

The first thing to understand about Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition is that it is, in its essence, a vast piece of administrative paperwork pretending to be a fantasy. Before you can imagine yourself hurling fireballs across a moonlit ruin, you must first internalize your THAC0—your "To Hit Armor Class Zero"—the base number from which, in order to determine whether you have actually hit anything, you subtract your target's (descending, naturally inverted) Armor Class to derive the figure you must roll or exceed on a twenty-sided die, modified for weapon type, proficiency, magical bonus, situational cover, and possibly the alignment of the moon. You must consult Table 24. You must record, in the appropriate boxes, that your Strength of 18 grants you +1 to hit and +2 to damage—unless you are a Fighter, Paladin, or Ranger, in which case you will roll percentile dice for your "exceptional strength" rating, a number from 01 to 00 that places you on one of five further sub-tiers between 18/01 and 18/00, because a single 18 was, apparently, an insufficient gradation of bodily power and required additional bureaucratic stratification. You will do all of this so that, eventually, you can pretend to be free.

This is the game through which an entire cohort of late-Cold-War American children was inducted into the spiritual practice of filling out forms.

It is worth pausing on the year. AD&D 2nd Edition was released by TSR in 1989, the same year the Berlin Wall came down—an event that, in retrospect, also marks the moment when the only acceptable form of human imagination became market liberalism's vision of itself. The new edition promised a more "respectable" Dungeons & Dragons: cleaner art, smoother layout, the proliferation of branded campaign settings (Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, Dark Sun, eventually Planescape), and—most notoriously—the discreet removal of "demons" and "devils" from the Monstrous Compendium, replaced by the linguistically opaque "tanar'ri" and "baatezu." The Satanic Panic was not defeated; it was negotiated through corporate rebranding. A game accused of summoning literal demons responded by issuing them new HR job titles. There may be no more perfect emblem of the period than this.

What's striking, from any angle that takes bureaucracy seriously as a cultural form, is that the game's promise and its experience are almost perfectly inverted. Its rhetoric is the rhetoric of pure freedom: "Your imagination is the only limit." Its actual texture is the texture of an insurance adjuster's office. You may, in principle, do anything—but every "anything" must be adjudicated through a saving throw versus paralyzation, a check against your Wisdom score, a consultation of the encumbrance table that reveals that your character, having picked up one too many copper pieces, has just slipped from a movement rate of 12 to a movement rate of 9. This is the iron law of all liberation projects mediated through rules: the more freedom the system promises, the more rules it needs to specify what freedom looks like. Over the years that followed 1989, the Player's Handbook, the Dungeon Master's Guide, the Monstrous Compendium, and the proliferating "Complete" handbooks (the Fighter's and Thief's in 1989, the Priest's and Wizard's in 1990, the Bard's in 1992, the Ranger's in 1993, the Druid's in 1994, and onward through every niche the game could be made to support) accumulated into a small library—a Talmud for the production of evenings of fun. The dead zones of imagination, it turns out, are not the opposite of imagination. They are imagination subjected to total administration.

And yet to dismiss this as mere bureaucracy is to miss what is really happening. AD&D 2E is not failing to be a free imaginative space; it is succeeding at being something stranger: a training ground for the kind of subject late capitalism actually needs. Here, around the kitchen table, the suburban teenager learned that adventure requires documentation, that heroism is denominated in modifiers, that even the slaying of a dragon is, before anything else, an accounting problem. The character sheet—that grid of attributes, saves, proficiencies, hit points, spell slots, encumbrance, weapon-versus-armor-type modifiers—is the spiritual ancestor of every productivity app, every quantified-self spreadsheet, every LinkedIn profile. We did not, as a culture, become obsessed with optimizing ourselves because of smartphones. The smartphone arrived to fulfill a desire that had already been carefully cultivated, in part, by men in cardigans with three-ring binders.

Now consider the economy of the thing, because if there is one place where this game becomes politically transparent, it is here. The original 1974 D&D awarded experience points directly for gold acquired—a beautifully candid mechanic, in its way: advancement was wealth, full stop. AD&D 2E performed a small revolution. It demoted universal XP-for-gold to an optional rule, tucked away in the Dungeon Master's Guide for tables that wanted it, and elevated the defeat of monsters itself to the primary, default metric of character advancement. This was meant, no doubt, to sound more heroic—more "story-driven," less crassly mercenary. What it actually accomplished was the removal of a polite fiction. Where the original game maintained the pretense that you were adventuring for treasure (which incidentally required killing things), 2E quietly admitted that the killing was the thing, and the treasure merely the reward for it. The Rogues—Thieves and Bards—true to type, retained the older logic: they alone among the core classes continued to earn experience for the treasures they recovered, on the theory, I suppose, that at least thieves have the decency to be transparent about their motives. For everyone else, the calculus was now unambiguous: experience accrues to whoever finishes the killing.

The fundamental loop, in any case, remains. You, an armed stranger, enter a space (a dungeon, a tomb, the home of an "evil humanoid"), kill its inhabitants, and take their possessions. You return to town, where these possessions are converted, via the marvel of universal equivalence, into gold pieces, which are converted into equipment and training and magical advantage, which enable you to enter larger spaces and dispatch more powerful inhabitants. The murderhobo economy is, structurally, a fantasy of primitive accumulation rendered as recreation. It is the colonial frontier transposed into a labyrinth. The dungeon is a place where wealth has been pre-positioned by the Dungeon Master so that violence may extract it; the "monster" is the inhabitant who has the misfortune of standing between you and your loot. That the rulebooks present this loop as a moral universe—the orcs are evil, the gold belongs to no one because its owners deserved to die—is not incidental. It is exactly the kind of moral cosmology required to make extractive violence feel like adventure rather than what it is.

This becomes more uncomfortable when you notice what the game does with categories of being. The alignment system—Lawful Good, Neutral Good, Chaotic Good, Lawful Neutral, and so on through a nine-square grid—reduces all of ethics to a coordinate pair. Paladins must be Lawful Good or lose their powers. Druids must remain True Neutral. Assassins, mercifully dropped from the core classes in 2E (then quietly reintroduced as a "kit" in The Complete Thief's Handbook the same year, because of course they were), required an Evil alignment when they had existed in 1st Edition. Morality here is not a practice or a relation; it is a position, recorded on the character sheet, generating mechanical consequences. Whole peoples are assigned alignments—orcs are "usually Lawful Evil," elves "usually Chaotic Good"—in a move that revives, with apparently no self-consciousness, the worst of nineteenth-century evolutionary anthropology. Civilization good, tribal bad; settled lawful, wandering chaotic. The game's imaginative cosmos rests on exactly the linear-progressive view of human social development that recent anthropology has spent decades dismantling. We were sold "fantasy" but received a Victorian ethnology textbook with dice.

The class system performs a similar literalization. In the world outside the game, social class is the great unsayable; in AD&D 2E, class is the first decision you make. You will be a Warrior, a Wizard, a Priest, or a Rogue (with the various sub-classes branching from there). You will be permitted certain weapons and forbidden others. You will advance at a prescribed rate, with prescribed hit dice, toward prescribed maximum levels—and if you are not human, those maximum levels are explicitly capped, as if the dwarves and elves and halflings, by their very nature, could only ascend so high in the bureaucracy of the world. The game makes feudal estates feel exciting again by promising mobility within them, never out of them. You can become a more powerful Fighter; you cannot become something that is not, ultimately, one of the recognized professions. The aspirational logic of the corporate career ladder, dressed in mail and tabards.

And here is where one is tempted, in a certain mood, to dismiss the whole apparatus as a small but instructive piece of ideological machinery. But this would be too easy, and also untrue to what actually happened around those tables.

Because something else was always going on. The Dungeon Master, that unpaid worker performing extraordinary feats of imaginative labor for an audience of four to six teenagers eating pretzels, was not running a corporation. The friends who showed up week after week were not employees. They were doing, in the most ordinary American suburban living rooms, something that looks, on inspection, suspiciously like mutual aid. They were collectively constructing meaning out of nothing but their own attention and a few funny-shaped dice. The actual moment-to-moment experience of play—the genuine surprise when someone's character does something no rulebook predicted, the laughter when a plan disintegrates, the small acts of generosity between players who let each other have the good scene—is not reducible to the apparatus that surrounds it. It is, in fact, what the apparatus is always, despite itself, in service of.

This is the dialectic worth holding onto. AD&D 2E is the artifact of a moment when American culture tried to manufacture freedom through total documentation and got, predictably, a generation fluent in spreadsheets. It is also the artifact of a moment when, in defiance of everything the rules were trying to organize, millions of people sat down with their friends and practiced the genuinely subversive art of imagining a different world together, for no money, for no purpose other than the doing of it. The rulebooks were a cage. They were also—and this is the part that ought to give us hope—too small to contain what the play kept producing.

The kids who grew up filling out those character sheets became, many of them, the precariat of the platform economy. They know how to fill out forms. They also remember, somewhere, what it felt like to sit at a table and decide, collectively, what the world was going to be tonight. The question of which of these inheritances ends up mattering is, of course, still open.