The Original Tradition: Trusting Your Imagination

Whitehack, p. 14

Volume 3 The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures, p. 36

I've often introduce or explain both Whitehack and OD&D to players as "high-trust" games as I firmly believe that trust itself is core for these original tradition games. You have trust from the game's designers that things are better off in your capable hands, and that you will make the experience of the game your own. There's trust in your own imagination, and in the idea that nearly anything you or your fellow players can come up with is valid because you've all been playing make-believe with friends in form or another your whole life. 

While it may seem rote to point out house rulings are part and parcel of these style of games, written permission being emphasized is a powerful thing indeed. I think what I am really getting at is reinforcing that Whitehack and it's great ancestor OD&D's biggest strength is less about their elegant mechanical minimalism (something oft touted in old school adventure gaming and certainly at play here) and rather more about their own creative confidence in the people reading them. The base assumption of the texts, holding true even after people start questioning where the hell the initiative rules are in OD&D or how figuring miracle costs work in Whitehack, is that all the ad-hoc rulings, chatter, and explorations into these open spaces between the lines of rules text that you and your fellow players will run into are not misfires or signs of some deficit in systemic rigor, but rather the actual point of the damn game! These small books are screaming at you to make them your own. To boldly lay claim and form the table's ideal experience with the rich foundations so given in the texts. Write in pen! Fill the margins!

Getting back to this base foundation of understanding, something that seems like it comes so easily and naturally when we are first able to conceive of play, is a major boon for games in this original tradition and any branching from it and I am always pleased to see it emphasized in game text. Forget figuring out wrong way or right way! There should only ever be figuring out the way that does right by your table!

And therein lies the beautiful challenge of wrestling with these beasts of the original tradition. It requires a touch of vulnerability and humility. It requires a willingness to adapt. That the folks at the table release their hold and come to terms that the real driving force of such a game is not sitting within the pages of a book waiting to be discovered, but trust that it's been sitting around the table itself from the start.