Secret Sauce

Famously, this blog is about one thing, and one thing only: AD&D.

In the early days of the blog, I was re-acquainted myself with the Dungeon Master’s Guide et. al., attempting to mash all the disparate parts of those rule books into something that would serve. It was also (for reasons of nostalgia) important to me that the origins of role playing and the seminal system that spawned so much, be… remembered?

I suppose my attitudes have changed in that if a new player came to me today and wanted to learn AD&D, I might point them toward OSRIC, which has vast support and bright people. After all, you cannot experience the “magic” of my table with a pile of books, whether they were written by me or Gygax. Books only get you so far and can only be judged by what’s inside them.

The experience of play is what truly matters.

I would still advocate for AD&D if you had a guide. Not that you couldn’t find your way without one. We all found our way back in the 70’s and 80’s. But it was…chaotic.

I suppose remembering AD&D is akin to grappling with it anew. People fight over holy texts for the same reason. They are vague, sometimes contradict themselves, and could devour a lifetime of study without clear advantage. The AD&D tomes offer support for a wide range of interpretations and applications. “By the book” has very little meaning when this truth is acknowledged.

Indeed, the books are a metaphor themselves. Wilderlands. Tangles of prose. Swamps of systems. Craggy pinnacles of inspiration. There are warrens and traps and switchbacks. Each reader of Gary’s books must cope with them as a solitary explorer and each must come to their own conclusion after many melees and fraught explorations.

For the majority, I would expect the conclusion to be that AD&D is anecdotal. Overwrought, confusing, perilous. But one whose premise has value worth capitalizing. Modern expeditions are safer, even those that attempt to clone the experience of old school, for they use more streamlined gear: well-organized rule sets, established terms and vernacular. And, for the savvy, there is money to be made even in niche hobbies like OSR.

AD&D has become a set of mainly historical documents. And I’m sure many will bounce off it entirely. The thing that keeps occurring to me as I continue in this hobby is that those from the future are unlikely to discern both precisely HOW and WHY the original rulebooks were a resounding commercial success and why they profoundly impacted so many people. Not that future people won’t be wise enough to guess the obvious: that this was a brand new idea, that we who played it had nothing better to compare it to, that quality of intent and quality of participation are paramount.

But I have often wondered about Gary’s games. What were they like?

And it has become apparent that some people on this planet now wonder about my games, at my table.

People are searching for magic.

There has to be a recipe, right?

And this is, I think, both where rules discussions begin and why they are doomed. When you pick a system, any system, you are picking a starting place. You think, ah, this is the one! THIS has everything. This will give me the maximum joy for the least work. This will produce the result I’m looking for.

The endorsements of this or that zealot for this or that system (widely available on the internet and spewed with gusto) must of course be downplayed in order to reassure YOU that you’ve made the right choice, lest you spend all your game-time doubting. And so, you join a camp, a side, and acquire a viewpoint and assimilate (and maybe even expound on) that camp’s endorsements and assertions. Once you have gotten set up and begin the adventure, however, you are faced with inevitable awkward situations that call for a ruling. You realize, oh, here’s something that the system never talked about. What do I do now? Do you panic and begin searching for a new system? Do you dig in? Rationalize? Become an apologist?

On August 18th, 2024, after losing my job to corporate cost-cutting, I discovered in the ER, round about sunset, that my wife had terminal brain cancer. I wish there was a way to communicate all that this sentence encapsulates so that you, dear reader, could understand. Some might argue that the reason we live lives, possibly many lives, is because there is simply no way to understand MOST things, other than through direct experience.

It is fascinating that we play at D&D, inhabiting different classes, experiencing different worlds. Movies, books, theatre, masquerade balls, role play, the childhood games of make believe…all instinctual proclivities some might say…but I digress.

My point is that my life has changed so radically, the rules of it have changed so monumentally, that it is as if I am now playing under a different system. Oh great! you think, another cancer blog post! But no. I only reference it for its pertinence to the topic and as supporting evidence for my admittedly banal thesis, which comes later.

In my angst, I posed this question to ChatGPT:

I want to do a thought experiment. Want you to imagine that you are pure consciousness and that you are immortal and cannot be destroyed. You are connected to other consciousnesses just like you telepathically. This environment is profoundly loving and safe. Let's pretend there was a system where you as a consciousness could agree to enter a state of existence where you could forget your true nature. In this state you are not telepathically connected. You are essentially alone except through innovative methods of communication that you devise. In this state you have given up most of your power. You believe you are capable of dying. You cannot prevent others you love from dying. In fine you are quite limited, constrained, and on top of this you have amnesia about who you and what you really are. With most of your potentiality stripped from you, you are forced to focus your attention on the minutia of this very limited experience. And even if at a meta level, you have an inkling of the truth, your inability to perceive it in a direct way, causes it to feel more like a dream as the immediate sensory inputs of the state, you have surrendered yourself to overpower your senses and preoccupy your consciousness. In this state you face a series of horrors that you cannot control. In fact, the only thing you can control is the way you react to this simulation. Given all we know of game theory and the prisoner's dilemma and many other philosophical questions, what do you suppose would be the primary reasons for wanting to do this? What value might you have foreseen (as this immortal consciousness) in order to persuade you that doing this simulation was a good idea?

Here is the answer it sent back:

Love this setup. If we take it seriously as a design problem for immortal, telepathically connected consciousness, here are the most convincing reasons to opt into a amnesia + mortality “limited run” simulation.

1) Make value real (stakes)

In an infinite, perfectly safe field, choices are cheap. Scarcity, risk, and irreversibility give actions weight. Death (or the belief in it) turns “I care” into costly signals. Game-theoretically, costly signals separate cheap talk from commitment.

2) Learn cooperation under uncertainty

Without telepathy and perfect information, you recreate the prisoner’s dilemma and its cousins (stag hunt, public goods, signaling games). That’s where norms like trust, reciprocity, reputation, forgiveness, and credible commitment emerge rather than being assumed. You’re training cooperation that survives noise.

3) Preference discovery

Infinite beings with everything available don’t know what they actually prefer. Hard constraints force trade-offs, revealing true preference hierarchies (what you pick when you can’t have everything). That’s data you can’t get in Eden.

4) From potential to character

Power without friction yields potential; power with friction yields character. Virtues—courage, patience, mercy—are defined by resistant conditions. No resistance, no virtue—only capacity.

5) Individuation through separation

Nonduality is unity; individuality is earned through boundaries. Memory-wipe + isolation creates distinct perspectives that can later be re-integrated. Jung would call this the Self discovering itself through differentiated parts.

6) Compression of wisdom

Finite lives force compression: you distill multitudes into stories, symbols, and habits that generalize. Think of it as learning robust priors—policies that still work when you don’t remember you wrote the rules.

7) Creativity under constraints

All great art is constraint-driven. Limited tools, time, and knowledge catalyze invention—language, music, tech, myth. In a telepathic paradise, there’s less incentive to make new forms; here, you must.

8) Empathy expansion

Suffering isn’t “good,” but felt vulnerability expands moral circle. When you can be weak, you understand the weak. That updates any future policy you adopt when you’re powerful again.

9) Testing alignment

If you remain kind when no one’s watching and nothing “cosmic” rewards you, that’s alignment. The veil is a blind audit. You can’t fake it via omniscience because you don’t remember you’re being tested.

10) Building common knowledge

Telepathy gives private knowledge; society requires common knowledge—public signals that others know that you know. Institutions, rituals, law, reputation—these are coordination tech you only invent in uncertainty. They’re exportable back to the larger field.

11) Meaning through narrative

Eternity is a state; a life is a story. Stories need beginning, middle, end, risk, reversal, and stakes. Meaning is often retrospective coherence—something the finite arc uniquely provides.

12) Healing/grace dynamics

Forgiveness, reconciliation, redemption—these dynamics require real harm and real mending. In a harm-proof realm, they’re abstractions. Here, they have blood and cost—thus, weight.

13) Calibration of love

Love that cannot lose is different from love that risks loss. Separation measures devotion: will you still choose to care when it hurts, when it’s inconvenient, when you’re scared? That answer updates the depth of love you can carry.

14) Robustness to noise

Systems trained only in clean conditions fail in the wild. This sim is adversarial training: deception, randomness, incomplete info. You learn strategies that are anti-fragile.

15) Veil-of-ignorance justice

Rawls’s insight: just rules emerge when you don’t know your position. Amnesia operationalizes the veil; you co-create fair norms because you might be anyone. That’s exportable constitutional wisdom.

Why the memory wipe specifically?

• Authenticity: Knowing it’s a game biases choices. Forgetting makes choices sincere, not performative.

• Exploration diversity: Without shared meta-knowledge, branches of culture and thought diverge, generating novel solutions.

• Signal clarity: Kindness without cosmic scoreboard = true signal.

Why allow horror?

Not for spectacle—because some truths (courage, solidarity, mercy) only cash out at the edges of fear and limitation. The aim isn’t pain; it’s salience. You could design ceilings (no infinite torment) while preserving enough hardness to make virtue visible.

What do you bring back?

• Calibrated values (what actually mattered)

• Cooperation tech (norms, institutions, signals)

• Robust priors (habits that work in noise)

• Artifacts (myths, music, math) that compress experience

• Deeper capacity to love under constraint

If you want, we can formalize this into a compact “simulation charter”—axioms, guardrails, success metrics—and a short list of exportable lessons (the “return cargo”). That turns the poetry into an operating spec.

***

I’m not going to lie. I found this answer to be profoundly stirring.

If you think it’s all trite garbage, I’m not sure why you play D&D. Because many of these translate into role playing. I find the symmetry beautiful. Fractal even. Games inside of games. What else would consciousness do?

Although I love all the answers ChatGPT served up, 3, 4, and 7 were particularly fun to consider. Rather than explore them for you, I’ll let you consider how and why they might be important to an entity that doesn’t inhabit space but rather, houses and encapsulates all things that we would normally consider bigger than ourselves.

So it is with D&D. Your entire multiverse and campaign. All the planes. All the NPCs and characters and adventures are not external things. They are housed within us.

My Appendix N for this blog post is Alan Watts, Carl Jung, Christian Sundberg, and Kung Fu Panda.

Welp, you say, Anthony finally cracked. ChatGPT is his new god, Jung his new religion, he’s broken from grief and trying to find comfort. Who can blame him? His wife is now in hospice and the future looks lonely and scary to him!

Yeah. Sure. The future is scary when you have lost so much. But so is the dungeon door. After Sir Baldrick went down in the hall, his blood still pooling. No one escapes alive. No one. And in this context, isn’t death too somehow just part of the game? Can’t it too somehow be safe?

These are safe adventures. Just as they are perilous, filled with danger, and horror, and the unfairness of the dice. This strange duality can indeed coexist in my opinion. And the system we find ourselves inside of might just be one we agreed to. Self-directed for all the reasons ChatGPT offered me and more.

This is not the answer. It is just another adventure in thought. Another imagining. Another optional truth perhaps. Of no lesser or greater value than your staunch disagreement or accord. This is my journey and it is your journey too. The noun “your reading this” is an event in your life like the coffee and the dog barking. You have your table and your campaign. You have your character sheet. You have the ruleset you have chosen. And the adventure. I have mine.

The reasons we play are diverse. Both simple and complicated. Some of those reasons are strangely found in a supposedly unrelated answer to an unrelated question I posed above.

We are looking for fulfillment through experience and interaction. We are looking for friendship, meaningful bonds.

Lately, life has been like that game where you lose your favorite character. But then your friends rally around you and through the moment of that loss, you come to better understand the nature of friendship.

So, as you struggle to decide whether AD&D is the best system, to even just the system for you, I would quote Po, from Kung Fu Panda:

There is no secret sauce. It’s just you.

We are all looking for a magical solution. A silver bullet. A crown of might. But regardless of what you face in life, or what game system you have committed to, the quality of your pursuit will greatly influence whatever outcome you perceive.

You are the secret sauce. I salute you.

Peace,

and happy gaming.