Thorfinn Tait March 1, 2016 at 3:34 PM Wrote:I've never understood the controversy over all these issues. It seems clear enough that both Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson had a hand in the creation of the game, and the genre. I don't really see the point of debating how much either man did. It's occasionally fun to read objective articles (like this one) delving into the roots of the mechanics of the game, but the controversy just puts me off.

Zenopus Archives March 1, 2016 at 5:30 PM Wrote:I agree generally with your post. The one point I would quibble is that The Fantasy Supplement of Chainmail is a mere aferthought. It is 14 of the total of 44 pages, so nearly a third of the content. That's a significant chunk of the product. I'd guess it felt like even more at the time since there was so little fantasy wargame rules available.

Rob Kuntz March 2, 2016 at 12:10 AM Wrote:Let's make this simple: Direct line of descent through using backwards causality notes that if D&D is derived from any single source that that source must be able to reproduce the causes and effects as noted in the new source. When applied to Chainmail vs. Blackmoor this does not hold up, thus Braunstein and Chainmail are influences only and have nothing more to do with the leap that Arneson made to the original, what is now called, RPG engine. I detail this more concisely in my upcoming book.

Quote:Ultimately we will never know how much of Chainmail Dave Arneson used. In the First Fantasy Campaign there are many references to creatures and units from Chainmail, so he clearly borrowed those. As to the rules themselves, Dave kept most of those secret even from the players, so that part will boil down to whether you trust his word or whether you don't.

finarvyn Wrote:I haven't had a chance to read the full version, but I liked the stuff in the main post of this thread

Quote: This passage in particular attracted my attention:

Quote:Ultimately we will never know how much of Chainmail Dave Arneson used. In the First Fantasy Campaign there are many references to creatures and units from Chainmail, so he clearly borrowed those. As to the rules themselves, Dave kept most of those secret even from the players, so that part will boil down to whether you trust his word or whether you don't.

I think that the problem here is that in a sense there were two Blackmoors -- the barony-scale Blackmoor and the character-scale Blackmoor -- and there is no reason to assume that both had to be run identically. The FFC clearly shows Chainmail style units on a Barony-scale, or if not exact Chainmail then certainly a very close derivative. This does not need to imply that character-scale had to use the same rules for one-on-one combat. And on a Barony-scale there would have been no reason for Dave to keep the rules of combat a secret. Blackmoor could have been run using Chainmail when nations or factions fought and this could be totally independent of what transpired on dungeoncrawl adventures. At least, that's pretty much the way my group ran it. The players might not have known what I did when we fought out D&D adventure combat, but when we got out the minis and fought wars the Chainmail attack tables were clear for all to see.

Just me thinking out loud.

Havard Wrote:You raise an interesting issue here. This also touches on something else that I have been thinking about. In an issue of Different Worlds, Dave Arneson uses the terms "Explorer Character" and "Ruler Character" to differentiate between the two roles in this twin scale type of campaign. There he is actually talking about Jon Snider's Star Empires Campaign, but I believe it is the same concept. This is an interesting phenomenon that seems to have been used in many of the different Twin Cities Campaigns, perhaps taken to its most extreme in Blackmoor.

Havard Wrote:Back to your comment on Chainmail being used for the Barony Scale/Ruler Characters rather than the Explorer Character Scale. That is certainly a possibility. Dave says he discarded the Chainmail Rules because they didn’t fit with what he was doing, but it is indeed on the Explorer Character scale that these rules would be most problematic. From what I understand, Chainmail is not designed for single character scale combat?

Havard Wrote:Now if you are right about this, it is worth keeping in mind that the Barony Scale game is one aspect of the Blackmoor Game that never really found much of a place in D&D. That would mean that there is even less of a reason to consider the Chainmail Combat system all that important for the development of the world's first published roleplaying game?

finarvyn Wrote:It certainly matches the way games evolved and developed in my group. We had played minis for months before D&D and when this new “role playing thing” came out (not that it was called that at the time) our natural response was to start playing characters in our mini battles. We would have adventurers doing stuff intended to help the generals that we also played, such as running spy missions or killing the bad guy’s monster before it could come into play against our army. That kind of thing. A lot of crossover between the two levels of play.

Quote:I suppose it would come down to what you mean by “designed.” Chainmail has an entire section devoted to one figure in combat with another figure, as opposed to one army against another army, which included the ability for Hero types to fight monsters and so on. I’ve used Chainmail’s combat system to run actual role-play campaigns, so it’s not at all impossible that Dave did something like that before coming up with alternate combat methods.

Quote:I’m not sure that I’d make that claim. The early dungeon crawls probably started out a lot like “Barony Scale characters going into a dungeon” and used the same basic rules for everything. The Chainmail combat system probably started the whole thing off and then Dave would tweak it and tinker with it and players would say “can I add more spells?” and then Dave might make up more monsters and slowly the thing takes on a life of its own and becomes D&D. In that sense, Chainmail is vital to the development of the game even if the final result became less and less Chainmail-like with time.

Havard Wrote:But you also touch upon something else that I am planning to explore in a later blog entry. That is the fact that Blackmoor was in a state of constant change. As you say, player demands meant Dave had to expand and revise rules constantly. This dynamic nature of Blackmoor is a pretty interesting aspect of the game when it comes to talking about what Blackmoor was and what it wasn't.

Jan Egil Wrote:I believe none of the "camps" have the utter truth here, and even the memories of the persons involved was somewhat shaded by their their shared history and disappointments with each other.
Without Gygax' business savvy or Arnesons leap of imagination from wargaming to roleplaying we wouldn't have DD ... and maybe not the hobby as is ..
:-)

Rob Kuntz Wrote:The idea of WE having a hobby or not is irrelevant in ascertaining the line of descent of the original RPG engine, which was being used several years prior to Gygax's, or my own, involvement with it. Who starts what and as influenced or derived from what is the issue, and not its end-point commercialization.

Cheers!

Rob Kuntz Wrote:Havard. Thanks! Yes. The combat system, all of Blackmoor's or D&D's "game systems," are the actual sub-systems of what became D&D (or remained Blackmoor). They are just different iterations (Dave's and then Gary's, and then my own, et al, forwarded to the present as individual "takes"). It's the conceptual system interface on steroids that Arneson moved to that makes it leaps above anything preceding it.

Michael (Gronan) Mornard Wrote:Anybody who actually claims that about Blackmoor is a booger-eating moron and should be ignored as hard as possible.

Havard Wrote:I think it can be very interesting to discuss the various influences that Dave Arneson and his group borrowed from.

finarvyn Wrote:

Havard Wrote:I think it can be very interesting to discuss the various influences that Dave Arneson and his group borrowed from.

Gary told us repeatedly his influences (the Appendix-N list, etc.), but Dave seems to have been a lot more vague on the issue. Makes it harder to have a good discussion when we're guessing half the time.