[Blog] The "Blackmoor is Just a Chainmail Variant" Fallacy

[finarvyn]

I haven't had a chance to read the full version, but I liked the stuff in the main post of this thread. This passage in particular attracted my attention:

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.