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

[Havard]

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

Thank you!

By the way, full version really just means the same text with pics, links etc. The text is the same. Perhaps I should call these something else in the future

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.

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.

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 didnt 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?

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?



-Havard