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

[finarvyn]

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.