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

[Havard]

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.

I find this really fascinating. I sort of had the opposite experience. We started a bit later so our group began with D&D and then later began exploring more strategic aspects of the game. Of course, Frank Mentzer's BECMI structure helped in that he introduced much of that stuff in the Companion Rules.

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.

Ah you are right. I had forgotten about that. I really should be reading more in by copy of Chainmail.

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.

"First" is something I may want to discuss further. But my position was never that Chainmail had no impact on Blackmoor. I do believe it did have significant impact. The point in the blog entry though is that it was the other aspects of Blackmoor that turned D&D into something other than a miniature game.

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.

-Havard