A Post I'm Not Happy About Writing...

[finarvyn]

I had some very bad interactions with self-described 'pillars of the OSR', who kept telling me that my gaming experiences with Dave, Phil, and Gary were all wrong, and that the gaming we did back in the day could not have happened that way...

That is so sad. I think that the problem we have at the moment is a glut of "scholars" who are trying to research something which was very fluid and ever changing. Some of them are careful in their research and have access to primary documents, others are not and do not, but on the internet everyone speaks with the same volume. Bill James, the baseball sabermetric research guy, made a statement around 30 years ago about how the internet was destroying research because in the old days you had to submit research to a journal for fact-checking and review but now anyone can get published by visiting a message board and saying something.

Personally, I have no idea how Dave, Phil, and Gary did stuff. I know what rulebooks and magazines were in the hands of myself and my group and what we did with them. In that way I can attest to how we did things "back in the day" but I have no idea if other groups did things the same way because Dragon magazine was pretty much the only lens that I had to view the ideas of outsiders at the time. That's all of the scholarship that I can personally lay claim to, and that has little value in the arguments that erupt on message boards. For example, I can say with certainty that Chainmail influenced my OD&D campaigns in the mid-'70's because I know that we played it just before we got OD&D, and OD&D seemed like a natural extension of the rules found in Chainmail. Whether this was even remotely similar to the experiences for the pioneers (in Lake Geneva and/or the Twin Cities a few years before that) I have no idea.

What I value most about what you have to say (as well as Greg and Gronan and others) is their take on things from that era. My experiences were from reading and interpreting a rulebook. Yours were from person-to-person interaction, and that carries a heavy weight in my opinion. 8)