Snarf Zagyg
Notorious Liquefactionist
A conversation in another thread started me thinking about the excellent flurry of recent scholarship in D&D, and, more importantly, why I write the posts that I do- and why I write them in the way that I write them. Because, of course, in the end it's always about me!
To start with, I always find it important to really interrogate assumptions. Memories are incredibly fallible. I have seen a number of people make claims about things that happened that, quite literally, could not have happened. Or they get dates confused. To call out my own fallibility, for the longest time I remembered that I played in a module ... but it was only recently that I bothered checking the dates and realized that it was actually impossible for that to have been the module I played in because the module was published years later. To this day, because of my fallible memory, I still can't tell you what I played, but I do know that it wasn't the module I thought it was!
And this is something that animates most of my longer posts ... well, most of my posts, I guess, the "longer" is superfluous. I try, to the extent possible, to go back and verify things- what does the actual text of a book in 1974 say? What was the real rule buried in the DMG in 1979? What did a particular Dragon Magazine article from 1982 have to say? The reason I do this, the reason I almost always try to take the time to go back and verify with the actual sources, is part and parcel with the explosion of excellent scholarship into D&D that we've been seeing in the last decade.
For serious scholarship, you have to bring receipts. And the reason for this post is simple- it's explaining the importance of this. Why we need to interrogate those assumptions, those memories, against contemporaneous records.
A. Human Memory Is Fallible
I have to believe in a world outside my own mind.
We've all been there. Someone is telling a story. And it's about something you were there for. And you think to yourself, "Wait, that wasn't how it happened!" Or maybe you're going through old photos, and you didn't remember that you were even there, or didn't remember all the other people that were there with you. Or perhaps you're reading something you wrote, and you think, "Wait, I wrote this?" Or you find some old correspondence that was sent to you, and you notice the date on it, "Hold on, that happened in 1997 ... I thought it happened in 2003!"
The question of memory, and how accurate it can be, has been hotly debated for well over a century. That said, the main reason that the debate is hot has little to do with the science. The science has repeatedly shown us that our memory isn't an accurate recollection of the past, like a constantly recoding video camera. No, the reason that the debate is so hot is because, for all of us, our memories feel like reality, because they constitute the core of our self. It's one thing to recognize that other people are lying to you; it's a much more fraught proposition to understand, at a basic level, that you might be lying to you.
But let's start with the basics; how does memory work? To simplify an incredible amount, the process of memory starts with encoding. Encoding is not an accurate representation of what occurred- instead, it depends on all sorts of factors such as what the person attends to (what you're paying attention to), what the person expects, what a person needs, the person's emotional state, and the prior encoded information. But this initial step can be fraught- for example, you can look to anyone of innumerable experiments such as the "Invisible Gorilla" to see that the very first step in memory, encoding, often doesn't occur for even the most obvious of situations.
From encoding, the information is then integrated and consolidated with other memories into long-term memory- this is the autobiographical "sense-of-self." This integration and consolidation will often change memories subtly in order to make them align more closely to the other consolidated memories.
Finally, there is recollection or retrieval of the memory. While the other stages present their own problems, this stage present its own problems. Most importantly, recollection is a reconstruction of the remnants of memory previously stored - which includes forgetting parts or all of the memories or interference from new experiences. In addition, the act of recollection can lead to the construction of new memories to replace what was previously in there- in essence, you are no longer remembering the original memory, but the "story" you have recalled. This can be benign (you really remember that the fish was THIS BIG!) or it can be .... less benign (a victim in a crime is shown a single photograph and asked to identify the assailant, and in recalling the memory will integrate the photo shown with the actual memory).
All of this is a long windup to something which repeated studies in the criminal justice system (and scientific studies more generally) have shown- that while people believe that memories are accurate representations of the past (since we all have them and that is how we reconstruct our own past), memories actually suffer from well-known and documented issues which make them unreliable.
But what does all of this have to do with D&D?
B. D&D and Contemporaneous Evidence
You can lie to yourself to be happy. There's nothing wrong with that.
I've been there. You've been there. We've all been there. The old guy at the table is staring you down, stroking his beard, and then unleashes this-
I’m old! And I’m grumpy! And I don’t like things now compared to the way they used to be. All this progress — phooey! In my day, we didn’t have this Amazon Internet Thingy that would send you a D&D book when you needed it. No!
There was only one game store in each state — and that store was open only one hour a year. And you’d get in line, seventeen miles long, and the line became an angry mob of people– fornicators and thieves, mutant children, circus freaks and grizzled wargamers that hadn't showered since the 50s — and you waited for years and by the time you got to the front to buy your copy of the Monster Manual, you were already senile and arthritic and you couldn’t remember your own name. You were born, got in line, and ya died before you even got to roll a single d20!
Life was simpler then. There wasn’t all this concern about playing like some Critical Role person on the Youtubes or playing "remotely" and on "Roll20". When I started playing D&D, we didn’t even have electricity. We would have to make our own candles, and when we went to play, those candles would burn our books and our house down, and then we'd have to build our house and get back in that line for another decade to buy another copy of a book. Just so we could play a game!
Life was a carnival! We entertained ourselves! We didn’t need to get together a "group" to "play" "D&D." No, in my day, there was only one show in town - it was called, "Play the BECMI module by yourself, over and over again, and watch Aleena die." And you thought, “Oh, no! Maybe I should have tried something else this time! But it was too late! Dead Aleena."
Kids today don't even know. And one day, they will be complaining about those youngsters sitting in their holodecks playing holo-D&D, and how wizards only get d1000 hit points and that wish is an underpowered cantrip. HA! You just wait.
Yeah. That. Point being that we all know, instinctively, that when it comes to the old-timers telling stories about the good ol' days of playing D&D, you have to take it with a grain of salt. Even if they have perfect memory (which, as you see above, isn't happening) and even if they aren't emphasizing aspects of their story to make a point, they still would have a limited perspective on what actually was happening in the overall gaming world.
Which is why it has been so important that we've seen people taking the history of the game seriously, recently. For those of you who don't know, individuals such as Jon Peterson, Shannon Appelcline, and Ben Riggs have been putting in the work and the hours to provide details about the history of the hobby. Most importantly, rather than rely on the faulty memories of people that have continued to provide us with the same half-truths that have gotten repeated ad nauseum (and continue to be repeated to this day!), they went back and examined the contemporaneous documents to shed new lights on issues. I'll give you two quick examples.
People here talk about the Arneson / Gygax litigation all the time, often in passing. Well, the book Game Wizards actually has the full details of the litigation. And I can guarantee you that if you just heard about it from someone else, it's not what you think. And the reason that it has the full details is because someone bothered to get ahold of the legal documents. I know!
Or how about this- for the longest time, people talked about the use of Chainmail in OD&D. But it took actual work, and looking at the contemporaneous records, to uncover the link between Len Patt's Battle of the Pelennor Fields and Chainmail.
I could go on and on, from the details of Gygax's ouster, to the diverse playing styles of the 1970s, to the factual recounting of TSR's sales and how the played into the game had in the 80s and 90s- but the point continues to recur. Once we moved away from people using their memories to tell us what happened, and had people that took the hobby seriously and looked back at the historical records and the contemporaneous evidence, our understanding of the history of the game grew by leaps and bounds. Taking the history of the game seriously, and looking at contemporaneous evidence, is what allows us to judge claims and discuss them.
C. Why Receipts Matter When I Write Posts
Don't believe his lies.
Whenever I make one of my lengthy posts, I do my very best to scrupulously check dates and original contemporaneous sources. Partly it's because I enjoy doing the research, and partly it's because I am fallible. My memory of things is not always correct; as I wrote above, I have a false memory of a module that I played in. It's not that I want to be deceitful- either to myself, and certainly not in recounting the story, but just that after the passage of decades, events can morph, change, and bleed into one another. It happens. Maybe at some, I was retelling the story and I inserted the wrong module, and since then all I can truly recall is the retelling of the story. I honestly don't know- since I don't have full recollection of the original event.
The whole of the TSR era can often act like that type of confused memory. The primary issue is that all of the TSR products were largely interchangeable and interoperable. It was possible to, for example, play through B2 - a module designed for OD&D and released with B/X - using rules for 2e! In addition, the prevalence of homebrew, 3PP, semi-official rules (Dragon, Strategic Review), and the lack of the internet at the time for standardization can make things incredibly confusing, not to mention the nomenclature ... (Oh, Basic? Do you mean Holmes, Moldvay, or Mentzer? Sorry, you were playing with the Rules Cyclopedia ... never mind.).
Nevertheless, there is a strict delineation in those rules, and often, a strict delineation within those rules. 1e was different before UA ... and different than 2e. Holmes Basic (which is codified OD&D) is not the same as Moldvay Basic- and someone who was introduced to Basic with the Rule Cyclopedia will have a different understanding as well. People often "read into" certain rules other rules that they remember from other eras in TSR - for example, I have seen that it is exceedingly common for people to "read back" 2e rules into 1e, primarily because they played 2e, for a DECADE or more, more recently.
I mention this both because I have seen it (for example, Gygax was famously again crits, and they did not exist in 1e in the core rules- in fact, even rolling a 20 did not guarantee that you hit (it did in BECMI/RC)). This changed in 2e, with the optional critical hits in the DMG that many adopted. However, there are those that still remember core rules (as opposed to homebrew) that provided for critical hits in 1e. Memory is funny that way!
What I do think happens is, for a lot of people, there is a OD&D/1e/2e/Basic "Mandela effect." And it exists not just for the rules themselves, but most likely for how people remember playing the game at times. Now, you might be thinking to yourself, "Self, that's unpossible! Of course I have it all remembered correctly!" And yet, with legions of studies showing how fallible memory is, are you sure?
We all love good stories. But when it comes to accurate research and stories, it's best to trust ... but verify. Think about it- the majority of people commenting about "AD&D" are doing so having never played 1e (just 2e) or having played just a little 1e before playing 2e - this makes sense just by looking at the grim math of an actuarial table. And memories, notoriously, don't improve with age.
Even those olds of us who haven't died yet who started with OD&D and early 1e ... well, most of us here ... 1e ended in 1988. OD&D ended no later than 1979 (with the DMG). Arguably, the "classic" rules for D&D ended in 1985, when you have the UA split. Which means that people discussing "old school" rules today are trying to remember what the rules were like, usually having not played it for more 30 years, and often having spent more time playing a very close variant (2e) and/or playing computer games based on 2e ... and that's before remembering that 1e had some famously opaque rules.
Heck, and you knew this was coming ... if you read The Elusive Shift, you'd know that the 1970s were not, in fact, some monolithic time where all D&D games were grimdark amoral hobomurder sessions of dungeoncrawling with 60% fatality rates. Did such games exist? Sure. But there were also narrative games. People playing diceless diplomacy variants. People using the OD&D rules for superhero campaigns. Monty haul adventures with PCs taking on the gods. Games with adult sensibilities (and if your kink of choice was to be a bard, well, I'm judging you). Characters adventuring into space and beyond. All of these playing styles, and more, supported by contemporaneous evidence. Instead of relying on the grumpy old man telling you how the "game was played back in the day, when gamers were real gamers," we look at the historical record.
D. A Brief Aside About Bias
Why are you asking me? I can't remember what I've done.
Finally, I will address one point that came up, which, roughly paraphrased, is this, "But what about bias! Contemporaneous sources ... they can be BIASED TOO!" Well, yeah, of course they can! They can be biased. They can be wrong. Thing is- you evaluate that information just like you would any other information. You evaluate it against other contemporaneous sources. You determine how useful that information is! It's not actually that hard. To give you two examples-
In the book Game Wizards, Peterson discusses contemporaneous evidence regarding Gygax selling the company. Based upon all the other contemporaneous evidence, Peterson indicates that the contemporaneous statements of Gygax were not credible. While, IIRC, he does not outright say it, the implication is that Gygax made those statements to further his own interests, and not because they were true.
There are occasional debates about the exact publication date of Chainmail. Without going too far into the weeds on this one, it is true that the registration of copyright lists Chainmail as having a publication date of May 15, 1971. While this is good evidence of an approximate date of publication, it is not good evidence of an exact date of publication- given that this is one of three products from Guidon Games having an identical publication date, all three of which were not published on the same day, and the copyright was submitted seven months later, and Guidon Games had a practice of arbitrarily assigning "close enough" publication dates on batch copyrights.
That said, the difference between a contemporaneous source and a recounting decades later is obvious; not only does the memory have all the issues of bias that have to be accounted for that a contemporaneous source might (if not more for some cases), memory has all the additional issues of ... memory, which, as detailed above, has numerous additional issues even when a person is doing their best to accurately recount an event.
That doesn't mean that you should never use oral recountings- first, they make great stories! Really. If you've ever read a book like Live from New York (an oral history of SNL) you know how much FUN they can be. They can also provide you information that you can then use to go and find contemporaneous sources and verify the stories. In addition, there will be occasions when, to paraphrase Hamilton, there's only a few people in the room where it happens, and you have to depend on what they tell you. Finally, as we go back in history, the existence of contemporaneous records (especially of marginalized or underserved communities) is more scarce, and sometimes there is little or no contemporaneous evidence.
All that said, the reason for this lengthy essay should be plain- the revolution in understanding the history of our hobby has come about because we have stopped depending on the stories people tell us, and started looking at the historical record. And it's important to credit that revolution to shift from "listening to people telling us stories," to "doing the work and bringing the receipts." To do any less is to shortchange a lot of hard work.
To start with, I always find it important to really interrogate assumptions. Memories are incredibly fallible. I have seen a number of people make claims about things that happened that, quite literally, could not have happened. Or they get dates confused. To call out my own fallibility, for the longest time I remembered that I played in a module ... but it was only recently that I bothered checking the dates and realized that it was actually impossible for that to have been the module I played in because the module was published years later. To this day, because of my fallible memory, I still can't tell you what I played, but I do know that it wasn't the module I thought it was!
And this is something that animates most of my longer posts ... well, most of my posts, I guess, the "longer" is superfluous. I try, to the extent possible, to go back and verify things- what does the actual text of a book in 1974 say? What was the real rule buried in the DMG in 1979? What did a particular Dragon Magazine article from 1982 have to say? The reason I do this, the reason I almost always try to take the time to go back and verify with the actual sources, is part and parcel with the explosion of excellent scholarship into D&D that we've been seeing in the last decade.
For serious scholarship, you have to bring receipts. And the reason for this post is simple- it's explaining the importance of this. Why we need to interrogate those assumptions, those memories, against contemporaneous records.
A. Human Memory Is Fallible
I have to believe in a world outside my own mind.
We've all been there. Someone is telling a story. And it's about something you were there for. And you think to yourself, "Wait, that wasn't how it happened!" Or maybe you're going through old photos, and you didn't remember that you were even there, or didn't remember all the other people that were there with you. Or perhaps you're reading something you wrote, and you think, "Wait, I wrote this?" Or you find some old correspondence that was sent to you, and you notice the date on it, "Hold on, that happened in 1997 ... I thought it happened in 2003!"
The question of memory, and how accurate it can be, has been hotly debated for well over a century. That said, the main reason that the debate is hot has little to do with the science. The science has repeatedly shown us that our memory isn't an accurate recollection of the past, like a constantly recoding video camera. No, the reason that the debate is so hot is because, for all of us, our memories feel like reality, because they constitute the core of our self. It's one thing to recognize that other people are lying to you; it's a much more fraught proposition to understand, at a basic level, that you might be lying to you.
But let's start with the basics; how does memory work? To simplify an incredible amount, the process of memory starts with encoding. Encoding is not an accurate representation of what occurred- instead, it depends on all sorts of factors such as what the person attends to (what you're paying attention to), what the person expects, what a person needs, the person's emotional state, and the prior encoded information. But this initial step can be fraught- for example, you can look to anyone of innumerable experiments such as the "Invisible Gorilla" to see that the very first step in memory, encoding, often doesn't occur for even the most obvious of situations.
From encoding, the information is then integrated and consolidated with other memories into long-term memory- this is the autobiographical "sense-of-self." This integration and consolidation will often change memories subtly in order to make them align more closely to the other consolidated memories.
Finally, there is recollection or retrieval of the memory. While the other stages present their own problems, this stage present its own problems. Most importantly, recollection is a reconstruction of the remnants of memory previously stored - which includes forgetting parts or all of the memories or interference from new experiences. In addition, the act of recollection can lead to the construction of new memories to replace what was previously in there- in essence, you are no longer remembering the original memory, but the "story" you have recalled. This can be benign (you really remember that the fish was THIS BIG!) or it can be .... less benign (a victim in a crime is shown a single photograph and asked to identify the assailant, and in recalling the memory will integrate the photo shown with the actual memory).
All of this is a long windup to something which repeated studies in the criminal justice system (and scientific studies more generally) have shown- that while people believe that memories are accurate representations of the past (since we all have them and that is how we reconstruct our own past), memories actually suffer from well-known and documented issues which make them unreliable.
But what does all of this have to do with D&D?
B. D&D and Contemporaneous Evidence
You can lie to yourself to be happy. There's nothing wrong with that.
I've been there. You've been there. We've all been there. The old guy at the table is staring you down, stroking his beard, and then unleashes this-
I’m old! And I’m grumpy! And I don’t like things now compared to the way they used to be. All this progress — phooey! In my day, we didn’t have this Amazon Internet Thingy that would send you a D&D book when you needed it. No!
There was only one game store in each state — and that store was open only one hour a year. And you’d get in line, seventeen miles long, and the line became an angry mob of people– fornicators and thieves, mutant children, circus freaks and grizzled wargamers that hadn't showered since the 50s — and you waited for years and by the time you got to the front to buy your copy of the Monster Manual, you were already senile and arthritic and you couldn’t remember your own name. You were born, got in line, and ya died before you even got to roll a single d20!
Life was simpler then. There wasn’t all this concern about playing like some Critical Role person on the Youtubes or playing "remotely" and on "Roll20". When I started playing D&D, we didn’t even have electricity. We would have to make our own candles, and when we went to play, those candles would burn our books and our house down, and then we'd have to build our house and get back in that line for another decade to buy another copy of a book. Just so we could play a game!
Life was a carnival! We entertained ourselves! We didn’t need to get together a "group" to "play" "D&D." No, in my day, there was only one show in town - it was called, "Play the BECMI module by yourself, over and over again, and watch Aleena die." And you thought, “Oh, no! Maybe I should have tried something else this time! But it was too late! Dead Aleena."
Kids today don't even know. And one day, they will be complaining about those youngsters sitting in their holodecks playing holo-D&D, and how wizards only get d1000 hit points and that wish is an underpowered cantrip. HA! You just wait.
Yeah. That. Point being that we all know, instinctively, that when it comes to the old-timers telling stories about the good ol' days of playing D&D, you have to take it with a grain of salt. Even if they have perfect memory (which, as you see above, isn't happening) and even if they aren't emphasizing aspects of their story to make a point, they still would have a limited perspective on what actually was happening in the overall gaming world.
Which is why it has been so important that we've seen people taking the history of the game seriously, recently. For those of you who don't know, individuals such as Jon Peterson, Shannon Appelcline, and Ben Riggs have been putting in the work and the hours to provide details about the history of the hobby. Most importantly, rather than rely on the faulty memories of people that have continued to provide us with the same half-truths that have gotten repeated ad nauseum (and continue to be repeated to this day!), they went back and examined the contemporaneous documents to shed new lights on issues. I'll give you two quick examples.
People here talk about the Arneson / Gygax litigation all the time, often in passing. Well, the book Game Wizards actually has the full details of the litigation. And I can guarantee you that if you just heard about it from someone else, it's not what you think. And the reason that it has the full details is because someone bothered to get ahold of the legal documents. I know!
Or how about this- for the longest time, people talked about the use of Chainmail in OD&D. But it took actual work, and looking at the contemporaneous records, to uncover the link between Len Patt's Battle of the Pelennor Fields and Chainmail.
I could go on and on, from the details of Gygax's ouster, to the diverse playing styles of the 1970s, to the factual recounting of TSR's sales and how the played into the game had in the 80s and 90s- but the point continues to recur. Once we moved away from people using their memories to tell us what happened, and had people that took the hobby seriously and looked back at the historical records and the contemporaneous evidence, our understanding of the history of the game grew by leaps and bounds. Taking the history of the game seriously, and looking at contemporaneous evidence, is what allows us to judge claims and discuss them.
C. Why Receipts Matter When I Write Posts
Don't believe his lies.
Whenever I make one of my lengthy posts, I do my very best to scrupulously check dates and original contemporaneous sources. Partly it's because I enjoy doing the research, and partly it's because I am fallible. My memory of things is not always correct; as I wrote above, I have a false memory of a module that I played in. It's not that I want to be deceitful- either to myself, and certainly not in recounting the story, but just that after the passage of decades, events can morph, change, and bleed into one another. It happens. Maybe at some, I was retelling the story and I inserted the wrong module, and since then all I can truly recall is the retelling of the story. I honestly don't know- since I don't have full recollection of the original event.
The whole of the TSR era can often act like that type of confused memory. The primary issue is that all of the TSR products were largely interchangeable and interoperable. It was possible to, for example, play through B2 - a module designed for OD&D and released with B/X - using rules for 2e! In addition, the prevalence of homebrew, 3PP, semi-official rules (Dragon, Strategic Review), and the lack of the internet at the time for standardization can make things incredibly confusing, not to mention the nomenclature ... (Oh, Basic? Do you mean Holmes, Moldvay, or Mentzer? Sorry, you were playing with the Rules Cyclopedia ... never mind.).
Nevertheless, there is a strict delineation in those rules, and often, a strict delineation within those rules. 1e was different before UA ... and different than 2e. Holmes Basic (which is codified OD&D) is not the same as Moldvay Basic- and someone who was introduced to Basic with the Rule Cyclopedia will have a different understanding as well. People often "read into" certain rules other rules that they remember from other eras in TSR - for example, I have seen that it is exceedingly common for people to "read back" 2e rules into 1e, primarily because they played 2e, for a DECADE or more, more recently.
I mention this both because I have seen it (for example, Gygax was famously again crits, and they did not exist in 1e in the core rules- in fact, even rolling a 20 did not guarantee that you hit (it did in BECMI/RC)). This changed in 2e, with the optional critical hits in the DMG that many adopted. However, there are those that still remember core rules (as opposed to homebrew) that provided for critical hits in 1e. Memory is funny that way!
What I do think happens is, for a lot of people, there is a OD&D/1e/2e/Basic "Mandela effect." And it exists not just for the rules themselves, but most likely for how people remember playing the game at times. Now, you might be thinking to yourself, "Self, that's unpossible! Of course I have it all remembered correctly!" And yet, with legions of studies showing how fallible memory is, are you sure?
We all love good stories. But when it comes to accurate research and stories, it's best to trust ... but verify. Think about it- the majority of people commenting about "AD&D" are doing so having never played 1e (just 2e) or having played just a little 1e before playing 2e - this makes sense just by looking at the grim math of an actuarial table. And memories, notoriously, don't improve with age.
Even those olds of us who haven't died yet who started with OD&D and early 1e ... well, most of us here ... 1e ended in 1988. OD&D ended no later than 1979 (with the DMG). Arguably, the "classic" rules for D&D ended in 1985, when you have the UA split. Which means that people discussing "old school" rules today are trying to remember what the rules were like, usually having not played it for more 30 years, and often having spent more time playing a very close variant (2e) and/or playing computer games based on 2e ... and that's before remembering that 1e had some famously opaque rules.
Heck, and you knew this was coming ... if you read The Elusive Shift, you'd know that the 1970s were not, in fact, some monolithic time where all D&D games were grimdark amoral hobomurder sessions of dungeoncrawling with 60% fatality rates. Did such games exist? Sure. But there were also narrative games. People playing diceless diplomacy variants. People using the OD&D rules for superhero campaigns. Monty haul adventures with PCs taking on the gods. Games with adult sensibilities (and if your kink of choice was to be a bard, well, I'm judging you). Characters adventuring into space and beyond. All of these playing styles, and more, supported by contemporaneous evidence. Instead of relying on the grumpy old man telling you how the "game was played back in the day, when gamers were real gamers," we look at the historical record.
D. A Brief Aside About Bias
Why are you asking me? I can't remember what I've done.
Finally, I will address one point that came up, which, roughly paraphrased, is this, "But what about bias! Contemporaneous sources ... they can be BIASED TOO!" Well, yeah, of course they can! They can be biased. They can be wrong. Thing is- you evaluate that information just like you would any other information. You evaluate it against other contemporaneous sources. You determine how useful that information is! It's not actually that hard. To give you two examples-
In the book Game Wizards, Peterson discusses contemporaneous evidence regarding Gygax selling the company. Based upon all the other contemporaneous evidence, Peterson indicates that the contemporaneous statements of Gygax were not credible. While, IIRC, he does not outright say it, the implication is that Gygax made those statements to further his own interests, and not because they were true.
There are occasional debates about the exact publication date of Chainmail. Without going too far into the weeds on this one, it is true that the registration of copyright lists Chainmail as having a publication date of May 15, 1971. While this is good evidence of an approximate date of publication, it is not good evidence of an exact date of publication- given that this is one of three products from Guidon Games having an identical publication date, all three of which were not published on the same day, and the copyright was submitted seven months later, and Guidon Games had a practice of arbitrarily assigning "close enough" publication dates on batch copyrights.
That said, the difference between a contemporaneous source and a recounting decades later is obvious; not only does the memory have all the issues of bias that have to be accounted for that a contemporaneous source might (if not more for some cases), memory has all the additional issues of ... memory, which, as detailed above, has numerous additional issues even when a person is doing their best to accurately recount an event.
That doesn't mean that you should never use oral recountings- first, they make great stories! Really. If you've ever read a book like Live from New York (an oral history of SNL) you know how much FUN they can be. They can also provide you information that you can then use to go and find contemporaneous sources and verify the stories. In addition, there will be occasions when, to paraphrase Hamilton, there's only a few people in the room where it happens, and you have to depend on what they tell you. Finally, as we go back in history, the existence of contemporaneous records (especially of marginalized or underserved communities) is more scarce, and sometimes there is little or no contemporaneous evidence.
All that said, the reason for this lengthy essay should be plain- the revolution in understanding the history of our hobby has come about because we have stopped depending on the stories people tell us, and started looking at the historical record. And it's important to credit that revolution to shift from "listening to people telling us stories," to "doing the work and bringing the receipts." To do any less is to shortchange a lot of hard work.
