LOL @
TwoSix, yes, we need more angst!
Seriously though, it was really interesting when that article came out like a month ago detailing the first real description of a "fireball" in the pre-Chainmail historical wargame.
I've never done a real tracing of D&D's roots. I know there's books, and articles, and whatever else all over the place that go into all of it, but I've never really gotten into it.
But that article on pre-Chainmail battle rules opened my eyes, because there's so much about D&D that I always took for granted as just being "natural" or "the way it works," or that someone had thoroughly gone through and vetted the mechanics to work a certain way.
And really that wasn't necessarily the case. A lot of what became the game I got under the Christmas tree in 1985 was handed down from wargames
and simply passed on because it was what they had. For example, it totally blew my mind when it finally clicked for me (and this was maybe only 3 or 4 months ago) that "hit points" are a relic of wargames that are designed to measure
the ability continue remaining effective in combat. They were never really intended or designed to be a measure of a single individual's personal health. They're not measuring wounds, or injuries, or any kind of "health scale"; they exist because in a war game, they represent a unit's ability to remain in the battle. That's it. Hitpoints in war games are at the very least modeling a level of abstraction at least two, possibly three levels above what they're attempting to model in an RPG.
So what happens when you evolve combat and other tactical challenges around that basic paradigm to a single, individual character? You get a specific set of functions, or rules, that work within that basic assumption.
And it's given me a glimpse of why "Story Now!" became a thing---because it's an attempt to go all the way back and say, "Wait wait wait . . . what if we DON'T start the basic assumptions of how an RPG operates from
here and instead assume we should start
there." Interestingly, even as much as I'm pushing into a more "fail forward," "No myth" style, I don't know that I'll ever 100% completely embrace "Story Now!" either. For example, I've heard descriptions of stuff like Dogs in the Vineyard, Life With Master, Paranoia, etc., and I honestly can't say I'd have any interest in them. I bought a hardcover copy of Legends of Anglerre because I liked the art, but I don't know that I'll ever try Fate, or that my group would even want to either.
I think one of the great things @
pemerton tries to do is to at least get people to look inside their own assumptions a bit about the ways RPG rules work. At the very least to be informed about what their own preferences are doing, the assumptions around them, etc. Even if you don't agree with or see how other people like to run their games, I think there's value in understanding what's happening within the context of your own games.