BrOSR

[Cordwainer Fish]

following as painstakingly as possible any and all of the rules that are contained within ... Classic Traveller Books 1-3

1977 or 1981?

 

[PHATsakk43]

1977 or 1981?

This question results in a discussion reminiscent of swallows air speed and carrying capacity by BrOSR folks.

 

[Mannahnin]

I also took a bit of a break due to recent Reading D&D Aloud podcast by Ben Riggs which featured Jon Peterson which sheds some light on several of the points that Jeffro & Co are making about this whole endeavor. I ultimately didn’t change this writeup, but if it keeps going, it will be something that I will likely visit.

I listened to the Ben and Jon interview last night, and it seems like it really only touches on any of this tangentially, insofar as Ben avers that some parts of the internet will currently tell you that Dave Wesely invented roleplaying games with Braunstein. And TBF Wesely more or less does claim credit at this point. But as Jon opines once more, it's impossible to definitively attribute it to just one person. For a couple of reasons, which I'll try to summarize here.

1. What exactly constitutes an RPG, what attributes and features are sufficient but not required vs required but not sufficient, has never been firmly defined and is fundamentally subjective. Key elements which showed up in Braunstein or Blackmoor also appeared beforehand or contemporaneously in other games*. I've had interactions with one or two Blackmoor partisans who insist it's Blackmoor because that's where we first see the combination of individual characters used in an ongoing campaign with attributes, hit points, and formal advancement/leveling up rules, but for my part I can't see most of those as mandatory for an RPG. There are lots of modern RPGs designed for one-shots for which advancement is superfluous and irrelevant, for example.

2. The creative process happening here was fundamentally collaborative and hobbyist, with lots of people stealing/borrowing ideas from each other, and not necessarily making formal attributions. We found out relatively recently (after the first edition of PatW) that Gygax took ideas from Leonard Patt's Middle Earth wargame for the core of Chainmail's fantasy supplement. Peterson has found contemporaneous documentation (discussed in this Riggs interview) that the Twin Cities crew and Gygax were reading about Western Gunfight and Tony Bath's Hyboria campaign in wargaming zines from England and that one of Dave's crew actually visited England and played with the gamers there and brought ideas back. Western Gunfight apparently directly informed the rules for Wesely's Brownstone Western-set Braunstein game.

(*Western Gunfight (ongoing campaign focus on playing individual personalities "in character" as opposed to with optimum tactics), Mike Carr's Fight in the Skies AKA Dawn Patrol (an experience and advancement system used with individual pilots, who were also supposed to be played "in character"), or even Tony Bath's Hyborean campaign, which also had rules for attributing personality traits and quantifying attributes of fantasy characters, albeit at the higher level domain-style play. Or even Korns' Modern War in Miniature, which while really only focused on 1-1 scale military simulation, uses the immersive immediate first person dialogue interaction between player and referee which we're all familiar with from RPGs. Reading and hearing about Tony Bath's campaign, I'm almost surprised that the BroSR guys don't attribute their play/campaign style to Bath rather than Wesely.)