Broken Base Lookback: Gaming through the Ages

[GreyLord]

I thought I'd post a series of articles in blog and on the forum that look at some contentious portions of Dungeons and Dragons through the years. THIS IS NOT TO START AN ARGUMENT, SO IF YOU WANT TO ARGUE...TAKE IT SOMEWHERE ELSE!!! It's to look at items that were brought up and were either controversial and/or caused what some call a Broken Base.

What is a Broken Base? Well, that's why this is the First of several articles looking at it.

Broken Base - Television Tropes & Idioms

Broken Base is a civil war among fans of a particular series. It involves infighting over whether or not the series is still good after a certain change. The loyalists believe it's as good as ever - maybe even better - and constantly hold up its merits. The dissenters feel betrayed by declining quality, and attack the series at every opportunity. They'll also be annoyed by the other fans' loyalty, and will call them blind fanboys / fangirls. However, despite not liking the show anymore, the dissenters will linger around fan forums solely to criticize the show and the loyalists. The loyalists will reply by calling the dissenters a bunch of fuddy-duddies who go all Chicken Little at the slightest change to the status quo.

I'll post a small portion of the article here, and a fuller section of text to the blogs for analysis. If there are commentaries...I'll post more.

It should be interesting to see peoples (NON-Argumentative...that means analytical...not emotional) responses to these items. Some of what I post will be from a different view...so some of them won't necessarily be talking about the D&D specific base...it may be talking about Christians, or others that may be involved with gaming in some way.

Be respectful to all in the threads.

Since I got the first portion from TVTropes.com it by default becomes the first article. It doesn't so much discuss everything, but does raise the idea of changes in the game and that it may have caused a broken base.

Dungeons & Dragons - Television Tropes & Idioms

D&D has been through many huge rule changes, provoking some variety of Broken Base at every turn.

The core rule books contain no "official" background setting material. Dungeon Masters are invited to either make up their own setting, or use one of a number of published campaign settings. Of course, stuff from some settings leaked in anyway — after all, one cannot roleplay in vacuum. Basic D&D and AD&D has elements of Gygax's own Greyhawk as the implied setting (the wizards whose names attached to spells of the core list are classical Greyhawk characters), 3.0 even included the top of Greyhawk's pantheon and 4th edition books' assumptions unofficially form a vague setting called "Points Of Light".

The history of D&D is a bit twisty. It started as a companion book to a miniature-based tabletop wargame called Chainmail. Due to Creative Differences between the creators, the original game became split into Basic Dungeons and Dragons and the ultimately more popular (and more complex) Advanced Dungeons and Dragons in 1981. Then Battlesystem was added — a mass combat supplement for both D&D and AD&D. That is, it's Chainmail reborn as an expansion of its own grown-up derivative.

So the first change here would be the twist between wargamers and D&D, as well as the two lines Dungeons and Dragons and Advanced Dungeons and Dragons.

The rest of the article goes into a very short brief history of D&D, but for this first article I'd like to focus on the first broken base here...which I'll explain on my OWN opinion below in response.

 

[GreyLord]

In the beginning before D&D came about there was an avid group of people that played Wargames. From my point of view, it was from these Wargamers that D&D was born. Many Wargamers did NOT like D&D and thought it a convolution of gaming.

To this day I won't admit to many that I wargame/boardgame with that I play RPGs, especially D&D. It's for a different reason than many may hide that they play D&D. It's not because they may see it as nerdy or geeky or anything to that effect, in many instances before D&D..WARGAMERS were occasionally seen as the geeky ones.

No, it's because D&D had something that they thought was a threat to the wargaming community, or that's the best I could guess at.

Some wargamers will qualify a wargame if it covers something that actually occurred in history. It attempts to recreate/simulate an ACTUAL battle or war. It utilizes the frame of reference of real world items. It utilizes movement, spaces, and measurements.

For Wargamers from whom many of the original D&D player were drawn from, these were obviously NOT occurances. D&D was fantasy, not history. It had no actual battle from history, and used magic and other things not found in reality. Of course, these same arguments could be handled towards chainmail...and they were...but even chainmail seemed more palatable to some than D&D.

Why? I'm not certain. As I said, my best analysis was that some felt that D&D was trying to encroach on their territory of gameplay by replacing it with something else.

Eventually D&D became larger then wargaming...but I'd say the original Broken Base dealing with D&D was actually the Wargaming community.

 

[Zelligars Apprentice]

Interesting idea for discussion! I'll throw in a couple of pieces to add to the mix.

When I read through the early Dragons/Strategic Reviews (as well as other material from the period) the distinction you point out is more nuanced than you state. It seems that (at least at first) there was a split among WARGAMERS. On the one hand you had the traditional hex map and chit based gamers. Then you had people (like Gary Gygax) who used lead miniatures and sand tables and the like. Keep in mind, the original version of Chainmail WAS a historical (miniatures) wargame. Gygax added the "Fantasy Supplement" (which would eventually form the basis of D&D) later.

This split was further expanded by the commercial conflict between the then-dominant SPI and the newly-created TSR. Of course, we know how that story ended.

Some interesting parallels can be drawn between (on the one hand) the conflict between wargamers and role-players in the early '70s and (on the other hand) the conflict between role-players and players of collectible card games in the early '90s. In both cases, the established players were threatened by the new game form, and some predicted the destruction of "their" game by the upstart. Eerily similar nasty comments were made disparaging each group by the other. Finally, the company that created the "upstart" game form ended up buying out the dominant rival "traditionalist" company (first TSR bought out SPI, later WOTC bought out TSR). I'm sure some sociologist could write an interesting paper on this dynamic. Maybe someone already has.