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 speeds 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. Braunsteins themselves were, as I recall, one-shot games without such advancement rules.

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.)

 

[PHATsakk43]

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.

Accurate recap, especially as it relates to Brozer and the BrOSR more broadly. My intent of that statement was that it really feels that Jeffro Jackson attributes much to Mr. Wesely. I also get the feeling that Mr. Jackson has also self-appointed himself as the arbiter of BrOSR. Thus, as the most public and vocal BrOSR'er this seems to likewise elevate Mr. Wesely's role in all of this. Especially if we accept that Brozer is the play guidelines that distinguish BrOSR play from other RPG playstyles. Which is what the bulk of Brozer states.

I'll also add that I've spent a fair bit of time reading through Mr. Jackson's WordPress which provides a lot more context to what we see in Brozer. If I were to make a real-world analogy, Brozer is to Mr. Jackson's blog is what The Communist Manifesto is to Das Kapital. It isn't a perfect analogy, but it is pretty close. Basically, to really understand Brozer you have to wade into Mr. Jackson's blog.

If anyone is interested, and I'll caveat this by saying there is much darker undertone in Mr. Jackson's blog than Brozer, Mr. Jackson provides a fairly straightforward pathway that describes his personal thinking and what, I believe, ultimately led to the development of Brozer here. One of the things you'll notice is that Mr. Jackson actually goes in a bit of different direction from this "is he or isn't he the Father of TTRPGs" regarding the legacy of Mr. Wesely. Mr. Jackson clearly states that Braunsteins are not RPGs but a separate category of game. D&D at least until sometime after the 1E DMG was released, is, according to Mr. Jackson, a conflict resolution system for Braunstein style play and was never intended to be ran in the cooperative sense and that all of this is fully self-evident when you read OD&D and 1E products. Mr. Jackson even finds that Mr. Gygax himself was stating this, albeit in the 1st Edition of Boot Hill as opposed to the flagship product where this was supposedly expected. Tunnels & Trolls is actually the "first TTRPG" in this narrative of gaming history and that this play style was then misapplied to the rest of the market, particularly D&D.

Part of all of this is to delve into the BrOSR mindset and attempt to actually analyze what they are saying and why, which going back through this post to the beginning felt like it was more of an attempt to describe those who are part of this play faction rather than the play that defines it separately from the rest of hobby gaming, which I'd lump wargaming, TTRPGs, and certain forms of board games, particularly Diplomacy into.

Getting back to why the interview gave me pause is because that it definitely challenges some of the BrOSR internal narrative, or at least Mr. Jacksons version, which is so very crucial to the understanding of the BrOSR more broadly, at least in my opinion after looking into this group. There is such a throughline contrary to the received wisdom most have towards TTRPGs in the BrOSR; it is this throughline that is the defining theme.

 

[Mannahnin]

Getting back to why the interview gave me pause is because that it definitely challenges some of the BrOSR internal narrative, or at least Mr. Jacksons version, which is so very crucial to the understanding of the BrOSR more broadly, at least in my opinion after looking into this group. There is such a throughline contrary to the received wisdom most have towards TTRPGs in the BrOSR; it is this throughline that is the defining theme.

Yeah, Johnson's theses are interesting but ill-supported. Trying to argue that Boot Hill shows how OD&D and AD&D were actually meant to work seems highly dubious given that AD&D was published afterward and doesn't lay out the same kind of competitive play style. AD&D is not a type of Braunstein, though it seems clear that Boot Hill is indeed a close descendent of Western Gunfight at least as much as it is of OD&D.

While one might try to run OD&D in a competitive manner, at least at higher levels once characters reach name level, the examples of play we have, both the dialogue in the LBBs (OD&D vol III pages 12-14, see also AD&D DMG p97-100) and the published modules, are ALL of cooperative play. With the players acting as a tightly-organized squad of compatriots and sometimes commandos (ref. Steading of the Hill Giant Chief, among other examples).

I've written before about how the domain level play OD&D and AD&D talk about for high levels (but give few details on how to run) seems more aspirational than operational. I suspect that Dave Arneson, following in Dave Wesely's Braunstein footsteps (where the original Braunstein was intended to set the stage/opening conditions for a miniatures wargame), did intend for Blackmoor to originally be a mix of cooperative (especially at lower levels) dungeon exploration, like the famous tale of the first dungeon delve, and competitive, faction-oriented domain and wargame play. From what I've read for reports of action from his game (whether anecdotes online, or details from First Fantasy Campaign or Blackmoor Foundations), it does seem like the players fell in love with the dungeon crawling and character advancement parts, and neglected the wargame parts, resulting in events like the Barony of Blackmoor getting overrun by the baddies at the wargame scale and the Blackmoor Bunch having to high-tail it to Lock Gloomin.

Dave's original game seems like it was intended to have more of a wargame component, and Gary dutifully copied details about that over into OD&D (and forward into AD&D), but stories from Gary's games about players engaging in intrigues and faction play against one another seem virtually nonexistent. And the tales he tells us in the intro to OD&D that the game is meant to emulate, like Fafhrd and the Mouser, John Carter groping through black pits (not ruling over Barsoom as Warlord), or Pratt and de Camp's hero Harold Shae, are not those of powerful, influential political players intriguing against one another.

Jeff's argument that people are keeping "the truth" from us out of malice also gives me some ick. It reads like a sales pitch from a conspiracy theorist. Which is, of course, very much in keeping with his previously-quoted claims about a "cabal" of undesirables working against his cultural preferences.

 

[PHATsakk43]

Yeah, Johnson's theses are interesting but ill-supported. Trying to argue that Boot Hill shows how OD&D and AD&D were actually meant to work seems highly dubious given that AD&D was published afterward and doesn't lay out the same kind of competitive play style. AD&D is not a type of Braunstein, though it seems clear that Boot Hill is indeed a close descendent of Western Gunfight at least as much as it is of OD&D.

I believe that part about Western Gunfight is the key to criticism of Mr. Jackson’s theory. I had not heard of this game prior to the aforementioned podcast, nor have I any experience with Boot Hill (or Gamma World, Top Secret, or any other Golden Age TSR game, or anything before Gygax’s ouster except B/X for that matter—I am simply too young to have played the stuff) so I initially had less trouble with Mr. Jackson’s explanation beforehand. Granted, I now see where you mentioned it at least a year ago in your @Mannahnin linked post, which I may have overlooked. From what I can gather now, your deduction feels more accurate than Mr. Jackson’s—that Boot Hill and Mr. Wesley’s Braunstein have a connection, but to Western Gunfight rather than each other.

I suppose that it fundamentally doesn’t matter, as there is actually some good ideas within Brozer (I’ve not been particularly kind to it so far, but I figured we could get into that after we discussed the product). That said, I think it does call into question some of the meta narrative which the BrOSR community seems to apply a reverence towards which makes their arguments regarding Brozer more difficult to separate from criticism of Brozer.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Jeff's argument that people are keeping "the truth" from us out of malice also gives me some ick. It reads like a sales pitch from a conspiracy theorist. Which is, of course, very much in keeping with his previously-quoted claims about a "cabal" of undesirables working against his cultural preferences.

I've seen this sort of thing presented before by individuals in the OSR of an older stripe; its hard for me to take it serious when it requires almost the entire West Coast OD&D community to have mostly or entirely missed the point to work (and as far as that goes groups as divergent from that as the MIT centered gaming groups).

 

[PHATsakk43]

Jeff's argument that people are keeping "the truth" from us out of malice also gives me some ick. It reads like a sales pitch from a conspiracy theorist. Which is, of course, very much in keeping with his previously-quoted claims about a "cabal" of undesirables working against his cultural preferences.

And there is a great example of the foulness of some of the cesspools you will encounter if you click on too many linked people from Mr. Jackson's WordPress I linked above. Although, those quotes are from Mr. Jackson himself.

After getting the Red Text of Doom a while back, I've tried to play it as factually as possible, although I'm still not precisely aware of what I was doing to receive the warning. My post that received the warning was regarding Questing Beast being suggested as a BrOSR sympathizer (I don't have a personal opinion of QB, nor had I heard of him prior to being mentioned here) but was referenced in Mr. Jackson's blog as "Questing Plagiarist".



Which made me assume that QB was likely, at least in Mr. Jackson's head-cannon a member of the 'wrong-play cabal'. Which I also assume that would at the least provide some distance between QB and the BrOSR. I feel there is a value in bringing light to some of these darker corners, as without context it is pretty easy to simply follow the breadcrumbs that are laid out in various BrOSR blogs. Breadcrumbs which appear to be liberal interpretations or inaccurate correlations more than reality. Given your own posts that indicate the Mr. Jackson's blatant Antisemitism and financial incentives to create interest in this narrative (Mr. Jackson routinely links to the order page for his book How to Win at D&D in his blog posts as well as within Brozer itself) I feel that there is a responsibility to mark the trap in the dungeon even if we can't disarm it.

 

[Gus L]

I've seen this sort of thing presented before by individuals in the OSR of an older stripe; its hard for me to take it serious when it requires almost the entire West Coast OD&D community to have mostly or entirely missed the point to work (and as far as that goes groups as divergent from that as the MIT centered gaming groups).

My own reading is that both Lake Geneva and the West Coast D&D scene missed part of the point of OD&D, because I do suspect that it was originally intended as a sort of mini-game to a larger Chainmail campaign - a sort of "raid the castle for gold to build your army" thing in a Castles & Crusades society type deal. I don't think it lasted as that even through the development process and thus the RPG was born. A lot of the idiosyncrasies of OD&D (the size of treasure hoards and corresponding XP limits or the numbers of monsters found in random encounters) make a lot more sense if the characters are expected to be funding warbands and domains...

Given that though, the RPG clearly pops out of the wargame here and overtakes it. One can read about this sort of happening in First Fantasy Campaign, with the dungeon becoming more and more the game's focus. It happens in the rules as well I think - for example the alternate combat system is added to make things more character friendly and work at a smaller scale of combat. So while there may be some truth to the idea of OD&D as wargame, it wasn't for very long or to a very great degree.

Of course I find it more interesting to build a "what if" using the Chainmail Rules (or better skirmish game ones) and think about how one might run such games rather then proclaim any sort of connection to ur-D&D and wave about the bloody shirt of nostalgia.

 

[Thomas Shey]

My own reading is that both Lake Geneva and the West Coast D&D scene missed part of the point of OD&D, because I do suspect that it was originally intended as a sort of mini-game to a larger Chainmail campaign - a sort of "raid the castle for gold to build your army" thing in a Castles & Crusades society type deal. I don't think it lasted as that even through the development process and thus the RPG was born. A lot of the idiosyncrasies of OD&D (the size of treasure hoards and corresponding XP limits or the numbers of monsters found in random encounters) make a lot more sense if the characters are expected to be funding warbands and domains...

Given that though, the RPG clearly pops out of the wargame here and overtakes it. One can read about this sort of happening in First Fantasy Campaign, with the dungeon becoming more and more the game's focus. It happens in the rules as well I think - for example the alternate combat system is added to make things more character friendly and work at a smaller scale of combat. So while there may be some truth to the idea of OD&D as wargame, it wasn't for very long or to a very great degree.

Of course I find it more interesting to build a "what if" using the Chainmail Rules (or better skirmish game ones) and think about how one might run such games rather then proclaim any sort of connection to ur-D&D and wave about the bloody shirt of nostalgia.

The problem with this is it really only worked if you were playing the game for really long or really frequent periods. I've mentioned before that I managed to get a couple characters in the low teens over time, but there were a lot of people who never exceeded 6-8th level, and you needed to do that to get into the whole domain game.

So at best, the game had a serious split personality here; it actively discouraged getting to the levels where the more wargame elements would kick in (and was, honestly, pretty sketchy about handling those by itself).