BrOSR

[Mannahnin]

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).

Well, yeah. Jeffro's arguing that OD&D and AD&D were intended to be played as a more wargame-style campaign similar to a Braunstein, and that Gary basically just didn't spell that out in the rules clearly because he assumed his audience would all already understand that style of wargame.

Jeff opines that Tunnels & Trolls was actually the first RPG as we know them, because Ken St. Andre and virtually every other non-wargamer didn't get what OD&D actually was and was trying to do, and that this certainly includes all the West Coasters.

Of course, as I already pointed out, this theory runs afoul of the actual example of play we see in OD&D, and the lack of faction/PvP style play in the LBBs. It overlooks that Gary was in active dialogue with the early non-wargamer D&D adopters in forums like Alarums & Excursions and as far as I'm aware never wrote to them, "Oh, and after characters get a few levels under their belts they should start splitting off and playing independently and becoming rivals to one another."

And it overlooks what kind of adventures TSR actually designed, ran at tournaments and conventions for OD&D, etc. If Gary & co wanted OD&D to be (at least some of the time) a Diplomacy/Braunstein-style competitive game where the players are all plotting against each other, they certainly could have published at least one such scenario, given, their own extensive experience playing Diplomacy, and their awareness of Tony Bath's Hyperborea game and of Western Gunfight. As Jeffro cites, Boot Hill actually does describe a style of play more like Braunstein and Western Gunfight.

 

[Jahydin]

From the players’ and the PCs’ standpoint, any role-playing game is a group endeavor. Individual success is secondary to the success of the group, for only through group achievements can the quality of a campaign be measured. - Gary Gygax​