This, right here, goes to the heart of the current "Team Gygax or Team Arneson" nature of the disagreement among D&D historians. It's a debate that has been around for quite some time among those who look into the game's history: if you read Lawrence Schick's
Heroic Worlds, published in 1991, you'll find an essay from Gary Gygax himself talking about how
Chainmail was fundamental to the development of D&D, and another essay from Dave Arneson about how
Chainmail had very little influence on the development of D&D! In more recent characterizations, Shannon Appelcline, author of
Designers & Dragons agrees with Gygax that
Chainmail played a pivotal role in the creation of D&D (and calls those who disagree "Chainmail denialists"), whereas Paul Stormberg disagrees. This is
the dividing issue among D&D aficionados!
I’ll relate what Bob Meyer told the group when I played
Blackmoor with him in late October 2017. This jibes with what Arneson had on his website (look in the Wayback Machine for the archive):
Meyer was playing a hero, and his hero came upon a bridge under which lived a troll. Meyer, figuring that his character is a hero and should act heroic, had his character charge at the troll. Thus Arneson broke out
Chainmail and rolled a bunch of dice. End result: Meyer’s character bit the dust on the first action.
This didn’t sit well with the players, especially Meyer. He skipped out on
Blackmoor games for some time (I think he did play in the Napoleonic games with this group in this timeframe, but don’t know for sure). After several weeks (I think this is spring 1971 for some reason), he came back, and Arneson no longer used
Chainmail for combat in
Blackmoor.
From this, we can deduce a few things. First is that nobody likes to go down in the first round. Well,
duh, but that’s the nature of
Chainmail: roll a bunch of d6s, loser has to take away figures based on he and the other player rolled. This makes sense for wargaming since each player has a lot of units, but for role playing games, the individual figure doesn’t make sense as the unit for attrition as the player has but one character. From a game design standpoint, this rewards the weaker combatant, since it makes the stronger combatant highly vulnerable to one bad roll. This isn’t fun, and player characters make more rolls than the monsters over the course of a campaign. This is likely the origin of hit points.
Arneson swapping out a whole combat system based on one bad set of rolls underscores something else:
a role playing game is more than its combat resolution system. That gets at the crux of why Gygax thinks
Chainmail is a big development: if the combat system is what’s important, then Gygax, coauthor of that combat system, did make an essential part of that game, and thus his contribution predates Arneson’s and thus Arneson only did some refocusing of the game. From Arneson’s standpoint, the combat resolution system was just one part of the game, something he could replace with little hassle. It could be
Chainmail, but that didn’t work so out it goes, but the rest of the game stays the same.
Daniel Boggs did once point out that there’s more to
Chainmail than it’s combat resolution system: namely, it’s spell and monster lists. Arneson likely kept using those, which again brings up Gygax’s argument. This also has a counter, which is that those lists are mostly common to fantasy literature, especially the monsters, so it’s mostly just a list of those game elements. (The monsters in
Monsters and Treasure are almost all from mythology or literature, with almost no original creations.) I don’t think this is Gygax’s argument, though I find it better than the combat resolution system being key. Arneson almost surely did use the monsters and spells in
Chainmail long after Meyer’s bad day with the troll.
The ease with which Arneson could swap the combat system leads me to think that he did use
Chainmail in combat one more time: late 1972 in Lake Geneva. This makes sense, since he wants to show his game to Gygax and Gygax co-wrote
Chainmail so you don’t need to explain to the player what you’re doing for combat if you use the combat system the player wrote. But as both participants in the troll under the bridge scenario agree on the specifics, the basics of
Chainmail denialism seem to be true, absent other evidence. Yes, Arneson had good reason to downplay
Chainmail and Gygax had good reason to play up
Chainmail.
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