My Life As A Gamer: Peterson's Past-Delving Reveals More Secrets

The man behind Playing at the World put up a new post over the weekend, which you can find here. It has a promising start:

When it comes to unearthing the influences behind Chainmail (1971), Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren's medieval rules with a fantasy twist, you need to cast a wide net. Many authors (myself included) have been guilty of singling out Tony Bath as the primary influence behind the mass combat rules in Chainmail, but that has always been something of an oversimplification. There are elements of Perren's medieval rules which drew directly from a 1957 archery system proposed by Charles Sweet, one that recurs in the Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association (LGTSA) rules up to the publication of Chainmail. A clear connection can be observed in the values in this chart from Sweet's rules, originally published in War Game Digest Vol. 1 No. 4.

Much like Jeffro Johnson's Appendix N, Jon Peterson's Playing at the World throws a light on the early days of tabletop RPGs generally and Dungeons & Dragons in particular. Since he published that tome he's been keeping up at the tie-in blog of the same name. The impact that Jeffro's had with Science Fiction has not be identical with tabletop RPGs, but you can see something slower--yet similar--going on and Peterson's role has been to show how the old ways works.

Posts like these are why.

Tabletop RPG design is a cargo cult. No one working in the business knows what they are doing or why because they don't understand what they are reacting against--and most design decisions stem from a reaction to an old game mechanic or practice--so they're blind men leading the blind. The aforementioned tome, and posts like this, remove that blindness by putting decisions into context and connecting what we see in the rulebooks to their origins. Once you know how something came to be, you see where the decision to use that thing came from; you learn how the game is intended to be played.

Once you know how the people who made the game everyone's riffed off of for over 40 years, then you can actually figure out how to properly make your own rulings for your home game without fucking things up down the road- and once you get that, making wholly new games that actually find audiences and become juggernauts in their own right becomes not only possible, but inevitable. In short, this is how you can become a competent game designer- something this field is sorely lacking in, especially for the major properties.

Regress Harder. It's not just for the genre fiction field, folks. Good gaming returns by going that route also.