NOW LIVE! Into the Woods--new character species, eerie monsters, and haunting villains to populate the woodlands of your D&D games.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mannahnin" data-source="post: 9664778" data-attributes="member: 7026594">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 <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/brosr.691184/post-9481517" target="_blank">previously-quoted claims </a>about a "cabal" of undesirables working against his cultural preferences.</blockquote>

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