Quote from: Spinachcat;470447Explain!

Well for instance (still from memory) the game explains how some classes of characters, or this or that rule, came in early in the campaign, and others later. You'd have to make a choice as to which classes you want to use in your campaign, and which ones you won't, depending on the feel you want out of the game play.

Beyond that, it's a game that basically gives you building blocks extracted from a study of Arneson's material, quotes, memories from the players and so on. It's not a bullet-proof game system with everything smoothed out for you. There are gaping holes in the rules that would drive Frank crazy. At times during my first reading it felt to me like these were just it : disjointed mechanics that were not necessarily all used at one moment in time during the course of the campaign. You'd have to study the subject of the FFC on your own to get to know what kind of feel you want out of your game, and basically separate the wheat from the chaff on that basis.

Quote from: Settembrini;470453If it is the Sean! I think it is, he is not talking out of his ass. Welcome, btw.

Hi...and no, sorry, I'm the other Sean unfortunately, the thick working class bloke.

D@D - the 'chop 'til you drop' warriors, the wizards who spend 99% of their time researching spells, the Elfin song magic, the ability to play trolls and robots, the importance of suceeding on your morale check - these are a few of the things that I remember. But mostly I forgot stuff, which proved vital to my stab at ur-gaming.

Over time I found the less I consulted the D@D rules the better my games probably became, ruling freestyle - more alive to the situation and the group at hand. I hate to use the phrase 'Arnesonian'  but the gameplay during those sessions seemed to be what I was looking for when I bought the rules.

Settembrini - if I could be so bold, I recommend Adventurer Conqueror King instead - it's grounded in economics which inform the rules from equipment to domain building to mass combat. From what I've read on this board I think you would relish the complexity.

Stuff like this is where the OSR starts to look suspiciously like the Forge... people aren't playing this as an RPG, they're playing it as a simulation of some imagined history of RPGs.

Its retarded.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;470534Stuff like this is where the OSR starts to look suspiciously like the Forge... people aren't playing this as an RPG, they're playing it as a simulation of some imagined history of RPGs.

I don't know about "people". I got the game to add to the repertoire of possibilities at my game table. (1) to give me ideas of house rules for O/AD&D games, and (2) to run it itself if the game pleased me. Verdict : I would run it with the right table, that is, people who would be fine with rulings on the spot, with a strong grip of the GM on the rules, what they mean, how they come into play, and so on, people who would just play the make-believe and not take the rules apart... these kinds of tables.

Quote from: RPGPundit;470534Stuff like this is where the OSR starts to look suspiciously like the Forge... people aren't playing this as an RPG, they're playing it as a simulation of some imagined history of RPGs.

Its retarded.

RPGPundit

I'm not digging at you, I am in fact I think agreeing with you when I say this is the same reason I really dislike Hackmaster - or at least Hackmaster 4e, AKA AD&D + 2nd edition + MAD Magazine.  The thrust of the game never seemed to be "Hey we're sneaking AD&D back out under the wire" and more "Hey let's metagame how people used to play games, it's so wacky!  Look the DM is trying to kill our characters!  I'll be the angry fat guy gamer, you can be the artsy role-player type gamer!" (I'd use KotD character names but I don't follow the strip).

Quote from: RPGPundit;470534they're playing it as a simulation of some imagined history of RPGs.

There is a lot of interest in Dave Arneson in the OSR mostly because we have so much from Gary and so little from Dave. And there is even chatter that what we do have from Dave wasn't really Dave, but just his notes molded into something coherent.

I was lucky enough to game once with Dave, but equally interesting was meeting people who played regularly with Dave in the 70s. They raved about this guy's crazy creativity and nobody could answer why Dave didn't put most of his thoughts on paper.  About a decade ago, I encouraged two guys who gamed with Dave and/or Gary to get their memories into some kind of record, but so far I haven't seen anything.  Neither was a paragon of health and I wouldn't be surprised that one or both are dead by now.

I'd love to meet someone who took Dave's classes at Full Sail University. I wonder how he was as a teacher and what exactly he taught.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;470587I'm not digging at you, I am in fact I think agreeing with you when I say this is the same reason I really dislike Hackmaster - or at least Hackmaster 4e, AKA AD&D + 2nd edition + MAD Magazine.  The thrust of the game never seemed to be "Hey we're sneaking AD&D back out under the wire" and more "Hey let's metagame how people used to play games, it's so wacky!  Look the DM is trying to kill our characters!  I'll be the angry fat guy gamer, you can be the artsy role-player type gamer!" (I'd use KotD character names but I don't follow the strip).

This is some good shit. You should post it at YDIS.

Quote from: RPGPundit;470534Stuff like this is where the OSR starts to look suspiciously like the Forge... people aren't playing this as an RPG, they're playing it as a simulation of some imagined history of RPGs.

How is that like the Forge? Not sarcasm, just not picking up on the analogy.

Quote from: Tavis;470779How is that like the Forge? Not sarcasm, just not picking up on the analogy.

Forge games aren't about roleplaying, they're about pseudo-intellectual exercises in "addressing themes", and generally feeling pretentious about how clever you're being.  OSR games, when taken to the kind of extreme we see in this case, are about an almost fetishistic "pseudo-historical re-enactment" of an imaginary nostalgic past.

In other words, both aren't so much about playing a game itself, but about the meta-experience and the "feeling" you get from being part of the "scene".

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;470816Forge games aren't about roleplaying, they're about pseudo-intellectual exercises in "addressing themes", and generally feeling pretentious about how clever you're being.  OSR games, when taken to the kind of extreme we see in this case, are about an almost fetishistic "pseudo-historical re-enactment" of an imaginary nostalgic past.

In other words, both aren't so much about playing a game itself, but about the meta-experience and the "feeling" you get from being part of the "scene".

RPGPundit

Or about playing old games they like, instead of newer games they don't like.

Although a few people do seem to be more advocating a movement than a style of gaming.

Quote from: RPGPundit;470816Forge games aren't about roleplaying, they're about pseudo-intellectual exercises in "addressing themes", and generally feeling pretentious about how clever you're being.  OSR games, when taken to the kind of extreme we see in this case, are about an almost fetishistic "pseudo-historical re-enactment" of an imaginary nostalgic past.

In other words, both aren't so much about playing a game itself, but about the meta-experience and the "feeling" you get from being part of the "scene".

RPGPundit

Ever Play shatranj?  How about ludus latrunculi or hnefetafl?  Historic gaming has its followers simply because it is fun and different.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;470176Tavis, playing a game based on ahistorical premises and research might help you learn how to be a better player, but that still doesn't recommend it as a reliable source. I'd be less critical of the project if it didn't wrap itself in claims of authenticity. This is a concern not only because I'm sick of echo-chamber viral hype that emphasizes acquiring games and "getting them under one's belt", so to speak, but also because gaming discourse is hampered by people credulously citing "authorities" that are filled with speculation and inaccuracy.

Elliot, I am a professional archaeologist and scholar and have poored as much critical reaserch into the early days of gaming as I would any research project.

Dragons at Dawn is not a thesis, however, it is a game.  A fair amount of the evolution of the ruleset can be found in the Blackmoor and Dragons at Dawn subforums on ODD74 http://odd74.proboards.com/index.cgi and while the game booklet is liberally peppered with quotes and caveats, I do not specifically state where each and every mechanic came from (but will be more than happy to answer questions).  

The game emulates early Arnesonian play in several stages - sometimes this is exact, as with the listed hit points at various levels or experience points required for fighters.  Sometimes this is creative expansion, as with some of the spell descriptions of which only the name, not the mechanic, survived.

In most all casses with Arnesonian rules it is a matter of, "at one point".

I'll give you an example - Protection points.  Dave used these to stock his dungeons.  He gives a description of how to calculate them in the FFC.  I have given two different but similar interpretations of how to use these - one based on what Dave said, another based on what Dave actually did.  If you look at the PP given in the FFC for various dungeons and dungeon sections done at different times in the Blackmoor campaign and you calculate the PP from the monsters present, it becomes apparent that none of the PP's were calculated using the method Arneson described.  In the case of the Glendower dungeon, for example, it was a random roll x 100.

What I'm saying simply is that if you are looking for a pure "ur-game" there never was one.  The closest you could come to that is running Blackmoor as a Braunstein, which is exactly what it was at the start.  Dragons at Dawn is a "mash-up" of Arnesons ever changing rules from the early 70's, where we have them, or recreated mimic mechanics where we don't have exact methods but we do have verbal descriptions.  Further the game is divided into the basic original style where only Fighters and Wizards "classes" existed and there were only three levels (flunky, hero, superhero), to an enhanced version of the game as it developed '72-74 with real class differentiations including Priests, Sages, Merchants, and Thief Assasins.  Some of the mechanics for these classes can be teased out of the Supplement II material and FFC, but Priests and especially Merchants, had to be recreated, using the other classes as models.  The priest class brings up another issue in that I couldn't legally use the classic D&D "turn undead" table, which fairly obviously originates with Arneson, so I used different mechanic based on the Morale system (itself drawn from DGUTS).

I'll give another example - magic swords:  Swords were the first and most important magic item in Blackmoor.  The FFC gives two different listing for swords - the first from circa 1971 the second is the original draft copy of the D&D magic swords rules from 1973 (discussed here http://odd74.proboards.com/index.cgi)
In Dragons at Dawn I give a method for creating magic swords that produces swords like the originals of the 1971 list, but also incoporates the familiar and very Arnesonian mechanics of Ego and Intelligence from his 1973 rules.

Combat, and how it was handled, is perhaps the most interesting of all the topics involved.  There's some pretty good evidence that Dave Arneson invented the familiar combat table in D&D, but using percentiles instead of d20.  But it is really clear that handling combat was an ever evolving thing with Dave.  At one point he was using the CHAINMAIL fantasy table, and I used hit probabilities derived from that table to develop a HD vs HD table (instead of monster vs monster) that takes into account the combat Values that Arneson developed and follows the modifying steps as they have been related in the FFC, by original Players, and in AiF.  In Dragons at Dawn: Supplement 1, I provide some alternate tables and numbers based on information that came to light after Dragons at Dawn was written.  In no case can I say, "Oh yes, here is the table and method Dave used in june of '72", we just don't have that fine grained of info for some of these things, but the tables and methods I give, do operate in the same fashion as the lost originals and follow the guidlines we are given for early Blackmoor play.

Quote from: Aldarron;471058What I'm saying simply is that if you are looking for a pure "ur-game" there never was one.

This has been exactly my point, all along. Or rather, there's no way to represent the "ur-game" as a set of fixed rules. But everything you have to say here runs counter to the promotion of Dragons at Dawn, e.g., as "The First Fantasy Game System", right there on the cover. The words chosen in the blurb ("entirely consistent with Arneson's original") also give an impression of authenticity while technically making a far weaker claim. And I don't think it's entirely a surprise that the word has gotten out that D@D "is" Arneson's game, or that D@D recreates or reconstruct Arneson's game. Again here we see the claim that D@D is a "recreation". But as I commented in my followup, what importance can D@D have as a recreation when the supposed essence of Arneson's gaming was its ephemeralness?

Quote from: RPGPundit;470534Stuff like this is where the OSR starts to look suspiciously like the Forge... people aren't playing this as an RPG, they're playing it as a simulation of some imagined history of RPGs.

Its retarded.

Worse, there seems to be a "RPGnet darling" phenomenon going on, where every new month some olde schoole clone(tm) heartbreaker game comes out and everyone jumps on the bandwagon to argue its more "authentic" than the other 500 versions already out there; until the next month anyways, when the game is forgotten and attention moves on to the new favorite.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;471073This has been exactly my point, all along. Or rather, there's no way to represent the "ur-game" as a set of fixed rules. But everything you have to say here runs counter to the promotion of Dragons at Dawn, e.g., as "The First Fantasy Game System", right there on the cover. The words chosen in the blurb ("entirely consistent with Arneson's original") also give an impression of authenticity while technically making a far weaker claim. And I don't think it's entirely a surprise that the word has gotten out that D@D "is" Arneson's game, or that D@D recreates or reconstruct Arneson's game. Again here we see the claim that D@D is a "recreation". But as I commented in my followup, what importance can D@D have as a recreation when the supposed essence of Arneson's gaming was its ephemeralness?

Eliot, history itself is a reconstruction.  The retro clones are all reconstructive projects.  Dragons at Dawn does not even claim to be a retro clone and is in fact specifically promoted as a retro tribute. I get that you personally are not interested in reconstructive projects, but clearly when original documentation is unclear or fragmentary, a reconstruction is found desireable by many people for many different reasons.  Reconstructions have no authenticity by definition and no such claim was ever made or implied, quite the opposite in fact, and I suggest you shouldn't read more into what is written than what is actually written.
However, Dragons at Dawn is indeed entirely consistent with Arnesons methodology, it is his systemics, (the first fantasy system*) if not always his exact rules.  The system very much incorporates the ephemeralness of the game in the early years as an approach to play.  Guidebook would be a much more apt description than rulebook, and those guidlines are fairly simple - very simple if you stick to the basic game, further, the rules are deliberately written to be used or ignored as desired, sometimes with known variations suggested in the text.  Dragons at Dawn gives people a chance to experience and experiment with an Arsonian approach to the game that Became D&D.  Some I suppose would consider that the games "importance".

*BTW this phrase is a tribute to the cover of the FFC, where the phrase "Fantasy System not included" appears.