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Game Historian: Gygax Swiped Fantasy Rules From a Forgotten 1970 Wargame (blogspot.com)
An anonymous reader writes: According to game historian Jon Peterson, Gary Gygax's Chainmail fantasy wargame (which became the basis for Dave Arneson's Blackmoor and later Dungeons & Dragons) borrowed heavily from an earlier set of rules published by Leonard Patt, a long-forgotten member of the New England Wargamers Association. Among the appropriations were rules for heroes and wizards including the iconic fireball spell, which ended up in everything from Magic: the Gathering to World of Warcraft, as well as monster rules for dragons, orcs, ents, and other Tolkien creations. Gygax had something of a reputation for borrowing things without giving proper credit, and this latest revelation shows how the open and collaborative environment of early gaming was quickly exploited for commercial purposes.
Maybe he did, and maybe it wasn't something he thought as entirely unusual?
I remember reading Dragon magazine and going to the stores with the little lead figurines to paint ... this stuff was self-referential and constantly incorporating things from one another.
Cartoons pulled in things from multiple sources.
I sure as heck wasn't aware of all of it, but it seemed like at the time it was more of a fan-driven "hey isn't this cool" kind of thing, and the cross-pollination was kind of expected.
And then it became greedy bastards like Wizards of the Coast who tried to decree like they'd invented the whole damned thing in a vacuum, when nothing could be further from the truth.
These things were still being iterated and adapted.
Acting like these things sprang into existence without the stuff around them is idiotic, unless of course you're a lawyer arguing copyright for someone who just bought something someone else built.
Making it sound like Gygax ripped someone off is probably a little unfair to what actually happened.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Indeed. The history of roleplaying games is fairly well know, and everyone who knows the history of the genre knows that tabletop war games provided the initial inspiration, not to mention a number of mechanics used by Gygax and other early formulators of RPG rules. As I recall, the whole hex map scheme common to many roleplaying games, particularly from the 70s, was lifted entirely for war gaming. Indeed, I've often felt the original D&D was sort of the C of roleplaying games, something of a halfway point between the war games and the later more fully formed FRPGs like AD&D.
At any rate, game rules in all gaming genres freely steal off of each other, whether the rules are copyrighted or not. It's how all games evolve.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I wrote this article (sorry, I have no karma here, so I imagine this comment may plummet into the void), and I am frustrated to see the clickbaity way it's presented here. Wargaming was a very open and collaborative environment where ideas moved quite fluidly: this is the fun of studying it, actually, as tracing ideas over time is quite a challenge. The message I was trying to get across here is that Chainmail, to say nothing of the many, many games that built on its system and setting, owes an unacknowledged debt to Patt. I think this is big news for people who care about the origins of gaming today.
The debt isn't the idea of a fireball or whatever; fireballs are something that have long existed in fact and fiction. But identifying the original fantasy game to feature the fireball mechanic is an important historical question. The fireball that Patt seems to have invented has a lot of very specific features: it explodes at range (24 inches in game), you get a saving throw against it, but no save if you're a dragon as it instead drives you away for one turn, and so on. These are all system mechanics that Chainmail used, and which thus inspired D&D. That we owe some amount of the credit for that to someone other than the stated authors of Chainmail is noteworthy.
It would be like if we hadn't known that Shakespeare had relied on Holinshed for his stories, and someone had just now proved it by a textual analysis. Well, okay, Chainmail isn't Shakespeare. But you get the idea. Shakespeare didn't "swipe" Holinshed, he built on that narrative and other influences to make something new and amazing. Everything is a remix. But that makes discovering what got remixed exactly all the more important.