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.

Comments

Idea owners unite?

[s.petry]

The summary pretty much says it all. The person want's to claim that the "Fireball" used in every game from 1970 to present including all of the big MMOs was from some guy who GG stole from. WTF? In reality, the Fireball goes back many many thousands of years. The "gods" threw fire and lightning. Shot was thrown as well as spears, so guess which one was the spear and which was the shot?

People want to push this idea that if you change a label you somehow "invented" something. Society must owe something to somebody at all times. "You didn't make that!" right? Sheesh. The cynic in me just ignores this concept after lashing out at the idiocy.

Re:Idea owners unite?

[Ghostworks]

The summary uses the most stilted possible working for the facts presented in the article. (In other words, the summary is accurate, it just has a much more accusatory tone. Also, the article is 2 pages printed: people can stop being lazy and just read it.)

But you, petry, are also putting on blinders. The D&D fireball is what WoW and Magic cribbed from, because it's the famous fireball. (And if by "the gods" you just mean Zeus, then yes, things were thrown: lightning, not fire.) D&D linked fireball and wizards in peoples' minds. Chainmail is the basis of D&D, and now we find Chainmail cribbed from another game, which is interesting. Nobody is trying to claim ownership or copyright or patent or whatever the people who only read the summary seem to believe. Certainly no one is looking for a settlement or royalty or free Arby's sandwich or whatever your feel angry about them "wanting".

Here are the facts:

* The mechanical roots of D&D are Chainmail. Chainmail's Fantasy appendix is more limited in scope to Tolkien than D&D would become. At one point Gygax called the Fantasy rules that became the most popular part of it, "an afterthought". Until now, the line of thought was that the wizard's fireball and lightning (the only spells they had in Chainmail) were respective fantasy versions of Medieval catapult and Napoleonic cannon rules. It is illuminating to find otherwise.

* The mechanics of the Fantasy appendix use similar terms, identical mechanics, and generally numbers within +/-1 of the rules of Patt. It's directly cribbed. The other author of Chainmail, Jeff Perren, is on the subscription list for the very issue where Patt's rules are printed. There's no real doubt.

* Gary Gygax did take from everything without attribution. In Dragon he presented aerial combat for D&D as "Battle in the Skies", never mentioning the rules are identical to those in Avalon Hill's "Fight in the Skies" board wargame. The thief class of later D&D was invented by Wagner of the Aero Hobbies crew and shared with Gygax by and Switzer of the same group: he later rolled his own version to market, but to many on the outside (and inside) it looked like he just stole it whole because there was no attribution. Pretty much the only time he did attribute is when he didn't want to type out the rules anew, such as when D&D refers the reader to Chainmail for combat rules and to the Outdoor Survival boardgame for overland journeys. This is how the hobby worked back then, and this friction is what happens when a friendly hobby becomes a real business.

Is *anyone* surprised by this?

[tekrat]

When you steal from a lot of sources that's labeled "creativity".

George Lucas couldn't get the rights to Flash Gordon, so he steals from Akira Kurosawa, some WWII movies, and a few few other bits and pieces and we get Star Wars.

Hanna Barbera wanted to do a "Jack Armstrong" series, but they couldn't get the rights. So, they fiddled with the formula a bit, changed a few names, and we got Jonny Quest, the killer animated series that influenced a generation and then some.

Frankly, if old Gary stole some ideas from here and there, that's very much BAU for how stuff goes from underground to commercial success.

Re:And...

[TWX]

Sounds to me like the idea of refining a set of rules, then someone else looking at those rules and refining a new set of rules based on what they saw. I admit that I am not a tabletop gamer, but when I've been around where people have been playing I haven't seen them use inches in-game as units. I've seen some battletech tabletop gaming where distance and vector were employed, but converted to units to scale in the game rather than in human terms.

Another consideration is how codified the gaming rules were prior to Gygax's part. If Patt's rules were not hard fixed rules but were more along the lines of guidelines or house rules that spread organically through play with random people, then while it could be argued that Gygax shouldn't have owned any intellectual rights over those rules, Patt also might not have been able to claim rights either.

In some ways look at games like Tag or Hide and Go Seek, or any other of a multitude of kids games where guidelines exist but hard-fast rules are only adopted when the games commence. Depending on how Patt's rules spread, they may have been a lot more along those lines.