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

And that guy

[Anonymous Coward]

... And that guy stole it from something else, which got it from some other dude, who took it from the Bible, which stole it from the pagans, who got it from Ancient Aliens.

Re:And that guy

[Anonymous Coward]

Ancient Aliens who got it from time travelers from the future, who got it from the library of congress of The Disney States of the Western Hemisphere, who got it from Disney Games, who got it from Parkbro, who got is from Hasbro, who got it from Wizards of the Coast, who got it from TSR, who got it from Gygax.

And...

[__aaclcg7560]

Shakespeare stole everything he read for his plays, including making up new words for the English language. In short, so what?

Re:And...

[mujadaddy]

Headline is pure bait: the blog poster makes no generalization such as "swiping", as wargaming rules were in constant flux, even from session to session.

Re:And...

[space_jake]

It wasn't swiping. Swiping is clearly defined on page 125. The ability Gygax used mimiced this power but isn't defined as swiping and therefore not subject to defined swiping rules.

Re:And...

[PlayingAtTheWorld]

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.

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.

We get it

[JackieBrown]

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.

We get it. Commercial is bad. Everything should be non-profit. We should all make the same wage. We should all have the same stuff.

Doesn't matter anyway

[Forgefather]

This is ridiculous. You can't patent game mechanics and you can't get copyright on something as general as 'Fireball'. This is how the sharing of ideas was intended to work not some illicit theft of ideas.

But the REAL question on all our minds is...

[LaurenCates]

...how does one get to be a game historian and get paid for it?

Re:But the REAL question on all our minds is...

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

I think you have to start as a Rules Lawyer and work your way up from there.

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?

[cfalcon]

Maybe read the article?

Fireball in Dungeons and Dragons is a particular spell with particular rules, and it has ABSOLUTELY BEEN COPIED STRAIGHT in many cases since then.

If you are disputing that Chainmail took "fire ball" from this guy, read the article- the rules specifics are way too much to be a coincidence (including the specifics of saving throws for heroes, and how they interact with Dragons).

If you are disputing that most of the modern gaming fireballs descend from Dungeons and Dragons / Chainmail / This guy, I don't know what to tell you, other than this is very unlikely. The idea of fire being used to attack is universal in human culture and mythology, but the specific visualization in question has some pretty clear pedigree. They aren't talking about the generic idea of an attack with fire, after all.

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.

Re:Where Was Leonard During All This?

[gstoddart]

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.

Good artists

[110010001000]

Good artists copy. Great artists steal. And they get all the chicks, too.

Re:I thought we all knew this already?

[MightyMartian]

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.

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:Fuck Gygax!

[Sir_Eptishous]

That's why I only play Pathfinder.

So thats what happens when you fail a Wisdom check...