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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.
... 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.
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.
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.
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
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.
"There are lies, there are damn lies, and there are statistics"
...how does one get to be a game historian and get paid for it?
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
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.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
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.
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.
That's why I only play Pathfinder.
So thats what happens when you fail a Wisdom check...
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
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.