Thread by @JohnsonJeffro

It's come to my attention that some of you meatheads lack a critical appreciation for the beauty of the Chainmail game that spawned not just D&D, but also all of modern gaming. Well I am here to help. Also to insult you a little. Because this stuff really should be obvious.

If you grew up playing any TSR edition of the D&D game, you have ALREADY BEEN PLAYING THIS GAME YOUR ENTIRE LIFE. Exposure to Chainmail should therefore be like meeting with an old friend and having a revelation he's had a rich double life no one ever told you about.

When you first learned D&D, you had to settle for fragments of a real game taken out of context which had little to no elaboration. But Chainmail has the missing rules that cause everything to snap into focus. It is the full cadence that answers the half cadence of D&D.

Obviously, Chainmail provides the actual miniatures gaming context for the combat rules which were ultimately played theater of the mind style as was intended. More than that, original D&D was-- properly understood-- a SUPPLEMENT for Chainmail. It says so right on the cover!

Chainmail gives a lightweight system that allows 2 players to quickly and easily play out LARGE medieval miniatures battles. D&D provides the campaign framework that will GENERATE those battles. This is of course the domain game which role-players universally ignore to this day.

Chainmail elucidates strange or broken-looking D&D rules that have baffled you for decades. Further, once you grasp its principles, you will be able to play the parts of the game which your teenaged self dreamed of realizing but which no DM you ever met could have accommodated.

Now, I am not exaggerating when I tell you that what we are talking about here is THE MOST IMPORTANT DISCOVERY IN GAMING. The reason for this is that wargaming and role-playing NEVER SHOULD HAVE BEEN SEPARATED OUT INTO TWO DISTINCT GENRES. Let me explain.

The dirty secret of wargaming is that you can buy these great looking well designed games and spend hours poring over them... but ain't nobody ever going to want to play these things with you. Take a hint! THIS IS WHY EVERY GAME HAS A SOLITAIRE RATING MARKED ON THE BACK.

The reality of role-playing is that people either buy rpgs just to read them, they play fake non-game variants of rpgs where players have little to no autonomy, or else they run very short-lived campaigns that just peter out and die when people eventually stop showing up.

At its inception, D&D was not like EITHER contemporary wargaming or roleplaying. CAMPAIGNS DID NOT STOP. They supported larger numbers of people with more diverse gameplay modes for longer periods of time with very little of the type of "support" that people deem essential today.

There is something about what Gary and Dave were doing way back that was just phenomenally successful at the table. People are shocked when the old rulebooks suggest campaigns with 50 people BECAUSE THEY KNOW THAT NOTHING ANYONE IS DOING TODAY CAN SCALE UP THAT HIGH.

You should be able to intuit why. The best games of the 8bit era were the two player ones, because your friend provided infinitely better competition than any puzzle or artificial intelligence. But role-players today shun this type of engagement in favor of cooperative play ONLY.

Meanwhile a raw contest between two wargamers is hilariously uninspiring. For one thing, somebody's feelings are guaranteed to be hurt! And without the balancing effect of a broader ongoing campaign framework, an individual battle has no real significance or meaning.

What happens when you conceive of D&D as a rule set for FANTASTIC MEDIEVAL WARGAMES CAMPAIGNS? The outcome of every battle becomes of interest to even non-wargamers. Every battle influences every subsequent battle. And every player can influence these battles in surprising ways!

Assemble your Chainmail army. Play D&D the objectively correct way. Experience a REAL campaign where people clamor to play with you-- one they WON'T LET YOU stop running!

This is the answer to all your gaming dreams. Glories like unto those of Blackmoor and Greyhawk await!

Anyone that applies the ideas I discuss will observe the same astonishing dynamics emerge in actual play that the #BrOSR enjoys. Your campaigns last longer because they are anti-fragile and self-sustaining and players are more invested overall.

"Does [Game X] do the same thing?" No it doesn't. I have unpacked self-evident revelations about D&D and gaming in general that NO ONE HAS COMMENTED ON OVER THE PAST 40 YEARS. This is a huge paradigm change and all game designers need to catch up to me.

Melee is one of the greatest games that nobody will play with you. So elegant! But playing well requires the mastery of a couple of nuances in the rules that will offend anyone you actually use them on. Melee proves that wargames are intrinsically boring

Well, if you want a tour of the finer points of the Chainmail game I can do that. But I will not cease to remind you that nothing about it matters until you play it as part of a campaign. Dave Arneson's solution to that problem is why Chainmail matters.

What happened was that Dave Arneson combined Chainmail with what was called a Braunstein. This is covered in very fine detail in a documentary which I recommend everyone to watch. The information was simply not available before its release.

The Braunstein went like this:

1. Have each player take on a significant role
2. Referee talks to each player one at a time
3. Players talk to each other while waiting!
4. Use this to add background and color to a battle you have planned
5. Playing the battle is optional!

The original Braunstein is an extremely powerful concept. There is nothing to it, but it demonstrates the confidence that the grognards had that playable scenarios could just magically emerge from play. Via freeform roleplaying no less!

When I applied Braunstein methods to my own AD&D campaign it produced multiple engrossing Chainmail-scale conflicts. If you could not imagine how to run a D&D domain game back in the day, THIS is a key concept that gets it off the ground. It just works.
jeffro.wordpress.com/2021/07/31/the…

Everyone else takes a STATIC view of gaming. Play wargame scenario. Play adventure module. The wargaming never interacts with role-playing and vice versa. Oh, everything has to be worked out, designed, produced in both cases, too. Real improvisation and collaboration is rare.

But the grognards of old had no problem moving between the modes of play of role-play and wargame, even with their awful slapdash rule sets. They didn't need any of the products we have today because the independent interactions of the players is what created the excitement.

This probably doesn't make sense.

"Just combine role-playing and wargaming" -- Which no one in game design has even done in 40 years.

"Just play the D&D domain game" -- Which no one actually does.

"Make a Braunstein, man" -- Which is not even a game!

Trust me, it works!

The proven way to start doing this NOW is this:

1) Adopt strict 1:1 time in your D&D campaign
2) Give 3-4 people that CAN'T attend sessions domain level roles to play (See AD&D MM for examples)
3) Be prepared to resolve Chainmail type battles via Twitter

There doesn't HAVE to be anything. My July game was even run without any sessions. People with player characters insisted on playing, too, even when I didn't invite them or intend to entertain them. Crazy fun stuff started happening IN SPITE OF ME.

Anyone that has run rpgs seriously knows that a rich world can spontaneously emerge from the interaction of random encounters and player decisions. But I am telling you that Braunstein techniques can turn ANYTHING into playable game with minimal effort.

2 things happened around 1980:

Wargamers mostly eliminated the referee from their gaming in favor of an endless stream of unplayed products.

Role-players gave up their ability to manage multiple independent actors within the same campaign. They are captives of the "spotlight".

If you want to explore bringing these two streams of gaming back together to create self-sustaining original campaigns of your own devising, Chainmail is a GREAT choice. It is the game that originally made all this possible and it fits well with something you likely already do.

I know this sounds daunting. What I want you to know is that YOUR game will work far better than you think it can. You don't need a game designer to make it for you. The grognards of old KNEW you could just blithely whip up an original campaign with no handholding. LET'S DO IT!

Feast your eyes on this. I don't see how you could not want to just play this RIGHT NOW. Cavalry, longbowmen, and catapults. Historical flourishes like the Turks, the Spanish, and the Anglo-Saxons. If this doesn't fire your imagination, you are beyond help!

And that's weird. Armored foot get a move of 6 inches. The heavy foot get a move of 9 inches. And the longbowmen get a move of 12 inches. Hmm.... Something's familiar about those numbers. Oh yeah! This all maps directly to what your Basic D&D set would have told you to do!!

I'll just go ahead and tell you, D&D combat is not a good fit for man to man combat as every single game designer that's looked at it will tell you. But the reason it's so terrible is because it it optimized for handling large masses of troops that move in columns and lines.

This is how you know the D&D combat rules were not intended/expected to be played with miniatures: YOU HAVE TO GO ALL THE WAY BACK TO CHAINMAIL TO GET RULES FOR FACING CHANGES. Also, fleeing parties in AD&D must take a round of free attacks because of this about face rule here.

And check out these sweet fatigue rules. Yet another thing dropped in the D&D rule sets which other designers added back in theirs. It really should tell you something that D&D expected to work just fine without all these rules that are essential in actual tactical combat games.

There is so much here. Light cavalry moving just within range to fire and then wheeling away. Ranks upon ranks for archers filling the sky with arrows. And stationary troops firing ranged weapons just before they're charged. How could you live without this?

And oh my gosh these catapult rules. Not one game rules from the past forty years has been half as fun is this. Think for a second. D&D games today rarely feature either cavalry charges or catapults. WHAT HAPPENED THAT THESE THINGS STOPPED BEING A PART OF FANTASY GAMING?!