Tuesday, July 27, 2021

White Dwarf: Issue #2

Issue #2 of White Dwarf (August/September 1977) opens with an editorial by Ian Livingstone in which he addresses the disdain that tabletop wargamers supposedly held for roleplayers at the time. I know, from reading contemporary reports, that there was in fact some friction between the participants in these two related hobbies. I also know that almost all of the early adopters of RPGs were wargamers. Further, my own personal experience – for whatever it's worth – is that there was considerable overlap between the two hobbies. I can't recall ever seeing any evidence of antagonism, though we should bear in mind I didn't start roleplaying for more than two years after this editorial was penned. 

The first article proper is "Competitive D&D" by Fred Hemmings, a follow-up to the identically titled article in the previous issue. Hemmings provides extensive details of his scoring system for a dungeon he ran at event called "D&D Day," as well as an overview of the "pre-thrown" (i.e. pre-generated) characters used in the scenario. Speaking for myself, I didn't find the scoring system or his discussion of its rationale as compelling as I did the snippets of information he reveals about the dungeon itself, which included such elements as Pandora's Box, Mars, Hercules, Thor, and Monty Python, among others. Would that the article had simply been a write-up of the dungeon itself!

Ian Livingstone reviews "Asgard Miniatures," which he seems to have liked overall. I don't believe I ever own any figures from this line, but I recall their regular advertisements in gaming magazines well into the early 1980s. Lewis Pulsipher, meanwhile, reviews "The Green Planet Trilogy of Game," a series of science fantasy wargames published by Fact and Fantasy Games. I've never heard of any of these three games – Mind War, War of the Sky Galleons, Warriors of the Green Planet – and, from what Pulsipher says, it doesn't sound like I'm missing much (though he himself judges two of the three as "workmanlike" and having "appeal to certain gamers." More fascinating, I think, is his introduction where he bemoans the fact that game reviewers tend to be "faceless" and reveal little of their own "preferences and pet prejudices." To counter this, he lays his own cards on the table, such as his love of "realism" and his detestation of luck "as it allows inferior players to defeat a more skilled one." 

"Before the Flood" by Hartley Patterson is a brief reminiscence of a fantasy wargame (and setting) called Midgard that was played and developed in the pages of a fanzine of the same name. Patterson notes that Midgard predated Dungeons & Dragons but that it nevertheless seems to have anticipated many features of D&D. I love articles of this sort, since it's a useful reminder that there was "something in the air" in the early 1970s that would likely have given birth to RPGs at some point, even if Gygax and Arneson had not done so. 

"Open Box" is the issue's review feature, consisting of four different reviews. The first is for Steve Jackson's Ogre, while the second is TSR's Lankhmar boardgame. Both receive good reviews, though Ogre is better regarded. The third review is very negative and tackles War of the Star Slayers, a science fiction wargame of which I've never heard (a recurring theme in today's post). The final review is by Lewis Pulsipher and deals with Tunnels & Trolls. As one might expect, Pulsipher does not wholeheartedly like T&T, though he (mostly) takes pains to explain why he dislikes aspects of its design. More intriguing, though, is this section of his review, which I reproduce without comment:

The second part of Don Turnbull's "Monstermark System" appears in this issue and, like the first part, I have to say, perhaps to my shame, that I simply didn't see much point in all the ink spilt to measure the relative power of various D&D monsters. I know many referees, then and now, find this kind of thing useful and, if so, more power to them. I'm simply not one of them and thus my eyes glazed over as Turnbull presented his mathematical formulae. 

Much more fun was the "Open Chest" feature, which included submissions by readers. By and large, this consisted of magic items and monsters (like the dune stalker, which would later appear in the Fiend Folio). Also included was a humorous character class, the scientist, and its chaotic counterpart, the anti-scientist, whose level titles are quite amusing.
I can't make up my mind as to whether I find Administrator or Vondaniken funnier. Rounding out the issue is Andy Holt's "The Loremaster of Avallon," which follows his previous "What's Wrong with D&D?" In the article, Holt presents changes to D&D that he uses in his own campaign, focusing more on the magic system than other aspects of its rules. His changes are interesting and involve the use of 38 magical symbols to evoke effects. 

Overall, I'd say that this issue of White Dwarf shows much promise and suggests that it will quite quickly turn into something I will enjoy reading. It's very D&D-centric, of course, but that's to be expected (and is not unwelcome to me at any rate). There is already evidence of many of the traits I'd later come to associate not just with White Dwarf but with Games Workshop more generally, particularly its humor. I look forward to seeing them come even more to fore.

21 comments:

  1. I don't remember any widespread anti-rpg / wargame rhetoric either at the time. Admittedly the first club I joined was in the mid 80s, but it was roughly half and half rpgs and historical wargames, and I'd think 90% of the rpgers were also wargamers. There were probably more of the wargamers who weren't into rpgs (maybe 1/3 of them), but there was no ill will from them to the rpgers, even those few rpgers who weren't also wargamers.

    In later years (90s), there was more curmudgeonly attitude from the historical wargamers to the fantasy wargamers (I'm still a historical-only wargamer) but that wasn't because there were more rpgers amongst the fantasy wargamers.

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  2. Asgard Miniatures was part-founded by Bryan "Dark-Winged Avenging Lord of Chaos" Ansell, who later left to found Citadel Miniatures (with a number of Asgard staff) and take over Games Workshop.

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    1. Yep. A surprising number of old Asgard Minis are still available through both Viking Forge and Alternative Armies to this day.

      http://www.thevikingforge.net/

      https://www.alternative-armies.com/collections/15mm-laserburn-and-asgard-ranges

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    2. Thanks, this is becoming almost Proustian in its evocation of memory. He has long since gone into the West but from my recollection of his hat I believe he was the Dwarf w/crossbow.

      SJB

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  3. I believe that Asgard Miniatures was the first company started by Bryan Ansell who went on to own Games Workshop. Asgard kindly sent me a chunky dwarf model when I was 12, even though I had miscalculated the price with postage.

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    1. Was your chunky Dwarf one of these? :)

      http://www.thevikingforge.net/25mm-fantasy-dwarves.html

      The fact that Viking Forge is still making those after all these years brightens my day.

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  4. The more I read about how close pre-D&D stuff came to D&D and yet never reached it; and how accidental the D&D spark actually was—Arneson showing his ideas off to Gygax but having to play the opposing team himself due to not having the rest of his group there—I become more and more convinced that tabletop roleplaying as we know was not inevitable and might not have come about until well after personal computers. And that would have meant a very different kind of tabletop roleplaying.

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    1. And of courses the first edition of Traveller in 1977 did not even require a referee. The rules were simple yet comprehensive enough that players (any number) could co-operate in the "universe" anyway. GDW's En Garde is similar (though not as much roleplaying).

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    2. En Garde is fascinating. I picked up a copy many years ago but finally got a chance to play it last year at North Texas. The host sort of set it up as a board game, with a board of all the locations listed in the rulebook, and the potential mistresses that we set up at the beginning of the game. I always wondered whether En Garde was inspired by roleplaying at all.

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    3. The absence of D&D would have had a cataclysmic impact on the evolution of computer games, as many of those early computer games were simply attempts to model the D&D experience.

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    4. Gladwain, yes, I agree. I don’t think we have any idea what tabletop roleplaying would look like if it had been delayed even five or six years. Computer games would still exist, but they would be very different. Tabletop role-playing games might even be inspired by computer games instead of inspiring them.

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    5. It's fascinating to consider. The prominent computer games at the time D&D was published were Pong and Space War (and chess). The concept of setting a video game in an enclosed space filled with obstacles, puzzles, and enemies owes everything to D&D's spark.

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    6. Yes. It’s interesting to look at the games in the 1973 101 BASIC Computer Games and compare them to the games in the 1979 More BASIC Computer Games.

      These were hugely influential books; you can see the nucleus of a lot of later personal computer arcade games in those text-oriented games. The latter has Wumpus, Star Trek, and Chase (RobotWar, which is an enclosed space filled with obstacles and enemies; there is no fighting the enemies, the goal is calculating how to avoid them).

      How much of the latter book was influenced by tabletop roleplaying? And how much of the first book (mazes, wargames, logic games) would have influenced any tabletop roleplaying that developed from computer games?

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    7. I suppose En Garde has elements of early roleplaying in that one player plays one fictional character with traits and a position in society, and then is trying to advance his "level". The lack of board (usually!) and essentially taking place between paper, dice and a player's imagination.

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  5. These reviews offer a fascinating window into the early days of the hobby. Thanks!

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  6. I used to use the Monstermark system as a basis for comparing creatures under GW's points system. It turns out a Rat Ogre really is worth about 39 points, whereas the Empire Knight is worth less than 2 IIRC. (Under Warhammer they cost the same!)

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  7. We moved from miniature gaming to D&D in 1974. Added is probably a better term, we never stopped playing miniatures although D&D took up most of our time after we started playing it. Of course we played Chainmail, historical and fantasy (as well as every other historical period you can think of) which might have made the addition natural. No problem with negative feelings with my group at the time. Of course we played board wargames as well. I think the key word for us was "game".

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  8. W.r.t. Midgard: it is described extensively in Playing at the World, as indeed one of the "cousins" of D&D.

    W.r.t. wargamers and roleplaying: since D&D grew out of wargaming, the attraction and curiosity but also animosity from wargamers is understandable. I guess it took a number of more years before roleplaying had developed itself to become seperate enough from wargaming.

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  9. FWIW I can recall a distinct and sometimes quite bitter divide in the wargamer community around this period, almost entirely between self-described "historical purists" and people who also enjoyed fantasy and scifi gaming. Many of the latter category also dabbled in RPGs, but the main complaint from the purists seemed to to be that every sf/f board game or minis rule set could have and should have been a historical game instead. RPGs got sniffed at as well but they weren't somehow "wasting limited design resources" the way games like SPIs Lord of the Rings were. Avalon Hill, SPI, and Yaquinto were all seen as "betraying their fans" for dipping into scifi/fantasy, at least by some people - they'd been seen more as historical wargaming companies initially.

    The attitude never made much sense to me (the hobby wasn't ever a zero-sum game of competing genres) but it existed. You could even see some of the same thinking in the opinion of many in the RPG community in the mid-90s toward CCGs (Magic, mostly) where they were blamed for "stealing players" from TTRPGs. There was also an incident around 2000 where Games Workshop publicly blamed their poor stock performance on the success of the Pokemon CCG taking market share away from their miniatures business.

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  10. I dimly recall the "Green Planet" games being reviewed in The Space Gamer, with similarly negative opinions about them. Saved me some money back in the day - the FLGS had War of the Sky Galleons at one point and I'm a sucker for flying ships.

    Unsurprisingly I snapped up GDW's Sky Galleons of Mars the moment I had the chance, which I've never regretted. Not sure I ever bought anything from GDW that I didn't like.

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  11. Loving the WD reviews...I reckon my first issue would have been around #12 or 13 so still some way to go. I don't recall any particular animosity when I first started trading a line between wargaming and Role-Playing, more a degree of tolerant bemusement from some of the historical gamers

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