Thursday, September 19, 2024

Boot Hill Introduction (Part III)

The introduction to Boot Hill continues. 

A campaign could be run with as few as 4 players and a referee, although a referee is not strictly necessary in smaller games, since players as a group can decide any questionable situations and together can put a check on any actions which tend to disrupt the smooth flow of a game (shooting anything which moves, for instance, quickly brings the wrath of the other players and the law down upon the head of the offender). 

Once again, we see the distinction between a "game" and a "campaign." Equally interesting in my opinion is the suggestion that the players can not only handle certain aspects of play themselves without the need for a referee, but they can also be self-regulating in the sense of preventing one another from going against the spirit of the game. Nevertheless –

A referee is always preferable in any size campaign, and is a must for larger undertakings (which could easily encompass as many as 20 different roles). When the referee moderates the action, there is a secrecy aspect which the platers can work to advantage and which can greatly add to the interest of the campaign. Thus, the referee can relate information individually to each player depending upon the actions and position of his own character, and each character will have his own outlook on the game situation, since there will often be developments "behind the scenes" which will not be common knowledge to all. Likewise, secret plans can be made and related to the referee without the other players knowing of what transpires.

I've talked before about the need for large groups of players in our RPG campaigns, so I'm pleased to see that Boot Hill is yet another game that explicitly supports this kind of play. The discussion of secrecy is good, too. In my youth, I ran a short Top Secret campaign in which each of the three players was working for a different agency and all of them were tasked with adversarial goals. I also did something similar in my youthful Gangbusters campaign and that worked pretty well.

In a campaign situation, each player character will have his own identity and abilities (these are determined by dice rolling, with a slight advantage to allow player characters to be above the norm). If this character is killed, the player will have to take on another persona in the campaign (sometimes starting "from scratch" again in a similar character, or in a position which is completely unrelated to the former).

The idea that a player character should have "a slight advantage" so that he is "above the norm" is notable. Many post-D&D TSR roleplaying games included ability score generation schemes that were skewed in player character's favor. 

Note, however, that in a large game, a player could conceivably take on the role of two different characters if carefully arranged and monitored by the referee. In such an instance, the two roles would have to be completely independent and not subject to conflict or possible cooperation. For instance, a player could have one role as a major rancher who is seeking to expand his holdings and another character who is an outlaw specializing in stagecoach robberies. Obviously, these two characters would have little cause to cooperate or conflict with each other, so such an arrangement would provide two characters for the campaign (assuming the referee was agreeable) rather than only one. 

When I started playing RPGs, it was a widely accepted truth that no player should play more than one character in a session. However, most players had more than one character in the campaign and would often swap between them, based on interest and the context of the scenario on offer. That approach seems very similar to what's been suggested here.

Campaigns can be as small or as expansive as desired, centering on a single town or a large geographical area. Preparation can be minimal or as extensive as desired. While it is possible to structure rigid scenarios, free-form play will usually be more interesting and challenging. It is easy to set up a town, give a few background details, and allow the participants free rein thereafter. In no time at all lawmen will arrest troublemakers, gunfights will take place, and Wells Fargo will lose yet another payroll to masked outlaws. This game isn't named BOOT HILL without reason!

He makes it sound so easy!  

Fortunately, there's an entire section of the rulebook dedicated to the creation and running of a Boot Hill campaign. I'll be taking a closer look at it in another series of upcoming posts.

8 comments:

  1. In my long ago youth, I had a fair amount of success running a Boot Hill campaign over lunch hours in Grade 9 and 10 at school. The dastardly dude Dubious Dubois proved an ongoing antagonist for my players, appearing at in opportune moments to be the sand in the gears of whatever plot they were scheming.
    I recall much use of dynamite, buffalo rifles being used from barns, and sawed-off shotguns fired through windows more than any quick-draw showdowns. My players quickly learned that shooting other people was far better than getting shot at.

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  2. It's interesting that the rules suggest a lower limit of 4 players for a campaign. An awful lot of the source material prominently features a lone protagonist, maybe with a sidekick/aid/helpful love interest but usually outnumbered by the opposition. Of course, the game mechanics don't support that very well - combat is too deadly and too random for the Lone Ranger or Eastwood's nameless drifter to actually work in game. Instead, you're really playing factions against one another, usually with a PC as leader and NPC hirelings/henchmen/allies/relatives in support.

    So, yes, it's an RPG, but it's not an attempt to emulate Wild West fiction at all faithfully. Instead, it's more of a Braunstein game set in the period, which must have been a disappointment to a fair number of buyers even back then when expectations about RPGs were less established.

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  3. Gameplay supports more a "Silverado" style than "Shane." It's an adjustment, though perhaps not as much as party dynamics would be in "Top Secret" or "Paranoia."

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  4. Man, it’s been a while since I thought about Boothill. I remember a scenario in Dragon Magazine (late 60’s, early 70’s issue, maybe?) called ‘The Taming of Brimstone’ (I think). It intrigued me, and I eventually bought Boothill, but never seriously put a game together.
    These articles have inspired me though, and I think it’s high time to put a campaign together. (my gaming group will know what’s up when I start suggesting Westerns to watch…)

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  5. This series of Boot Hill posts kicked my memory into gear and reminded me that Space Gamer actually had a one-off adventure in issue #64, which is easily found online these days. "Big Lizzie" is a decidedly tongue-in-cheek (but still quite dangerous) scenario where the PCs are pursuing a bunch of bad guys who've kidnapped a local woman they're all connected to (most romantically, as a potential bride) and wind up in a pocket dimension clearly inspired by Land of the Lost, complete with dinosaurs.

    The adventure incorporates a whole raft of rules for earning Romance Points, a semi-secret tally that determines the order in which PCs get to propose Donna at the end of the adventure. It being 1983, there's no allowance for anything but straight relationships here, and if someone's playing a female character or (for an extra touch of casual bigotry) the Chinese cook from not-Ponderosa they can only use their opportunity in favor of another properly white, male suitor. Aside from that reminder of the Reagan Era, the rules mostly exist to encourage the players to compete for dinosaur kills rather than flee from them, with lesser bonuses for doing things like naming geographical features after Donna, shouting her name while charging into battle, or getting bravely injured or killed in the process of trying to rescue here (dead characters still get to "propose" in the usual order of highest RP to lowest, with Donna choosing to pine away for them in they're accepted). You also suffer penalties for doing things she wouldn't approve of, like murdering your fellow suitors.

    Possibly the most interesting thing about the whole thing is the article that proceeds it, where Bill Armintrout notes that their are only two Western rpgs on the market in 1983 and both are hard to find in stores, and modules for them are even rarer, with a grand total of four spread between FGU's Wild West and Boot Hill. He then goes on to provide rules for converting between the two so your characters can play in either system and get maximum useout of what few adventures there are. Big Lizzie is, unsurprisingly, dual-statted for both games, and of course it includes a bunch of dinosaurs stats that would be very handy for playing out something like Turok or Valley of Gwangi in your games. There are also some cavemen, and some ideas for further scenarios using the time-travelling organization behind the pocket dimension and other time-displaced troublemakers showing up in the Wild West, as well as a brief mention of the Wild, Wild West TV show as inspirational material.

    Enough meat in that issue that it might even be worth James doing a full post about it, because no one actually reads comments on these older posts and this is by far the most Boot Hill material I ever saw in a contemporary gaming mag back then - including Dragon.

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    1. I think I’d likely have to beat the old Westerns to death before I resorted to pocket dimensions and dinosaurs… The whole courtship thing sounds interesting though (and if you fret over “Reagan-era” social acceptability and racism, check the setting: the late 1800’s were worse…).
      Deadlands did the ‘Weird West’ thing well, but it never stuck with me. I guess I was more interested in straight-up gunfights, corrupt cattlemen associations, Texas Rangers, etc, than I was in the drifter gambler casting hexes on my character?

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  6. The sequel to Cowboys and Aliens, perhaps? Cowboys and Dinos?

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