If we'd played anyplace interesting....

We played in rooms at the student union.  They were like any fucking room in any fucking student union in any fucking college I've ever been in.

Also, I personally find that kind of writing rather annoying.

I do talk a bit about that kind of thing when it (in my mind) matters, like Gary saying "if the day comes when I can't wear blue jeans to work, I quit."

Also, as my chapter titles suggest (or at least I hope they do) the book is a lot about my take on how D&D evolved out of wargames, how D&D turned from a wargame into big money, and a few funny stories (mostly about dumb shit I myself have done) for comic relief.

Quote from: Old Geezer;692988Also, I personally find that kind of writing rather annoying.

That's cool.

I'm not trying to tell you what to do, I was just trying to explain what the other posters seemed to be asking for.

Like I said, I liked the story as is, and I'd like to read some more.

One book of this sort I recently enjoyed re-reading was Achtung Schweinhund by Harry Pearson. He knows his audience and managed to put in some personal anecdotes as well as give some of the history of wargaming in the UK, with some decent examples of the wargaming mindset that readers could empahise with. I think you really had to be of a certain generation in this country to fully appreciate it but he puts his professional skills to good use use in making sure you identify with his experiences.

Mike's free to write whatever he wants and I'm sure some people will buy it, Ghulash and all. I suppose I'd rather have seen one of the other chapters rather than the one presented, but I assumed that by posting, Mike wanted to solicit feedback, positive or otherwise, that might help move sales from some people to at least a few more. Any feedback that might help the book reach a wider audience would, I'd have thought, been worth noting at least, rather than dismissing it out of hand as irrelevant in a rather angry tone.

Quote from: Old Geezer;692835Somewhere you mentioned that you wish you had more "personal" stories, which is one of the things that induced me to write not only my ideas on what I saw evolve, but also amusing anecdotes like this.

I hope you found the tale of Ghulash amusing, at least.

Very much so! I think it exemplifies the spirit that "anything can be attempted," that players could innovate radically in the course of play to meet their objectives. Before D&D, what sort of game would have, or could have, supported this sort of player initiative?

Quote from: Joshua Ford;693025One book of this sort I recently enjoyed re-reading was Achtung Schweinhund by Harry Pearson. He knows his audience and managed to put in some personal anecdotes as well as give some of the history of wargaming in the UK, with some decent examples of the wargaming mindset that readers could empahise with. I think you really had to be of a certain generation in this country to fully appreciate it but he puts his professional skills to good use use in making sure you identify with his experiences.

Mike's free to write whatever he wants and I'm sure some people will buy it, Ghulash and all. I suppose I'd rather have seen one of the other chapters rather than the one presented, but I assumed that by posting, Mike wanted to solicit feedback, positive or otherwise, that might help move sales from some people to at least a few more. Any feedback that might help the book reach a wider audience would, I'd have thought, been worth noting at least, rather than dismissing it out of hand as irrelevant in a rather angry tone.

If you think that's an angry tone, then in the words of Bruce Banner "you wouldn't like me when I'm angry."

I posted this story because it's short.  I'm not going to post a 2500 word chapter on how CHAINMAIL influenced D&D.

And frankly, no, I wasn't really looking for feedback, I was looking to drum up attention.  If you like this, you will like what I've written.  If not, you won't.

Quote from: KenHR;692395Hair-splitting is one thing.  Completely missing the point while doing so is another.

:duh:

Ken, Ken, Ken . . . of all the posters on this site, you are usually the one to get my jokes.

Quote from: increment;692791Of course when you do history, you choose to cite facts that further your narrative, and your choice of narrative is constrained by what facts you can cite. Primary sources tell you which narratives will work and which won't. Sometimes, finding new sources expands the number of narrative threads available to you; other times it eliminates some threads.

In the good old days, we used to look at sources first and then figure out what the "narrative" was the sources were pointing at. We didn't choose to manipulatively put more emphasis on certain facts and less on others in order to further the agenda we had already front-loaded into the study; but rather tried to make sense of all the facts available to figure out what had actually happened. But that's imperialist and patriarchal and all kind of other dirty words in modern historiography because it believes in evil things like "Facts" and "Truth".

QuoteBut you're never going to get anywhere near the facts of the early history of RPGs without the primary sources. Even questions of simple historical fact that are quite easily resolved with access to the right letters or fanzines have been the subject of religious wars for decades  - like, say, when Blackmoor started. In that sense, primary sources mean everything, they're the difference between groundless conjecture and an actual grasp of history. Knowing when Blackmoor started, you can of course fit that fact into whatever narrative suits you. But if someone tries to build a narrative based on Blackmoor having started far earlier or later than it did, the primary sources enable us to rule it out.

Of course, but the point is that depending on how you manipulate this detail of when Blackmoor started, you could use it to claim "see? Arneson was really the most important guy and that plus this plus this plus this all prove that D&D was really a monstrosity that should never have been the way it was and that early roleplayers were actually running Forge-like narrative storygaming!", or conversely "See? Arneson wasn't really as important at all and because of that plus this plus this it proves that D&D was a monstrosity that should never have been the way it was and early roleplayers were actually running Forge-like narrative storygaming!"

See what I did there?

That's why I don't trust post-modern trained-in-relativism think-narrative-comes-first historians these days.    Since they don't believe in actually finding out historical truth (because they don't believe that "truth" is a thing) they are quite willing to twist the narrative into anything that suits them.

Now, I haven't read your book, so I can't judge it specifically.  I was just commenting on when someone else said "he quotes primary sources so he MUST be telling the bible-truth!"
For all I know your work is rigorous and magnificent.  However, since most of the time that I've heard  references to your book it has been when Storygamers have quoted it to try to "prove" some bullshit argument of theirs about how the "real OSR is storygaming" or some other piece of historical revisionism, that doesn't fill me with confidence about your work.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;693321For all I know your work is rigorous and magnificent.  However, since most of the time that I've heard  references to your book it has been when Storygamers have quoted it to try to "prove" some bullshit argument of theirs about how the "real OSR is storygaming" or some other piece of historical revisionism, that doesn't fill me with confidence about your work.

RPGPundit

Pundy, BABY, you know as well as I do that people who want to reach a conclusion will do so quite untrammeled by what their sources really say.

At least read Jon's work before deciding you don't like it.  I've worked with Jon enough to say he's well aware that D&D came out of wargaming.  If some story gamer wants  to say that Free Kriegspiel is a "story game," does that make it so?

I didn't butt into this thread to promote my own work or methods; just to suggest that, although my approach may differ from yours, Michael, nonetheless I really look forward to your project and I encourage everyone to support it.

Quote from: RPGPundit;693321See what I did there?

It sounds like you were horribly abused by some academic in early childhood, for which I must apologize on behalf of scholars everywhere. My own research has no connection to any of the "post modern" ideas that apparently traumatized you. It does not address the question of what story games are or the question of what the OSR is, though it does consider stories and it does try to figure out how people played D&D when it first appeared. If those former questions particularly interest you, I would recommend reading someone else's work.

Quote from: Old Geezer;692988If some story gamer wants  to say that Free Kriegspiel is a "story game," does that make it so?

Of course it does! Who has ever played a game of Free Kriegspiel where the pre-teen maids didn't have sex?

Quote from: Spinachcat;693463Of course it does! Who has ever played a game of Free Kriegspiel where the pre-teen maids didn't have sex?

"I freed my Kriegspiel twice during that game"

Quote from: RPGPundit;693321Now, I haven't read your book, so I can't judge it specifically.  I was just commenting on when someone else said "he quotes primary sources so he MUST be telling the bible-truth!"
For all I know your work is rigorous and magnificent.  However, since most of the time that I've heard  references to your book it has been when Storygamers have quoted it to try to "prove" some bullshit argument of theirs about how the "real OSR is storygaming" or some other piece of historical revisionism, that doesn't fill me with confidence about your work.

Pundit, just get the book and read it dammit. Agree or not by the time you finish it you will find it is worth the time.

My opinion about the book's accuracy is this. For several years I followed and participated in the collector community at the Acaeum and its forums. It has a fascinating insight into what was available in the earliest days of the hobby.

Regardless of how you feel about their "obession" of collecting one benefit is that they are relentless in digging up rare items that are relevant to the origins of roleplaying. This includes talking about stuff that are very rare or very obscure. All of this was occurring well before Jon's book saw the light of day.

What caused me to respect Jon's book is that he includes all the items that I seen talked about on Acaeum, (and other sites with collectors). And adds some that were not mentioned but otherwise fits in with what I have read about.

So when I say that Jon's book is the standard by other RPG historical works will be judged by I don't make that statement lightly. It is exhaustive in its use of primary sources that are currently known. If you don't believe look at the Acaeum and other sites where collectors hang out yourself. They have a search function on their forum.

Now there are sections where I reserve judgement. And most of those are in his discussion of the origins of various D&D mechanics. Of all the sections in his book that part is the one that feel most like interpretation.

The other major sections, the time period before D&D's release, the history of wargaming, the time period after D&D's release all seem very down to earth and factual. Perhaps too factual as it is very dry reading in parts.

I think there room for a good history of the origins of D&D focusing on the personal drama. It certainly doesn't cover much of the TSR era at the height of D&D's popularity. There always the chance that a rare zine or manuscripts pops up.

Again just read the damn book Pundit.

I agree with the others, Pundit.

I think you do have a point that just taking primary sources of the time instead of trusting people recounting the events 30 years later does not in itself guarantee your work will be unbiased - I think that bias has a funny way to creep its way into anything we're passionate about. So when you're working on something like Playing at the World it must be a constant struggle to keep one's head cool and keep some hopefully neutral perspective while working at unearthing sources, trying to see how they fit in the big picture, whether patterns emerge, etc. I think Jon would agree to this, because he discusses his approach and methodology at the beginning of the book, if memory serves.

Now that doesn't mean that other people won't take your work and project whatever agenda is theirs onto its findings, if any, citing bits and pieces of the corpus selectively in order "prove" whatever they magically had known all along. But that's a function of these people's bias. It doesn't mean Jon's methodology suffered from the same errors of judgment or shared these people's agenda.

Read the damn book, man. You're going to like it.

Again, my comments weren't directly a condemnation of the book, since I have no way of saying what the book's content is itself.  Rather, its a condemnation of how I've seen many people approaching "RPG history".

RPGPundit

I would be interested in RPGPundit's review of Playing at the World.

Doubly interested if he goes apeshit nutball on it.