Chain mail

Now I will add that in order for me to run this, I'm counting it as one, but I don't need Greyhawk or anything, but I would need the three little brown books, which is the baseline of OD&D.

And Chainmail, because you would need that to run, right? Without Greyhawk, you really, you know, you should have Chainmail.

And Outdoor Survival.

Like those three that are mentioned in that combination would give me basically what I'm running now.

So for me, that's the thing.

It doesn't scare me off because I know the game.

And I'm going to include, as you did with OD&D and Chainmail and Outdoor Survival, I'm just going to lump together Pathfinder and Starfinder because they're basically the same thing.

One is a sci-fi space.

Yeah, call us, let us know.

Do you want to play Chainmail powered by GURPS? Or Outdoor Survival with GURPS? GURPS Unchained.

GURPS Unchained.

All right, let me call Steve Jackson right now.

Mm-hmm.

So there was a game called Chainmail.

Chainmail.

You don't need to write this down.

I'm writing it down.

Chainmail was a game where you had armies facing off against armies.

Is it mail like I mailed it or mail like a man?

It's M-A-I-L.

I mean, we have Lake of America, don't we? But no, we call it tabletop wargaming because when you talk about tabletop miniature gaming, it could be anything from Zombicide to Warhammer 40K to HeroClick, anything with kind of dudes on the map.

But with wargaming, which actually is one of the oldest forms of tabletop games, When I was a young man, there was something called Chainmail, which was the original Dungeons & Dragons, which was very much a tabletop war game.

But I don't

do that, and I'm probably going to be not talking that much in this particular podcast to the joy of everyone who listens to this.

That's the first edition.

And it comes out of a supplement to a medieval war game called Chainmail.

And basically, the historians of it...

So John Peterson, who I sent out the thing, is an incredibly knowledgeable historian of Dungeons & Dragons.

So something unexpected that's kind of there and that goes back to kind of like flow and stuff like that, right? Is that the kind of vicarious experience of kind of seeing somebody else overcome challenges or not at times, right? And like, but there being some sort of balance between the difficulty of what's happening and the ability of the person, the subject or the hero of the story, if you will, kind of experiencing that at a time.

And there's also, we haven't really talked about it, but the really important category of the magical in all of this.

So to go back to Chainmail, this predecessor for Dungeons & Dragons, there's the fantasy supplement to Chainmail.

And one of the things that it includes is an early version of the famous fireball spell.

is very much that second edition was what most people really wanted in D&D at that time.

And original D&D was the bridge between it and Chainmail, Gary's war game.

Yeah.

But like, I'm watching this and I'm like, you're going on the option that you're too big to fail.

yeah fair but yeah i think you know and then as that expands into role playing you know there are there are the people who just roll dice and do the math yeah but then there's people that get into a lot more of the storytelling and well i think what we're talking today is the narrative stuff

Well, and that's good to note in general, because we, you know, D&D being, quote, the first roleplay game coming from Chainmail, which was a combat simulation game, which came from Napoleonics and from other wargame stuff.

Like, it's good to note that background.

And there's nothing wrong with playing, you know, to try and beat the challenge.

So historically, you know, over the years was, was there a game that you guys felt like was a shift into narrative gaming compared to the old school style?

Well, D&D in and of itself was, you know, kind of taking that wargaming and being a story.

Yeah, Chainmail was you are playing a war game and you're buying, you know, for different models and pieces and parts and like, OK, if you have a wizard in your army, that's kind of like playing it as an artillery piece.

And then people went, well, what if I just want to be the wizard? do i do that you know and so it was just the four dudes going into the dungeon um and for a while people would go back and forth between war situation and dungeon situation combining both systems so 100 dnd was stepping into more of the narrative um but but post that you know now we have role play games defined dnd second edition has happened what was your what was your next one that was like kind of the the first feeling of of more of a narrative shift from that