history

Ben Riggs has been working on this history of post-Gygax TSR for quite a while. Slated for release in July. https://read.macmillan.com/lp/slaying-the-dragon/ Role-playing game historian Ben Riggs unveils the secret history of TSR― the company that unleashed imaginations with Dungeons &...

Similar to the Writings on Role-Playing thread I thought it may be helpful to have a thread about books on the history, practice and theory of wargaming. I'm just starting to dig into some of these now that I have access to academic libraries again with my newish job. Here is one that is...

(In the Jeff Rients sense of the word.) And every time you try to scrub the Stupid out of D&D, you end up scrubbing the D&D out.

Jon Peterson is sure to piss off many a self-declared internet expert on the hobby's history with this one me thinks. Will be interesting to see the more rabid Gygax and Arneson partisans weeping and gnashing their teeth as several sacred cows are slaughtered. I am such a huge nerd as this...

For @Doc Sammy. My favourite detail is the mod kid with 16 siblings, lol!

Jon Peterson has announced his new book The Elusive Shift, following his impressive Playing at the World. I have preordered it for my Kindle, it comes out December 22nd, 2020. Read more about it here.

A good article as it interested me on a subject I have zero interest in.

This is an extensive video with Jon Peterson discussing wargames, not even finished yet and it is so excellent I wanted to share it:

This very cool video uses more than the expected Western sources, including classics like Sword of Doom and Harakiri (both absolute must sees)!

So I checked out this doc on the art of TSR (and a bit on WotC at the end) on Prime. First few minutes made me fear it would be a bunch of ahistorical, aimless 'This shit was cool!' fanrambling but after things settle down and they let the artists speak for themselves things improved...

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - Santayana Here's a great blog post exploring the tribal warfare between trad wargamers (a.k.a self declared grognards), fantasy wargamers and D&D players (a.k.a those damn kids!) displayed in the 1970s Battle Magazine. The...

Another fun video. Cool to find out the source of the terms freelancer and blackmail.

So Peterson doing his usual good work seems to have uncovered a possible explanation/rationale for how descending armor class was supposed to work. DAC never bothered me, particularly once I discovered THAC0 but I have wondered 'why?' I'm far from a math whiz but something always seemed off...

Ben Riggs presented this seminar on the failure of TSR at Gencon. Starts at 7:48. Riggs is working on a book on the same subject. Seems to be taking a serious, fact-based approach that helps avoid the ‘gamer rumour-mill treated as truth syndrome’ that Peterson also admirably avoids with his...

The Analog Game Studies site is an academic site dedicated to analogue table top games, including RPGs, board and card games and experimental games of all sorts. The articles are, not surprisingly, hit or miss but this recent one that tracks media portrayls of people playing D&D and the modern...

Blogger DM David has done a series of retrospective blog posts on 4e D&D that avoid being too virulent or negative while still being critical. Having missed the entire online 4e edition wars (thank god) I found this well written and insightful and refreshingly free of OTT venom.