Knights & Knaves Alehouse

Stormcrow wrote:I'm just saying he's doing actual research where others just try to combine a subjective analysis of authors' characteristics with long-after-the-fact memories. In the world of scholarly publication, there is a huge difference between these.

Maybe. I’m unfamiliar with the “others.” (The history of D&D, let alone its historiography, is not my forte. I’m a troglodyte; I just like playing the game.)

But I’m skeptical that documents invariably are superior to the memory of witnesses or that credibility assessments of witnesses are always inferior to documentary sources. Documents have their own problems. There’s no guarantee that a document accurately records the matters it discusses even when made contemporaneously with or close in time to the events recorded. And while we can credit or discount a witness’s testimony based on our sense of their biases and motives, that may be harder to do with documents created by marginal or unknown persons.

The Dalluhn manuscript seems like a case in point. Unless I misunderstand (always a possibility), the original conclusions drawn from it turned out to be false in the main, and Gygax’s assessment that he’d never seen it before was accurate. (No?)

Documents in most cases are a more useful primary source because if they are biased is the bias that existed at the time that it was written. While a recollection reflects the bias of the individual at the time he recounts it. A document can be looked at later by another person to confirm or refute an author's theses. While a individual bias and opinions may have changed in the interim.

Having said that writing a history of anything is about assembling a jigsaw puzzle treating each piece with skepticism. It only after you gathered everything together, documents, interviews, can you start painting a picture that even remotely accurate.

While Jon Peterson is invaluable in of itself. Far more valuable is the process that he used. It establishes a standard that future scholarship about the history D&D can be judged by. A future author may give more weight to recollections, another may go further than Jon and discount them all together.

Finally the fact the interpretation of the Dalluhn manuscript has change is not a a flaw in the process. Because of Jon's work and his continued accessibility to other hobbyist via the blog and forums, the process of assembling the jigsaw pieces is now played out in public. The Dalluhn represented something interesting. Looked promising, and then as more information came in what it was became clearer.

While Gygax was right about it from the get go we couldn't be 100% sure if he was remembering everything or wasn't slanting what he remembered. Note that Gygax is neither worse or better than other people who involved from back in the day in this regard.

What Robert said. Scientific thinking requires that you look at all available evidence, judge its accuracy to the best of your present ability, and draw logical conclusions without personal bias. And, when new evidence comes to light as it inevitably does, you re-evaluate with the possibility that your previous conclusion wss completely wrong. It's not about being 100% right, it's about being as right as you can possibly be given the information available to you. That's what I keep telling my thesis students, anyway.

Admittedly in this tiny field we have the problem that there is little peer review, as no-one is willing to go to the same lenghts that Jon has to look at the original data.

Now, as an academic writer of course you can't spread around copies of original documents without regard for copyright. As a collector and a fan, it's a crime against humanity to hide these documents away until you die and unconcerned relatives trash the stuff.

Jon has shared some pages from the actual original D&D manuscript, referred to as "Guidon D&D", including the entire Monster List. I started a thread to discuss it over on ODD74:

http://odd74.proboards.com/thread/12475/guidon-draft

I was skeptical (as I posted earlier in this thread) that BTPTBD was a pre-D&D published manuscript based on the art and certain rules expansions, but Jon was right that it does preserve much of the text of "Guidon D&D". It's still neat as one of the first examples of a DIY D&D variant. It shows the powerful pull that the game concept had even its embryonic form.

Robert (and Vile):

I don’t think documents are as static as you initially suggest, at least not complicated ones. A simple document with a plain text, unambiguous purpose, and clear authorship—sure. But documents as complex as the Dalluhn manuscript? The meaning and significance of that kind of document are not self-evident; we are interpreting it and giving it meaning, and all of our own biases, motives, and shortcomings are in play.

Peterson’s December 2015 .pdf analyzing the Dalluhn manuscript runs 33 pages. I’m not faulting his effort or even the result. But that’s 33 pages of analysis for a 57-page manuscript. That’s a lot of interpretation. The document is not simply speaking to us. And, as plausible as it was, his interpretation turned out (as I understand it based on my limited understanding) to be wrong. And Peterson determined it was wrong by tracking down the guy who made the manuscript or a related one. (Right? If that’s right, isn’t this an instance of witness memory and testimony debunking our understanding of a document?)

To be clear, I’m not trying to piss on Peterson’s campfire. I trust that he’s forgotten more about D&D’s history than I’m ever going to know. (Same is true of many of this forum’s regular posters—there is no doubt in my mind they that know more than I do on this subject.) But I continue to be skeptical of a method that privileges documents over other kinds of evidence as a general rule (i.e., as a methodology). I think case-by-case decisions about the weight to accord recollection and documents are necessary.

My takeaway from the controversy over the Dalluhn manuscript is that plausible, but ultimately mistaken, theories can be constructed from complicated documents. And had Peterson not managed to eventually track down someone who could, for lack of a better term, testify about the manuscript’s origin and purpose (something that will be less and less possible as time passes and old grognards fade away), we’d all “know” things that were not true. That we now know the truth seems less like a methodological triumph than a combination of good fortune and perseverance (Peterson’s perseverance, to be sure).

If Jon hadn't done the document-based research that he did, we'd still be listening to zealots telling us that it is holiest of holies from the very hand of the great Arneson himself.

The point is not that putting documents over recollection automatically gives you truth; the point is that documents are a contemporary record of the period. You still have to interpret that record. And as this incident shows, Peterson does not eschew recollection; he just doesn't use it as a primary source. If someone's recollection can help interpret a document, that's very useful.

This thing popped up again here:

https ://www.reddit.com/r/osr/comments/nvpo5f/dn ... alter_the/

People have some really stupid ideas about this game.

A lot of the phraseology in that reminds me of a certain person who constantly posts under multiple accounts.

thedungeondelver wrote: ↑

Wed Jun 09, 2021 9:16 am

A lot of the phraseology in that reminds me of a certain person who constantly posts under multiple accounts.

Yeah it was uncomfortably familiar.

Juju EyeBall wrote: ↑

Wed Jun 09, 2021 9:18 am

thedungeondelver wrote: ↑

Wed Jun 09, 2021 9:16 am

A lot of the phraseology in that reminds me of a certain person who constantly posts under multiple accounts.

Yeah it was uncomfortably familiar.

We really need to gatekeep this hobby a lot harder. I don't know if it's not too late though.

e: By "this hobby" I mean OD&D and 1e AD&D; obviously the table top RPG hobby as a whole is fucked.

thedungeondelver wrote: ↑

Wed Jun 09, 2021 9:16 am

We really need to gatekeep this hobby a lot harder. I don't know if it's not too late though.

e: By "this hobby" I mean OD&D and 1e AD&D; obviously the table top RPG hobby as a whole is fucked.

Yeah. I accidentally looked at dragonsfoot today. What a clusterfuque.

thedungeondelver wrote: ↑

Wed Jun 09, 2021 10:02 am

We really need to gatekeep this hobby a lot harder. I don't know if it's not too late though.

No kidding. After today, I am convinced it is time for that "fiery death --> rebirth" phase of the cycle, and will gladly bring the gasoline just to get it over with.

In Gygax’s Chainmail, you have three levels of fighter:

Normal Man
Hero (worth 4 men)
Superhero (worth 8 men)

And four levels of magic-user (as introduced in the International Wargamer zine in Jan 1972):

Magician
Warlock
Sorcerer
Wizard

Per Dan Boggs, in Arneson original house rules, there were four spell levels. This idea would seem to be derived from Gygax’s four magic-user types.

In Chainmail, 2nd Edition, Gygax added a fifth level of magic-user:

Magician
Warlock
Sorcerer
Wizard
Wizard +1

Now, in D&D of course you have the concept of character level, which is obviously “extrapolated” from the fighter/hero types.

It seems Gygax greatly changed and expanded Arneson’s four spell lists to make up five spell levels (again this would seem to at least echo the five types from Chainmail), and then mapped them against an expanded character levels list so that you attain a new spell level every two character levels (so, at 1, 3, 7, and 9). This is what you see in BTPBD.

By the time of publication, D&D has a sixth spell levels, which is attained upon reaching character level 11. Interestingly, Chainmail 3rd Edition backports this through adding the concept of spell complexity, which goes up to, you guessed it, 6.

It’s kind of an interesting topic, though I’m not sure what the Reddit user is driving at. I guess even BTPBD has too much power inflation for his tastes? It’s not old school enough?

Falconer wrote: ↑

Wed Jun 09, 2021 10:17 am

I guess even BTPBD has too much power inflation for his tastes? It’s not old school enough?

Yeah. I checked out at that point.