Talk:Chainmail (game)

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I was motivated to rewrite this article because the statement about Chainmail being developed by people at the University of Minnesota was wrong. I confirmed this with the man himself (see below). I have a copy of the 1975 rules in front of me, so I was able to add a short description of the Chainmail rules, something the article was sorely lacking. I diminished talk about Dave Arneson and Blackmoor. There are links for the reader who wants to find out more about Dave and his campaign. I also diminished talk about Swords & Spells. If someone thinks this supplement deserves a full paragraph, I recommend they create a stand alone article. Grubbiv 17:26, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

Correspondence with Gygax on Dragonsfoot

Grubbiv wrote: Hi Gary,

I wanted to ask you what Jeff Perren was doing and where he was living when you guys developed Chainmail back in 1968-69. The reason I ask is because the Wikipedia article on Chainmail opens with

Chainmail (1971) was a medieval miniatures wargame created by enthusiasts in the late 1960s at the University of Minnesota.

The part about the University of Minnesota seems wrong, but then again maybe Jeff was a student at UM.

Thanks, Clark

Bah!

That Wikipedia bit is absolutely incorrect. Jeff Perren was living in Rockford, Illinois, attended a GenCon here in Lake Geneva, brought four pages of medieval miniatures rules for a ratio of 1:20 to play on the sand table in my basement with his 40mm Hauser Elastolin figurines. I so loved the game that I acquired the figures, expanded his 1:20 medieval rules to about 16 pages, and these were published in the IFW's magazine, The International Wargamer sometime in 1969 as the Castle & Crusades Society Medieval Miniatures Rules. In 1970 Don Lowry of Lowry's Hobbies and Guidon Games wished to publish the rules, so I added the Man-to-Man, Jousting, and Fantasy Supplement portions, and the whole was published as Chainmail by Gygax and Perren in 1971.

About the only involvement of gamers at the U. of Minnesota was playing the rules after they were published Laughing

Cheers, Gary

Which magazine was CCSMMR published in?

There seems to be a contradiction between what Gygax says in his correspondence with Grubbiv, and what The Acaeum says, about which magazine the rules were printed in before they were published by Guidon Games.

In Gygax's correspndence with Grubbiv, above, he says that they were published in IFW's magazine, The International Wargamer. However, The Acaeum quotes an article by Gygax in Dragon magazine, where he says that the rules were first published in the Castle & Crusade Society's own newsletter, Domesday Book.

So, which is it? Or was it published in both? Or have I missed something? James Richardson 20:26, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

Actually, it looks like you're a little off. Acaeum says proto-Chainmail was published in Domesday, but the quote from Best of Dragon is talking about Arneson's reports on his Blackmoor campaign when it mentions Domesday (unless I missed something). So likely, the Acaeum made a mistaken assumption. Also note this quote from RPGNet in a 2000 interview of Gygax:

"With [Jeff Perren's] permission, I expanded his two pages to a longer treatment, and those were published around 1969 in the IFW's monthly magazine as the 'LGTSA Medieval Military Miniatures Rules.'"

Different name, so it might have even seen publication in both as different drafts. And note that according to Acaeum's page on Domesday Book, the C&CS was a effectively a branch of the IFW, so it's possibly just all muddled....

--Rindis 23:56, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

Some further clarification:

Gary was mistaken. The first appearance of the rules-that-would-later-become-Chainmail was indeed an article entitled 'LGTSA Medieval Military Miniatures Rules.' However, that article appeared in the July 1970 issue (#5) of Domesday Book, the newsletter of the Castle & Crusade Society. That society, as previously mentioned, was an offshoot of the IFW.

IFW's publication ('International Wargamer') does not have a Chainmail-like article in any of its 1969 or 1970 issues: http://tomeoftreasures.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=430.

The Blackmoor predecessor article was separate, and published in Domesday #13.

Further information on Domesday Book can be found on our page here: http://www.acaeum.com/library/domesday.html.

70.21.123.10 (talk) 22:01, 7 March 2013 (UTC)FoulFoot, Acaeum webmaster

Actually, that isn't quite right either. The first appearance of the rules-that-would-later-become-Chainmail was an article entitled 'Geneva Medieval Miniatures,' which appeared in the April 1970 issue of Panzerfaust, three months before the DB#5 appearance. The PZF rules are in a still-earlier form than the DB#5 rules. In fact, even the DB#5 publication only narrowly beat out the publication of exactly the same rules in the Spartan International Monthly of August 1970, as they were bumped from the July issue for space reasons.

There are many other factual problems with this Chainmail entry. The DB#5 rules, for example, are not sixteen pages: they span pages 3-10 of DB#5. Chainmail did not have a polymorph spell. There seems to be some language left over here from a previous edit that (mistakenly) suggested the first edition didn't have a fantasy supplement. An account of Chainmail should explain the relationship of the jousting rules and the man-to-man rules with their precedents in the Domesday Book. Will fix. Deconject (talk) 07:24, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

Anything you can do to fix it would be great. 24.12.74.21 (talk) 11:55, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

Sources rely on original research and lack Verifiability

Wikipedia has a rule of "No original research" and Verifiability nearly all of the resources point to one work of original research (Playing at the World). The researcher of this work relies heavily on documents in his personal collection, making it impossible for verifiability. This researcher also makes many assumptions and leaps in logic, making Verifiability important. There is at least one assertion in the work that relies on a source, but when the source actually is viewed others, the quote the researcher based the assumption on does not exist—again heightening the need for Verifiability. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.175.38.192 (talk) 16:16, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

If you think that the book "Playing at the World" is original research, then you probably did not read the policies carefully enough. 76.231.73.99 (talk) 22:35, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

I've tagged quite a bit of poorly sourced material. All these quotes from forum posts are nearly useless, to be charitable. A blog post by an author is still a blog post. This is explained at Wikipedia:Verifiability#Self-published sources (online and paper).

If this was only some sketchy facts about an old game, we could maybe find better things to worry about, but almost all of this concerns living people, and that means the WP:BLP policy applies. The discussion of who gets credit for what in the history of game innovation is somewhat controversial, and the policy leaves no wiggle room: "Contentious material about living persons (or, in some cases, recently deceased) that is unsourced or poorly sourced—whether the material is negative, positive, neutral, or just questionable—should be removed immediately and without waiting for discussion".

Unless better sources can be cited, I don't see how anything using unreliable sources can be kept. Sources that do meet the WP:RS criteria do exist, so this is a solvable problem. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 18:39, 17 February 2020 (UTC)

I think you are replying to the wrong thread, as that discussion was from over 1 year ago, and was someone complaining about a book published in 2012, that is clearly WP:RS. Rudolph85 (talk) 20:03, 17 February 2020 (UTC)

There is no time limit. I posted in the right thread, but you decided to start a new one, so fine. I answered you.

But the complaint from a year ago still stands: Playing at the World is self-published. Unreason Press is Jon Peterson. Peterson verified at Wired that it is self-published, in case there's any question. We're talking about half the article leaning on this one book or a bunch of forums and personal blogs. This is a problem, even if the Wired article praises the book. The value of editorial oversight vs a self-published writers's complete freedom to say anything is discussed at length in Wikipedia:Reliable sources. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 20:40, 17 February 2020 (UTC)

I can see the problem with an article using too much from one author, and self-published sources are inherently difficult. The book has been reviewed elsewhere, in Notes from the Wargaming Underground: Dungeons, Dragons, and the History of Games. From the abstract: "This review contextualizes Peterson’s book within other work on the history of games. It argues that Peterson offers an important intervention in this discourse by offering an empirical account of the historical player communities which innovated the role-playing genre and its most well-known staple, Dungeons and Dragons." I would also mention that Jon Peterson is an author featured in Role-playing Game Studies: Transmedia Foundations, which is a textbook on research in role-playing games published by Routledge in 2018. The opening line of description: "This handbook collects, for the first time, the state of research on role-playing games (RPGs) across disciplines, cultures, and media in a single, accessible volume." Rudolph85 (talk) 22:00, 17 February 2020 (UTC)

Sources tagged recently

It seems that a large number of references have been tagged recently with "better source" required. Was there going to be a section added to discuss why each was tagged?

Jon Peterson is basically the leading expert in the field, with one of the main sources for research, Playing At the World (2012). His blog posts as follow-ups to that book have been tagged as low quality sources, despite being written by an author who is clearly an expert in the field. Self-published sources written by experts in the field may be allowed, per WP:SPS ("Self-published expert sources may be considered reliable when produced by an established expert on the subject matter, whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable, independent publications").

In other cases, people very close to the subject (Gary Gygax and Rob Kuntz) have related their own experiences with gaming, which should likely be allowed according to WP:ABOUTSELF ("Self-published and questionable sources may be used as sources of information about themselves, usually in articles about themselves or their activities, without the self-published source requirement that they be published experts in the field, so long as..."). Under the criteria in this section, even social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit may be allowed. As authors of early Chainmail and D&D products, it seems their own statements should be usable. Rudolph85 (talk) 18:46, 17 February 2020 (UTC)

I just posted on this, in the previous thread on this precise topic. I would have made a new thread but it was already under discussion. Scroll up slightly.

At WP:ABOUTSELF it says, among other things:

2. it does not involve claims about third parties;

4. there is no reasonable doubt as to its authenticity;

So we have Jon Peterson's personal blog, and forum posts, and he's telling us things about Gary Gygax, Gary Switzer, and others. That clearly involves third parties, does it not? We have forum posts ostensibly by Rob Kuntz in which he is telling us things about Gary Gygax. Again, Kunz's self-published comments aren't about himself, they're about third parties. And then we have the question, how do we know "robkuntz Deleted Member" is in fact Rob Kunz? Is this account verified in some way? Are these other forum posts cited verified? Anybody can create an account at an open forum. Here we have Jon "Buck" Birnbaum posting things not about himself, but about a third party, Gary Gygaz. Is Birnbaum a professional author or journalist? Is gamebanshee.com a legitimate, reliable source, with editorial oversight and facdt checking? Or Birnbaum's personal website where he can post whatever he likes? The "About" says "GameBanshee was founded - and continues to be built and administered to this day - by Jon "Buck" Birnbaum." So? Personal, self-published website? Belonging to...? Some guy, as far as I can tell.

This goes for pretty much all these self-published sources. There have been several acceptable books published about the history of D&D, Chainmail, Gygax, TSR and such. We have no good reason to have to resort to such poor sources when good ones exist. And the BLP policy doesn't allow it.

How does this image verify that the cover art was inspired by The Fighting Man cover? Is that just a Wikipedia editor's opinion based on their surmise that the drawings look similar? If so, it's original research, plain and simple. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 20:16, 17 February 2020 (UTC)

Is there reasonable doubt about the authorship of posts by Rob Kuntz? These have existed for many years, widely referenced throughout the gaming community. This is the first time I've seen someone question their authenticity. Have you seen questions raised about the authenticity of these posts outside this discussion thread, or are you simply raising doubts yourself to attempt to remove those sources? Is the main problem that you have that Rob Kuntz mentions something about Gary Gygax marketing to wargamers?

Since you are convinced that better sources exist, would you be able to provide a list of high quality sources ("acceptable published books") that cover the Chainmail game? You have stated that better sources exist several times now, so naturally I'm interested in which sources you are specifically referring to. Rudolph85 (talk) 21:00, 17 February 2020 (UTC)

Regarding the cover illustration, I see that the reference to Art & Arcana was also marked as self-published. Can you confirm that the publisher "Ten Speed Press" qualifies it as self-published? Rudolph85 (talk) 21:15, 17 February 2020 (UTC)

Ten Speed Press is not a self-publishing press. Found in 1971, it was an independent publisher before becoming part of the Crown Publishing Group (itself part of the Penguin Random House empire) in 2009. Simple Google search to confirm this, not sure why anyone would suggest the Art & Arcana book was self-published. Guinness323 (talk) 23:37, 17 February 2020 (UTC)

I have also removed the self-published tag from the Applecline source, since Mongoose Publishing is a UK publisher of RPGs and related books, not a self-publishing agent. Guinness323 (talk) 23:47, 17 February 2020 (UTC)

Thank you for helping to sort through these sources and tags. It appears the editor who added them was overzealous and hadn't carefully reviewed the sources. Art & Arcana goes into the Chainmail cover in some depth and provides scans of the original drawings by Lowry and Gygax. Rudolph85 (talk) 01:00, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

I doubt the authorship of the posts by Rob Kuntz. If the only argument that they're authentic is that you think they've been on the web a long time, and you don't think you personally have heard any complaints about them, then I'd be especially doubtful. If you'd told me that a published author or professional journalist reported that Kunz verified those posts are real, I'd take that as evidence, but not this.

Even if we were to somehow verify all these forum posts are genuine, they still fail the other criteria at WP:SELFPUBLISH. They aren't about the author alone, they're about third parties, some of them living.

The existence or not of better sources has no bearing on questions of source reliability or violations of the BLP policy. These self-published sources are not acceptable; particularly the forums. The material needs to go on those grounds.

That said, I'd suggest turning to the following in lieu of forums, personal blogs, and other dubious content found out on the open web:

• Ewalt, David M. (2013), Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and the People Who Play It, Scribner, ISBN 978-1-4516-4052-6
• Kushner, David (2017), Rise of the Dungeon Master: Gary Gygax and the Creation of D&D, PublicAffairs, ISBN 9781568585598
• Witwer, Michael (2015), Empire of Imagination: Gary Gygax and the Birth of Dungeons & Dragons, Bloomsbury Publishing, ISBN 1632862794
• Tresca, Michael J. (2014), The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games, McFarland, ISBN 9780786460090

That's a start. Jon Peterson's self-published book might be OK, but if sources like those above contradict anything in Playing at the World, I'd delete mention of the Peterson's version.

Guinness323, thanks for fixing those. I didn't intend to tag them in the first place. My fault. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 00:08, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

Several of those sources are semi-fictional biographies about the life of Gary Gygax (one of which is in graphic novel form). While I appreciate that they are legitimately published, some should probably not be considered reliable sources for facts about the early development of Chainmail and D&D. In the case of Empire of Imagination, the author states that he used Playing At the World the "factual control" for his book. Rudolph85 (talk) 00:50, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

Of Dice and Men similarly uses Playing At the World as a source a number of times for facts about the early history of role-playing games... According to your list and recommendations above, should we delete references to works by an expert in the field, because they contradict what is in a semi-fictional graphic novel? From what I can tell here, the status of the publisher is the only thing being taken into account, even if that source is a comic book. Meanwhile, Peterson has several works by independent publishers that went unacknowledged: Role-Playing Game Studies: Transmedia Foundations (2018) and Dungeons & Dragons Art & Arcana: A Visual History (2018), and his self-published work has been favorably reviewed in several journals. Rudolph85 (talk) 02:00, 20 February 2020 (UTC)

You wanted suggestions, I gave you suggestions. Whether these sources are any good or not doesn't change the fact that the blog posts and forum posts are non-starters. They'd all go down in flames in any discussion at the Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard. Search the archives for any thread about a bulletin board, forum, or blog. Wikipedia rejects them as sources. See WP:RS for why. If you can find this content in other Peterson books that were not self-published, that's great. Publishers matter. Publishers have editors and fact checkers. Their reputation, in theory at least, is at stake and generally they make an effort to ensure an author isn't just noodling along saying whatever they feel like. Peterson's explanation to Wired as to why that book is self-published strongly hints he did exactly that. Who knows? No way to tell.

Of course a reputable book from a big name publisher can be wrong. Nobody thinks every cited fact in Wikipedia is WP:TRUTH. It's simply that Wikipedia has a standard to maintain. The place where we draw the line is what you see at... wait for it... Wikipedia:Reliable sources. Content that fails Wikipedia:Reliable sources needs to go.

I'm not going to waste much more time debating the merits of a self-published book or a forum post. This is very basic stuff. Deleting such sources is a slam-dunk, no-brainer. Read Wikipedia:Reliable sources. Read WP:BLP. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 02:50, 20 February 2020 (UTC)

Probably what is needed then is something about Peterson to prove that he meets this from WP:SELFPUB: "Self-published expert sources may be considered reliable when produced by an established expert on the subject matter, whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable, independent publications." BOZ (talk) 05:01, 20 February 2020 (UTC)

But you didn't finish the quote at WP:SELFPUB. The policy goes on to say "Never use self-published sources as third-party sources about living people, even if the author is an expert, well-known professional researcher, or writer." Never means never. The people concerned here are not all deceased. Yes, there's maybe a few little gaps here and there where this self-published book could maybe be cited, if we prove Peterson is an established expert, and no credible sources challenge him. But even then, only in cases when it in no way deals with a living person. You could cite him about deceased people like Gary Gygax or Dave Amenson, but the BLP rules apply to anything connected with Jeff Perren. Who is a co-author of Chainmail. So... what's the point? In the best possible scenario, you might could maybe get under the wire with the self-published book, but only if you aren't concerned with the co-author of Chainmail.

It's not a good use of anyone's time to find loopholes that allow this book to be cited, or to have lengthy debates hammering out those few areas where Perren isn't connected and it's only about Gygax. The self-published expert rules are mostly applicable to people like physicists or (ancient) historians, not biographers of living and recently deceased people, especially when we know there were disputes over copyrights and intellectual property rights over the years, and challenges to who gets credit for what game innovation.

Better sources do exist, and they should be the focus of everyone's attention. At the very least, make the effort to find the information in sources that aren't skunked. If there's content that can't be cited anywhere else, because we checked, then maybe it's worth re-visiting these weaker sources. But have we really checked? --Dennis Bratland (talk) 05:52, 20 February 2020 (UTC)

Attribution of Fantasy Supplement?

Jon Peterson, in his blog Playing at the World, posted on Jan. 20, 2016 that the fantasy supplement for Chainmail was actually an expanded revision of "a two-page set of rules developed for a late 1970 game run by the New England Wargamers Association (NEWA), which were designed by one Leonard Patt." These rules were used at a Miniature Figure Collectors of America con in October 1970, and published in NEWA's newsletter The Courier.

Peterson bases this attribution on extremely similar language used in both sets of rules, including the naming of fighter units as "Heroes" and "Anti-Heroes", that both are the last men in a melee to be killed, that a Hero is the equivalent of 5 men (4 men in Chainmail), that wizards cannot be hit by missile weapon, and the inclusion of "fire ball" as a burst effect spell, as well as several other areas of similarity.

Peterson also points out that Jeff Perren read that particular issue of The Courier, because he subsequently wrote a letter to the editor disagreeing with another article published in the same issue.

Given that Gygax called the Fantasy Supplement an "afterthought" added shortly before publication, it seems clear that Pratt's rules (1970) predate the Fantasy Supplement (1971). Should this attribution, properly sourced to the Courier article, be added to this article? Guinness323 (talk) 20:54, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

If we were to add another Jon Peterson bio about this particular Jon Peterson, his opinions might be appropriate on that article, per WP:ABOUTSELF, but self-published content doesn't qualify as a reliable source. Maybe Peterson's theories will get attention and be published somewhere else that meets the criteria at Wikipedia:Reliable sources, but until then, no. It's not Wikipedia's role to take part in analysis of history or uncovering previously unknown facts, righting great wrongs, or otherwise carrying out original research.

I don't think building on ideas in previous games is shocking to anyone. There were lots of precursors to Chainmail, after all. But if a good source takes interest, then great. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 23:23, 15 March 2021 (UTC)