Devotees of D&D in the early 1980s were lucky to encounter Bruce Galloway's master treatise: The Highest Level of All Fantasy Wargaming. The title was a bold claim, clickbait in the days before clickbait, intriguing to those of us with a bottomless appetite for whatever gaming we could get our hands on. And it was certainly ubiquitous. As I recall, my 14-year-old self found his copy on Winn-Dixie's magazine rack. Mom didn't approve of its occult artwork, but knowing her offspring, she acquiesced with little argument...
Between the casual, unexamined sexism (obvious even to a teenage boy) and overly dense rules keen on subverting the players' agency, a fine collection of essays spanning fantasy literature's greatest themes got the reader thinking, and its medieval reference materials may have been its ultimate triumph. And in all fairness to Galloway, his obvious distaste for Gor tempered some of its generational misogyny. His remains a seminal offering, but my younger self rejected what was clearly his leading argument, summarized below:
"In many ways, however, D&D is unsatisfactory...The party of adventurers will usually be an oddball assortment of warriors wearing armor and bearing weapons from a wide variety of cultures and historical periods; Black and White magicians; thieves, clerics...Apart from the sheer unlikelihood of such a motley crew being able to agree on any course of action without coming to blows, why should they associate together in the first place...Motive is the key word. D&D scenarios exist in a vacuum, and that is why we call them unsatisfactory...a fantasy scenario must contain its own consistent and intrinsic logic."
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This was doubtless a marketing ploy. Why buy the book? Here's why. Galloway must have understood that the rules weren't imposing a setting so much as providing raw materials, drawn from history's abundant source, to fashion the campaign. Want history? Referees can make it happen. But most campaigns don't even occupy our universe, redrawing the lines beyond all reproach. Dwarves invented Renaissance plate armor, elves the English longbow to their specifications and on their timeline. This, alone, negates any argument...
But there's more. There's gonzo. Take the game as offered and you do get a collection of armor and weaponry. You absolutely achieve that motley assemblage. Chaotic wizards, respectable, law-abiding heroes. And so what? There's this thing called fun, and an eldritch logic can still prevail in this environment. The introduction of dragons and wizards, alone, violates realism, and the same logic which allows this can exert its own consequences when some rule gets broken. In Wonderland, this intrinsic logic can be different.
These objections percolated within my adolescent brain, and to his substantial credit, Galloway appeared to anticipate as much, beseeching his D&D-oriented readers to see the power of his point despite such disagreements. Galloway's greatest achievement was a medieval reference manual complete with essays on everything from fantasy literature to the art (indeed, the necessity) of world building. And it taught this 14-year-old the value of his personal intuitions and how best to turn disagreements into something worthwhile...
Note: I still disagree on many counts, but find things to praise in this historic publication, including, most especially, its astrology, angels, demons, and solid essays.
Reminds me of the argument that inspired the original ravenloft module. "A vampire shouldn't be a wandering monster with no previous motive or reason to be there" only reason the Hickman's felt this way is because of a bad/inexperienced DM. Of course the vampire on the random encounter chart has a backstory and reason to be there! But you know who's job it it is to figure it out? The DM, not the rules of the game or the random table.
ReplyDeleteThe title of the game was just Fantasy Wargaming. The text "The Highest Level of All" was ad copy. If you get a copy of the Patrick Stephens Limited (PSL) edition, the original, it does not include that ad copy that was put on the US editions from Stein & Day.
ReplyDeleteConfusingly, PSL published a different game from another author by the same title, though it was exclusively a tabletop miniatures battle game. But to make it still more confusing, the author of that game adapted it a couple years later into a fantasy adventure/roleplaying game under the title Fantasy Gaming.
Anyway, the apparent misogyny in the game (as well as the seeming antisemitism) was entirely from an attempt to be true to the source material, not from "generational" issues.
To my way of thinking, the most important thing the game brought was the unified magic and religion system. Only slightly less valuable was the early attempt to outline the social characteristics of the setting (that is, Medieval Europe), something otherwise mostly limited at the time to Chivalry & Sorcery. The game system otherwise could have used some additional development, bith to streamline the rules and to better integrate the several sections, each written by a different author. Monsters and other foes, particularly, could really have included both a damage rating and a "monster value" that was promised elsewhere.*
*The quick fix for that last that we used was a basic XP value of 100 times the creature's Combat Level, but that's not fully satisfactory. A similar quick fix for damage is 1d4 with a required Physique and Agility of 11, which is similarly only partly satisfactory.
Dammit, I intended to comment on player agency. There are other games from the era that introduced similar rules to track personality traits of characters, notably Pendragon. It's worth noting that, other than the Morale rules which are actually a significant element of the combat system, the personality rules ("Temptation" and the "Challenging the Party Leader" sections) are explicitly intended as a "court of appeals" when the GM believes the player is playing excessively out of character. I'll agree that they could really have been better written and designed, but they weren't intended to fully handcuff player choice.
DeleteMorale, though, was a way to include victory and defeat in combat without necessarily killing the character. It's how the Combat Level becomes significant in a character surviving and achieving victory in physical conflicts in the game. As an unusual mechanic at the time, it's not surprising that the mechanic was undervalued by the hordes of roleplayers at the time who did not come, as the game's authors did, out of the wargaming hobby culture. It's really another aspect of the rules that could have been better explained.
Hey, it’s great to hear from someone so knowledgeable about the system. You’ve just prompted another reading to incorporate this new information, so thank you very much for weighing in! I’ve never met anyone who’s actually played, much less modified, these mechanics, and will have to defer to your experience in this regard. The wargaming assumptions were definitely present here and in OD&D (among others) as the hobby grew towards what it would become. It was an evolutionary process with generational modifications. Everything’s generational, everything’s transitional. That said, when Galloway describes “liberated” wives and girlfriends (in quotes), he implies a skepticism of the feminist movement that absolutely mapped to many of the adult males in my personal orbit. He was, in his own words, "no great advocate" of women’s lib, although he wasn’t a monster, detesting the abuse present in Norman’s Gor series. It was the benign sexism of an older generation, noting that my generation is already under a similar lens. We’re all transitional. The penalties to female characters forced female players to run a male character or endure second-class status in a game ostensibly played for fun. This wasn’t malicious. Galloway desired realism and couldn’t imagine women lining up to play these games because they weren’t doing so at the time. It was a generational characteristic that hasn’t survived. None of this is to denigrate the man, who clearly wrote an important work. Anyway, in the light of your excellent perspective, I'd welcome any additional information and/or resources you’d care to share about this fascinating subject. Thanks again for reaching out to the blog, and see you around…
DeleteI guess, but criticism of second-wave feminism had better not be the same as misogyny, or there would be many modern feminists who would be labeled misogynists, and that would just be weird. It would be more damning to demonstrate agreement by the authors with any Medieval values depicted, but I doubt that could be done. We do know that Galloway's gaming circle included some women, several of whom are in fact credited in his dedicatory sections, so while I'm sure he (rightly or wrongly as it may have been to do so) expected most players of roleplaying games to be male, Gail Smith, Maggie, Margaret, and Verity, all of whom are listed in the "Gramercy" dedication, point toward a wider audience in actuality. See Mike Monaco's The Highest Level of All: The Story of Fantasy Wargaming for documentation of the specific nature of Galloway's gaming situation. The PDF should be available at that link. (Full disclosure: I am among the people Monaco references in that book, for a series of blog posts I wrote discussing and reviewing the game, and I corresponded with him during the time he was writing it.)
Delete(Comment got too long, so I'll split it into two.)
(Part two)
DeleteOf more potentially direct value, though, Monaco's book includes, among other things, low-res reproductions of the extant playtest/development materials for a second book that was in development at the time of Galloway's untimely death - it would have allowed the game to be played in a bronze- or early iron-age Babylonian setting. I'd warn you that material very incomplete, though.
Anyway, I don't want to be trapped into over-defending the game. It was very much a product of its time and place and was never as well-developed as might have been hoped anyway, as I've noted. I do wish that a game making use of the theory and metaphysics ascribed to the magic/religion system could be published - and in fact I occasionally noodle toward something of that sort myself, though I don't have the resources to spend too much time on it*, so don't let me stop you - meaning anyone reading this - if it's something you're interested in pursuing.
Then you hit the "for fun" critique, and that's a bugbear of mine. Different people have different goals that provide them with "fun", so saying that one set of parameters is contrary to "fun" seems like a non-starter to me. Some people find fun in meticulously recreating a particular situation, while others find fun in wild, gonzo playfulness. Trying to limit one of those to parameters best suited to the other is just going to make everybody miserable. Some people play Chivalry & Sorcery, some play Risus (some play both, because human beings, am I right?). It's unfair to critique one in the terms of the other. Is Risus "bad" because it can't easily provide a detailed minigame of running a manor? Is C&S "bad" because it requires detailed character sheets and involves meticulous calculations to resolve many types of actions in the game? Both can be "fun". It is a more fraught question as to whether simulating institutional misogyny is necessary for any kind of "fun", and I'd submit that it probably isn't much, though failing to account for it at least a little bit is bound to deform the fictional society depicted. The amount that a given gamer or group is willing to tolerate that deformation will vary. I can say that most of the specific parameters Galloway includes were modified by us in actual play, so we certainly erred on the side of deforming the setting over deforming our ideals in pursuit of understanding attitudes within the simulated environment. I can see that I'm assuming large amounts of discussion I've had over the years here, so forgive me if it's gotten too densely theoretical to follow. I'll try to clarify if necessary, but for now I feel like I'm just getting far off in the weeds so I'll stop.
*Not to mention that I have a couple different directions I tend to pursue when thinking about how best to structure an adventure game, and I still haven't settled on just one direction yet so my design tends to become incoherent (in a real way, not in whatever the Forgies meant from their abstract theoretical perspective) when I actually write it down. So far.
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