Who wrote the aerial and naval combat rules?

[delta]

Do we know who drafted the Vol-3 rules on Aerial and Naval Combat?

I've been making a particular guess for years, but I'd like to not have to speculate on that. Those rules aren't in the BTPBD text. Not sure if they're in the pre-D&D draft or not.

[paleologos]

I was under the impression that rules for aerial combat were based on Arneson's "Battle in the Skies" or BITS, which in turn was based on Mike Carr's "Fight in the Skies".

Griff (of "Secrets of Blackmoor") ran a BITS game at GaryCon in 2019, and my son was signed up to play in another session this past March, but - Covid.

[delta]

Aug 6, 2020 22:27:55 GMT -6 paleologos said:

I was under the impression that rules for aerial combat were based on Arneson's "Battle in the Skies" or BITS, which in turn was based on Mike Carr's "Fight in the Skies".

Griff (of "Secrets of Blackmoor") ran a BITS game at GaryCon in 2019, and my son was signed up to play in another session this past March, but - Covid.

That was my guess. Did Arneson publish BITS in some prior publication (with his name accredited)? That's what it's called in Vol-3, but the phrasing makes it sound new, not a re-publication, and there's no name attached (other than the "no apologies" back-reference to Carr).

[captainjapan]

This is the Arneson draft on display at GaryCon. It is titled Battle in the Skies and it looks to be about a dozen pages typewritten for Arneson by Gail Gaylord, the wife of a friend.

[retrorob]

Language ("can take from 6-36 hits") and crunch (hit location etc.) point to Arneson as the possible author of those rules.

[delta]

Aug 7, 2020 0:28:17 GMT -6 captainjapan said:

This is the Arneson draft on display at GaryCon. It is titled Battle in the Skies and it looks to be about a dozen pages typewritten for Arneson by Gail Gaylord, the wife of a friend.

That's awesome, thanks for that link!

[delta]

Aug 7, 2020 1:43:10 GMT -6 retrorob said:

Language ("can take from 6-36 hits") and crunch (hit location etc.) point to Arneson as the possible author of those rules.

Agreed, that was always my guess, and basically that reason, too.

[delta]

Holy smoke, now I really wish I could see the complete document draft there. Maybe it made for a coherent game unto itself?

"Small Insects" have 6-36 hits to kill, the same as a Griffon? And "Large Insects" the same as a Balrog? I did not ever expect that!

[delta]

Looking at my notes, I'm reminded that Griff wrote a small bit about it on his blog about a year ago, mostly focused on the details of one of the 3 phased-movement options given therein:

www.secretsofblackmoor.com/blog/archives/07-2019

[retrorob]

As for this BITS-draft, note also the proto-THAC0 and ranged weapon fire rate.

[delta]

Aug 8, 2020 0:43:17 GMT -6 retrorob said:

As for this BITS-draft, note also the proto-THAC0 and ranged weapon fire rate.

What do you see as "proto-THACO"? Personally I read the "to Hit" column as effectively Ascending Armor Class. (Note that 20 - "to Hit" = AC in Vol-2 in most cases.) Maybe we're talking about the same thing.

[retrorob]

That's right, I meant base 20 - Armor Class = number "to Hit" on d20. So to hit a Balrog (AC 2) you have to roll 18. That matches Guidon draft.

[Zenopus]

I also took a picture of it at Gary Con in 2019. The pages were displayed a bit differently at the time; the front page shown in the photo linked above was in the typewriter and a different page was fully visible to the left.

This other page is titled "Battle in the Skies Suppliment", so I think it is extra rules as the front page is just titled "Battle in the Skies".

It should be just readable in this photo if you download and blow it up:



Download from here: imgur.com/oIkURNM

[delta]

Aug 8, 2020 12:06:57 GMT -6 Zenopus said:

I also took a picture of it at Gary Con in 2019. The pages were displayed a bit differently at the time; the front page shown in the photo linked above was in the typewriter and a different page was fully visible to the left.

This other page is titled "Battle in the Skies Suppliment", so I think it is extra rules as the front page is just titled "Battle in the Skies".

Super great, thanks for that. Looks like that page is about the Bombing and and Ground-to-Air attacks rules ("shotgun effect" catapults).

There's about 4 pages of hand-written notes on lined paper at the back. Per the Reddit link, Griff's Kickstarter had a stretch goal to release a facsimile of 4 pages of handwritten notes. Likely that was it? I wonder if those handwritten notes were extra, or incorporated into the typewritten text?

[aldarron]

Dan you should email Griff and ask, but realize he is under restrictions as to what he can reveal because these notes are in the Stormberg collection. The bits rules are yet another example of the draft material Gygax edited into what we see in OD&D. As to the naval rules, those are acknowledged by everybody to also have been developed from an Arneson draft, but to my knowledge, no one has produced that draft yet.

[delta]

Aug 9, 2020 6:07:24 GMT -6 aldarron said:

Dan you should email Griff and ask, but realize he is under restrictions as to what he can reveal because these notes are in the Stormberg collection. The bits rules are yet another example of the draft material Gygax edited into what we see in OD&D. As to the naval rules, those are acknowledged by everybody to also have been developed from an Arneson draft, but to my knowledge, no one has produced that draft yet.

I did; as expected, he declined.

[Zenopus]

I made a post about the BITS draft over in the Guidon thread:

I took a look at Arneson's monster stats in his Battle in the Skies draft and the HD/AC equivalents given there match very closely with the Guidon draft. I was inspired to do this by delta's column where he mentioned that the numbers were close to the OD&D numbers, so I thought I'd take it one step further and compare the earlier Guidon numbers.

odd74.proboards.com/post/232219/thread

[thegreyelf]

Aug 9, 2020 6:07:24 GMT -6 aldarron said:

Dan you should email Griff and ask, but realize he is under restrictions as to what he can reveal because these notes are in the Stormberg collection. The bits rules are yet another example of the draft material Gygax edited into what we see in OD&D. As to the naval rules, those are acknowledged by everybody to also have been developed from an Arneson draft, but to my knowledge, no one has produced that draft yet.

It is my assumption, though I haven't actually compared them in any way, that the naval combat rules are probably drawn from DGUTS, just as BITS was drawn from FITS. Again, I haven't done any comparative work, but DGUTS was written by Arneson/Gygax/Carr, and it seems a reasonable assumption.