Gygax vs History

 About 18 years ago, I had the privilege of meeting Gary Gygax at a special event at the now defunct Higgins Armory in Worcester, Massachusetts. The curator there was extremely knowledgeable in medieval weapons and armor, and they were able to boast at the time to be the only group of researchers in the world translating and putting into training and practice medieval German combat training manuals.

The event, of course, included Q&A with Gary and a book signing. But it also featured a debate between Gary and the museum curator over the use of polearms in medieval combat. The curator held the safe and boring position that the wild and bizarre designs on polearms were strictly ornamental, or perhaps designed for intimidation, and were completely useless in combat. Gary took the position that, no, you actually could learn to use all those specialized and intricate heads.

Gary was never one to take the label of "expert" lightly. Although he was well read and knowledgeable, he only considered himself an expert on polearms specifically. So on this topic, at least, he was by no means punching above his class. But in addition to reading and research, Gary drew on his own experience, where as a child he and his friends created replicas of medieval weapons and armor and used them to fight.

I can easily imagine a future where after 500 years of electronic music, historians saying two-hand guitar tapping technique was ahistorical. That it just isn't possible to play like that live. You wouldn't be able to keep up with the beat. You wouldn't have tonal consistency. Videos of 20th century guitar players doing it live would be assumed to be edited or manipulated somehow. And so I hesitate to accept on authority a historian's say on what would have been possible. Even contemporary vocational skills are squarely outside of the historian's wheelhouse. Vocational skills further removed in time from the present would be even further outside of the historian's wheelhouse. Studying the history of an era does not translate to vocational expertise of the period.

More recently, I came across some commentary on an AD&D group regarding dumb ol' Gary's error in including banded armor in the game. If only he'd read the more recent and presumed more correct work by Claude Blair rather than the outdated Charles ffoulkes work, Gary could have gotten it right.

And to that I must say,

Congratulations on the 10 minutes of hard research you've done reading wikipedia. Have you actually read the Claude Blair book? Because you have a lot more confidence in the proposition that banded armor never existed than Blair himself had. In fact, although Blair mentions that the widely accepted position among historians at the time of his writing is that banded armor did not exist, he did acknowledge that this is not an uncontroversial position. It's not a settled historical fact.

The second problem with the wikipedia article is once again a wheelhouse problem. Even if I accept Blair as an infallible authority on medieval armor, he is not any kind of authority on AD&D. The nature of the term "banded" is a descriptive term. It's not a set categorical phylum. So you do have to ask what specifically did Gary mean by that term. The wikipedia article cites three direct quotes regarding D&D banded mail. Only the first of the three quotes are taken directly from Gary's DMG. The others--which I'm only assuming do actually appear in some D&D book--are not necessarily consistent with the original vision. The wikipedia article argues a pretty good case against the latter quotes, as does the Blair book, but not the former, the one that's actually in the book.

Gary would many years later revisit banded armor in his book, World Builder, from the Gygaxian Fantasy Series. The descriptions here are a little more detailed than the ones Gary gave in the DMG, and although they are not 100% compliant with Blair's ideas, they do enough to negate the criticism you find on the wikipedia page.

This isn't the first time that the nerds erroneously accused Gary of error on armor. Studded Leather was an interesting case. Here, the theory goes, dumb ol' Gary mistook a picture of brigandine armor, where metal rivets protrude from the other-lying cloth armor, as being little studs in the leather. Somehow D&D players got it in their heads that studded leather was something Rob Halford might wear on stage--leather clothing with blunted metal studs. And that wasn't the only mistake dumb ol' Gary made. When he added studded leather to AD&D, he forgot to update the allowable armors for thieves to included studded leather. Note that this theory requires that Gary erred not once but twice.

The problem is if, once again, you go to Gary's actual description of studded leather in the DMG, he was accurately describing what you might call brigandine. He was describing a mail armor, not a leather armor. And once again, studded leather is revisited in World Builder where he gives a more detailed description that reinforces that Gary, in fact, had it right all along. And since he was considering studded leather as a type of mail armor, it was probably intentional that he did not include it in the PHB as usable by thieves (and even when it was made usable by thieves in UA, it came with some hefty penalties).

Gary was not infallible. He was not perfect. I don't doubt that he made several mistakes. But he was also very well-read and knowledgeable. DMG Appendix N only scratches the surface of his inspirational readings. Those who are familiar with his Dangerous Journeys RPG might recall seeing the Bibliography of works utilized in inspiring and creating Mythus. It's 3 full pages of tiny print just listing titles of source books, less than 15% of which were fantasy stories. The majority of the sources were non-fiction research.

I'm not going to say this makes Gary an expert or an authority on these subjects. As I mentioned earlier, Gary applied the term expert very sparingly. But within the realm of RPG hobbyists, you really can't ask for much more. The differences of opinion between Gary and Claude Blair, or Gary and the Higgins Armory curator, legitimately fall within the range and scope of those things in which there is no consensus among genuine experts.