Admittedly this post isn't actually going to be about shaman classes, but it is valuable connective tissue in the history of D&D that I didn't feel right about skipping entirely. So bear with Uncle Furt as he bumbles through regaling you with an ancient past that he himself never lived through.
When 1977 rolled around, D&D had been selling extremely well for several years, especially considering its original $2,000 budget and the “whatever our friends and family can doodle on a napkin” style of art direction. It sold tens of thousands of copies and made millions of dollars; well enough that its publisher, TSR, wanted more products to sell, and to a wider audience this time. To accomplish this, the ruleset of OD&D was rewritten and cleaned up by a guy named John Eric Holmes to make it more accessible to newbies and people from outside of the tabletop hobbyist scene. It also excised copyright-sensitive words like "hobbit" or "balrog" from the text.
This new edition of D&D—for that's what it was, even if it was never numbered like one—was given a lower character level cap and an explicit endpoint: when you played all that you could in this Basic edition of D&D, it was time to move up to the shiny new Advanced D&D compiled by Gygax.¹
Once graduated, you'd hang out with Gary and all the other big boys, and you'd get to enjoy more options, more monsters, and more spells, not to mention tournaments and other big, prestigious things that necessitated having a lager body of codified rules to be able to referee objectively. Essentially, Basic was what you'd play at home with your friend group to get a taste, and AD&D was what you'd go to a big fancy convention to play (and pay).²
Thus the Basic and Advanced split was one of the first big “rulings vs rules” philosophical divides the hobby would see, and from where I'm standing it was entirely motivated by sales, marketing, and a desire to expand what this nascent market was even capable of.
I also can’t pass up the opportunity to remind everyone that AD&D was also meant to be legally distinct enough from OD&D that TSR didn’t have to pay Arneson royalties for any of its sales, despite Dave being a co-creator of the original game. According to Gary, Arneson only ever sent him notes from the Blackmoor game he was running using Gygax's Chainmail rules, which Gary then consulted while writing D&D mostly by himself.
This wasn't the first time they fought like this; there was an episode in 1976 where TSR tried to lay claim to all of Arneson and other writers' personal creations written during or even after their employment at TSR through a revised contract, ³ like some kind of tabletop Disney Vault with (hopefully) far fewer smut illustrations locked away in its depths.
That incident led to Dave quitting, but that was far from the end of their disputes. Arneson took his removal from the royalties to court in 1979 in a series of lawsuits that would drag on until 1981. This kerfuffle would come to be known as the "Great War", in Arneson's own dramatic words.
According to Dave, he provided much of the raw basis for D&D which was later edited and prettied up by certain other people he didn't care to name. But he further asserted that he and his Blackmoor group had never been all that focused on the mechanical side of gameplay to begin with. Instead, he emphasized his role in developing fundamental but less material components of play. The big example of this was "roleplaying", which was still a novel concept at the time. His contribution then, was to the sense of wonder and creativity that gave meaning and purpose to the pile of rules; animating the physical game with its own spirit.
This protracted legal battle led to the genesis of the somewhat artificial “Arnesonian” style of game design, which then proliferated within tabletop communities. The court of public opinion was as much a battlefield as the courtroom, and Dave and TSR slung countless printed articles and interviews back and forth over who should be thought of as the True father of D&D. All of this just so Dave could argue his case in court and get the money he believed TSR owed him (and rightly so, in my opinion).
Not to disparage the guy, but the free-wheeling and rules-lite style of play attributed to him doesn't exactly line up with the sometimes very chunky and simulationist rules he wrote. This is especially evident in the rules of his own books post-TSR, many of which he claimed to have wanted for D&D if it weren't for Gygax's role in cowriting it.⁴
Eventually they settled out of court and Arneson got his royalties on AD&D products, ⁵ but by then the bifurcation of D&D was complete.
Imagine reshaping the trajectory of an entire hobby just to stiff your business partner.
Anyway, the two-pronged approach to D&D emphasizing two parallel newbie/veteran systems ended up not lasting all that long. What ended up happening is that Basic and Advanced D&D each followed their own trajectory independent of one another. AD&D eventually released a 2nd edition, while Basic D&D gradually got a bunch of rules expansions that raised the max level and added more stuff to do while remaining more-or-less the same edition it started off as. By the time Basic was joined by Expert, Companion, Master, and Immortal rules (completing the BECMI series we know today), the rules were arguably as complex as those in AD&D, and the level cap was a staggering 36.
Has anyone here ever gotten a character even close to that from level 1? What was that campaign like? I’d like to know.
Speaking of BECMI, now’s a good time to bring up a bit of a faux pas you’ll run into in my writing. I almost always refer to all versions of Basic collectively as BECMI, rather than differentiating between B/X as a stand-alone entity and BECMI as something else that came later, or further specifying Holmes vs Moldvay vs Mentzer, etc. I know some folks will chafe at that, but I do this for simplicity’s sake, and because it’s the lens I learned about Basic through.
These two branches of D&D ran separate-yet-parallel for over twenty years before Wizards of the Coast bought D&D and either merged the branches back together, cut one of them off, or just grew an entirely different tree, depending on your point of view.
More important to our story is that from both these branches, several shaman-shaped fruit grew over the years.
As I said, Basic and Advanced ran concurrently, but we’ll look at the full lifespan of one edition before the other in the following entries, again just for simplicity’s sake.
Or return to the Shamans in D&D archive.
¹ Gygax, Gary, & Dave Arneson. Dungeons & Dragons. TSR. 1977. Edit. Eric Holmes. P. 2.
² Schick, Lawrence. Heroic Worlds: A History and Guide to Role-Playing Games. 1991. P. 130–131.
³ Jon Peterson. Game Wizards: The Epic Battle For Dungeons & Dragons. 2021. P. 114. (At least those are the page numbers on the EPUB converted to a PDF that I have access to at the moment.)
⁴ I often think back to the Lich van Winkle article pointing out a formula that includes a "Players Intelligence" statistic in Arneson & Snider's Adventures in Fantasy (1979), among other game design arcana.
⁵ Game Wizards. P. 170.
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