Rutskarn’s Gambit | Creating Political Intrigue with Boot Hill | Wandering DMs S06 E30

Wandering DMs

Dan and Paul are joined by special guest Adam "Rutskarn" DeCamp, author of the blog Chocolate Hammer. Rutskarn will share his experience running a highly political campaign using the original TSR Western RPG Boot Hill, first published in 1975. How can a game with zero rules for social interactions and a highly deadly combat system actually encourage play focused on politics, deception, and intrigue?

Boot Hill is a western-themed role-playing game designed by Brian Blume, Gary Gygax, and Don Kaye (although Kaye unexpectedly died before the game was published), and first published in 1975. Boot Hill was TSR's third role-playing game, appearing not long after Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) and Empire of the Petal Throne. Boot Hill focused on gunfighting rather than role-playing. The first edition and second editions were specifically marketed as a miniatures combat game, but even in the third edition, most of the rules concerned combat resolution, with relatively little information about settings and few rules for social interaction.

Combat could be short and deadly, with death often coming from the first gunshot. This lethality did not change over time since, unlike D&D characters, Boot Hill characters did not advance in levels to develop better defenses or advantages over non-player characters; they remained just as likely to die in their hundredth combat as they had been in their first. As a result, most characters had a very short life span, and players generally had little chance to identify with their player character over the long term, as they could with a player character in D&D.

• Read Rutskarn's "Boot Hill and the Fear of Dice" on his Blog Chocoloate Hammer
• Check Out Rutskarn's Patreon
• Follow Rutskarn on Twitter

This description uses material from the Wikipedia article "Boot Hill (role-playing game)", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.