[OPR] Let me introduce you the 'Eisen vow'
Foreword
I am on Substack from March 2023 however I officially kicked off my VI·VIII·X project in March 2022: I ran for one year an “ordinary” blog with “ordinary” posts and then I moved here… Since some old posts are worth to be read to fully understand my work and purpose, I decided to re-post the most relevant ones in a new series entitled OPR (Old Post Revisited) where I simply resume these old texts, rephrase them (an ideally keep within the 4-minute length threshold I set as a golden rule) and present again since I consider them “worth to be read”.
May the fun be always at your table!
I was sure that my idea about KUP was not original and it was nearly impossible that no one had already come to my conclusion, what is surprising is that this happened 50 years ago, in April 1975. The fundamental concept underlying the KUP model has already been discussed by Gygax himself! That is absolutely outstanding!
Ok, let's explain this with more details and order. On the RPGGeek boards, Chris B (kudos to Chris!) pointed me out that this is not the first time someone has though about a game 'veiled' to the players. He kindly provided me with the post of a fellow who worked on a game with rules completely hidden to the players. For the sake of completeness, I leave here the link to a podcast on 'Eisen's vow' from the that post!
What is interesting in that post is the quotation of the 'Eisen vow'! Being a quotation from the book The Elusive Shift by Jon Peterson, Jon kindly pointed me out the original piece of information about the 'Eisen vow' (kudos to Jon!). The original document is the zine Europa: hopefully I found on James' blog Grognardia a post where he uses that zine to discuss about another article by Gygax from the same issue and doing this, makes the full zine available. That is simply great!
For your convenience I will report both excerpts, the first is Gygax's comment to the first Eisen's letter (not reported, but duly quoted by EGG):
Based on Gygax's reply, mr Eisen wrote this clarification to better explain his thoughts:
That is the pillar I used to build the KUP model, neither more nor less!
Maybe I am not a good communicator, (or better, without the 'maybe') I am not able to explain this but I found that Sandy Eisen, nearly 50 years ago came to the same conclusion, and let me say, he could not express his thought better!
A final word: I am happy not to be the first person on Earth to think this way, this makes me feel I am not an alien... the real point that impresses me is that it happened nearly one year after the publication of the very first edition of D&D!
And now, room to button time! If…
…you want to read more in the future:
…you like the current post:
…you want to know a bit more about me and my project:
…you found my project interesting:
…you want to have a glance at my products on sale on DrivethruRPG:
…you want to read my rule-set in its free of charge online version:
The concept of hiding the rules from the players is one I am very unsure of. I find great enjoyment, as a player, in seeing all the rules and the ways in which the imaginary world works, and as an arbiter I find holding all the rules to myself can be a lot to track. It is a very interesting concept though, thanks for the read!