Boot Hill: Role Playing Game of the Wild West TSR Games

by Brian Blume; Gary Gygax; Editor-Mike Carr

Very nice paperback book, just some signs of reading and age.

Paperback

Published January 1, 1979

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

This rulebook for one of TSR’s first non-Dungeons-and-Dragons RPGs suggests an alternate path that table top gaming didn’t take. The now-standard approach is a (relatively) unified party of players, each with individual motivations and personalities, working together to accomplish a single goal. Even if at times they may work at cross-purposes, squabble amongst themselves, or even betray the interests of the group, the characters generally stay together and take turns to get something done – a “cooperative” model of gaming which has now even spilled over to some board and card games in which players work to accomplish something before time runs out or some other non-player entity “wins” the game. “Boot Hill,” along with some other older TSR RPGs (“Gangbusters” comes to mind) follows more on the heels of the tradition of wargaming from which role-playing originated to propose a “competitive” model. At its essence, “Boot Hill” is a micro-level wargame, in which individual players pit single characters against one another in replicating “classic” shootouts from history and fiction. And, indeed, the basic introductory scenario – “The Gunfight at the OK Corral” – is built around the assumption that players will want to skip all the niceties of role-playing and character construction and just cut to the chase and start shooting. Broader scenarios often suggest pitting characters, or groups of characters, against one another in the form of cattle ranchers vs sheep herders, outlaws vs lawmen, Indians vs settles, etc.

I’ve commented elsewhere that the reason this didn’t become a dominant model is because of the huge strain it places on the GM (or “referee” as the role is consistently called here) to keep everyone entertained while half of the players – or in some cases one player at a time – does things the others aren’t involved in and perhaps shouldn’t even have prior knowledge of. I’ve never seen this work in the gaming groups I’ve participated in, at least not for very long, and those “Boot Hill” games I did play that lasted more than one session pretty consistently set all the players up on one side against a bunch of antagonistic NPCs, which I suspect is how most people have played the game most of the time. However, I know at least from reading old gaming magazines, that the use of multiple referees at convention tournaments has a history of working pretty well in realizing “Boot Hill” as it was conceived, and I’d be very happy to participate – as a player, if not as a harried GM.

Given the mention above of “Indians” as well as the rules not-infrequent stereotyping of Mexican characters, it’s worth mentioning that this game was published at a time when a lot was taken for granted in terms of ethnic representation and default whiteness. That said, it seems to me that there’d be plenty of room for an imaginative GM to build a situation that turns this on its head, making the native tribes into the protagonists, including escaped enslaved people or women as heroic gunfighters, or even having the players be “Robin Hood”-style Mexican bandits and revolutionaries rather than stereotypes. The rules are set at a basic enough level to provide allowances for such variants, or even fantasy or science fictional variants which dispense with the less appealing aspects of American colonialism entirely. It’s an old game, and maybe not the most successful of TSR’s products, but there is some fun still to be squeezed out of it, if you let it.