Is That A Stetson?

BOOT HILL was an attempt by TSR to do for the Old West what D&D did for the fantasy novel. It was first published in 1975 as a set of miniatures-based combat rules with no particular role-playing accessories, and again in 1979 as a “full” RPG. It was the first role-playing game to be set in the Old West, and remains one of the most spectacular flops in all of gaming. Most RPGs manage to scrape out a niche of committed (if perhaps slightly deranged) players that cling to it through thick and thin. There are, even today, small communities of die-hards who still play DRAGONQUEST, for crying out loud, and there’s even an on-line community of THE MORROW PROJECT players! And THE MORROW PROJECT sucked! BOOT HILL never managed even that much; the number of fans was so small that they never managed to find one another and link up the way the somewhat more numerous DRAGONQUEST or THE FANTASY TRIP fans managed to do, like survivors of the Titanic clinging to one another for warmth.

The designers of BOOT HILL made certain design choices (or lack of design choices, which amounts to the same thing) that tended to inhibit true role-playing and made the game seem more like a long-running TV show and a role-playing game. In most successful role-playing games, role-playing is the whole dang point. The point of the game is to blur as much as possible the line between the me sitting here and the me striding through this imaginary glen. Among the things these games tend to do is honor the characters with a certain durability – it’s hard to evolve a deep role-playing connection with a character if his life expectancy is measured in minutes. This means that combat systems in particular are tweaked in such a way that they are rarely immediately mortal. There’s almost always a way out, even if it involves pell-mell retreat or godly intervention. Your character can die, and often will especially at low levels, but if you survive “game infancy” and get a few levels under your belt, you can look forward to a certain longevity.

But not in BOOT HILL. It started out as a wargame of gunfights in the Old West, and as it evolved into a role-playing game in its second edition, it never lost its detailed and accurate combat system. And an unfortunate fact of life is that to accurately model gunfights, you have to accurately model the fact that a single gunshot wound can kill dang near any cotton-picker. Once you’ve made the decision to throw down, anyone can be killed, from the lowliest minor character to the most veteran player character in the game. All it takes is one shot, and there’s no option to retreat and no divine intervention. Wounds in BOOT HILL are divided into three categories – light, serious, and mortal. Head wounds are mortal 60% of the time, which is realistic, but it’s kind of a bummer all the same.

In other words, you learn not to develop deep role-playing connections with characters because they have a habit of not sticking around. Instead, you tend to view them as actors in a long-running TV show. You may like them, you may have a strong emotional attachment to them, but they aren’t you and you know that in the long run they’ll be replaced by someone else.

BOOT HILL had a lot of strange quirks. It had no alignment rules, for example, and in a genre that was almost obsessed with alignment, the sheer amorality of the system could be alarming. You could shuttle seamlessly between black evil and upright decency without the slightest penalty, and some players didn’t like that. The swift and sudden lethality of the combat system was very unusual for an RPG, as we’ve already discussed. Characters never really grew or evolved. There were no levels and no skills, and really no way for a character to benefit from experience. You were who you started out as, and that was that. And these were all deliberate design choices.

TSR didn’t help its cause by its strange management of the game. The rules were always heavy on combat, especially gunfights, and fairly weak on everything else. There was a decided lack of supplemental material, and the “campaign game” (as TSR called the role-playing element of the game) rules were distressingly brief. Everything, it seemed, except the rules for gunfights was up to the players to work out, and not everyone liked having to finish the game design. Every new edition of the game was so unlike the earlier editions that it was like getting a whole new game, which tended to make rubbish of all the work you’d done for the earlier editions (a problem it shared with other TSR games like GAMMA WORLD).

Personally, I like the mythical Old West of gunslingers and outlaws, and I liked BOOT HILL. I liked it a lot. I generated hundreds of characters to populate the town, and hundreds more to populate the ranches, mines and settlements that I scattered across the countryside. I evolved a region that was locked in perpetual struggle between miners and ranchers, between open-range and closed-range ranchers, between an increasingly urbanized town population and an essentially feudal rural population, between high-born Mexican nobles and hardscrabble campesinos… Oh, you get the idea. But it was never really role-playing; it was more like writing a movie or a TV show and I never really identified with any of the characters. I think the failure of BOOT HILL was a tragedy, and to this day I harbor dreams of writing a “fourth edition” of the rules to correct its quirks and deficiencies, but that’ll have to wait.