Post originally by Jay Triplett at 2003-05-21 09:15:17
Converted from Phorums BB System

Well, no, not exactly. The Strageic Review was not Dragon magazine under another name. The Strageic Review was a tabletop miniatures battle magazine. In fact, an excerpt from The Strategic Review, Summer 1975, Vol. 1 #2 is rather interesting.

"Tactical Studies Rules is not a giant company; it is not even a large one. But we are growing now, and in the future we might attain substantial size. While we must make profit to remain in business, TSR is not around solely to make money. The members of TSR are long-time gamers who have found that there is a great deal of satisfaction in creating and/or publishing a good set of game rules or an enjoyable game, and please note the emphasis on the term gamers. Some (people) attempt to downgrade the game aspect of our hobby and pretend to simulate reality. We at TSR believe that it is impossible to create real-life situations, although some of the excitement and challenge of reality can be reflected in a game although a game always remains a game. Thus, we try to publish rules and games which are easy to play, logical, and still give some of the flavor of the particular era or battle or whatever it is that they cover. This, of course, cannot really apply to those fantasy and science fiction titles where reality is not relevant. In these comes the stress of providing a framework which excites and challenges players as they develop their own games. The keynote in all of our publications has been flexibility tempered with playability and mixed with the proper amount of "authenticity" so as to reflect the sense of historical realism or genre realism. We hope you will always find that we succeeded..."

This properly reflects my impression of the gaming community at the time and TSR product lines at the time. These standards of TSR are met by Pendragon. I don't feel they were met by any Dungeons and Dragons products that were produced after the boxed sets came out. Of course you could argue that they don't apply their standards of reality to fantasy games, but in fact, when you go back through the boxed sets you can see this very standard demonstrated in their work of providing a framework of medieval realism.
I think the emergence of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons signaled a break in their previous attempt to provide "authenticity" and a sense of historical realism. At this point you may say that their goal was to provide goofy fun, and I would agree with you.

The Strategic Review was a magazine that encompassed all strategy games, historic, fantasy, and science fiction. Dragon Magazine mainly focuses on one game, Dungeons and Dragons, although I believe, in the beginning, they published some material on other fantasy games as well.

Your comment that there was no "Golden Era", that it was "goofy fun from the get go," is really misleading. The Stragegic Review was born of long time gamers who had never even played a fantasy role playing game, except for possibly in recent years of the publishing of this article. Gen Con had been going for sometime and was already giving out gaming awards. You can bet that they weren't for fantasy rpg's. Most of the gamers I knew at this time were historical gamers.

Then, as today, there were many gamers who were trying to make battle too realisitic to be fun for many players. This article comments on this and by stating that they realize they cannot produce realism they mean that it is impossible to realistically reproduce every blow and the subsequent gory details of damage in a game.

The point I want to make here, is that there was once a large gaming community that used Chainmail to produce historic simulations and recreation of battle. Some were interested in incorporating mythical elements in their battles. Dungeons and Dragons was born out of requests from these players. Dungeons and Dragons began with a solid base in medieval realism and later drifted away from it. Pendragon does not. So if you are interested in applying the standards mentioned in this article to your fantasy roleplaying...buy Pendragon.

I am not saying that we never got together to have goofy fun for an evening or two...or even for a small campaign. But goofy fun definitely does not express this "era," as you refer to it, of gaming.