‘Boot Hill’ – TSR’s Second Game Was Wild And West – PRIME
We all know that Dungeons & Dragons was the first RPG. But what about the second? TSR also made the 2nd ever RPG, and for that, they had to Go West.
Dungeons & Dragons introduced the idea of roleplaying games and founded an industry, taking wargames away from clashes between whole armies and putting the player in command of a single powerful hero who could fight off enemies one to one. But not long after the first boxed set of Dungeons & Dragons had quickly sold out, did TSR set their sights on another roleplaying game. And in 1975, the company that founded an industry released their second RPG – a wild west gunfighting game called Boot Hill.
Boot Hill still very much bears the hallmarks of the early RPG industry. Like D&D it’s still heavily based in miniatures wargames, but in Boot Hill you take control of a gunfighter instead of a magic-user, cleric, or fighting man. Boot Hill took the concepts of D&D and interpreted them through wildly different lenses, often stumbling onto some of the earliest innovations in tabletop RPG design.
The biggest innovation was the dice system. Boot Hill is one of the first games to move away from using six-sided dice and embrace percentile dice as a means of resolving abilities and skills, but that’s only a small innovation. Boot Hill could also be considered the first “GMless” game:
“Almost from the very start, Boot Hill managed to incorporate concepts that the gaming world wouldn’t see again for decades. Things like realistic combat systems where one shot can kill anyone; an emphasis on 10-sided (percentile) dice instead of 6-siders and 20-siders; the sort of ambiguous morality that comes from role-playing as a bunch of outlaws, as opposed to the polarizing “Lawful Good versus Chaotic Evil” alignment system of D&D; and the strange notion of NOT having a “Dungeon Master” run everything, instead relying on “group consent” instead.”
And like D&D before it, Boot Hill was heavily combat focused–but it’s one of the few instances where you can really see the work of the other two founders of D&D alongside Gygax. Brian Blume and the original third partner of TSR, Don Kaye (who tragically died before the game was published), put in a great deal of collaborative work on the first edition of the game, making it one of the few instances where Gygax is working on something non-D&D related.
And unlike D&D, Boot Hill was lethal. There were no rules for armor, no death saves, no luck checks–a bullet was a bullet in the game, and if you got shot in the head, that was it:
“Extended campaign play for a given character is made difficult by the lethality of the combat system. Now I’m not complaining about the combat system–bullets to the head _should_ often be fatal–it’s just that a well-developed character, even one who avoids superfluous gunplay, can perish very suddenly.”
Which also highlights one of the problems that plagued Boot Hill. Like its wargame predecessors, it was great for assigning stats to specific moments: you could recreate historical gunfights, simulate bar brawls, and so on, but the game didn’t have much for advancing beyond the first session.
Despite these problems (which would ultimately be the reason you’re playing D&D today instead of, say Boot Hill 5E), the game still sold well enough to hit three separate editions before WotC ultimately shuttered production on Boot Hill.
And this brought everyone to the world of Promise City, somewhere in El Dorado County where legends were born and outlaws were legends:
“You step from the cool shade of the Long Branch Saloon into the midday heat of Promise City. Loosening your Colt in its bolster, you look down Main Street and spot the leather and denim-clad stranger who called you out. Citizens of the town scramble for cover as they sense the forthcoming battle. The outlaw doesn’t look fast enough to match your draw, but… wait! Your keen eyes catch the unmistakable glint of the sun against gun metal from the roof of the dance hall – the yellow coward has a buddy who’s going to shoot you in the back! What will you do? Think fast, or you’ll be the next resident of… BOOT HILL!
BOOT HILL is the game of role-playing in the Wild West of history and legend. Each player adopts the persona of their character, becoming a shiftless outlaw robbing banks and stages, a renegade half-breed leading Indians on the warpath, straight-shooting sheriff determined to clean up the town, and so on. This boxed version contains a revised and expanded rules booklet (which now includes ratings for many of the real-life “fastest guns that ever lived”), a campaign map for El Dorado County (“Somewhere in the Southwest”), percentile dice, and a 34″ X 22″ map of Promise City, including a movement grid which can be used with the counters provided (70, including 2 blanks) or by miniatures, and detailed structure drawings showing door, window, and stair locations as well as the height of the buildings! BOOT HILL merges the West of movies, television, and literature with reality to form the locale for endless hours of adventure and fun. Strap on your gunbelt, and enter the world of BOOT HILL!”
Happy Adventuring!
