It comes as no surprise to readers of this blog that the Boot Hill role-playing game is a five-star GOAT. Now that the #BROSR has done the heavy lifting and reintroduced the concept of the bronstein to the wider RPG community – and more importantly, demonstrated through actual play that it is a viable mode of campaign – many of the uncertainties that played readers for decades have been eliminated.
If you do a brief survey of Boot Hill blogposts published before about 2020 you’ll find a common lament. The game is almost entirely geared toward the resolution of high-stakes combat encounters. It leans heavily into the use of miniatures for distance, and cover, and relative positioning with only the bare minimum guidance presented for generating the surrounding world, and running games that build up to that climactic battle. All of those blog posts will handle the game in a very traditional manner. The Boot Hill campaign that is theorized, and sell them implemented, is a bog standard narrative game in which a band of allied characters takes on a world created by, and run by, a GM who is there to help them feel like they are overcoming challenges.
This is not the way Boot Hill is intended to be played. This is not how it is written to be played. Trying to use Boot Hill in this manner, is using the wrong tool for the job. One of the common laments revolves around the fact that combat is so utterly devastating. In a standard RPG campaign this is a serious design flaw. The players will not want to risk combat because it is so deadly.
There are two flaws with this mode of thinking. One, this is a real world RPG that relies heavily on high stakes engagements. The social ramifications within the game world are as high as the game ramifications at the table. Combat is best avoided. If you can get things done without it, you are far better off. It should be a method of last resort and in Boot Hill, it is.
Decades later the hack that wrote the Unknown Armies modern day mythic horror RPG would amaze the community by acknowledging that in the modern real world violence is generally frowned upon. So foreign was the idea of in-game consequences of violence in the mid to late 1990s that RPG readers were awestruck by this idea and praised themselves for being smarter than adventure game enthusiasts.
Meanwhile, Gygax had beat him to the punch almost right out of the starting gate. This is an open and honest approach to the concept of violence in RPGs. It is the most high risk- low reward tactic around, and the rules enforce that. This is not a flaw.
The other flaw here stems from the assumption that combat should involve all players every time. That is the case in most games, particularly those that use the default team-based narrative approach. The players are all in this campaign together, and all pursuing essentially the same goals, so they all engage in combat at the same time. They all take a share of the risk and then they all take a share of the reward.
This is not how Boot Hill works. You can use it this way, just as you can use the handle of a hammer to drive a nail, but you’re working against type. Rather, this is a means of adjudicating violent conflict between and among players. It is a game that provides an objective and neutral process for resolving conflicts that erupt into bloodshed.
Social conflict, like blackmail and gambling and bribery, all required two willing participants to agree on the terms of the contract. You don’t need rules for those conflicts. Either the players agree to the terms or they don’t, when they don’t they can either walk away or settle things the primal way. And if they choose the ladder, they’re going to live or die with a consequences.
Boot Hill is an amazing game. The second order ramifications of the combat system are are not obvious, but they are powerful, and they lead to a vastly more interesting game than most. Forget about the implied setting, the implied play style is king here.
Flipping a well-known analogy on its head, skinning that hog in Boot Hill is a lot like casting a spell in Call of Cthulhu. It’s very powerful, but even when it works, it comes at a very high price. Most RPG players aren’t willing to pay that price, and so most RPG players will never understand how great this game is.