Is it safe to say that RPG's would not exist without D&D and Gygax, and that it is the "purest" an RPG can ever be? Or do you think RPG's were an inevitability and it was just a matter time someone decided to officially publish their wargame/whatever homebrew and that D&D isn't the end-all be-all?I've seen some OSR discussions that view any early deviation from old D&D's(ie Runequest and Chaosium's BRP system) as the first signs of the death of the medium and when they were starting to stop being "games". Granted OSR is D&D-centric, but this view is held for RPG's as a whole. And on the other hand, I hear people talk about how certain games were already starting to focus on smaller scale scenarios, like that one survival game whose hex map was used for early D&D, and that D&D just gave people the confidence to know there's a market for games like this and Gygax was just the first guy to do it.
>>93223263I invented tabletop RPGs when I was in school. I happened upon a D&D book at some point where I realized that it was an entire industry already, well before I was born. It was a revelatory moment in my life. I think it's safe to say that eventually RPGs would have happened.
>>93223263What you’re describing was the early D&Drones
>>93223263As >>93223305 said, they are inevitable. The only real difference is that D&D provided the basis for having a mechanical game first and then a roleplay layered on top of it. Which for all intents is an important distinction because people need to recognize the mechanical importance is more important than the roleplay importance. If it hadn't been D&D which started the boom and it was something more rules-lite like Golden Sky Stories for example then the genre would likely be more trended toward roleplaying rather than rollplaying.
>>93223305I saw people playing off-brand D&D in cartoons and comics as a kid and I tired to reverse engineer it to the best of my ability, which was very nonexistent as a 12 year old. I think I just made a boargame, a grid map with dire roles determining how much you movie, toy soldiers with HP, random treasure on the map, and that's literally it
>>93223263Without the happenstance merger of Blackmoor and Chainmail, it's likely that roleplaying games would have emerged from a more gradual formalization of acting as one character within the wargame context instead of "jumping" down to individual adventurers.That merger was important to an EXPLOSIVE takeoff establishing "role-playing games" as their own medium instead of a subset of boardgames or wargaming because Arneson and Gygax ended up serving as proxies for the fundamental tension between character behavior and game mechanics, allowing the very first published to have already harvested some critical low-hanging fruit.People bemoan character classes greatly for being "restrictive for no reason", but they're a great example of it because they pair archetypal behaviors with mechanical niches. That one decision serves as guardrails against quite a few very basic failure modes that'd otherwise take somebody used to it laboriously instructing in use, without which all the people who bought it off the shelf contents unknown are MUCH less likely to start a table that spreads the medium.
>>93223376>>93223305truly precious! the motivated creativity of childhood
>>93223907we must harness it in the name of capitalism
>>93223263If not for GenCon I think the board game boom would have happened a bit sooner, and I think a lot of the people who wrote dungeons in the 80s would instead be writing their own boardgames. Also videogames would have still been happening and they still would have moved in the direction of tactical strategy and storytelling, but it would have happened a bit later and would be more strongly associated with mainstream anime. TTRPGs would be seen as cargo-cult JRPGs for poor people (also JRPGs would be very different because they wouldn't be inspired by D&D, but they would still happen in a different form). The whole process of Japan discovering Western Fantasy and nerding out over it would have been delayed by 5-10 years.
>>93223376Me to except I probably did less, I said "I'm going to make a game like D&D" even though I'd never seen or played a TTRPG (only just heard of them from the other kids that were playing pretend in Nintendo chatrooms). In practice I spent a lot of time trying to make an original race lineup with different powers, I spent way way too much time thinking about the difference between gliding and flight and how to express that in simple rules terms. I had so much fun though, it's hard to describe.
>>93223263>RPG's would not exist without D&D and GygaxThis is a claim that is impossible to prove.>it is the "purest" an RPG can ever beThere is no metric by which this has the ability to be demonstrably true.>RPG's were an inevitability and it was just a matter time someone decided to officially publish their wargame/whatever homebrewNobody knows. It's impossible to tell for sure.>D&D isn't the end-all be-allIt sure as hell isn't.
>>93223320You keep trying to force that.Do you really have to try and force such gay attempts at creating memes? All your shit is terrible, and just makes you trackable via the archives.
>>93224394>>D&D isn't the end-all be-all>It sure as hell isn't.Should've just said that
>>93223376I'm sure people in the 70's would've have had their minds blown
>I've seen some OSR discussions that view any early deviation from old D&D's(ie Runequest and Chaosium's BRP system) as the first signs of the death of the medium and when they were starting to stop being "games"Do they really think this? That's fucking retarded.
>>93223263I think that's a retarded false dilemma.
Gygax also ended up moving into exploring classless possibilities
>>93225102I wouldn't say all of them but it doesn't seem like an uncommon opinion at all. Some of them call RQ the start of the "nu-school"
>>93225102>>93225256Nostalgia-for-paradise is older than Rome.
>>93225102It's weird especially since I'd argue CoC has kept waaaaay more of its original purity than D&D, OSR included.
>>93225102All of the most out-of-touch, deranged RPG opinions I've heard came from hardcore OSRfags, so I'm willing to believe that. Not saying that all of them are like that of course, but there seems to be plenty are fanatically hellbent that their extremelly narrow and niche style of RPGs is the one and only correct way to play them
>>93223263It defined ttrpg genre basically. I honestly believe it would have been inevitable that a smaller scale narrative wargame happened, and then became a tabletop roleplaying game. maybe the name would be different, maybe the main ideas behind ttrpgs will be different, such as fantasy taking backseat to modern for example.One thing is for sure, if d&d was not created modern entertainment's idea of fantasy would have been so much different. MMORPGs, warcraft, Warhammer, all the medieval fantasy anime, and many other things would have been completely different.
>>93223263It was only a matter of time. There were fantasy wargames played since the 1960s (Armageddon), Diplomacy relies heavily on negotiations (roleplaying) and inspired? Braunstein, precursor of Blackmoor.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braunstein_(game)Gygax did just put together ideas that were emerging everywhere and most importantly made them popular outside of the wargame circle.Without him we would still have Lord of the Rings that inspired a ton of fantasy writer and made fantasy popular, that inspired wargames and boardgames, and it is only a small step to roleplaying games.
>>93225764>One thing is for sure, if d&d was not created modern entertainment's idea of fantasy would have been so much different. MMORPGs, warcraft, Warhammer, all the medieval fantasy anime, and many other things would have been completely different.This is true, things people take for granted like not!Shaolin Monks walking around in medieval European settings, even 80's JRPG's that were just Dragon Quest still had some d&d inspiration going on here and there
Gary made other RPGs after D&D, go check them out or just go read about it. He he was very savvy when it came to like what Hasbro and Wizard of the Coast were going to do, by the way. He often was, even late in life, the the industry had moved on quite a bit, he had learned a lot about that business, not all of it I don't think that was an entirely pleasant experience for him. He kind of put the nail on the head when it came to like where they were going to want to take the game. If anything, he wasn't cynical enough.He didn't really believe, having done D&D and having seen where the game and the industry went, he didn't really believe in a lot of the principles of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons design anymore. He really liked the idea of a Skill-Based System. I don't think he liked classes and levels anymore. He thought they were restrictive. So you would have seen something a little bit more late 80s early 90s skill focused, as opposed to attribute focused, build your own, Point-buy everything rather than class-based. Third Edition didn't do that they didn't feel like they could. But that's the thing, Gary had learned a lot of lessons. There's a great quote from Gary where he talks about how like originally in Dungeon Dungeons and Dragons your armor class a naked person had an armor class of 10 and the harder you were to hit the lower that number got. He writes about how that's how it worked in 74 now it's 79 and he's revising the book and he's like "that's stupid, it doesn't make any sense, it's one of the more confusing parts of the game". Go read uh go read The Elusive Shift by John Peterson. So much of what we still argue about in the Hobby, they were arguing about in 78. It's amazing how quickly they came to what we would consider very sophisticated ideas and viewpoints about um RPGs." Armor class should just go up". Then he writes he goes "it's too late now". "How many more people are ever going to play this game? Well...it turns out a couple million.
I think a Gary led-TSR would have been a much more radical in the design, as opposed to everybody everybody who's done anything with D&D since then, with the exception of 4th edition was very conservative, very backwards-looking very worshiping at the altar of 1974.
The originator of wargame, which is from where D&D comes from, is possibly Kriegsspiel (1812), literally, "War Game," which was created by two Prussian officers, Lieutenant Georg Leopold von Reiswitz and his son Georg Heinrich Rudolf von Reiswitz. The game, intended to be a more modern realistic adaptation of Chess, was widely played by the Prussian officers of the 19th Century, and after some stunning Prussian victories, military officers around Europe. It was serious business from the very beginning; Kriegsspiel was endorsed by the General Staff of Prussia as an invaluable teaching aid. Kriegsspiel was the codifier a lot of conventions used by current military thinkers, military historians, war gamers, and table top role players. It codified the use of the colors red and blue for enemy and friendly forces (Blue was chosen for friendly because that was the color of the Prussian Army uniform, red was chosen for enemy because it's easy to distinguish from blue), respectively, the use of maps and miniaturised scale terrain, detailed movement rules and turns, referees and game masters, specialized dice, the block symbols for units, table quarters, loads and loads of rules, the randomization, the core rulebook, Rule Zero, even the Game Master (Umpire), and so on.It was so influential that it is still available today. A great many of the concepts used to create training simulations for modern officers and table top wargames today would seem completely familiar to the Reiswitzes, even despite technology they could never have imagined. The eminent author H. G. Wells was also responsible for several more light-hearted and simplified sets of rule conventions for wargame simulations —Floor Games (1911) and Little Wars (1913)— which were popular in Great Britain before World War I, and which had a strong influence on the later development of the wargaming hobby in the UK.
>>93230929After World War II, the game evolved again. The original Kriegsspiel used only symbolic blocks to represent units. Little Wars advocated use of what were then standard 54mm or 3.5" toy soldiers. In the 1950s, with the rise of firms such as Hinchcliffe or Spencer-Smith who sold 25mm or 1:72 scale metal figures, new thinkers such as the hugely influential Donald Featherstone (who had commanded tanks in North Africa and Italy) advocated far larger battles over the same size table using figures 3/4 of the size. Featherstone's new rule-sets and advocacy of using smaller scales also coincided with the rise in cheap, small, plastic figures, and construction kits of tanks and artillery; like those made with injection moulding by the Airfix brand.In the 1950's, Charles S. Roberts founded Avalon Hill and published Tactics II, which is generally agreed to be the first modern board wargame. Until the late 1960's, Avalon Hill pretty much had a monopoly in this niche, and its games introduced most of the mechanics and concepts still used today in board wargaming. The great majority of wargames use a map with a hexagonal grid overlay, for instance; Roberts got the concept from a high-level professional wargame simulating nuclear warfare. In the late 1960's, the magazine Strategy and Tactics (S&T for short), was founded by several former Avalon Hill staffers, notably James F. Dunnigan, pioneering the concept of a magazine with a game in it, and the company Simulations Publications, Inc. (SPI) was founded to publish it and also put out standalone games.
>>93230935During the 1970s and early 1980s, several companies (chief among them Avalon Hill, SPI, and Game Designers' Workshop) produced literally hundreds of games covering every era of warfare from the ancient period to science fiction and Alternate History. In many ways a return to classical Kreigsspiel format, these games ranged in size from tiny "folio" games with perhaps 100 counters and maps no larger than a standard sheet of paper, to gigantic "monster" games with 9 or more 22" x 34" maps and thousands of counters. By the end of the 1970s, the biggest "monster" wargames (for instance, SPI's "Campaign for North Africa") were so complex and unwieldy that they were pretty much unplayable as actual games in the traditional table format. Roleplaying games, in their pencil-and-paper-and-rulebook format, first became popular in the late 1970s. Dungeons & Dragons was created as a companion book to the miniature-based wargame Chainmail. It was co-written by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson and published by TSR in 1974 as a set of three digest-sized books (the "little brown books" or LBB): Men & Magic, Monsters & Treasure, and The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures. There were three original classes (Fighting-Man, Cleric and Magic-User), four races (Human, Dwarf, Elf, Halfling) and only three alignments (Law, Neutrality, Chaos)note .The original game shows some holdovers from its wargaming roots, most prominently the assumption that players are not very attached to their characters. Character creation is very fast, as is the possibility of character death, and one should simply send another brave soul to join the party should the old one perish. There's even an inheritance mechanic to let your new character start with some of the old one's treasure (unless the rest of your party isn't willing to give it up...). Resurrection magic exists, but is not available for the first few levels.
>>93230929>>93230935Thank you for that history lesson. Have you heard of FKR?
>>93223305>I invented tabletop RPGs when I was in school.This. Even forced my mom to play a game with me.I used those rubber M.U.S.C.L.E. guys as miniatures.
>>93230988It was a cool crash course but I don't know what questions it answers
>>93225764>maybe the name would be differentEven in our timeline, I think "FRP"(fantasy role-playing) or something was used often enough early on.
>>93223263It was gonna happen eventually and what ever form it took would rock the world and influence everything from TVs, Film to video games. The version we got in this timeline was D&D. Now is it the purest RPG. In one sense yes because it is the first game of its kind and it set the industries equivalent of the Ten Commandments. On another it was quickly out done by other games systems that while not existing without them took the bar OD&D set and took it to the fucking moon. >>93230664I've read through Dangerous Journeys rulebooks (and the tie in novels written by Gary, he was a decent author) and it's clear he was looking to games like BRP/Runequest for inspiration but also trying to keep a more solidified structure for each character "type". I've always wanted to play it but my group are sub humans.
>>93223376Do you have the rules handy? Because that sounds pretty good for a middle schooler.
>>93233329That was 16 years ago and I was too embarrassed by it too. In math class we got some group assignment to do some math-based boardgames, I was excited to really expand on it and show it off but I got assigned to a group of nothing but girls and they all didn't want to hear it at all. They instead made some knock-off candyland game and I didn't want to think about my game again because I was that much of a bitch
>93224415>YOU’RE ALL THE SAME GUY! SAVE ME HASBRO!!
>>93233837was the candyland game any good
>>93234915Of course not, it was just going across a board and answering random sub-middle school math questions, and the board was just pencil line on blank paper. I'm surprised that experience didn't make me sexist
>>93225420I understand them getting pissed off at newfags walking in think they can discuss non-dnd games just because they're old, but it's not a newfags fault if he sees "old school" and doesn't think that's exclusively dnd. Not to say you should judge everything by some old name that stuck.
>>93223263YesIt's natural evolution from wargamingEventually you want to fight campaigns where your solders gain experience and risk deathThen you wonder what they do when they're not fighting and why those fights happen in the first place...and off you go...
I'll share a letter from Gygax from Alarums & Excursions #2 (1975) (click on "text"):https://archive.org/details/alarums_and_excusions_2-gygax_letter>In case you don't know the history of D&D, it all began with the fantasy rules in CHAINMAIL.He forgot to mention that this was rushed out because there were already fantasy games played, and he copied the fireball spell from one.[...]>[M.A.R. Barker and the Empire of the Petal Throne] Its form was influenced by D&D (and I am greatly flattered about that) although its author had been testing various other forms prior to the publication of D&D.Published 1975 by TSR, but without D&D it would have been published in another form and with different rules, becoming perhaps the first role-playing game.[...]>We also have a wonderful "parlor" version of D&D dungeon adventures coming up fairly soonThat should be "Dungeon!" (first boardgame dungeoncrawler), published 1975 by TSR, but prototypes existed 1972.[...]>There seems to be considerable confusion amongst your contributors -- particularly those who tend to be in a flap about incomplete or unpalatable solutions (to them) of D&D rules/questions/problems. The game is complex and complicated. When it was released, it was by no means in a final (or even polished) form, but were we to sit on it for another few years in order to get it that way? Can a broad fantasy game ever be finished? Of course we could not hold off publication, for it was too much fun to keep from others.So OD&D is unpolished and rushed out.1/2
>>93247468>If the time ever comes when all aspects of fantasy are covered and the vast majority of its players agree on how the game should be played, D&D will have become staid and boring indeed.>My answer is, and has always been, if you don't like the way I do it, change the bloody rules to suit yourself and your players.>Let us consider the magic-user question. We allow magic-users to employ the number of spells shown on the table, so a 1st level m-u gets exactly one 1st level spell to use once before he must go back to his books and prepare to use the spell once again -- or a spell once again. To allow unlimited use of the spell is to make the m-u's too powerful. There is a better solution, of course; one I have been aware of since the first. That is to utilize a point system based on the m-u's basic abilities and his or her level. Spell cost is then taken as a function of the spell and the circumstances in which it is cast and possibly how much force is put into the spell. All that would have required a great deal of space and been far more complex to handle, so I opted for the simple solution.So no unlimited spell casting (cantrips), and point based casting is superior to the fixed spells.>Each campaign should be a "variant", and there is no "official interpretation" from me or anyone else. If a game of "Dungeons and Beavers" suits a group, all I say is more power to them, for every fine referee runs his own variant of D&D anyway.Welcome, furries.>in Greyhawk we do not have existing religions included, for this is a touchy area. [,,,] Fighters are really the ones whom everyone should be irate about, for they have the hardest time of it [...]Casters vs. Martials (1975).>How does one use gunpowder weapons in the confined spaces of the dungeon? What happens to ears? Blackmoor has some gunpowder usage but the filthy stuff won't work in Greyhawk's world.bye bye gunslingers (there were guns in the middle ages!)not enough space ;_;2/2
>>93223263LBB is the purest D&D, yesIt is not the purest form of RPGs (probably)
>>93247468>there were already fantasy games played, and he copied the fireball spell from one.I'd like to know these, especially where Gygax got fireball from.>but without D&D it would have been published in another form and with different rules, becoming perhaps the first role-playing game.Barker had been developing Tekumel on his own for decades at this point, but as a setting and not a game. I don't think he would've thought of expressing his setting through games if it wasn't for D&D showing him that RPG's are a good way to explore a setting.It's a bit similar to Glorantha and Greg Stafford. I've seen people suggest him as example of the rumblings of potential RPG's in the early 70's. He was developing Glorantha since the 60's, and did wanted to express his world through gaming and he did. But it was a board war game in the late 60's and he seemed to have been fine showing off his setting through that alone. It wasn't until fans of it started playing D&D and wanted to see Glorantha as an RPG, and someone else at Chaosium already already making their own system inspired by D&D, did Runequest come about.
>>93248676Leonhard Patt - Rules for Middle Earth (1970) (not a commercial product, just shared fantasy wargame rules).https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/a-brief-history-of-the-fireball-in-fantasy-gameshttp://playingattheworld.blogspot.com/2016/01/a-precursor-to-chainmail-fantasy.html
>>93248676>It wasn't until fans of it started playing D&D and wanted to see Glorantha as an RPG, and someone else at Chaosium already already making their own system inspired by D&D, did Runequest come about.I read that Runequest was already in development by the time OD&D came out, so any inspiration would have come only after the fact.
>>93226169You forgot Conan.
>>93233837Lmao. I tried to make a Oregon trails type board game with one of neighbor friends (a girl) when we were kids. Fucked up by not keeping that relationship going on MySpace and Facebook as we grew up. Makes me sad when i remember it.
