spittingimage
hawwwk-ptui
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I don't know if D&D was created by Dave, Gary, or a million monkeys at a million typewriters. I'm just glad it was.
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You've been beating this drum for a few years now, but what your argument overlooks is that the overwhelming majority of rpgs (like, probably 99%+) ARE tied to specifically defined genres and assumed activities and if the players deviate too far from that the other players (including the GM) will veto them and nudge/push them back into line. The idea that "players can do absolutely anything they want no matter the scenario parameters and the GM will accommodate it" as the defining characteristic of what makes an rpg is pretty nonsensical because almost no rpg actually allows that. Sure, the spectrum of allowed/supported actions is a lot broader in most rpgs than in traditional games, but I'm not convinced either that if players in some of what you're categorizing as non-rag precursors went off-script that it wouldn't be allowed (we know, in fact, that Arneson himself did so as a player in one of Wesley's early Braunstein games and that Wesley allowed it) or that if someone had gone way off-script in one of Gary's Greyhawk games that he wouldn't have shot it down. Arneson may well have been willing to accommodate any and every one of his players' whims at the expense of his planned scenario in a way that nobody had done before, but since very close to nobody followed his lead in that it feels invalid to single it out as the ultimate distinguishing characteristic of what makes something an rpg.Except the invention of the wheel took more than just making a round disk and attaching it. It was about the invention of the axle as well and getting that you need the wheel to be loose enough to sprin but not too loose. Which is why for some parts of the world the wheel wasn't invented, or not invented until much later.
- Roleplaying itself is very intuitive.
- Identifiying as an individual character and playing the game as if you were the character also make sense although would be considered unusual.
- Playing a sophisticated game that emulated a specific genre, or situation is also intuitive.
- Introducing fog of war by using a referee who has a god's eye view of the game's situation also makes sense.
- Extending this to multiple players with multiple sides with multiple goals took some work and initiation which David Wesely deserves credit for, along Bath's with his hyperborian campaign.
So the next step was to do the last thing as a campaign. Which Bath did but not Wesely. From all accounts, Dave Arneson was the first to do this in the US but it quickly caught on with others leading to a gladiator game and Jenkin's Wild West game among others.
But we are still not at the point where any of these would be considered a tabletop roleplaying campaign that we play today. Why? Because all of these campaigns were beholden to the established scenario behind the campaign.
Think of it like a mid 80s group playing Battletech and pretend that RPGs didn't exist. So the group gets the bright idea to appoint a referee and instead of playing a bunch of individual scenarios they play out an entire campaign in one of the succession wars. That they would use the rudimentary pilot rules to track their mech pilots as individual characters. The campaign is launched and while we see some roleplaying and some play outside of the battles themselves. It is still focused on figure when and where to fight various battletech battles. And if a players found themselves more interested in playing a character who was a thief going around and stealing tech to sell to the highest bidder it wouldn't be part of the game.
Unless you had somebody like Dave Arneson who was willing to say yes. More importantly not only say yes but willing to put to work in to make the adventure that thief character had as interesting as the battletech battles themselves.
While we are real close but we are still not quite there yet. The transition happens when we get yet another player, who wants to go and explore the Succession War setting and not even bother with worrying about being involved in the battletech battles which is the main focus. Our BT version of Dave Arneson says yes and just as importantly also puts the work in to make this as interesting as the battletech campaign. Now this campaign has all the elements of a tabletop roleplaying game. The referee of these campaigns now allows their players to do anything their character can logically do within the setting without having to pay attention to some overarcing scenario or idea. Instead of the focus being on achieving the goal of the scenario which is to win this succession war campaign. We have players pursuing their individual character goals as the focus.
And hey, I get that this sounds like that with tournament dungeons, using published adventure, or organized play that I am saying that they are not roleplaying games. That is not what I am saying. Prior to Dave Arneson, everything was focused on the scenario however broad it may be. But when Dave allowed his players to ignore the scenario and actively supported what they were doing as the referee. The resulting rules he used became more expansive. They became a roleplaying game. And Gygax picked up on that when he made Dungeons & Dragons and it is just as expansive.
This also means that D&D and all the RPGs that came after didn't lose the ability to handle a specific scenario. That for various reasons like a lack of time for Prep, group interest, handling a lot of participants, using a scenario with a RPG may be the best option despite the reduction in scope to pre-Arneson campaigns.
One last bit of supporting evidence. Korns has several sections in his World War II skirmish rules that read like something that would be found in modern RPGs like GURPS World War II. A lot of folks use this section as evidence that Arneson didn't really invent the RPG. But when you read the entire chapter it is clear that it is there for two reasons. One that is very much about making a skirmish level World War II more realistic, and Two specifically by introducing fog of war in a way that the players has to consider the situation from the viewpoint of a ww2 infantrymen. That with the chapter and the book as a whole there is zero expectation that a group will decide to use the rules for anything other than a world war 2 skirmish. For example, playing out something like Kelly's Hero a ww2 heist.
Hope this makes sense.
It is remarkable when you hear about people's campaigns when they use systems like AD&D 1e. Just how diverse they are. Far more diverse than you hear what happens with wargaming rules even if they are used as a campaign. I don't see an RPG tied to a specific genre as particularly limited, especially in the case of AD&D which is a smorgasbord of fantasy tropes.You've been beating this drum for a few years now, but what your argument overlooks is that the overwhelming majority of rpgs (like, probably 99%+) ARE tied to specifically defined genres and assumed activities and if the players deviate too far from that the other players (including the GM) will veto them and nudge/push them back into line. The idea that "players can do absolutely anything they want no matter the scenario parameters and the GM will accommodate it" as the defining characteristic of what makes an rpg is pretty nonsensical because almost no rpg actually allows that.
I made clear in the past and present folks were running sophisticated and nuanced wargames that are far more free-form than sitting down to play AH's Gettysburg or SPI's First World War. But those incidents were the exception not the rule. There are also accounts of people getting annoyed at this because they wanted to focus on completing the scenario.Sure, the spectrum of allowed/supported actions is a lot broader in most rpgs than in traditional games, but I'm not convinced either that if players in some of what you're categorizing as non-rag precursors went off-script that it wouldn't be allowed (we know, in fact, that Arneson himself did so as a player in one of Wesley's early Braunstein games and that Wesley allowed it) or that if someone had gone way off-script in one of Gary's Greyhawk games that he wouldn't have shot it down.
My answer is to that is given the fact the usual mode of play is a small group meeting on a regular basis to play that the diversity isn't found within a group like it was in Dave's Blackmoor (or Gary's Greyhawk) campaign but rather in diversity of campaigns that are run using a given system. In short D&D and AD&D campaigns were all not about dungeon crawl and wilderness explorations. They were just the most common campaign types out of a bewildering kaleidoscope that existed then and now.Arneson may well have been willing to accommodate any and every one of his players' whims at the expense of his planned scenario in a way that nobody had done before, but since very close to nobody followed his lead in that it feels invalid to single it out as the ultimate distinguishing characteristic of what makes something an rpg.
Dave Arneson has a perfectly legitimate and defensible claim as the co-inventor of the tabletop roleplaying game based on having co-written the first such commercial ruleset. That's established fact. Gygax and TSR in later years tried to minimize his contributions but the historical record has pretty well been set straight there - Dave came up with the concepts and worked with Gary to codify them into a publishable set of rules, even if he wasn't totally satisfied with the result and wasn't willing to do much to support or spread it (the first couple chapters of Peterson's Game Wizards book are full of letters from Gary to Dave urging him to do more to support and publicize D&D - to write articles and letters about it, work on supplemental material for it, invest in TSR to help fund it, etc. - and Dave demurred on all of it and seemingly only became really interested in D&D after he parted from TSR, when he developed a grudge against it and wanted to "beat" it and prove that his ideas were better than what Gygax/TSR published).
The problem is people want to go beyond that to elevate Dave into the true/sole inventor of the rpg game-form without sharing that credit with Gary (and usually going a step further to imply or state that Gary stole his share of that credit from Dave and is undeserving of it). But in order to do so they have to come up with other definitions of what "inventing rpgs" means beyond the obvious (i.e. writing the first commercially published set of rules). However, all of those attempted redefinitions ultimately fall short, either because it's demonstrable that other people were already doing those things prior to Blackmoor or because (as in this case) effectively nobody did them other than Dave. "Dave Arneson invented roleplaying games because he was the first person to say yes to everything his players suggested" is a nice-sounding story, but it's also meaningless because "the GM must always say yes to everything the players suggest" isn't a defining characteristic of role-playing games.
"Dave Arneson invented roleplaying games because he was the first person to say yes to everything his players suggested" is a nice-sounding story, but it's also meaningless because "the GM must always say yes to everything the players suggest" isn't a defining characteristic of role-playing games.
Again, that's why I compare Gygax to Stan Lee.Early days Gygax pretty much was his own PR agent, one of the reasons D&D took off.
I’m of the opinion that tabletop roleplaying games would have been invented even if Dave and Gary didn’t exist. That they were the first to do it gives them the right to take that credit but that’s about as far as I’m willing to go in general. Now when you narrow it down to Dungeons & Dragons and it’s specific idiosyncrasies, I believe in even more credit. I believe somebody would have invented RPGs. There were already other people who had inspiration that was headed in that direction. In an overview, I look at something the wheel. Nobody knows who invented it; it’s more important that it exists. That’s the way I feel about most inventions including RPGs.
I feel we must make the distinction between saying "yes" to what the players say they want their characters want to do versus saying "yes" to what they players say their characters do, or what happens in the game world.Which is rather unfortunate, as it's the one unique thing that RPGs have to offer over any other type of interactive media.
You are correct, that it never becamme a defining feature of the hobby, but it should be.
Also worth noting that Gygax was aware of the game and was following their campaign with interest.The Old West Skirmish Wargames that Blackleaf mentions upthread is a rpg imo and it was published in 1970.
So yeah I think it was pretty clearly going to happen, hell it already HAD happened before D&D was a twinkle in anyone's eye.
Yeah, I think that in this context "say yes" is pretty clearly "the PCs can attempt anything they want to" rather than "any halfbaked idea the players comes up with succeeds".I feel we must make the distinction between saying "yes" to what the players say they want their characters want to do versus saying "yes" to what they players say their characters do, or what happens in the game world.
It will.Yeah, I think that in this context "say yes" is pretty clearly "the PCs can attempt anything they want to" rather than "any halfbaked idea the players comes up with succeeds".
You can certainly try and knock down a tower with your head, it just won't work.
I'm slowly starting to hate it when people say an SFRPG is "limited in scope"...unlike fantasy?Metamorphosis Alpha the first SFRPG is aimed at exploring wilderness as dungeon. And as an SFRPG is limited in scope.
While I always appreciate a nice rant, Metamorphosis Alpha really is limited in scope. It deals solely with a “lost” generation-ship where the human crew has devolved to barbarism and radiation has turned most of the plants & animals (& many of the humans) into mutant monsters. The PCs are barbarian humans or mutants who explore the decks of the ship fightning mutants (& rogue robots), gathering tech artifacts, & learning more about the ship. There’s no support in the rules for doing anything else. Even the simple alternative of the PCs starting not as primitive barbarians but as “unfrozen” crew members who know the situation from the start but have to work to fix it isn’t in the rules and was presented by a third-party author in a Dragon magazine article.I'm slowly starting to hate it when people say an SFRPG is "limited in scope"...unlike fantasy?
Conversely, I'd say that SF-oriented RPGs are much less limited in scope, because SF has different sub-genres, and you might encounter primitive societies as well. Thus, they've got to be able to cover all bases, from nobles and barbarian mercenaries to scientiests on an exploratory ship.
Especially when we add psionics, which can usually act as a substitute for magic.
Unlike most FRPGs, where you'd need to add stuff to represent a time-traveller in power armour as per the Temple of the Frog, in SF RPGs you generally have to cut stuff out to run a fantasy setting. But they still work even without power armour.
...OK, sorry about that. /Rant
I agree with you that an open ended SFRPG may have a larger scope than fantasy (at least if the SFRPG has enough scope to allow for magic and dragons...). But Metamorphosis Alpha as an SFRPG is pretty limited in scope unless you invent rules. It has no rules for exploring worlds or traveling between them. It has no trade rules. Lots of missing bits.I'm slowly starting to hate it when people say an SFRPG is "limited in scope"...unlike fantasy?
Conversely, I'd say that SF-oriented RPGs are much less limited in scope, because SF has different sub-genres, and you might encounter primitive societies as well. Thus, they've got to be able to cover all bases, from nobles and barbarian mercenaries to scientiests on an exploratory ship.
Especially when we add psionics, which can usually act as a substitute for magic.
Unlike most FRPGs, where you'd need to add stuff to represent a time-traveller in power armour as per the Temple of the Frog, in SF RPGs you generally have to cut stuff out to run a fantasy setting. But they still work even without power armour.
...OK, sorry about that. /Rant
Some interesting stuff on Megarry here.The Blackmoor Campaign kicked off the RPG revolution that exploded in an exponential fashion for 10 years. What made it special can be inferred from the very different off-shoots which each took a part of what made it special: boardgames (Dungeon!, Sorceror's Cave), gamebooks (Warlock of Firetop Mountain), and computer games - both puzzle adventures (Colossal Cave) and fighting/exploration adventures (pedit5 & dnd). To me that indicates it wasn't one thing but the magic combination of dungeons + role playing + puzzles + fighting monsters.
Blackmoor was itself clearly not mechanically very much like D&D (as can be seen from the surviving documents), and almost immediately spawned three immitators - Dungeon! (it didn't just turn into a boardgame, it showed how you might codify the rules, and provided what a dungeon looked like - dungeons look like Dungeon! not Blackmoor), the Rules to the Game of Dungeon (see Jon Peterson's blog, it's a sort of cross between Dungeon! and Blackmoor from people who had seen both), and D&D (itself clearly a cross between Dungeon! and Blackmoor).
It is clear the seed that Blackmoor planted was potent and was going to spread exponentially across the world (slowly at first, by the nature of exponential growth, but surely and consistently) - this would have hapenned regardless of whether D&D had been invented. What D&D did was provide a very solid set of rules that were, in particular, clearly better than the other three alternatives. That is, it out-competed other strains.
This doesn't take anything away from Gary Gygax, and although it's interesting to ponder if the Were Bear comes from Arneson or Gygax, people shouldn't get too emotionally invested in it. D&D is clearly the work of both - the person who isn't given enough credit is Dave Megarry.
Wererats come from The Swords of Lankhmar by Fritz Leiber, published in 1968. The other stuff may have been Megarry's or he may have lifted it from Blackmoor (Megarry was one of the early players who explored the Blackmoor Castle dungeons, which is what inspired him to create the Dungeon! game). That said, "the idea of descending dungeon levels becoming harder as you go down" is (from what I understand) pretty indisputably his: Blackmoor Castle had multiple dungeon levels, but not AFAIK a particular notion that the lower levels were more dangerous or had richer treasure than the upper ones. The version of the Blackmoor Castle dungeons published in First Fantasy Campaign is set up that way, but it was revised post-publication of D&D (the book notes it was the version of the dungeons Arneson ran at conventions in the mid-70s) so we (or at least I, without accessed to unpublished manuscripts) can't say whether or not it was always that way. People generally do seem to give Megarry credit for that innovation, though.Some interesting stuff on Megarry here.
To summarise, on the balance of evidence it looks like he may have invented the following.
The idea of descending dungeon levels becoming harder as you go down.
Secret doors.
Only getting spells back when you leave the dungeon.
The Medallion of ESP.
Wandering monsters.
Wererats.
Also what a dungeon looks like. - everyone after Dungeon! draws maps that look like it, not Dave's maps.Some interesting stuff on Megarry here.
To summarise, on the balance of evidence it looks like he may have invented the following.
It's also a damn fine kid's game and a great way of getting younger family members interested in RPGs.Also what a dungeon looks like. - everyone after Dungeon! draws maps that look like it, not Dave's maps.
I'm a big fan of SF these days, however fantasy has a range of different sub genres too (I'm sure you're aware of them, but are trying to make a specific point.) For those who don't know you, let me point out: Fantasy has Sword & Sorcery, and Urban fantasy, and Epic fantasy, and Trad Fantasy, Low Fantasy (which isn't always S&S) and High Fantasy. D&D used to be Trad, but is now High Fantasy.I'm slowly starting to hate it when people say an SFRPG is "limited in scope"...unlike fantasy?
Conversely, I'd say that SF-oriented RPGs are much less limited in scope, because SF has different sub-genres, and you might encounter primitive societies as well. Thus, they've got to be able to cover all bases, from nobles and barbarian mercenaries to scientiests on an exploratory ship.
Especially when we add psionics, which can usually act as a substitute for magic.
Unlike most FRPGs, where you'd need to add stuff to represent a time-traveller in power armour as per the Temple of the Frog, in SF RPGs you generally have to cut stuff out to run a fantasy setting. But they still work even without power armour.
...OK, sorry about that. /Rant
Bloody story game!
Is that volume of writing publishable level writing? I've written way way more code in my life than I've written publishable code. Orders and orders of magnitude more. It works for me and gets the job done for me but if someone else has to figure it out what it's doing and why they need to do a lot more work. When I hear complaints about his writing it's always that it needs editing and polishing and that's where he fell short. That often list as a problem with him in comparison to Gygax who I think everyone agrees desperately needed an editor.I'll probably be recovering from the weekend Blackmoor Session with the house group.
The mythology that Arneson was not capable of producing was created by people who did not like him, which is most people at TSR who actually were not even there when Dave and Gary Wrote D&D together. . At the same time as D&D was released he also had a follow up game to Don't Give up The Ship which was never published by TSR, but does have a forward in it by Gygax.
Just got off the phone earlier with someone who has a collection of about 115 banker boxes full of mostly unseen Arneson stuff. He would disagree on Arneson not being a producer of game things.
I have also seen what is left in the hands of the Arneson estate and it was culled due to space and also severely culled after a flood, yet, it contains an entire gangster RPG by Arneson that was never published.
We could argue all of this round and round. Most who make claims of the sort have not seen the amount of work Arneson put into his game research and design.
Arneson was an inventor. Once he had created fantasy RPGs he moved on to other things. Above all he was a hard core war gamer and loved both civil war and napoleonic era war gaming. In fact he won war game tournaments at conventions.
Having actually seen massive archives of his work I am convinced he was a genius, that is what Robert Kuntz says about him and I agree with his perspective.
As to other people having created RPGs previously in history. I would agree we see glimmers, but nothing on the level of Wesely's creation. Perhaps most telling about Wesely's game is that it has no combat system in the first session he runs. Korns is an RPG war game for sure, but there is no built in mechanism for interaction aside from shooting at each other. It is often inferred that Korns is multi player, but the rules talk about a player A and a player B with a referee - think what you will of that.
I've seen other games which have war game RPG elements, but often they are so fixated on combat that turn lengths are in the 5 second range which is hardly enough time to carry on a conversation.
And of course there are earlier play acting games, but they aren't much more than that.
Who knows, maybe Monday I'll rewatch Secrets of Blackmoor.
I don't think anybody is saying Arneson wasn't extremely creative or that didn't put in the work. Quite the opposite. People are saying he was very much an ideas man (or an "inventor" in your terminology) who needed other people to edit and market to get that into a publishable form. That's not an insult and doesn't preclude him being a genius. I suspect the same has been true of a lot of creatives in history.The mythology that Arneson was not capable of producing was created by people who did not like him, which is most people at TSR who actually were not even there when Dave and Gary Wrote D&D together. . At the same time as D&D was released he also had a follow up game to Don't Give up The Ship which was never published by TSR, but does have a forward in it by Gygax.
Just got off the phone earlier with someone who has a collection of about 115 banker boxes full of mostly unseen Arneson stuff. He would disagree on Arneson not being a producer of game things.
I have also seen what is left in the hands of the Arneson estate and it was culled due to space and also severely culled after a flood, yet, it contains an entire gangster RPG by Arneson that was never published.
We could argue all of this round and round. Most who make claims of the sort have not seen the amount of work Arneson put into his game research and design.
Arneson was an inventor. Once he had created fantasy RPGs he moved on to other things. Above all he was a hard core war gamer and loved both civil war and napoleonic era war gaming. In fact he won war game tournaments at conventions.
Having actually seen massive archives of his work I am convinced he was a genius, that is what Robert Kuntz says about him and I agree with his perspective.
I think more people on here are Bath partisans rather than Korns.As to other people having created RPGs previously in history. I would agree we see glimmers, but nothing on the level of Wesely's creation. Perhaps most telling about Wesely's game is that it has no combat system in the first session he runs. Korns is an RPG war game for sure, but there is no built in mechanism for interaction aside from shooting at each other. It is often inferred that Korns is multi player, but the rules talk about a player A and a player B with a referee - think what you will of that.
I've seen other games which have war game RPG elements, but often they are so fixated on combat that turn lengths are in the 5 second range which is hardly enough time to carry on a conversation.
And of course there are earlier play acting games, but they aren't much more than that.
Who knows, maybe Monday I'll rewatch Secrets of Blackmoor.
Bloody story game!
I don't think anybody is saying Arneson wasn't extremely creative or that didn't put in the work. Quite the opposite. People are saying he was very much an ideas man (or an "inventor" in your terminology) who needed other people to edit and market to get that into a publishable form. That's not an insult and doesn't preclude him being a genius. I suspect the same has been true of a lot of creatives in history.
From my perspective, this is a fascinating thread. These sorts of discussions always astonish me, as they tend to be unaware of the middle 1970s context that led to RPGs in general and D&D in particular. (Free Kriegspiel, anyone?)
General Julius von Verdy du Vernois invented rpgs in 1876.From my perspective, this is a fascinating thread. These sorts of discussions always astonish me, as they tend to be unaware of the middle 1970s context that led to RPGs in general and D&D in particular. (Free Kriegspiel, anyone?)