RPGs...A historical inconsistency?

[Grinner]

I was just thinking about RPGs as a medium. Since the baseline RPG seems to be reminiscent of Tolkien's Middle-Earth, I'd assume that they evolved from fantasy literature. However, entertainment media traditionally evolve from earlier, primordial forms.

For example, photography developed into filmmaking by creating moving images, or "movies". Later, methods of incorporating audio were added, the products of which were originally called "talkies". As time progressed, new technologies were developed and incorporated into the medium, whilst others fell out of use.

The technology for pen-and-paper RPGs (writing materials and dice) has been in use for thousands of years. Considering this, it strikes me as a bit bizarre that RPGs weren't made in the thousands of years of preceding history. Did they exist before the 70s? If so, are there any surviving examples? :smallconfused:

[Wyntonian]

I remember way back in elementary school we'd do some essentially like free-form roleplaying, without any pens or paper or dice. It kinda spontaneously evolved without any external influence aside from the old pokemon Red and Blue games. When I found out about D&D and other systems, it was awesome. They had Rules! For Things! Woo!

If some kinda creative kids can come up with that literally on a playground, I imagine we weren't the first, historically speaking.*



*Well, it was the early 90's, so Gygax was already doing his thing, but you now what I mean.

[Gerrtt]

Sure, you just have to be kindof loose in your interpretation of what a RPG is.

Consider Monopoly. As a concept it existed in the early 1900s and was published as it stands in the 1930s. In it you play the role of a property developer and work towards dominating a market.

It's not quite like playing D&D, but it's arguably a role playing game.

[erikun]

Storytelling has probably been around as long as language, and longer than the written word. One popular method of storytelling was to modify the story to local people and events; one of the reasons it is so difficult to determine the "real" version of old stories is because the written copies in different areas conflict in this way.

Another thing to note is that theatre tends to have a bit of an impromptu format - some forms do make it a point to react to the crowd. Some other forms of entertainment, like stand-up comedy and stage magic, tend to interact with the crowd as well.


What D&D did was take the various forms of storytelling like this (which is basically roleplaying) and combine them with wargaming rules. The result was interactive storytelling with a ruleset determining the outcome of actions, rather than being freeform or determined by a single storyteller.

[LibraryOgre]

Well, role-playing games were preceded in mechanics by War Games, but similar games were in play for a long time. I want to say the name was like "Brownstein" or something, that inspired Arneson.

[Grinner]

What D&D did was take the various forms of storytelling like this (which is basically roleplaying) and combine them with wargaming rules. The result was interactive storytelling with a ruleset determining the outcome of actions, rather than being freeform or determined by a single storyteller.

In the past, wargames were chiefly a pastime of the upper class. Even so, I just have a hard time believing that no one in the totality of the human experience did that prior to 1974. :smallsmile:

[Kurald Galain]

Professional actors have been using roleplaying games for a very, very long time (albeit without the rules). And that's much closer to RPGs than Monopoly or wargames are.

[navar100]

Playing an RPG just playing Cops & Robber or Cowboys & Indians with codified rules to prevent "I shot you!"/"No you didn't!" arguments. The dice help adults pretend they aren't playing like kids. :smallamused:

[hamlet]

I was just thinking about RPGs as a medium. Since the baseline RPG seems to be reminiscent of Tolkien's Middle-Earth, I'd assume that they evolved from fantasy literature. However, entertainment media traditionally evolve from earlier, primordial forms.


It should be pointed out that while D&D ripped off a lot from Tolkien, there was more inspriation from things like Moorcock, Poul Anderson, Howard, etc.

[Yora]

But nobody knows these guys, so nobody recognizes the things they originally created.

The modern RPG industry cna be traced back directly to tabletop wargames, which in turn have a direct line to Kriegsspiel, which codified most of the standards what tabletop wargames are in 1812, developed as a teching tool by a Prussian officer academy member. Though I'm sure even he did not come up with everything all by himself but based it on other tactics simulations of mock battles that had taken place before. But Kriegsspiel seems to be the moment when it aquired the characteristics of a game as we understand it today.

Earler there were chess and go, which have been praised for training abstract planning into the future under constantly changing conditions, but those games do not involve any individual scenarios but rather always the same perfectly symetric geometrical setup. They were also not meant to simulate any actual tactics, while Kriegssppiel did include movement rates and engagement distances that approximate the actual capabilites of military units in use at the time.

And as the story goes, it was actually Gygax who came up with the innovation to have individual soldiers on the field rather than units, and at that point filling these soldiers with personalty became an interesting option. Which then according to hearsay was developed into the modern tabletop RPG by Arneson.

[Greylond]

I notice in this thread something that I see from a lot of gamers. Equating a "Roleplaying" activity, i.e. acting or playing 'pretend' to Roleplaying Games. Sure the game has Roleplaying in it and some RPGs are more "Storytelling Activities" than games but a true "RPG" has Game Mechanics in it, thus making it a "Game." In other words, RPGs have a "Role Play Activity" involved, but not all "Roleplaying Activities" are RPGs. :)

Sure, kids have been playing pretend and actors playing at a Role for many, many years, but to formulate that into a Game is as far as I know a pretty recent concept. "Recent" in terms of how long Human Society has been around. There may have been people who played Wargames in decades past who has some sort of Roleplaying activity during their Wargames, but I'm pretty sure that Arneson was the first recorded Wargame Host/GameMaster to codify actual Game Mechanics into a Wargame.

[erikun]

In the past, wargames were chiefly a pastime of the upper class. Even so, I just have a hard time believing that no one in the totality of the human experience did that prior to 1974. :smallsmile:
As has been mentioned earlier, impromptu role-acting and storytelling has been around for as long as stories have existed. That is what most people familiar with roleplaying would identify it as.

I am sure there have been round-robin story sessions where multiple people can contribute to making one story. I suppose there could have been story-making games, although why you would want to use dice to determine how to compose a story is beyond me. I would not at all be surprised to find a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book published before 1974, although I don't know of any off the top of my head.

If you are looking for something that has similar mechanics to D&D, though, you probably won't find much. This shouldn't be too surprising; if you are narrowly defining what a RPG is, you'll end up excluding good examples that simply don't fit your requirements. It's like looking for "celphones that can fit in your pocket" and seeing them only appear in the 90s, while ignoring that similar devices (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkie-talkie) have been around since the 40s and the technology to use them has been around for two centuries.

[Greylond]

And as the story goes, it was actually Gygax who came up with the innovation to have individual soldiers on the field rather than units, and at that point filling these soldiers with personalty became an interesting option. Which then according to hearsay was developed into the modern tabletop RPG by Arneson.

Sorry, but that is incorrect. David Arneson was the first known, i.e. documented, person to develop game mechanics for this.

[Prospector]

Storytelling has probably been around as long as language, and longer than the written word. One popular method of storytelling was to modify the story to local people and events; one of the reasons it is so difficult to determine the "real" version of old stories is because the written copies in different areas conflict in this way.

Another thing to note is that theatre tends to have a bit of an impromptu format - some forms do make it a point to react to the crowd. Some other forms of entertainment, like stand-up comedy and stage magic, tend to interact with the crowd as well.


What D&D did was take the various forms of storytelling like this (which is basically roleplaying) and combine them with wargaming rules. The result was interactive storytelling with a ruleset determining the outcome of actions, rather than being freeform or determined by a single storyteller.

Back in High School a friend and I did a report on evolution(?) of storytelling in which we made a lot of similar points that Erikun made. We talked on the idea of shared storytelling where audience participation affected the story. That this idea was at the core of RPGs. Probably one of my favorite projects in school even if it only got a B. Stupid small hillbilly school. :smallyuk:

[Eldan]

And as the story goes, it was actually Gygax who came up with the innovation to have individual soldiers on the field rather than units, and at that point filling these soldiers with personalty became an interesting option. Which then according to hearsay was developed into the modern tabletop RPG by Arneson.

I remember a similar topic came up these games a while ago, another discussion on the origin of RPGs. Someone linked an article which described a game (I think it could be this "Braunstein" which Mark Hall mentioned earlier) in which Arneson played before going on to D&D.
As far as I remember it, it was run by ex-military and military people and basically involved everyone taking on the role of a single character in a war or espionage situation and then playing it out. They got points for accomplishing different goals.
Arneson played an undercover communist who got points for distributing his propaganda leaflets amongst the people. He managed to get everyone else in the game to believe that he was actually an uncercover CIA agent and won the game by taking a helicopter and distributing his propaganda material over the entire city in the last scene.
It was a pretty awesome read, if anyone manages to find it.

[Grinner]

I found a Wikipedia article which states that Dave Arneson attributed the concept of the RPG to one David Wesely (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Wesely) and his game "Braunstein".

Edit:


If you are looking for something that has similar mechanics to D&D, though, you probably won't find much. This shouldn't be too surprising; if you are narrowly defining what a RPG is, you'll end up excluding good examples that simply don't fit your requirements. It's like looking for "celphones that can fit in your pocket" and seeing them only appear in the 90s, while ignoring that similar devices (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkie-talkie) have been around since the 40s and the technology to use them has been around for two centuries.

Fair enough.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

The technology for pen-and-paper RPGs (writing materials and dice) has been in use for thousands of years. Considering this, it strikes me as a bit bizarre that RPGs weren't made in the thousands of years of preceding history. Did they exist before the 70s? If so, are there any surviving examples? :smallconfused:
One of the biggest reasons (I think) is that dice were associated with gambling for so long, nobody ever thought of applying it to storytelling and such for the longest time.

Really, I don't find it so weird, because you could say the same thing about literally every human invention. We had the necessary technology for the wheel for a very, very long time, but it didn't magically exist. It needs that one initial spark of someone saying "We can do this!" to get started, and the spark also needs to keep burning, and not get doused.

Similarly, we had the technology necessary to make a game like Dominion (i.e. playing cards) for centuries, but it only came out recently. The missing ingredient was a human's creativity.

[Ravens_cry]

Dice also saw use in augury before and concurrent with their use in gambling.
I think social factors, like modern near universal literacy and extended childhood and extra leisure time are just as important as technological factors, like the invention of the printing press, for the rise of role playing games in their present form.

[Radar]

It was a pretty awesome read, if anyone manages to find it.
Here (http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/104/braunstein-the-roots-of-roleplaying-games/) you go. :smallsmile:

[nedz]

The Romans had all of the components of the Steam Engine, but never built one.

The history of RPGs, IIRC, was

Tabletop wargaming — with a figure scale, where each figure represented a number of soldiers.
Skirmish systems — tabletop wargames with a figure scale of 1.
Dave Arneson developed one of these for 'medieval' combat — Chainmail.
Arneson + Gygax added monsters and spells to create D&D.

[GolemsVoice]

Yeah, I think Ravens_cry has a point here. D&D, and other such games need a book, or books. They have a LOT of rules, which separates them from the simpler games with simpler rules. For a long time, universal literacy was just not a thing, and printing books was expensive, let alone print enough books to saturate a market.

So maybe roleplaying games existed, but in much simpler, and thus easier to remember, form.

[Jay R]

D&D grew out of miniatures games. People playing a miniatures battle tend to think of themselves as playing Patton, or Napoleon, or whoever. So the element of role-playing was already there, as were miniatures, dice, and long complicated rules.

The first published miniatures wargame I know of is Little Wars (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Wars), by H. G. Wells, published in 1913. It includes an element of role-playing, in tyhe form of a winner describing the battle from the point of view of teh general of the army.

[Ravens_cry]

If you go by an abstract enough definition of wargames, chess is much, much older, and officers practised manoeuvres using sand tables (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_table#Military_use) for quite some time too.

[Draz74]

This (http://xkcd.com/593/) seems relevant, although it's debateably tongue-in-cheek ...

[Knaight]

Playing an RPG just playing Cops & Robber or Cowboys & Indians with codified rules to prevent "I shot you!"/"No you didn't!" arguments. The dice help adults pretend they aren't playing like kids. :smallamused:

This really depends on the game. To some extent, something like D&D fits into this category fairly well. On the other hand, there are games like Fiasco and Microscope out there that are completely different, for which the comparison is absurd.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

This really depends on the game. To some extent, something like D&D fits into this category fairly well. On the other hand, there are games like Fiasco and Microscope out there that are completely different, for which the comparison is absurd.
I actually tend to think of the "Cops and Robbers with rules" analogy as obsolete, these days. It wasn't the original description of RPGs, as far as I'm aware, it was just tacked into major RPGs from 3E on. Might have even started with White Wolf. I've made a personal creed never to use that analogy, simply because it's cliche and doesn't really prove to be all that useful.

Really, though, it's a limitation that RPGs need to grow out of. Because if you're just playing "Cops and Robbers with enforcement", you only need to play one or two RPGs. You can easily reskin and refluff the rules to cover anything else, if enforcement is all you're looking for. (And lo and behold, this is the exact mentality of many gamers I've seen.)

But that's more of a tangent from the original topic.

[Ravens_cry]

I don't know ,that sounds like a good description of AD&D as well, if anything more so.

[EccentricCircle]

http://www.wizards.com/DnD/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4dmxp/20121129

this article appeared on the D&D website today, and is at least tangentally relevant to this thread's discussion.

[Grinner]

this article appeared on the D&D website today, and is at least tangentally relevant to this thread's discussion.

Interesting.

I think Ravens_Cry's got it, though. Widespread literacy is a relatively recent trend in mankind's history, but it's also quite necessary for structured roleplay like D&D.

[Raum]

Collaborative storytelling has been around a long time - probably as long as we've had a spoken language and gathered in social groups. Sometimes it's as simple as an audience giving themes or names for the storyteller to use, sometimes it's a letter writing game, sometimes it's an elaborately themed fete, and more recently it has been codified into a variety of commercial games. It's not new though. :smallwink:

[Madara]

Here (http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/104/braunstein-the-roots-of-roleplaying-games/) you go. :smallsmile:

That was amazing. As a younger gamer, I find it really amazing to listen to "War Stories" from gaming vets, as well as hearing about the history of our games. I can't tell if its true or not, because of the line at the end, but I'd like to believe it.

[erikun]

It's been a few days since the last post, but you might want to talk a look at an example of Fiasco (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXJxQ0NbFtk) for a RPG that doesn't follow the "roll dice to see if your sword hits" lead of D&D and wargames.

[Susano-wo]

just a clarification, Gygax made Chainmail with some other guy, and Arneson (from what we can tell through letters and recollections) started putting together more RP-type scenarios. They later collaborated on DnD.

Gygax liked to act like it was pretty much all him, with maybe some help from Arneson, but given that Gygax treated DnD like a meta puzzle solving game, I think we have Dave to thank for most of the solid Role-playing elements

TL,DR conjecture free version: Gary created Chainmail with Jeff Perren, and Gary and Dave created Dungeons and Dragons

[Greylond]

, I think we have Dave to thank for most of the solid Role-playing elements


Yea, there's documentation from players that Dave Arneson was adding RP elements to his Wargames before he ever met Gygax. He was the first known Game Host/Game Master to come up with the concept of RP Interactions with NPCs. Not to mention several other GM concepts that are now taken for granted.

Don't get me wrong, I think Gygax added a lot to the game but Arneson's contributions need to be remembered and Honored.

[Susano-wo]

Yea, there's documentation from players that Dave Arneson was adding RP elements to his Wargames before he ever met Gygax. He was the first known Game Host/Game Master to come up with the concept of RP Interactions with NPCs. Not to mention several other GM concepts that are now taken for granted.

Don't get me wrong, I think Gygax added a lot to the game but Arneson's contributions need to be remembered and Honored.

Yes, exactly

also, I would stress that those who love the storytelling/character interaction elements have much toe thank Arneson for.

[eulmanis12]

allow me to offer an alternate perspecive:smallbiggrin:

http://xkcd.com/593/

[Grinner]

allow me to offer an alternate perspecive:smallbiggrin:

I thought that someone might link that comic. :smallamused: