…Buck Rogers...
How Gary Gygax lost control of D&D
Agamon
Adventurer
Have you read Playing at the World? The zeitgeist among early geekdom shows that RPGs were pretty much an eventuality. D&D was the first true RPG, but there were a number of games being played that weren't that far off. Gary was the enterprising person to bring a few concepts he saw going on around him to create D&D. I'm not saying anyone could have done it, but it would have happened, and it certainly wouldn't have taken 10-20 years.
evileeyore
Mrrrph
So you play D&D and complain it feels like D&D...
Sigh.
As it is with every other edition of D&D.
And your wrong.
Hold your questions until the History Lesson Ride is over...
MAR Barker was working on stuff for Tekumiel (to help him figure out the world of Tekumiel), but as D&D came along at the right moment for him he grabbed it and used it instead (he's a linguist scholar like Tolkien, not a miniature wargame rules creator like Gygax).
Greg Stafford was trying to figure out other stuff for his book series (things different from the run of tactical wargames, his first attempt was a board game) and eventually (4 years after D&D) made Runequest.
Mark Miller incorporated GDW (with Frank Chadwick) in 73 and was developing board games and RPGs at the same time Gygax and Arneson were developing D&D. Frank Chadwick was reinventing and innovating wargames at the time and developed En Garde! (published 1 year after D&D) which is a game where you play a gentlemen duelist in 17th century Paris.
Slobbovia (which started being played in 1969) was a play-by-mail roleplaying game, while the roles you played were things like Ruler of Country or General of Army, the game was about advancing your character more so than the game it was based on... Diplomacy.
So yes, plenty of people were developing towards rpgs, it's just Dave (Arneson) took two things, Gary's (Gygax) Chainmail mass combat rules (which allowed for individual heroes) and (David) Wesley's Braunstein and made something different: Blackmoor. Gary then developed better rules for Dave's game, and from here the current history of RPGs were written.
Keep in mind though, without encountering David Wesley's Braunstein, Arneson would have likely not stopped fiddling with naval miniatures and Napoleonic recreations (it's what he was still fiddling with when I gamed with him 10 years ago). Solo heroic roleplaying wasn't something he really was into, until Braunstein. And without Blackmoor, Gygax would have continued developing mass combat rules in Chainmail.
/History Lesson Ride
A - It probably would have taken 2-4 more years...
B - It probably would be a bit more niche. Though we'd likely still have it becoming the break-away hit rpgs are now with video games, so the table-top games would be going through (or just be peaking in) a revolution of interest among the "non-geek" masses (as we're just coming down from).
Dungeoneer
First Post
Arguments about what MIGHT have been are pretty pointless. Maybe it would have taken ten years for someone to make a true RPG without Gygax. Maybe it would have taken ten months. The point is, there were several people and groups of people working in that direction, and the elements needed to make such a game were present in the gaming community.
I will say that Gygax seems like he was uniquely qualified to take such a new and abstract idea as a 'heroic fantasy game' and codify rules for it that could be easily picked up and played. I think roleplaying games would have been unlikely to see the early commercial success that they did without him or someone like him.
I will say that Gygax seems like he was uniquely qualified to take such a new and abstract idea as a 'heroic fantasy game' and codify rules for it that could be easily picked up and played. I think roleplaying games would have been unlikely to see the early commercial success that they did without him or someone like him.
PatW does indeed show that other people were experimenting with many of the same ideas that ultimately constituted D&D. Tony Bath was coming quite close, perhaps. But it's important not to underestimate the extent of Gygax's personal achievement.
When it comes to inventing a technology, often times it's not the idea for some new widget that matters, it is the vision and perseverance required to create a world for that widget to live in. Glowing metal in a glass bulb was not a new idea, but it took an Edison to create a world of power plants and standardization that would make it cheaper to light your house with electricity than candles. MP3 players were not a new idea, but it took a Jobs to create a world where record labels allowed their songs to be sold on iTunes and eventually, where even your phone could just download a new song when you're walking down the street.
Gygax's singular talents were all invested in community, in collaboration and consensus-building. He created structures like wargaming clubs and conventions (you know, like Gen Con) and used them to get ideas in front of people, get people playing in similar styles, to drive innovation. He created this huge community apparatus, and when the time for D&D came along, he packaged the game in a form he had trained that community to understand and then unleashed it through the outlets he created or influenced. That is one of the main lessons of the first chapter of PatW, that this is who Gygax was and why he was important.
And that's why the "Ambush" is so tragic, and why it was such a hard story for me to write. It doesn't belong in PatW, which is a story about the triumphs of that amateur community. The "Ambush" is the story of how that machine grew into something with knobs and levers that Gygax no longer knew how to operate. But the very end of the piece makes one thing clear: even without that apparatus, the community never forgot Gary, and he never forgot the community.
Dungeoneer
First Post
I've read that before. Unfortunately, Intellectual Ventures has basically turned into one of the world's biggest patent trolls. I'm not a Myhrvold fan.
evileeyore
Mrrrph
You know... it's entirely possible that without GenCon and the many other organizations Gygax was involved in (or outright created himself) D&D may never have caught on in the way it did.
Keldryn
Adventurer
If you're going to consider 3e and 3.5 to be two distinct editions, then it's rather disingenuous to lump everything prior to 2e into the "1st edition" label. You're including at least three distinct versions of D&D in that category, perhaps as many as six.
The most relevant measure of an edition's lifespan is how long TSR or WotC continued to produce material for it. This includes reprints of the OD&D set and its supplements in late 1979 (after the AD&D DMG was published), as well as reprints of the 1e PH, MM, DMG, and UA books in 1990 and 1991 (after 2e was released), but not the premium, limited-run "collectors' edition" books published years later.
It is also important to remember that TSR had two parallel product lines, each tracing its lineage back to OD&D, and each one replacing OD&D, but proceeding along very different development paths.
OD&D: 5 years (1974-1979)
AD&D: 12 years (1979-1991)1 [5 years after OD&D]
AD&D 2e: 11 years (1989-2000) [10 years after AD&D]
D&D Basic Set (Holmes): 2 years (1977-1979) [3 years after OD&D]
B/X D&D: 2 years (1981-1983)2 [4 years after Holmes Basic]
BECMI D&D: 8 years (1983-1991) [2 years after B/X D&D]
RC D&D: 5 years (1991-1996) [8 years after BECMI D&D]
D&D 3e: 3 years (2000-2003) [11 years after AD&D 2e]
D&D 3.5e: 5 years (2003-2008) [3 years after D&D 3e]
D&D 4e: 4 years (2008-2012)3 [5 years after D&D 3.5e]
D&D 5e (2014) [6 years after D&D 4e]
1 The AD&D Monster Manual was published in Dec 1977, and the Player's Handbook in Jun 1978. Until the Dungeon Master's Guide was published in Aug 1979, these were effectively just supplements for OD&D. Thus, AD&D wasn't really playable as a system until 1979. The MM, PH, and DMG all received a final printing in 1990, and Unearthed Arcana had its final printing in 1991, as stores were still ordering 1e books.
2 If D&D 3e and 3.5e are considered to be distinct enough to split into two separate categories, then B/X, BECMI, and RC are distinct enough as well. RC because of the inclusion of the skill system and the wholesale revision of Set 5: Immortals Rules into Wrath of the Immortals.
3 The last retail product specifically for 4e rules was published in 2012
While Gygax was running TSR, the following editions of D&D and AD&D were released -- over a span of 9 years:
OD&D (1974)
D&D Basic Set (Holmes, 1977)
AD&D (1978-1979)
new D&D Basic and Expert Rules (Moldvay/Cook, 1981) (B/X D&D)
revised edition D&D Basic and Expert Rules (Mentzer, 1983) (BECMI D&D)
By 1983, Gygax had already started planning a revised edition of AD&D, of which Unearthed Arcana (1985) was an initial pass of.
Under WotC, the 3e to 3.5e change is the anomaly. Every other edition came out at least 5 years after the previous edition was released. This is not releasing a new edition every 2 to 3 years.
I will grant you that we did have longer periods of compatible game systems in the past. AD&D and AD&D 2e were on the whole pretty compatible with one another; BECMI and RC D&D were mostly the same rules and were both drawn from B/X D&D, so products of that lineage shared a great level of compatibility with one another. All of TSR-era D&D, while distinct games, mixed-and-matched reasonably well, as they were all iterations upon the same basic system (OD&D). Higher-level BECMI and RC stuff went off the charts compared to AD&D, however.
But the customer base in the 2000s is very different from that in the 70s and early 80s. There are far more forms of entertainment competing for our attention -- including much more accessible ones, like electronic games. Expectations have also rapidly changed in this digital era. Look at how many people buy a new $400 cell phone every year or two to replace their still perfectly functional "outdated" models.
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