Dungeoneer
First Post
I've been eyeing Jon Peterson's Playing At The World on Amazon for some time. The price held me back, though. I kept waiting for it to drop. It never has, so finally I bit the bullet and ordered a copy. It came yesterday and now I see why it costs so much: it's enormous! A 740 page tome on the early history of D&D. Nonetheless I'm excited to read it.
I'm already through the introduction and thirty-some odd pages into Chapter 1. It's very interesting and most of it is new to me. Grognards will no doubt snort derisively, but I did not know that GenCon pre-dated D&D and was in many ways responsible for bringing together the people that made D&D happen. Of course I knew the broad strokes of Gygax and Arneson's collaboration, but I'm only in my thirties so even that seemed like pre-history to me!
It's very interesting to me that the pre-D&D wargame community so closely resembles the modern D&D community (albeit without a little thing called The Internet). There was a small but enthusiastic group of fans. Many of them were looking for people to play with, or at least talk about the game with (newsletters and play-by-mail were their message boards). There were sub-groups dedicated to specific types of games (like naval battle simulation). There were also bitter arguments over rules and rifts and schisms in the community. The more things change...
Anyway, it's clear that D&D couldn't have been created without that community. It's a game that requires a pretty good number of dedicated enthusiasts to play. It requires a significant amount of time invested playing the game and learning it. How do you find people like this and get them together in one room? Even today it's a problem for some. But the existing wargaming community really helped solve that problem. If Gygax had published D&D in a vacuum, a few lonely enthusiasts would have bought it, but they probably wouldn't have had anyone to play it with! It's unlikely that it would have seen the success it did.
Of course D&D wouldn't have come into being in a vacuum, in all likelihood. The wargaming community allowed the ideas that underlie tabletop roleplaying games to cross-pollinate. I think it's safe to say that neither Gygax nor Arneson would ever have invented something like D&D if they hadn't been exposed to miniatures wargames and board game wargames. And there was a practice in the community of sharing rules for game variants at virtually no cost, so people could try out different rule sets and improve on them. There is no question that D&D drew heavily from the ideas of the wargaming community. All of which were propagated by newsletters, mail correspondence and conventions*.
Has anyone else read PatW?
* No internet. Not even email. Absolutely MIND-BLOWING to this child of the 80's.
I'm already through the introduction and thirty-some odd pages into Chapter 1. It's very interesting and most of it is new to me. Grognards will no doubt snort derisively, but I did not know that GenCon pre-dated D&D and was in many ways responsible for bringing together the people that made D&D happen. Of course I knew the broad strokes of Gygax and Arneson's collaboration, but I'm only in my thirties so even that seemed like pre-history to me!
It's very interesting to me that the pre-D&D wargame community so closely resembles the modern D&D community (albeit without a little thing called The Internet). There was a small but enthusiastic group of fans. Many of them were looking for people to play with, or at least talk about the game with (newsletters and play-by-mail were their message boards). There were sub-groups dedicated to specific types of games (like naval battle simulation). There were also bitter arguments over rules and rifts and schisms in the community. The more things change...
Anyway, it's clear that D&D couldn't have been created without that community. It's a game that requires a pretty good number of dedicated enthusiasts to play. It requires a significant amount of time invested playing the game and learning it. How do you find people like this and get them together in one room? Even today it's a problem for some. But the existing wargaming community really helped solve that problem. If Gygax had published D&D in a vacuum, a few lonely enthusiasts would have bought it, but they probably wouldn't have had anyone to play it with! It's unlikely that it would have seen the success it did.
Of course D&D wouldn't have come into being in a vacuum, in all likelihood. The wargaming community allowed the ideas that underlie tabletop roleplaying games to cross-pollinate. I think it's safe to say that neither Gygax nor Arneson would ever have invented something like D&D if they hadn't been exposed to miniatures wargames and board game wargames. And there was a practice in the community of sharing rules for game variants at virtually no cost, so people could try out different rule sets and improve on them. There is no question that D&D drew heavily from the ideas of the wargaming community. All of which were propagated by newsletters, mail correspondence and conventions*.
Has anyone else read PatW?
* No internet. Not even email. Absolutely MIND-BLOWING to this child of the 80's.
