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General Tabletop Discussion
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Hypothetical Fun: What If A Different Genre Was The RPG Foundation?
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<blockquote data-quote="Wofano Wotanto" data-source="post: 9293775" data-attributes="member: 7044704"><p>It seems likely that if roleplaying didn't start off with fantasy, it would have been scifi instead - specifically, Star Wars. 1977 wasn't all that much later than OD&D, its impact was huge, and the general scifi fan base was already open to some performative cosplay that was only a cognitive leap from being a proto-LARP. There were also a few scifi wargames out already (much to the dismay of historical purists of the day) and many more post-SW. Postulating a world where someone got a license for Star Wars gaming in '77 and had the creative spark to make a TTRPG with it (as well as the inevitable wargames) a scifi-based RPG hobby is pretty plausible, especially if other IPs (Star Trek, Space 1999, Doctor Who, any of a variety of literary ones) also licensed out their gaming rights in an attempt to ride the coattails of SW the way the film industry did.</p><p></p><p>Overlapping fan bases would still have led to fantasy becoming part of the TTRPG hobby, as well as loads of homebrew original sf/f games as the cheap early licensing dried up. You might see the 3" SW toys getting used in place of miniatures at first and maybe more scifi "tabletop" toys in general, although I suspect there'd still be some metal figs (licensed or knockoffs) pretty fast. The process of producing metal figs back then had less lead time than modern 3D-sculpted plastics, and was something that could be (and was) done by garage-shop startup businesses. Whether Tolkein-esque fantasy would catch on as well as it did in our timeline is questionable, but I doubt it would go wholly ignored. Maybe you'd see more pulp RPG stuff early on as the Lucas interviews talking about their influence on SW came out - something that would no doubt show up in whatever the Appendix N equivalent of the "Star Wars Galaxy Master's Guide" looked like.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Wofano Wotanto, post: 9293775, member: 7044704"] It seems likely that if roleplaying didn't start off with fantasy, it would have been scifi instead - specifically, Star Wars. 1977 wasn't all that much later than OD&D, its impact was huge, and the general scifi fan base was already open to some performative cosplay that was only a cognitive leap from being a proto-LARP. There were also a few scifi wargames out already (much to the dismay of historical purists of the day) and many more post-SW. Postulating a world where someone got a license for Star Wars gaming in '77 and had the creative spark to make a TTRPG with it (as well as the inevitable wargames) a scifi-based RPG hobby is pretty plausible, especially if other IPs (Star Trek, Space 1999, Doctor Who, any of a variety of literary ones) also licensed out their gaming rights in an attempt to ride the coattails of SW the way the film industry did. Overlapping fan bases would still have led to fantasy becoming part of the TTRPG hobby, as well as loads of homebrew original sf/f games as the cheap early licensing dried up. You might see the 3" SW toys getting used in place of miniatures at first and maybe more scifi "tabletop" toys in general, although I suspect there'd still be some metal figs (licensed or knockoffs) pretty fast. The process of producing metal figs back then had less lead time than modern 3D-sculpted plastics, and was something that could be (and was) done by garage-shop startup businesses. Whether Tolkein-esque fantasy would catch on as well as it did in our timeline is questionable, but I doubt it would go wholly ignored. Maybe you'd see more pulp RPG stuff early on as the Lucas interviews talking about their influence on SW came out - something that would no doubt show up in whatever the Appendix N equivalent of the "Star Wars Galaxy Master's Guide" looked like. [/QUOTE]
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