Celebrim
Legend
A very brief history of the origin of RPGs.
The modern RPG was created by Dave Arneson using ideas developed by David Wesely and Gary Gygax, who in turn had many inspirations. Gygax would then formalize Arneson's play into a set of published rules that became known as D&D.
Wesely was an avid reader of professional wargaming theory. Unlike the amateur games of the day, professional games were still heavily dependent on arbitration. A typical scenario was a sort of 'play by memo', which participants in separate rooms and a judge reading all the proposed moves sent to them. Because the proposed moves were supposed to be identical to real world orders and courses of action, they weren't constrained to an abstract board or set of codified rules. The orders were read by a panel of expert judges, that would then respond with the consequences of the actions. Wesely organized a rather short series of chaotic games of this sort with himself as the judge which, despite the complete lack of rules or anything like a mastermind pattern, were very well received and highly influential. In particular, Arneson - who'd become bored with the dreary sameness of moving pieces about in normal wargame scenarios - was taken with the idea of running a more freeform game in the style Wesely had introduced for a medieval setting where the participants were various knights, bishops, and other influential persons, with himself as the judge and after a session or two Gygax's Chainmail used to adjudicate combat between the various parties, their armies and retainers, and invading forces. The early focus of the game was largely economic, but the longer the group played the more they enjoyed playing out the choices and actions of the individual personalities they'd assumed and the more personal the action became.
Thus, right from the start, even before something like D&D can be said to exist, the interest of play was primarily personal and story driven. Indeed, the game was invented as a story framework for generating scenarios, which would be improvised by a referee and judged in large part by fiat.
Because Gygax's Chainmail had a fantasy supplement, and because Arneson was becoming bored with the economic aspect of fantasy kingdom management, one especially memorable scenario had the major participants in the story leave behind their armies and delve into a ruined castle filled with monsters. Although it never fully eclipsed the rest of play, exploration of the dungeons of Castle Blackmoor rapidly became the most popular part of the Blackmoor game and dominate focus of play. D&D had effectively been born. Gygax observed one session and was immediately taken with the potential of the game. He set up his own campaign in Castle Greyhawk using his children as the first playtesters, and immediately set out to create a marketable set of rules.
There was never a point in any of this that it didn't depend almost entirely on improvisation. Neither Gygax or Arneson said, "Before I can play I need a regularized content generation system produced by a decipherable mechanical pattern, and I need to make my decisions in such a way that the players can reverse engineer the rules of the system." Gygax and Arneson largely made up everything as they went along, and while Gygax at least leaned toward formalizing a sharable rules set, all of D&D's early rules sets Chainmail/OD&D/Basic/AD&D relied heavily on DM improvisation and said so.. The game rules aren't shy about the fact that DM's will need to be able to improvise solutions and content.
The modern RPG was created by Dave Arneson using ideas developed by David Wesely and Gary Gygax, who in turn had many inspirations. Gygax would then formalize Arneson's play into a set of published rules that became known as D&D.
Wesely was an avid reader of professional wargaming theory. Unlike the amateur games of the day, professional games were still heavily dependent on arbitration. A typical scenario was a sort of 'play by memo', which participants in separate rooms and a judge reading all the proposed moves sent to them. Because the proposed moves were supposed to be identical to real world orders and courses of action, they weren't constrained to an abstract board or set of codified rules. The orders were read by a panel of expert judges, that would then respond with the consequences of the actions. Wesely organized a rather short series of chaotic games of this sort with himself as the judge which, despite the complete lack of rules or anything like a mastermind pattern, were very well received and highly influential. In particular, Arneson - who'd become bored with the dreary sameness of moving pieces about in normal wargame scenarios - was taken with the idea of running a more freeform game in the style Wesely had introduced for a medieval setting where the participants were various knights, bishops, and other influential persons, with himself as the judge and after a session or two Gygax's Chainmail used to adjudicate combat between the various parties, their armies and retainers, and invading forces. The early focus of the game was largely economic, but the longer the group played the more they enjoyed playing out the choices and actions of the individual personalities they'd assumed and the more personal the action became.
Thus, right from the start, even before something like D&D can be said to exist, the interest of play was primarily personal and story driven. Indeed, the game was invented as a story framework for generating scenarios, which would be improvised by a referee and judged in large part by fiat.
Because Gygax's Chainmail had a fantasy supplement, and because Arneson was becoming bored with the economic aspect of fantasy kingdom management, one especially memorable scenario had the major participants in the story leave behind their armies and delve into a ruined castle filled with monsters. Although it never fully eclipsed the rest of play, exploration of the dungeons of Castle Blackmoor rapidly became the most popular part of the Blackmoor game and dominate focus of play. D&D had effectively been born. Gygax observed one session and was immediately taken with the potential of the game. He set up his own campaign in Castle Greyhawk using his children as the first playtesters, and immediately set out to create a marketable set of rules.
There was never a point in any of this that it didn't depend almost entirely on improvisation. Neither Gygax or Arneson said, "Before I can play I need a regularized content generation system produced by a decipherable mechanical pattern, and I need to make my decisions in such a way that the players can reverse engineer the rules of the system." Gygax and Arneson largely made up everything as they went along, and while Gygax at least leaned toward formalizing a sharable rules set, all of D&D's early rules sets Chainmail/OD&D/Basic/AD&D relied heavily on DM improvisation and said so.. The game rules aren't shy about the fact that DM's will need to be able to improvise solutions and content.
