The Father Of...

[cattoy]

Steve Jackson - Father of point-build chargen.

 

[Feanor Liberius]

http://www.enworld.org/forum/genera...d-you-learn-try-anything-new.html#post4894155

[MENTION=52725]James J. Skach[/MENTION] played in one with the man himself. It would be cool to get some details about how it went. I wonder if he'll be at GenCon 2011 or GaryCon in March?

We tried to get one together again this past year (2010); but it was too last minute. I stood on a corner and spoke a lot with Major Wesley about setting one up next year.

I have a place to use to run it (assuming I can get family out as they will likely attend in 2011) - which is where we ran it in 2009.

Details? I'll see if I can dig up a write up about it. It certainly is interesting. You're not sitting around a table, that's for sure. You do take on the roles, physically. Locations were spread around The Condo and you moved between them to get things, or try to get things, done.

But there was no combat that I recall. No attempt to cross foam swards or anything like that which, I suppose, makes it a bit different from a LARP (the way I understand them).

No HP, No AC, nothing of the sort.

 

[Lanefan]

We tried to get one together again this past year (2010); but it was too last minute. I stood on a corner and spoke a lot with Major Wesley about setting one up next year.

I have a place to use to run it (assuming I can get family out as they will likely attend in 2011) - which is where we ran it in 2009.

Details? I'll see if I can dig up a write up about it. It certainly is interesting. You're not sitting around a table, that's for sure. You do take on the roles, physically. Locations were spread around The Condo and you moved between them to get things, or try to get things, done.

Yes, the main room was the tavern, the front hall was the university, the kitchen was another location, and so on; and unless your role tied you to a place you had to move from area to area in order to interact with the people you needed to.

But there was no combat that I recall. No attempt to cross foam swards or anything like that which, I suppose, makes it a bit different from a LARP (the way I understand them).

No HP, No AC, nothing of the sort.

True, though the genesis of LARP (moving around in character to specified locations as opposed to staying put at a table) is certainly present.

That said, I'm not sure how (or even if) the game would handle it if two or more of the characters had gone ahead and hauled off on each other, other than that having the players actually duke it out isn't really a viable option. But the setup is such that physical confrontation is not out of the question. Any idea how Wesely and-or the game would deal with that?

[MENTION=7434]James[/MENTION], you might remember me: I played the University Chancellor in 2009. Good times!

Lanefan

 

[Feanor Liberius]

Of course I do, Lanefan! You also were kind enough to run a game in which I was lucky enough to participate.

Well...it came close. One of my goals was to get into a duel with Student B (I think it was him). And I purposefully...let him bump into me...so I could be insulted and then challenge him. IIRC, he successfully backed out or there was some intervention.

Perhaps it was dueling goals - so maybe the chief of police had a goal to not let any fights break out.

 

[Beginning of the End]

When I first looked at the three booklets of D&D the first glance was more like puzzlement over the integration of the combat rules and levelling. It was nothing like what you see now...or at least very different. The roll dice against AC (or that we use a D20 to roll against AC, saves etc these days...that idea) that we used was actually a secondary option in the back.

That secondary option, from what I understand, is closer to what Arneson was running by the time D&D was published. Chainmail was put front-and-center because that was a system Gygax had created and was reluctant to move on from.

When were the actual rules where what we know as D&D today started to come to light and be codified into a definite shape which we would recognize? I think was Greyhawk.

Do a Google search on "Blackmoor". Blackmoor may have been Supplement II, but it was the original D&D campaign. And it was in Blackmoor that the fundamental principles of D&D gaming took form and root.

I can see most would also put him (Gygax) as the father of Roleplaying as well.

Wouldn't shock me. Gygax spent at least a decade waging a publicity war and a legal war to minimize and degrade Arneson's contributions to the game. I suspect that Gygax legitimately felt he played a larger and more significant role than Arneson did, but that doesn't make it true.

 

[eyebeams]

Bringing H.G. Wells into the equation - per the previous page - is probably a bit of push regarding "RPGs" but there were people playing ongoing campaigns using 6x6 diced tables for individual character background, casualties (think Traveller as well, perhaps? *g*), promotions before/between games, etc., and being careful to try not to get their key characters killed off during games back in the 1940s. And that /was/ on the direct line from Wells rather than Wesely's hook back to Totten.

The idea of individual characters as player-controlled actors in a fictional world is firmly in the set of ideas Wells lays out in Floor Games. It's all a bit obscure because none of the actors involved in framing the history of RPGs have any social or economic motive to call back the work of someone they all knew about, but who suffered the singular defect of being an uncopyrightable socialist who made them all less novel looking by comparison.

Gary Gygax is interesting as far as this goes because he used to talk about Floor Games and Little Wars as part of his lineage but later in life took pains to talk about how he was doing what Wells talked about when he was 4. I think in the later years he had settled on a minimum complexity threshold for what he was willing to credit as real development -- a level that put him on one side, and his predecessors on the other.

Anyway, by my count we're now on maybe the 5th consensus on the history of RPGs, D&D and what D&D was supposed to "really" be. I think the truth is that the seeds of early RPGs were spread across several groups and the form was not so much invented as collected, packaged and sold.

Right now I would think that in terms of a significant cultural movement, RPGs were invented around 2005. That would be the time in which the first original-world "RPs" grew from fandom RPs, which in turn came from fanfic with no direct ties to D&D and its successors at all. And baby, let me tell ya that where we're headed, in 60-70 years they will be the "first roleplayers" and we will be seen as being vaguely related to computer gaming or as some general spontaneous cultural expression, viewed with as little attention as we pay to things outside of our current narratives of self-identity.

TL;DR: The reason you think RPG origins are cut and dried are the reasons future gamers will think we're irrelevant,