Was D&D the first RPG?

[Garnfellow]

Back on topic -- I have read some scattered accounts of a German fantasy role-playing game from the 1960s. It's never been clear to me if this was a published game or just a collection of house rules that circulated informally amongst a small community of gamers or writers. Monte Cook wrote a Line of Sight article on this a few months back, but I think details remain pretty sketchy. I would love to know more about this.

Clearly this German school didn't influence Gygax and Arneson -- it was a completely parallel development.

In this vein, it sometimes sounds like both MAR Barker and Ed Greenwood independently came close to developing roleplaying games on their own in the early 70s -- but D&D came along and their own efforts were swept up in the tide.

I think something was percolating in the culture during this period, and I suspect that if D&D had never been published roleplaying games would have still appeared at some point in the 70s, but the imagination reels at the thought of what those games would have looked like. Would fantasy have been the chief genre, or maybe -- inspired by Star Wars in 77 -- space opera. Would these games have been more or less influenced by wargaming than D&D?

Just imagine holding a first edition "Journey to the Forgotten Realms" softcover book by Ed Greenwood, copyright 1979. Subtitled "A New Game of Imagination," it outlines a completely diceless roleplaying game, using playing cards to resolve actions.

 

[Bullgrit]

Number of Players: at least one referee and from four to fifty players can be handled in any single campaign, but the referee to player ratio should be about 1-20 or thereabouts.

This concept boggles my mind.

Bullgrit

 

[eyebeams]

You could quibble and argue about Chainmail (not the most recently released rules for that), or really any wargame (HG Well's Little War or Fritz Leiber's homemade Lanhkmar game)where you had individual units instead of squads and up (because you could then claim 'It was marked as Wellington, so I made it go where I thought Wellington would go'), but D&D was the first thing that could be called a role-playing game.

Do you have more information about the Leiber game? I do vaguely remember that <b>Little Wars</b> had some rough discussion about playing a political game (with a fictional country) in addition to the military game.

 

[Henry]

It could also be argued (by Dave Arneson) that the first roleplaying ever done by an organized set of table rules were the scenarios run by Dave Arneson's group in the seige of Blackmoor Castle, where the chainmail rules were used to take a group through the sewers & dungeons to sneak in and let the beseiging group in. The first "monsters" were in such a scenario that I know of, too (prior to this, it was "man to man" action usually). This occurred sometimes between 1969 and 1974, though solid dates are hard to attain. I think Gary has disputed the claim, but the history from '69 to '74 is kinda muddy, because communication between groups is a very different story back then, and many people have different recollections (the participants are ranging from their 40's to early 70's).

 

[MonsterMash]

In the UK we had Skirmish Wargames (historical games) with a 1:1 figure scale, named characters (usually only with a mini description and one stat reflecting experience: novice, trained or veteran). I'll have to try and dig up original publication dates for this stuff, the first set of rules published was I believe Western Skirmish (old west) followed by Colonial.

This would have been evolving at around the same time as the stuff in the US (late 60s- early 70s).

D&D is almost certainly the first published Fantasy RPG.

 

[francisca]

Do you have more information about the Leiber game? I do vaguely remember that <b>Little Wars</b> had some rough discussion about playing a political game (with a fictional country) in addition to the military game.

I have the TSR published version of it. In an old dragon is some discussion from Fischer, I think concerning the differences between the published and original version they played.

However, I don't think it could be considered an RPG is any case, as I think it has much less claim to the moniker than say, Diplomacy.

 

[Angel Tarragon]

Somebody please correct me if I am wrong, but I am pretty sure that Tunnels & Trolls was printed before the DnD pamphlet set.

 

[francisca]

Somebody please correct me if I am wrong, but I am pretty sure that Tunnels & Trolls was printed before the DnD pamphlet set.

You are incorrect. T&T was a direct reaction to the "complexity" of the '74 edition of D&D.

Google around for Ken St. Andre and you'll find the history of T&T wherein he says so.

Here is a snippet from the FLying Buffalo website. I'm still looking for the quote from Ken himself:

In 1975, Ken St Andre tried to play Dungeons & Dragons (a trademark of TSR Inc, not to be used without their permission) and couldn't figure out the rules from just reading them. He decided that this was too complicated and invented his own fantasy role playing game, Tunnels & Trolls. He heard that I was going to Origins that summer, so he printed up 100 copies and asked me to take them with me to sell. (Actually I believe he only had 40 copies left by the time I left for Origins). I knew this game was dumb and no one would buy it. After all, there were no cardboard counters, no gameboard, and you didn't "win" it at the end. But I figured I'd stick them on the corner of my table and when I gave them all back to Ken afterwards, he wouldn't bother me any more. Of course, I sold every one of them, and we went on to become the publisher of T&T and all the solo adventures.

Source: http://www.flyingbuffalo.com/history.htm

 

[Eternalknight]

After quizzing the person some more, I got the following information:

He said it definately wasn't LARP, as they were sitting around a bedroom floor playing after someone's dad showed them the game.

He also said it wasn't fantasy; he thinks he remembers his 'guy' (as he called him) having a laser gun.
]
The only other he remembered was that there wasn't much dice rolling, and when they did it was only 'normal' dice (six-siders).

He was also only ten at the time, and he did say he may be misremembering things somewhat.

 

[wingsandsword]

I think something was percolating in the culture during this period, and I suspect that if D&D had never been published roleplaying games would have still appeared at some point in the 70s, but the imagination reels at the thought of what those games would have looked like. Would fantasy have been the chief genre, or maybe -- inspired by Star Wars in 77 -- space opera. Would these games have been more or less influenced by wargaming than D&D?

I'll agree, between a growing interest in Fantasy literature, the coming rebirth of Space Opera, the rise of the SCA and historical reenactment, and several other figures getting close to it, RPG's as we know them now were going to happen sometimes in the 1970's.

Yes, depending on who was first to print it could have been much less influenced by wargames and more story oriented. It could have been much more historically oriented with little or no fantastic elements, or it could have been space opera instead of medieval fantasy. There is no easy way to know, suffice it to say all of them were building up to a point and D&D gets the credit for being first to the summit, but it wasn't the only guy climbing the mountain at the time.

As for larping, that's a completely different story, with pretty much a completely unrelated evolution that only occasionally touches back to tabletop RPG's. It's also much murkier, with pretty much completely parallel development in the US and Europe, and much less distinct who did what when, and many groups claim to be the original major larp group or to have made major innovations to rules and play style that others sprang from.