What if you brought 4E back to 1970?

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harpy

First Post

• Oct 18, 2009

• #1

You're a trillionaire geek, and one day you think, "What would happen if I brought 4E back in time to 1970?"

So you load a fleet of trucks with thousands and thousands of copies of the 4E three core books, along with vast bundles of supporting material like pre-painted figures, battlemats, wet erase markers, dice, etc. You then drive over to your personal time machine and drive through to 1970.

Having done your research, you go and find local wargaming conventions. You set up shop at the con and sell the books real cheap, say a buck a book. You hit each region of the US, fly on over to Britain and douse them with 4E, you even zoom down to Australia for good measure. Then you set up a distributor to feed the books to the retail marketplace.

Then, since this is handy time machine that splits timestreams, you pick a different one from the timestream you started from (so as not to screw up your own future) and then step through to something similar to our present to check and see how RPGs have evolved.

What would have happened if you had a finely turned rpg engine dropped into everyone's lap in the early 70s?

 

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Wik

First Post

• Oct 18, 2009

• #2

Anarchy. Madness. And Vin Diesel wouldn't be the game's unofficial spokesman.

Also, people would wonder who the hell this "gary gygax" is that the game is dedicated to on the first page.

The real Gygax would be pretty freaked out to see his name in a book that he'd been thinking of, but hadn't got around to writing.

 

C

carmachu

Explorer

• Oct 18, 2009

• #3

Would be a bit weird since I wasnt born until 2 years later.

 

Mark

CreativeMountainGames.com

• Oct 18, 2009

• #4

harpy said:

What if you brought 4E back to 1970?

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People would have to wait decades to complain about it online.

 

Crothian

First Post

• Oct 18, 2009

• #5

They'd be impressed with that full color art and huge tomes full of information! Plus I'd be betting on the sports events pretty heavily.

 

Thasmodious

First Post

• Oct 18, 2009

• #6

I'd take all the dollars I made selling the books, put them in a stripper purse, and find my parents and tell them to wait a few years and invest all that money in my name in Microsoft stock.

 

H

haakon1

Hero

• Oct 18, 2009

• #7

Crothian said:

They'd be impressed with that full color art and huge tomes full of information! Plus I'd be betting on the sports events pretty heavily.

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Yeah, why not go to 1969 and bet on the Mets?

But mostly, I'd be putting my money into venture capital. Hello, Mr. Gates! Hello, Mr. Jobs! Hello, Mr. Lucas -- if I fund this "Star Wars" idea, can it get 20% of the profits for it and anything that MIGHT spin off from it? But that might screw something up and change history. And you'd need to bring back gold (hard to pass off 2007 $20 bills!), and that gets so expensive . . .

So, maybe just go back to the 1970s Lake Geneva and game quietly, then come home and blog about it. (And yes, pictures or it didn't happen, so you'd need to find some antique non-digital camera, like a Polaroid, to bring along.)

 

H

haakon1

Hero

• Oct 18, 2009

• #8

Thasmodious said:

I'd take all the dollars I made selling the books, put them in a stripper purse, and find my parents and tell them to wait a few years and invest all that money in my name in Microsoft stock.

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LOL, we think alike!

 

Morrus

Well, that was fun

Staff member

• Oct 18, 2009

• #9

They very appearance of the books - layout, art, colour - would utterly blow the entire publishing world away. Not just the D&D market, but the whole publishing market worldwise. Colour books? Glossy paper?

The art styles would be so far ahead of fashion that they'd appear alien. Same goes for even simple concepts like fonts.

You'd get rich, quick. But then, if you had a time machine, you could take much more impressive stuff back than D&D books and rapidly become the richest person on the planet. Take an iPod back and sell it to IBM. Take a few peer-reviewed physics or medical journals back and sell them to universities. Take a copy of Jurassic Park back and become the ruler of Hollywood. Pre-empt Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Dan Brown. And that's not even touching on the prospect of gambling on events.

 

D

DreadPirateMurphy

Explorer

• Oct 18, 2009

• #10

Morrus said:

Take an iPod back and sell it to IBM. Take a few peer-reviewed physics or medical journals back and sell them to universities. Take a copy of Jurassic Park back and become the ruler of Hollywood. Pre-empt Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Dan Brown. And that's not even touching on the prospect of gambling on events.

Click to expand...

Interestingly, most of that would actually not lead to an immediate revolution in technique or technology.

The manufacturing going into an iPod took decades of evolution. The technology simply doesn't exist to duplicate it in the 1970s. The basic principles behind what it does were known, but the novelty aspects (size and storage capacity) would be beyond IBM back then.

Blockbusters like Harry Potter and Jurassic Park require CGI that was impossible in the 70s. Actually, the very concept of a blockbuster was just being invented with Jaws. Good luck convincing a Hollywood producer that their business model is outdated without some very obvious examples.

You could possibly sell Harry Potter or Dan Brown's books to a publisher -- assuming the market was open to it. They would wonder where they came from... You could plagarize, but then you would have to retype them and submit them as manuscripts...and explain why they appear pre-edited.

None of this is strictly impossible, but the most surefire method is to bet on a lottery or sporting event you know with future knowledge, then dump that money into stocks for companies that will be successful. Actually, the 70s are a fairly lousy time for that -- just go back to the start of the .com boom, dump your money in Netscape or eBay, and pull out when the stocks are maxed out.