What if you brought 4E back to 1970?

[Umbran]

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?

Um, Morrus, I've got right next to me a cookbook from 1967. Glossy paper and color photographs, published by Better Homes and Gardens - so targeted and priced for the average home consumer. Folks are massively overstating the change in printing technology.

If anything were to throw people off, it would be the copyright date listed as 2008.

Anyway, I don't think that's the real question the OP wants answered. What happens to the evolution of the game, and RPGs in general, from folks having seen a "finely tuned RPG" early on. I don't think the end results would be as different as one might think, and here's why...

One example of high-tech does not impart a full understanding of physics, and one RPG does not impart a full understanding of game design. Reverse-engineering is more than just taking measurements of every part, and reproducing them. You have to understand the design, and the laws behind it. And that takes experimentation.

So, you sell all your rulebooks, and people play the game. They still have to experiment around that basic design to learn how RPGs work in general. You may give the hobby a leg up by getting more people an example of an RPG earlier, but the communication and experimentation step is still limited by the fact that it is the 1970s and 1980s - the internet isn't there to speed things up.

So, you still get an explosion of various designs some time after you seed the RPG pool. Many wheels are reinvented just like they were today.

I am not of the opinion that the mechanics of 4e are so stunning that they'd come to dominate automatically. There are many other potential systems out there that could have dominated as well if they were given similar market advantage. And while you've handed out a lot of books, you're not there driving development and publishing.

The real question of what games look like is probably a matter of who gains the major market share - and since you've mucked with things, it may not be TSR. I don't think we can predict who does become the big dogs on this scenario.

 

[SSquirrel]

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

B/c then Biff might steal the Delorean and you might never exist

 

[Clavis]

I think 4E in 1970 would have been a complete and total failure.

As far I can tell, D&D didn't become a phenomena based on the elegance of its rules set. In fact, the opposite appears to be the case. The very incompleteness of the published rules caused people to create houserules, and that created a feeling of personal ownership and involvement. D&D succeeded because people could make it their own game. Playing D&D became a hobby, and part of that hobby was making the game playable.

In addition, the physical chracteristics of the 4E books might have turned people off. First of all, people who had no previous knowledge of an RPG would take one look at the Player's Handbook and wonder how insane someone would have to be to try to play a game with 300 pages of rules. Furthermore, the art style is very different from what was popular at the time, so the art would probably not be a draw for the game.

IMHO, something like 4e can only make sense at the end of a long evolutionary process, not at its beginning.

 

[JohnRTroy]

There's a lot of other factors involved too. Remember that D&D started by aiming at the Wargaming market first and then moving towards the mainstream. Without that market--would the mainstream have been interested first? Remember, 4e is designed in a world when D&D and it's inspirational children is known to the general public. One of the bigger flaws I see with 4e is that the ruleset is not as geared to the beginner, and I believe D&D really took off when TSR marketed their Basic D&D games.

I see a lot of gamers say if Gary and Dave never got together (or were hit by a bus) that RPGs would have still happened. The problem is, there are various factors involved, and if the guys who created, say, Runequest came in, would they have had the same success? It's hard to say. Part of D&D's success came from the marketing and tenacity of the people involved. Clearly Gary had a great way of promoting this game, not just by quitting his original day job to form Tactical Studies Rules with Don Kaye, but by already having a good reputation in the wargame market and by starting things like GenCon. And I think some of it was just dumb luck.

I'd love to see some well-versed historians try to figure out alternate history of RPGs.

 

[Vorput]

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.

What's a stripper purse?

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

You're a trillionaire geek, and one day you think, "What would happen if I brought 4E back in time to 1970?"
...
What would have happened if you had a finely turned rpg engine dropped into everyone's lap in the early 70s?

The date makes a big difference. In 1970 the game was not yet even being played. You say "roleplaying game" and people would look at you like you had a third eye - just like they did when D&D WAS first published in 1974. They shopped it to a number of game companies and were turned down prior to deciding to form a company to publish it themselves.

In 1970 people would probably ooh and ahh over the graphical look of the rulebooks, marvel at the depth of imagination, the wonderful widgets like the painted plastic miniatures of fascinating creatures, and pseudo-photo-realistic grids to move them about upon. But the rules? A complete and total non-starter.

Oh, there'd be those who might make head or tails of it. Gygax, Arneson, Wesely, et. al. of course. But they would be so unlikely to actually play it as written and even if they DID, it would get house-ruled, added onto, modified endlessly. They just wouldn't know that game from a hole in the ground. People can pick up 4E TODAY, even without having played an RPG in their lives, and grok what to do with it - but only because there's been over 30 years of D&D and other RPGS seeping into the culture. That seepage was helped, was carried along by the geeks and nerds who brought it with them as they invented the staggering array of modern technology. In 1970 you would have nobody to even GIVE it to much less SELL it to. In 1970 the "hobby" was still 30-year old men in basements playing Napoleanics. Simply throwing this game at their feet would not produce marvelling at the GAME itself because the point of the game would be so utterly alien.

It took years for D&D to gain any kind of following, years to gain a foothold, more years to spread and grow to the point where ANYONE outside the hobby itself had even HEARD of it.

I honestly think the biggest impact would be generated by the minatures and THAT would create a significant long-term change in how the game developed. Rather than being dominated in its nascent years by people who approached the game as a fun group exercise in imagination and creativity for adults it would be seen as just an attempt to sell lots of expensive green and tan "Army Men" to kids. The adults would go back to rehashing the battles of Napolean and Ceasar and anyone who tried to build a business on selling high-priced Army Men would fail quite spectacularly. I don't honestly know how capable injection-molded plastics were in 1970 of doing the kind of detail we see today, but I sincerely doubt that it was much better than Army Men were.

We might see plastics miniatures companies develop instead of metal minis companies.

In general, if the year were 1970 then I think the development of D&D would have been as a GAME game, a grandiose and more popular version of wargames - not as anything like a ROLEPLAYING game.

However, if the year were AFTER D&D had already been published then I think the developments that took 20 years we'd have seen in 5 or less and more of the roleplaying elements of the game would be more likely to have been established, survive and thrive than they would from 1970.

 

[Intense_Interest]

Well, considering we're attempting to graft our current-generation product into the dawn of the hobby, I imagine that certain aspects would or wouldn't work:

All-upside races would be a wildly different way to approach . Ogres and/or Minotaurs would likely be a base-playable race as a "large" character in the first expansion (Adv. 4e?). The increased variaty of races would shift the game into being a far more cosmopoliton game than the "Only 4 races" systems we've grown up with; Human/Dwarf/Elf/Hobbit and evil Orc.

Class based system- any class-less system sent back would not "jump start" the role-playing game hobby, as many of the necessary hoops to play a class-less system (role protection, agreed game narrative, etc) would be necessary for the hobby to have gone through before you would be able to introduce it to the audience. Without the Wizard/Fighter/Thief/Cleric "agreement", you can't get people to play anything else.

The Feat system and the larger "branching classes" concept would not be understood at first. Far too technical a concept when not everyone has already played "Bob the Fighter" 1 2 and 3. Adding variaty to character classes isn't necessary when this would be the first RPG you've ever played.

The At-Will/Encounter/Daily system would probably be widely adopted across the hobby; any single arbitrary system (Vancian) is as nominally acceptable as another (W/E/D).

Surges are as undefinable as Hit-points anyway, so any person who adopts one is as liable to adopt the other; Surges are only derided now because of their lack of history, not because of any of their innate qualities.

The "1st level hero" vs. Farmboy & "extended sweetspot" would probably go over like a flat cat. There are WAY too many instances of low-powered to high-powered scales in fiction for an unknowing market to easily adopt that conceit. I imagine that "Advanced 4E" would be the first step back into the low-level hero idea, at least with 0-level characters and such.

Dragonborn would be wildly popular; Drow would not pre-Drizzit, and be derided as a "rip off of Tieflings", if anything. The Eladrin/Elf split would not be fully understood, but would probably warp all following fantasy fiction into adopting it if becomes the baseline.

No one would care about Gnomes. More specifically, Gnomes would not have ever been put into the PHB2 (if it ever got made) and Gnomes as a race would not be widely adopted. The primary reason Gnomes exist is to act as the Small-and-Magical trickster race, and the "Everyone can be any class" 4E-ism would allow Halflings to finally kill the Gnome and take all of their stuff.

 

[AllisterH]

I would actually split up my inventory.

So instead of taking back X player Handbooks, I would take back x/2 4E introductory boxed sets, x/4 DMG1, x/8 DMG2 and x/8 PHB.

I would sell the 4e boxed set as it is and then use Strategic Review and print articles that are just pages from the rest of the products.

Mainly because even the 2e PHB is a lot of rules (the 2e PHB has 300 page itself)

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I think the DMG might surprise people because there is a lot of information on how the game might play out for an entirely new game genre. Of course, these chapters are a result of 30 years of "play-testing"; so to speak.

 

[delericho]

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

Congratulations, you've just killed role-playing stone dead.

By doing as you suggest, you've just flooded the market with a product no-one can possibly compete with. It took years before TSR were in a position to produce books that were even close to the 4e PHB in terms of presentation (where by 'close' I mean the black-cover 2nd Edition PHB from '95ish - and even that's not very close).

Without the ability to compete, we never see the publication of OD&D, or Traveller, or Shadowrun, or...

My best guess, then, is that D&D 4e makes a big splash for a couple of years, and then sinks due to a lack of development work.

(Now if, on the other hand, you were to anonymously send Gary Gygax a copy of the rulebook just as he was about the start work on 1st Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, things might be very different. Or he might just ignore it entirely - he was on record as saying he preferred 'his' game to 3e, and I doubt he would have felt differently about 4e.)