If you are including those, I would say Bushido (1979) and the related Daredevils (1982) should be included for sure. As far as early very targetted "narrative" attempts, Theatrix (1993), for all its faults, was a serious attempt at a radical departure. I ran a fairly successful World of Darkness game using the WoD character ratings with Theatrix resolution systems as an experiment sometime around 1995. Everway (1995) should also get a mention - another not-fully-successful-but-interesting attempt.
Edit: probably should add The Morrow Project (1980) to the list, too.
I've been hearing that whine from older GM's since the early '80s, and at this point, I don't believe it. Similarly, you hear whines from fans of oop, logical, functional, etc. programming paradigms about how the only reason the procedural paradigm is dominate is it got discovered first; I don't believe that any more either.
The real revelation for me was how little impact on cRPG design continuing experimentation in PnP RPG design was having, which got me to thinking why D&D tropes like hit points, classes and the whole fortune in the mechanic are so enduring.
It may not be the only way to do things, and there may be real value in doing things differently, but the reason that D&D and its heirs with similar paradigms dominate isn't merely that D&D got there first. The fact that they got there first (often by evolution) tells you more about naturally adoptable mechanics than anything else. Even if 'plot coupons' were invented first, they would I think have created an independent small niche like En Garde! or something of the sort - a separate line in RPG development.
[MENTION=23935]Nagol[/MENTION]: You are the first person I've ever heard praise 1e for its layout. The 1e DMG is a masterpeice, but it's not exactly the most intuitively laid out as a rule book.
I'll grant individual page layout leaves... something to be desired and there are dangly bits that can be difficult to locate, but I've only had to add like 3 entries to the cross-index, ever. The sectioning works well enough. Even without the index I can figure out where to look for advice on swamp diseases for example.
The flow is Players --> Characters (including followers) --> Equipment (including add-on characters) --> Spell Considerations --> Adventuring --> Combat --> Experience --> World design (including NPCs) --> Magical creations --> Magic items --> Treasure assignment. There could be a different flow given (like move world before adventuring), but I don't thik it would change much and it reflects moden sensibilities more than the sensibilities of the time.
The biggest area I would address is to group the NPC sections (Hireling/henchman, followers from class abilities, and NPC personae) closer together.
But for experienced users, having access to a comprehensive cross-index trumps conceptual flow.
That sounds like edition warring to me (i.e. "4E is objectively better designed and laid out than previous editions").We're not talking about edition warring. There is a great separation between the DESIGN of a thing, design and production principles used in its creation, and whether or not you happen to like the thing subjectively. You're fighting an edition war that I'm not fighting. The standards of layout, presentation, ergonomics of design, etc were just brought to a higher level in each successive edition of D&D, uniformly. In these respects Basic was better than OD&D, and AD&D was superior to Basic, and 2e improved on 1e, etc.
Didn't Gygax basically organize it as he wrote, while adding things he missed from the earlier two books?I dunno, I gotta agree with Celebrim on this one. I don't think there's anything particularly WRONG with the 1e book's layouts and presentation, but it is kind of cluttered in places, not always very clear, sometimes groups related things in different places, and IMHO relies too much on tables and charts. Common elements often lack common formatting (items for instance) and there is no comparison for instance between a 1e monster stat block and a 4e one. I'm not sure what makes the 1e DMG's index better than that of the 4e DMG either for instance. What I WOULD observe though is that in actual play the amount of material you have to reference in 4e is quite small, you'd normally only need one page of the DMG, page 42. You might also use page 110, parcels, and page 56? for the XP chart. Now and then you might look up some of the other stuff, traps, poisons, diseases, etc, but most of those are deliberately designed to be easy to reproduce where needed, all having standardized text blocks.
Likewise, PCs are designed so that numbers are almost all pre-calculated and it is uncommon to change them except during level-up. You will reference your powers, but again the formatting both makes them easy to quickly understand, but also easy to copy to your sheet.
. There is a great separation between the DESIGN of a thing, design and production principles used in its creation, and whether or not you happen to like the thing subjectively. c.
But I dont think you have identified what that is. So far you have asserted 4E is superior design. But I dont think this is self evident and I think there is a lot of debate. I mean, if you want class parity, yes 4e is better designed than 3E, but not everyone wants that. They are different games, largely built with different design goals. But I really dont think one is objectively superior to the other. In fact, many of the things hou site as improvements in 4E, I see as design flaws. I just dont see 4E as objectively superior design.