The World Without D&D

Henry said:

A lot of people aren't aware of this, but Marc Miller has said he developed Traveller independently of D&D.

Click to expand...

Without D&D and with Traveller being first we might have also had Wanderer.

http://dirk.files.wordpress.com/2007/07/dsc01828.jpg

Saint Sir Adam West was important in making superhero comics safe again, but for a while, only the campy and watered down storylines really made it past code enforcement.

I mean, compare the Batman of the 1970s to either the Dark Knight of Frank Miller or the original character from the 1930s and '40s, and its like looking at a Cub Scout next to a couple of Green Berets.

The kind of epic/heroic storytelling that makes FRPGs or Sci-Fi RPGs work simply wasn't around for supers at the time.

Dannyalcatraz said:

Saint Sir Adam West was important in making superhero comics safe again, but for a while, only the campy and watered down storylines really made it past code enforcement.

I mean, compare the Batman of the 1970s to either the Dark Knight of Frank Miller or the original character from the 1930s and '40s, and its like looking at a Cub Scout next to a couple of Green Berets.

The kind of epic/heroic storytelling that makes FRPGs or Sci-Fi RPGs work simply wasn't around for supers at the time.

Click to expand...

Come on, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby et al at Marvel were providing depth not really seen previously in most comic books already in the 60s, and still getting them past the comic code, and becoming really popular.
Sure DC was going the Camp Adam West Batman route, with all of its silver age craziness, but Marvel's books (especially modeled after the Avengers and the X-men [even if it wasn't ever very popular in that era]) could conceivably have helped birth RPGs.

But who knows what would have happened to comics in the 70s and 80s without D&D - Geek activities spur on other geek activities, and encourage each other's growth.

There were a fair number of miniatures wargamers around at the time who were aware of the Brownstein (sp?) one mini = one character games that were the original catalyst for what became D&D (Gary and Dave did not wave their hands and create the game overnight) that some form of RPG was probably inevitable. Traveller? Quite possibly. Something else? Also possible. (Runequest is another contender.)

As for Trek and comics, they both had huge fan bases at the time, but neither generated an RPG of their own until well after D&D came out. (Well, there was the original Villians & Vigilantes, a very early RPG, but it started as a D&D campaign...)

deadsmurf said:

Come on, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby et al at Marvel were providing depth not really seen previously in most comic books already in the 60s, and still getting them past the comic code, and becoming really popular.

Click to expand...

The depth was mainly in character development- a factor in whic DC comics of the era clearly lagged.

And while they did manage to get the occasional story past comics code enforcers, those were the exception rather than the rule...and the bulk of the edgier stories featured the same thing Brad Pitt & Quentin Tarentino's current entertainment epic does- Nazis.

Getting into the 1970s, you started to see Marvel & DC explore the post-Flower Power age with even edgier stories & heroes- Adam Warlock, The Punisher, Etrigan and so forth. But even so, potentially extremely edgy characters like Ghost Rider were saddled with fairly whitebread storytelling. Wolverine, for instance, despite running around with 6 18" adamantium claws at his disposal didn't manage to mortally wound anyone for about a decade. How many times did the Hulk level city blocks...and no mention of casualties.

Racism and sexism were addressed...but in a glossy and superficial way. Homosexuality was verboten. Everybody was straight. Almost everybody was white- except aliens- and male.

It isn't until the 1980s that you started to see both the boom in comic book popularity and consistently deep and meaningful storylines that had believable threats, challenges and consequences of the type that really inspire roleplayers.

And even that pales in comparison to the 1990s and beyond.

(FWIW, my collection dates back to 1963, covering Marvel & DC plus several of the upstarts...)

All this talk of LotR -> D&D makes me think I'm odd in my path. I read LotR *because* of D&D, and I honestly didn't know or care that it was written decades before I discovered D&D. I saw LotR had orcs and goblins and ents just like D&D had orcs and goblins and treants, not the other way around.

D&D lead me to read and write more than was just necessary for school, which lead me to my current career path. I can honestly say that without D&D, I would be a very different person. For better or worse.

Bullgrit

Bullgrit said:

All this talk of LotR -> D&D makes me think I'm odd in my path. I read LotR *because* of D&D, and I honestly didn't know or care that it was written decades before I discovered D&D. I saw LotR had orcs and goblins and ents just like D&D had orcs and goblins and treants, not the other way around.

Click to expand...

For me, D&D got me to read Vance's Dying Earth, Lieber's Fafhrd & Grey Mouser books and Howard's Conan stories.

D&D lead me to read and write more than was just necessary for school, which lead me to my current career path. I can honestly say that without D&D, I would be a very different person. For better or worse.

Click to expand...

QFT. Even though I was a big-time reader before D&D, D&D definitely reinforced certain tastes I had.

I read LOTR after finding D&D. OK, I read the Hobbit in jr high and found D&D in elementary.

THis has been an interesting thread, especially for the revelation that Traveller may have had an independant genesis from D&D and would have possibly appeared regardless. (And Wanderer made me laugh quite a bit! )

On the one hand, there's enough people involved in the proto-scene that turns into D&D to make me think that Gary & Dave aren't necesarilly required to kick start the process. The game would look vastly different, and might not be as popular, without their specific leadership but I have to wonder if other people in the wargaming scene wouldn't have hit upon the same idea. I don't want to cheapen the contribution of these two men - and as others have said, it's easy after something has been invented to say "It was obvious", but I do wonder how likely a world without D&D in one form or another is.

But what if we do have no D&D? Traveller simply wouldn't hold it's own in the hobby, I reckon. I've long thought that fantasy gaming tends to be easier to sell to people than sci-fi because teh fantasy genre is often more "codified" and the game worlds are more recogniseable to beginners. Everyone has heard bedtime stories about dwarves mining, dragons lairing in caves and witches casting spells; again, some of that cultural exposure may be post-D&D but I've always found everyone quickly gets the gimmicks of a typical fantasy world. By contrast, tehre is no typical sci-fi - Traveller aims for a specific sort of world, quite hard sci-fi and almost amoral in focus, whereas Star Trek & Star Wars are quite heroic worlds but with again very different spins. Elves, Dwarves & Dragons appear very similar in most fantasy stories - in sci-fi it's rare to see that level of universal application. Traveller has a harder mountain to climb in selling itself to people.

A lot of other RPGs are direct reactions to or expansions of ideas in D&D, so it's hard to imagine what we'd get. A fantasy game would appear eventually but without the initial popularity kick I can't see RPGs ever hitting their 80s peak. As others have said this means that Games Workshop might not exist or be a far smaller brand; many computer games don't exist or are radically different, because the RPG trops don't exist; and a bunch of TV shows and films from the 80s also might not appear if there's no D&D to drive a fantasy fad.

Without D&D, Anime might not be as big in the USA as it is now.