Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ariosto" data-source="post: 5297401" data-attributes="member: 80487">RPGs for the most part keep imitating the original, D&D.D&D originated as an adaptation of war game rules to a "dungeon adventure" scenario inspired largely by monster movies and action-adventure and horror stories.All the early publishers of FRP ("fantasy role playing") games also had lines of war games, historical and fantastic. Role-playing games started as a subset of the pre-existing hobby and industry. As an indication of the demographic, note that The Dragon magazine published a series of Squad Leader scenarios.Not every game, even then, was so combat oriented. For instance:En Garde! (Game Designers Workshop, 1975) had sprung from a simple fencing game (essentially "Scissors Paper Stone" made a bit more complicated). However, the rules for creating situations that would provide excuses for duels came to make up most of the game. It ended up being primarily about securing status and rising through the ranks of Parisian society. Apart from the fencing (which is also very formalized), it does not really have the "tactical" scale and focus elements that many gamers seem now to consider partly definitive of RPGs. The process of play, which has been widely adapted to postal (and later internet) games, is thus distinctively different from most RPGs.Bunnies & Burrows (Fantasy Games Unlimited, 1976) was inspired by an adventure fantasy -- Watership Down by Richard Adams -- that certainly involved violence. However, the characters are rabbits! Bunnies don't do much killing, being rather more concerned with not getting killed by predators. The game brings in a dose of natural history along with a fair bit of anthropomorphism. Exploring, finding valued foods and medicinal herbs, contending for status and mating, telling stories, and more, figure prominently and have rules systems as developed as those for combat.Star Trek (FASA, 1982) struck me as representing the original TV series very well. Killing is so easy with phasers set to "disintegrate" (or with anti-matter warheads for mass murder) that it tends not to be a very interesting solution to problems. (Neither is "beaming up", but the troubles with communicators seem a bit less contrived now that little cell phones have been around for a while.) Among star-faring peoples, it can lead to inexorable mutual destruction until they annoy one of the godlike elder species. I don't know much about FASA's later scenarios, but I don't recall the two in the original boxed set being about killing. For my part, I took the classic TV show as my model.</blockquote>

Verification