overgeeked
B/X Known World
Great video by Ben at Questing Beast today. A little bit of the hobby's history for those who're interested.
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David Wesely: The Man Who Accidentally Invented RPGs
overgeeked
B/X Known World
Sort of. The idea goes back much further, as mentioned in the video. It can be traced back at least to Wilhelm Meckel and Prussian Free Kriegsspiel in 1873.
Balls. You’re right. Fixed.
Wofano Wotanto
Hero
It's easy to forget than many roleplayers these days have never played these kinds of games, which broadly include all sorts of multiplayer strategic wargames where individual players might have wildly different win conditions, not all of them incompatible even when they were theoretically enemies by faction/nationality. These things got played in formats from face-to-face (often at cons or college student centers) to play-by-snail-mail games (both free and professionally run pay-to-play ones). The board game Diplomacy was a big one once it came out and often adapted to include homebrew rules that made it more roleplaying-friendly. 70s and 80s era PBMs like Tribes of Crane and Space Master tried to sell themselves (honestly or not) on the strength of you being able to do anything in the game even if it wasn't in the rules thanks to having human moderators, which is a direct outgrowth of Braunstein's referee concept.
Even after D&D arrived you still saw this sort of wargaming linger for years, and it's not entirely dead today, just shifted more to PBEM, play-by-post or Discord play. TSR's early board game Divine Right was (deliberately, I think) extremely friendly to a getting a "Braunstein treatment" for con or PBM play, and the numerous early Dragon articles about its fantasy world setting (Minaria) opened it up for pure roleplaying as well. SPI dabbled with similar multi-layer hybrids like Lord of the Rings, Freedom In the Galaxy and Swords & Sorcery, all of which supported both a strategic wargame play level and individual heroes/villains adventuring when they weren't leading troops at the front.
I'm just barely old enough to remember these days, and really came into gaming through some early encounters with Braunstein-inspired local campaigns that eventually lead my to D&D and beyond. Younger roleplayers are much more likely to have entered the roleplaying hobby that way, and I suspect a lot of this seems quaint and obvious - but it used to be pretty revolutionary thinking back in the alien past.
Even after D&D arrived you still saw this sort of wargaming linger for years, and it's not entirely dead today, just shifted more to PBEM, play-by-post or Discord play. TSR's early board game Divine Right was (deliberately, I think) extremely friendly to a getting a "Braunstein treatment" for con or PBM play, and the numerous early Dragon articles about its fantasy world setting (Minaria) opened it up for pure roleplaying as well. SPI dabbled with similar multi-layer hybrids like Lord of the Rings, Freedom In the Galaxy and Swords & Sorcery, all of which supported both a strategic wargame play level and individual heroes/villains adventuring when they weren't leading troops at the front.
I'm just barely old enough to remember these days, and really came into gaming through some early encounters with Braunstein-inspired local campaigns that eventually lead my to D&D and beyond. Younger roleplayers are much more likely to have entered the roleplaying hobby that way, and I suspect a lot of this seems quaint and obvious - but it used to be pretty revolutionary thinking back in the alien past.
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Wofano Wotanto
Hero
I know a fair number of thespians who just call that improv practice. Anyone up for some Fiasco?
Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
I'm pretty sure every child independently invented RPGs, going back to before recorded history.
My brother and I created a complicated wargame with action figures, complete with damage charts and ranges (measured with plastic rulers) before we'd ever encountered a wargame.
No one "invented" RPGs. These precursors are often interesting, but they are just people who publicized and systemized a concept that's extremely old and incredibly common.
My brother and I created a complicated wargame with action figures, complete with damage charts and ranges (measured with plastic rulers) before we'd ever encountered a wargame.
No one "invented" RPGs. These precursors are often interesting, but they are just people who publicized and systemized a concept that's extremely old and incredibly common.
Wofano Wotanto
Hero
That.
It's the formalized system that matters when talking about Braunstein and its many cousins and forebears. That's really what differentiates it from improv, or shared creative writing exercises, or the Brontes' circle of acquaintances, or any of the other things that could reasonably be called precursors to the modern hobby.
Celebrim
Legend
Every child had played "make believe" but "make believe" is not an RPG. I was playing sophisticated games of "make believe" before I'd ever encountered an RPG, but until I encountered D&D it had never occurred to me to create an out of fiction conflict resolution system or to deal out different roles and abilities that were quantified outside of the fiction.
It seems like a very obvious idea now that it's ubiquitous, and you can find proto-RPG examples from the past but until Arneson played the first true RPG I don't think they existed.
It's surprising, in the same way that it took millennia for anyone to attempt to quantify probabilities and statistics given how simple that concept is and how ubiquitous gambling is in human culture, but it does seem to be true.
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