Did the EGG come before the chicken, or the chicken before the EGG?

[dead]

What am I trying to ask here?

Well . . . I guess I'm trying to ask:

How much of Gary's original campaign world influenced the "crunch" of AD&D and is now a part of D&D to this very day.

Because, if you look at D&D, there are a lot of idiosyncratic things about it. Now, I'm not thinking about things like "Mordenkainen's Disjunction", I'm thinking of the more basic "fundementals" of D&D worlds like: the divine/arcane divide, spell slots, clerics and turn undead, etc. I see all these things as stemming from a unique campaign setting first, and then being made the *standard* for the AD&D rules later.

I don't know, I could be wrong.

But, I mean, is an RPG system ever designed first and settings applied later, or does it always spring from someone's homebrew campaign setting first? Was GURPS designed first? Or, did the GURPS rules extend out of Steve Jackson's own campaign setting's requirements first?

 

[Dogbrain]

I'd guess that a great deal of the presumptions of the original two campaigns were enshrined as "physics" of D&D.

 

[Ourph]

I imagine co-development is the best answer you're likely to get.

Greyhawk and Blackmoor were the test tubes in which the experimental D&D rules were tested. I imagine setting influenced the rules and the rules influenced setting in equal measure.

 

[Olive]

Remember that something like GURPS was designed to be a generic universal system. Now in order to have that aim, there had to be a conception of what a RPG was. And until there was Dnd, there wasn't that conception.

so now you can set out to define the setting frst, or the rules first or whatever. But back then, I'd imagine that Gygax and Arneson were just designing a game, without a conception of what these questins would mean to people like us down the line.

But obviously they set out to create rues that they saw as relecting their influences: Vance, Zelany, Howard and the like. This elad to a interesting, but seemingly counter intuitive at times, rules set. The ruels relected the setting that they created, and we've inherited them.

Interestingly, I don't like a lot of the influences that Gygax and Arneson had (the lanhkmar stuff, vance, the conan stuff etc.) I'm not a traditional sword and sorcery fan. But I do enjoy the game, with all it;s wierd vncinan arcane magic , and the divine/arcane split, and have no real desire to move away from it.