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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pawsplay" data-source="post: 4768982" data-attributes="member: 15538">D&D and the other early RPGs are outgrowths of the fantasy wargaming tradition. Fantasy wargaming gave birth to a larger family of games, what we call RPGs. Early RPGs were basically focused on character development and action resolution. There came a shift when designers started setting up new character goals. D&D was basically goal-neutral, with the assumption that gathering treasure and experience was a common goal. The reasons we are not still playing fantasy wargames are:* Metagame incentives. While D&D insisted you play a certain alignment and stay more or less within character class, it was largely up to you what you wanted to do. Marvel Super Heroes inched things along with Karma, and things took a quantum leap forward with Vampire, which brought storytelling to the fore over basic resolution systems.* Reality check. While D&D and Marvel Super Heroes are both fantasies, GURPS WWII is not so much, and even a Call of Cthulhu game dealt with a lot of realistic elements. As the player demand for pseudorealistic resolutions increased, games had to do more than provide resolution systems, they had to provide resolution systems that produced logical results. * The player-driven game. While sandbox games have been around since the beginning, it was not until games like Ars Magica and such came along that it became an option for a player to initiate the scenario, rather than the GM. There are still a number of games that fit neatly into the fantasy wargaming mold, including D&D 4e, Rifts, Savage Worlds, Star Wars Saga, Fate, Hero System, and so forth. Then there quite a few games that really exist outside that paradigm, like the Dying Earth, World of Darkness, Story Engine. Apart from D&D, most popular games straddle the line. GURPS, D6, BESM, Shadowrun, Talislanta, and a lot of other games follow a fairly traditional fantasy wargame design, but provide various mechanical or narrative structures that move outside the world/resolution paradigm.</blockquote>

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