NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JEB" data-source="post: 8195534" data-attributes="member: 10148">The simplest way to prevent D&D's existence is for Arneson and Gygax to never come into contact. Arneson would never have developed Blackmoor into a commercial project without Gygax, and Gygax would have never had the role-playing concepts to build upon without Arneson. So Arneson remains a hobbyist with a cool game he plays with his friends, and Gygax stays a minor figure in wargame development.I agree that Choose Your Own Adventure is likely to lead to this. The question is, what would "leveling up" look like? No "character sheet" concept from D&D likely means that you wouldn't see an emphasis on vital statistics. Though there is another source I could see that idea emerging from... sports computer games, which would carry over sports stats like batting averages. (Maybe stats would appear in a percentage-based form, akin to BRP?)I'm betting character classes wouldn't be a thing, though.Another complication a friend mentioned when I brought this up is the effect on hobby stores - quite simply, we probably see a lot fewer without D&D or its derivatives (to include CCGs like Magic: The Gathering or major wargames like Warhammer), which in turn probably shrinks the tabletop gaming market to a much more modest size than it's achieved in our history. Maybe this would be averted by SF-derived tabletop games, though?But honestly, it more and more seems like we wouldn't see pen-and-paper RPGs at all without D&D. RPGs would more likely emerge from computer games and stay there, except maybe the occasional video game-to-board game translation.And, just to note a few more possible modern D&D influences mentioned I'm skeptical we'd see without 1974 D&D:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Discworld (D&D tropes are a pretty clear influence, and Pratchett was definitely aware of D&D)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Mistborn (created in response to cliches in other fantasy novels, of which there would be fewer - novels, to be clear, not cliches)</li> </ul></blockquote>

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