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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Man in the Funny Hat" data-source="post: 5636919" data-attributes="member: 32740">Combat is the symptom, not the disease. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> My understanding of the origins of D&D (and I could be wrong here since the earliest days of D&D are shrouded in mystery created by arguments and even lawsuits) is that it is actually traced to David A. Wesley's Braunstein games. His initial idea was to run a normal tabletop wargame, but instead of just setting up on opposite sides of the eponymous town of Braunstein the players would be given individual characters including the commanding officers of the two armies. There would then be opportunity for those individual characters to affect the setup by their actions in town. Wesley initially thought it a disaster because the armies NEVER MADE IT INTO THE GAME. The players all loved it and wanted more, essentially because it was NOT about the combat but the freedom of control of the individual characters. They spent the game stepping into different rooms and planning, plotting, scheming with and against each other. More a game of Diplomacy than Napoleanics. Arneson and Gygax began participating in and running similar sorts of games and D&D only actually reached something more like the form it's in now when Gygax decided to use his Chainmail rules for governing combat and finally gave it a name. That is, the rules for combat came LAST - it was the roleplaying that came first, and it was (and still is) the foundation of D&D. Combat is just along for the ride - even if people can and do ignore roleplaying entirely and focus only upon combat. D&D still isn't "about" combat even if you can treat it as such.</blockquote>

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