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="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8500473" data-attributes="member: 82106">I don't know about the 'specter' part, I don't perceive RPGs that way, or rules as some sort of 'specter of the wargame', because I don't see them as being descriptive or prescriptive of the RULES OF THE GAME WORLD. But what I mostly observe is that you have your history backwards. Dave Arneson, the inventor of D&D, didn't start from fixed rule tabletop games. His starting point was the 'Braunstein', which was an outgrowth of late-stage 'free' Kriegspiel. The characteristics of playing a specific character already existed. They simply took figurines and such cues, along with some process arbitration, from games like Chainmail and applied it to their Braunstein-like play. I'd note that this wasn't even a great leap, as Kriegspiel itself originated as referees applying heuristics to actions described by military officers during training exercises to adjudicate how their actions played out. That is, they would consult tables and whatnot which indicated the effectiveness of firepower, various logistical and morale factors, etc. Tabletop wargaming grew out of this as well! So what Arneson did was pretty much taking these existing elements, long existing, and remix them into  a game about crawling around in a dungeon after treasure.So the actual mechanics of how the PCs work in D&D was taken, partially, from Chainmail (with an admixture of some rules from an ironclads table top game). The concept of playing individuals in a free-form way was however ancient tradition. What was invented in 1974 was basically just dungeon crawling and the other elements of D&D that went with it (IE classes, races, ability scores, specific monster descriptions, and the trappings of the dungeon). This did create a paradigm with a GM who was in total charge of the 'board', which then evolved into the fiction (Braunsteins already had rich fiction, so maybe 'evolve' is even giving it too much credit). That is the 'town' and the 'wilderness' and more complicated interactions with PCs were added, but the rules took on the character of mostly arbitrating how actions took place, as a GM-aid to deciding what happened when a PC did X, just as in the Kriegspiel they told the referee how many casualties the battalion took when it rushed the enemy trench in a frontal assault. I don't believe games like DW or FitD based games are 'haunted' by anything here. They have fully shed the idea of rules which arbitrate real-world style outcomes and replaced them with rules which fully arbitrate the fiction creation process and how the characters fit into it, what the participant roles are, etc. It may be that people familiar with older RPGs are CONFUSED by this point, but it isn't particularly a problem. Beyond that many games have fairly comfortably mixed paradigms to an extent, though it takes a bit of cleverness. 4e for example has pretty trad combat rules, but it is still a story game at heart. As [USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER] has pointed out though, that means the numbers and such in 4e don't REALLY represent some kind of 'reality of the game world', they instead reflect a reality of the storytelling. Again this gets confusing to people who aren't versed in it.</blockquote>

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