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The Dueling Essays of Arneson & Gygax
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<blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 7806040" data-attributes="member: 8461"><p>There was a little more to it than that. Arneson's Blackmoor game was, by all accounts, the first time that a game featured a combination of all of the following elements: 1) players played a specific individual, 2) wherein anything could be attempted, and 3) the game had a referee, along with 4) characters had statistical measurements of their abilities, and 5) those same characters were used in subsequent sessions, along with 6) the characters were able to improve their abilities across those sessions, with those improvements being represented via the game mechanics.</p><p></p><p>That all of those were featured together was the key. The first four were certainly featured in various other games prior to the invention of the role-playing game, but the fifth one was far more rare (and I'm not even sure any other formal or commercial games had it), and none utilized the sixth until Blackmoor. All of those together were what <s>let you summon Captain RPG</s> we'd now recognize as a role-playing game.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Alzrius, post: 7806040, member: 8461"] There was a little more to it than that. Arneson's Blackmoor game was, by all accounts, the first time that a game featured a combination of all of the following elements: 1) players played a specific individual, 2) wherein anything could be attempted, and 3) the game had a referee, along with 4) characters had statistical measurements of their abilities, and 5) those same characters were used in subsequent sessions, along with 6) the characters were able to improve their abilities across those sessions, with those improvements being represented via the game mechanics. That all of those were featured together was the key. The first four were certainly featured in various other games prior to the invention of the role-playing game, but the fifth one was far more rare (and I'm not even sure any other formal or commercial games had it), and none utilized the sixth until Blackmoor. All of those together were what [S]let you summon Captain RPG[/S] we'd now recognize as a role-playing game. [/QUOTE]
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