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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mattcolville" data-source="post: 5373420" data-attributes="member: 1300">It's Wesely that had the conceptual breakthrough. Once you have that breakthrough, the idea spreads like wildfire.The basic conceit, for those who don't know the story, is that come gamenight there's going to be a big City Siege scenario in this war game Wesely and his friends were playing. I believe at this point Wesely is acting as what we would think of as a GM, even though it's purely a wargame.He knows, he is aware, that city sieges are usually accompanied by lots of spying, enemy agents trying to sneak into the city, poison the water supply, find out what kind of defenses the city has, etc.... It occurs to him that it would be very realistic indeed if the starting conditions of the war game scenario the players ran through were determined by this kind of pre-game spying and sabotage game.So he gives the players "characters" to play, and gives each an assignment. A goal. I believe it's all written down on a 3x5 card. Vanishingly little information. He imagined it would be like 30 minutes of gameplay, and then on to the siege. Most of these goals are *purely* gathering information. But he had, in this one moment, taken a huge scimitar and sliced the cord connecting the players to their army, loosing them upon the city with no rules, just characters and goals. And they went INSANE.They improvised, they schemed, they plotted and he had to furiously invent rules on the spot, roll this, roll that, to determine success or failure.At the end of the night, he was really broken down. All that work, wasted. They never even played the wargame! What a colossal waste of time, he thought.Meanwhile, his players spend the next week constantly bugging him. "WHEN ARE WE GOING TO DO IT AGAIN!?"He invented everything we associate with the core experience of roleplaying that night. Everything else was just classes and levels.</blockquote>

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