MoogleEmpMog
First Post
It's... really almost impossible to imagine, I think.
D&D both fed on and fed back into the fantasy literature craze of the 70s, which started with Tolkien and Sword and Sorcery, but moved solidly into epic fantasy territory by the 80s and 90s. Would fantasy as a significant genre even exist if not for D&D to shepherd its growth? Would space opera, spurred on by Star Wars, have flourished in the absence of fantasy competition? The horror craze continued? Or would speculative fiction have shrunk back to its earlier levels of popularity with perhaps a handful of exceptions? Oddly enough, I'm not sure how much earlier fantasy fads were necessary or helpful to the Harry Potter craze, so it might have ignited, rather than re-ignited, interest in fantasy (and with a different readerbase).
Would tabletop RPGs have come into existence without D&D? I can't imagine they would have until the rise and popularity (itself something of a fad, from what I can tell) of 'How to Host a Murder' and similar, mystery-themed titles. Those games could have formed an alternative starting point for RPGs.
It's hard to say how board- and wargame development was influenced by RPGs, though. Games Workshop started out supporting D&D; without their rise, would miniatures wargaming even exist in a remotely recognizable form? On the other hand, RPGs were certainly accused of "killing wargaming" much as CCGs and video games would later get fingered for "killing RPGs." If there's any truth to this claim, traditional wargaming might have actually flourished in an RPG-less environment.
On the computer game front, the terminology would certainly have been different and some of the early examples (the original Final Fantasy, for instance) would have been right out. I'm not sure something like X-Com couldn't have developed into a reasonably recognizable analog to the modern Tactics-RPG, however, if that genre had not existed. And a JRPG could potentially be extrapolated from a tactics-RPG instead of the other way around. Western-style RPGs have fewer antecedents outside of tabletop play; as others have said, something somewhat like the modern version might have grown out of FPS games. It really hinges on whether the idea of sequential power-ups grew out of D&D's levels or if they are an inevitable idea; if the latter, something like Deus Ex might well have occurred as designers experimented with persistent and flexible power-ups in an FPS, and from there developed into Fallout 3 or Mass Effect-like shooter-RPGs. Would point-and-click adventure games have persisted longer without the competition from JRPGs when it came to story-heavy games? They might represent an alternate origin for CRPG development - or even tabletop RPG development.
D&D both fed on and fed back into the fantasy literature craze of the 70s, which started with Tolkien and Sword and Sorcery, but moved solidly into epic fantasy territory by the 80s and 90s. Would fantasy as a significant genre even exist if not for D&D to shepherd its growth? Would space opera, spurred on by Star Wars, have flourished in the absence of fantasy competition? The horror craze continued? Or would speculative fiction have shrunk back to its earlier levels of popularity with perhaps a handful of exceptions? Oddly enough, I'm not sure how much earlier fantasy fads were necessary or helpful to the Harry Potter craze, so it might have ignited, rather than re-ignited, interest in fantasy (and with a different readerbase).
Would tabletop RPGs have come into existence without D&D? I can't imagine they would have until the rise and popularity (itself something of a fad, from what I can tell) of 'How to Host a Murder' and similar, mystery-themed titles. Those games could have formed an alternative starting point for RPGs.
It's hard to say how board- and wargame development was influenced by RPGs, though. Games Workshop started out supporting D&D; without their rise, would miniatures wargaming even exist in a remotely recognizable form? On the other hand, RPGs were certainly accused of "killing wargaming" much as CCGs and video games would later get fingered for "killing RPGs." If there's any truth to this claim, traditional wargaming might have actually flourished in an RPG-less environment.
On the computer game front, the terminology would certainly have been different and some of the early examples (the original Final Fantasy, for instance) would have been right out. I'm not sure something like X-Com couldn't have developed into a reasonably recognizable analog to the modern Tactics-RPG, however, if that genre had not existed. And a JRPG could potentially be extrapolated from a tactics-RPG instead of the other way around. Western-style RPGs have fewer antecedents outside of tabletop play; as others have said, something somewhat like the modern version might have grown out of FPS games. It really hinges on whether the idea of sequential power-ups grew out of D&D's levels or if they are an inevitable idea; if the latter, something like Deus Ex might well have occurred as designers experimented with persistent and flexible power-ups in an FPS, and from there developed into Fallout 3 or Mass Effect-like shooter-RPGs. Would point-and-click adventure games have persisted longer without the competition from JRPGs when it came to story-heavy games? They might represent an alternate origin for CRPG development - or even tabletop RPG development.
