D&D General Tracy Hickman: The third founder of (modern) D&D?

[guachi]

I definitely do like Jaquay's work. Caverns of Thracia is an amazing execution of the dungeoncrawl concept. And The Savage Frontier is my favorite D&D setting book by a wide margin.

While I have not read Pharaoh myself, I've often seen it mentioned as groundbreaking, and it later got re-released as Desert of Desolation.

While Rahasia is not that amazing, it really stands out from the other modules in the B series. Very different feel and approach to story. It was the first thing he had submitted to TSR as part of his job application in 1980.

I didn't pick up a copy of Pharaoh until 2015 (and got it signed by Hickman!). I also should have mentioned that as well. Its design and layout are stellar. Really lays into the 3 Pillars in each encounter. It's so much easier to run Pharaoh than basically any 5e adventure.

Rahasia reads better than it plays and could do with some tightening up. But it's serviceable and, like you said, it's different.

 

[GuyBoy]

I liked both Ravenloft ( a lot) and Pharaoh. However, with all respect to Hickman, I felt DL was the campaign equivalent of the DMPC issue; your character existed to tell the story of the DL campaign. Too much of a railroad.
I’m conscious that my experience might have been tainted as I played under a DM who was such a DL fan that he wouldn’t allow anything to break from orthodoxy.
Once again, respect for his work, but not a founder (that’s G and A only), and I’d still place behind Jaquays, Cook, Kuntz, Bledsaw in importance. And Greenwood too, though I’m more Greyhawk than FR.

 

[Mannahnin]

While it seems Laura Hickman was involved in Dragonlance in some form, she's not credited as a writer of the adventure series, from what I can tell, which is mostly Tracy Hickmann and Doug Niles.

Laura and Tracy were the writers of Rahasia & Pharaoh (independently, before TSR took them on board), as well as Ravenloft, and the concept for Dragonlance. So if I were looking to recognize their impact on the direction of D&D, I think I'd want to include both of them.

Margaret Weis was brought in from editing in the book department to team up with Tracy on the novels.

As you say, the DL modules were primarily Tracy Hickman and Doug Niles, with some contributions from Laura Hickman, Michael Dobson, and a few others in later entries.

 

[Zaukrie]

Clearly a HUGE impact, no doubt.

 

[Malmuria]

Not a founder, but I agree that Laura and Tracy Hickman are indeed hugely influential, pivotal figures in the shift of tone, scope, and goals of quite a lot of D&D and D&D groups between 1st ed and 2nd ed. Whether that's to the good or the bad is largely a matter of taste.

Going back to the origins in the 70s, as Jon Peterson talks about in Playing at the World and his recent The Elusive Shift, you had fantasy fiction fans wanting to use D&D as more of a story emulator (the wargamers or quasi-wargamers were the other big "faction" of players). Laura and Tracy were arguably the first (or at least the most prominent) writers at TSR to seem to REALLY cater to that goal and orientation. And by the time 2E came out, that was more the default expectation of the rulebooks.

In fact, reading/listening to Peterson it really seems like dnd emerges communally as an activity before it becomes a product. Even with OD&D, a lot of people say that the incomplete and confusing nature of those supplements led players to create very different types of games, and for scenes to spring up, for example in california and in the UK. So thinking of it this way might be better than enumerating a list of founders, though certainly Hickman was influential.

I'm not sure exactly where it started, but Hickman and ravenloft/dragon lance certainly helped establish the "trad" style of play. But this style was also prevalent in CoC and later in WoD games.

 

[Yora]

My thought was mostly on the shaping of what we think of as a "modern D&D type campaign", bassed on the assumption that AD&D 2nd edition is a distinctive different phenomenon than OD&D was.
When you really go back to the origins of RPGs, you have to go back to 19th century military theorists. In the same way that Arneson made a revolutionary leap turning the wargame into a dungeon crawler, I see a similarly big leap in turning the dungeon crawler into story-adventures.

 

[Mannahnin]

My thought was mostly on the shaping of what we think of as a "modern D&D type campaign", bassed on the assumption that AD&D 2nd edition is a distinctive different phenomenon than OD&D was.
When you really go back to the origins of RPGs, you have to go back to 19th century military theorists. In the same way that Arneson made a revolutionary leap turning the wargame into a dungeon crawler, I see a similarly big leap in turning the dungeon crawler into story-adventures.

But it's hard to pinpoint a spot when that happened, as Malmuria notes and Peterson documents. People were definitely already doing it in the 70s by the time the Hickmans started publishing modules catering more to that strain.

 

[THEMNGMNT]

Hickman was a giant and definitely deserves more credit. His adventures had amazing maps, evocative locations, memorable villains, and a compelling backstory that made everything seem more real. Unforgettable stuff.

 

[Yaarel]

In fact, reading/listening to Peterson it really seems like dnd emerges communally as an activity before it becomes a product. Even with OD&D, a lot of people say that the incomplete and confusing nature of those supplements led players to create very different types of games, and for scenes to spring up, for example in california and in the UK. So thinking of it this way might be better than enumerating a list of founders, though certainly Hickman was influential.

I'm not sure exactly where it started, but Hickman and ravenloft/dragon lance certainly helped establish the "trad" style of play. But this style was also prevalent in CoC and later in WoD games.

I view the D&D founders, Arneson as more narrativist and Gygax as more a "mechanic for everything". I suspect Arneson would approve of D&D 5e skills, that emphasize the storytelling context. But both of them were wargamers and liked complicated mechanics for combat.

 

[Malmuria]

I view the D&D founders, Arneson as more narrativist and Gygax as more a "mechanic for everything". I suspect Arneson would approve of D&D 5e skills, that emphasize the storytelling context. But both of them were wargamers and liked complicated mechanics for combat.

What's interesting is that even prussian war gamers struggled with how detailed their ruleset should be. As rules got increasingly simulationist, there was a 'rulings not rules' movement that sought to simplify the mechanical complexity by trusting the judgement of the referee.

Ancient Roleplaying, or Free Kriegsspiel Revolution (FKR): What The Heck Is That? | Free Kriegsspiel Revolution

url=https://youtu.be/vA4ywGK4ePM?t=6]A bit of mood music for you[/url]} KRIEGSSPIEL! For those of us who do not speak German, kriegsspiel simply means "wargame." It was primarily conveived of by Prussian military officers in the 1800s as a tool for simulating battlefield skirmishes and adapting

boardgamegeek.com

Original kriegsspiel was codified and expanded into a rather crunchy affair (the board gamers among us would call it "heavy") formally termed rigid kriegsspiel. The game slowly evolved to a point where military strategists realized that a neutral referee (the "umpire") could help arbitrate fog of war and interpretation of complex rules. However, the rules were so complex that the umpire was increasingly taxed by the role as the years progressed. Lieutenant Wilhelm Jacob Meckel published a treatise in 1873 and another in 1875 in which he expressed four complaints about the overcomplicated rules of kriegsspiel:

1) The rules constrain the umpire, preventing him from applying his expertise
2) the rules are too rigid to realistically model all possible outcomes in a battle, because the real world is complex and ever-changing
3) the computations for casualties slow down the game and have a minor impact on a player's decisions anyway
4) few officers are willing to make the effort to learn the rules

The fourth issue was the most serious, as the Prussian military struggled to meet the growing demand for umpires. If that sounds like "forever GM syndrome," well, that's exactly what it was back in the late 1800s! Meckel proposed dispensing with some of the rules and giving the umpire more discretion to arbitrate events as he saw fit. The only things he kept were the dice and the losses tables for assessing casualties.