What if you brought 4E back to 1970?

[haakon1]

D&D's bestiary doesn't come straight from the pen of Gygax, though. Most traditional D&D monsters are derivatives of the many fey beasties that inhabit folklore.

Gary didn't write all the monsters. The Tome of Horrors had some good notes on that in their updates, and the Fiend Folio was mostly TSR UK written (go flumph!).

But Gary did his own takes on lots of classic monsters, and to me his rules for how a vampire or werewolf or whatever work have become mine over the years -- not just in playing AD&D, but in my gut understanding of the myth.

I had fun talking with him about trolls here. I still have "bridge trolls" (lives under a bridge, turns to stone if exposed to light) as a homemade monster in my games. Gygax knew all about those myths too, and had insight into where they came from. Those stories were told to me as a kid, but I'm an American with mostly Irish cultural background, and some Norwegian, and my parents were both English majors, so I'm never entirely sure where my parents got their mythology from. I'm guessing it's a Scandinavian myth, since we have a stone troll statue under a bridge here in Seattle (which is heavily Norwegian -- watch some "Deadliest Catch" and check the last names if that's in any doubt!). Pretty much any tale of monsters, Gygax knew about it.

 

[haakon1]

Or if modern military weapons were on the battlefields of WWII. The surroundings aren't geared for it and can't support it.

AK-47's in WWII is no stretch at all -- the "47" means 1947, and the Germans had an assault rifle in 1943. Plus, items like the RPG are not really game-changingly different from bazookas and the panzerfausts invented during WWII. Artillery and heavy weapons are often either the same weapons as then (.50 cal), or slightly modernized versions (105 mm howitzer, 81 mm mortar, etc.).

Harry Turtledove, "In Guns of the South", had the South winning the Civil War because of AK-47's brought by time travellers. However, IIRC, they were importing them from the future, and the Southerners found it very expensive to reverse engineer -- but they were working on it.

If the time travelers had gone to the North, I suspect the Springfield Armory or Samuel Colt's firearms factory in Connecticut could have cracked the code and reproduced it. In the 1980s, I remember hearing there were metal shops in Afghanistan and Pakistan making ersatz AK's . . .

If you're thinking aircraft, OK, that is a different story . . .

As for analogy back to the original question of 4e in 1970, folks were not Neanderthals back then. They could have adopted it, reprinted it, and used it, if they wanted it.

 

[cattoy]

It's entirely possible that the game would have failed to catch on.

It's rather like taking a modern football defensive package to the mid 1930s. Many modern football defensive concepts like blitzes, zone blitzes, nickel and dime packages, press coverage and zone coverages were invented to defeat the forward pass which barely existed in 1935.

So, similarly, many of the design concepts in 4e are answers to questions that gamers (or potential gamers) of 1970 haven't asked yet.

What if you brought a computer programming book on C++ back to 1970?

 

[billd91]

If you're thinking aircraft, OK, that is a different story . . .

I was also specifically thinking of tanks, helicopters, and US assault rifles from the M16 on. Powerful pieces of equipment, but with significant maintenance issues that require a lot of changes in additional technology and logistical structure and training.

The AK-47 is a particularly brilliant piece of equipment, born directly out of the WWII experience, and built in such a way that has been shown to mitigate some of those concerns.