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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Man in the Funny Hat" data-source="post: 4967455" data-attributes="member: 32740">The date makes a big difference.  In 1970 the game was not yet even being played.  You say "roleplaying game" and people would look at you like you had a third eye - just like they did when D&D WAS first published in 1974.  They shopped it to a number of game companies and were turned down prior to deciding to form a company to publish it themselves. In 1970 people would probably ooh and ahh over the graphical look of the rulebooks, marvel at the depth of imagination, the wonderful widgets like the painted plastic miniatures of fascinating creatures, and pseudo-photo-realistic grids to move them about upon.  But the rules?  A complete and total non-starter. Oh, there'd be those who might make head or tails of it.  Gygax, Arneson, Wesely, et. al. of course.  But they would be so unlikely to actually play it as written and even if they DID, it would get house-ruled, added onto, modified endlessly.  They just wouldn't know that game from a hole in the ground.  People can pick up 4E TODAY, even without having played an RPG in their lives, and grok what to do with it - but only because there's been over 30 years of D&D and other RPGS seeping into the culture.  That seepage was helped, was carried along by the geeks and nerds who brought it with them as they invented the staggering array of modern technology.  In 1970 you would have nobody to even GIVE it to much less SELL it to.  In 1970 the "hobby" was still 30-year old men in basements playing Napoleanics.  Simply throwing this game at their feet would not produce marvelling at the GAME itself because the point of the game would be so utterly alien. It took years for D&D to gain any kind of following, years to gain a foothold, more years to spread and grow to the point where ANYONE outside the hobby itself had even HEARD of it. I honestly think the biggest impact would be generated by the minatures and THAT would create a significant long-term change in how the game developed.  Rather than being dominated in its nascent years by people who approached the game as a fun group exercise in imagination and creativity for adults it would be seen as just an attempt to sell lots of expensive green and tan "Army Men" to kids.  The adults would go back to rehashing the battles of Napolean and Ceasar and anyone who tried to build a business on selling high-priced Army Men would fail quite spectacularly.  I don't honestly know how capable injection-molded plastics were in 1970 of doing the kind of detail we see today, but I sincerely doubt that it was much better than Army Men were. We might see plastics miniatures companies develop instead of metal minis companies. In general, if the year were 1970 then I think the development of D&D would have been as a GAME game, a grandiose and more popular version of wargames - not as anything like a ROLEPLAYING game. However, if the year were AFTER D&D had already been published then I think the developments that took 20 years we'd have seen in 5 or less and more of the roleplaying elements of the game would be more likely to have been established, survive and thrive than they would from 1970.</blockquote>

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