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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bedrockgames" data-source="post: 9243886" data-attributes="member: 85555">This isn't a very good argument. I have to agree that being the first makes a difference here and it means we evaluate it in the context of it being first. The history of heavy metal is debatable but if we take for granted that the song Black Sabbath was the first, it wouldn't be reasonable to do a comparison against songs in the genre that have built on ten, twenty, thirty or more years of development. One could point to that song and come up with all kinds of technical arguments against it (it is too simple, it is repetitive, it only has two parts, the main riff has three notes and two of them are octaves, so really 2 notes, where is the chord progression?,etc). You can always come up with these kinds of arguments. But this song still resonates, it got the ball rolling, and it established many of the basic elements you find in metal today. I also think it happens to hold up and is arguably the best metal song ever written but that is a matter of taste. OD&D is very similar to this song.But this is even more speculative than what [USER=7023840]@Snarf Zagyg[/USER] is saying. I mean there were all kinds of things in the air at the time. I have tons of bookshelf games from relatives and that I picked up over the years. Many could conceivably turned into an RPG. But I am having trouble picturing a scenario where any of them do anything that takes off the way D&D did and I think a lot of that had to do with the combo of Gygax and Arneson. People can say what they want about Gary but he did do a lot of the ground work that made D&D successful. And that a business success early on is an important part of the picture.I would need to do a comparison so if you want to throw up some text that would be useful here. But my recollection is the OD&D boxed set is very much what snarf suggested, not a complete game, something that you had to reference against Chainmail. And I don't remember chainmail or anything from Avalon Hill exciting me and inspiring me the the white boxed set does. Maybe it isn't well laid out. I found it pretty simple and basic and that gives it a certain charm (certainly doens't look much worse than many of the games I have had from that time over the years. I don't think Gygax excels at the kind of writing and langaugae that have become standard and considered 'good RPG writing' today. But one thing I will say here is he is at least engaging and interesting to read. I have a much easier time reading the white boxed set or the AD&D books than any other rules system written for an RPG (because it has a conversational tone and personality). A lot ofthta old Avalon Hill stuff is written technically well but was boring as hell. I mean I loved games like Circus Maximus and Richthofen's War, but they could be a real slog to read and even to understand. The White Box can be hard because it is ground zero for a new type of game. But it has an energy to it and I feel like it is unlikely you get the hobby we have without that energyEverything invented ever seems simple in hindsight. But that is no guarantee these things are going to combine and meet with the kind of success it took for D&D to spawn RPGs as a hobby.</blockquote>

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