what might have the formative history of RPGs be without D&D? or would it have even happened?

[trappedslider]

I am now imagining what Gygax would have done with the Traveller character creation process in DnD if it had come first. (Think of the huge number of tables that let your PC die before adventuring! Would the extra risks have given you better ability scores or a better die rolling method to get your abilities?)

Would 2e's big improvement have been a funnel instead?

When that "light" is so ubiquitous, it is important in one sense, but then also ceases to be important at all.

There are even more powerful cultural influences on RPGs than D&D, but we aren't heck-bent on insisting on them being given credit.

spinning into it's own thread.

I don't agree, if only because they were not the first to have had people in a game playing roles.

As I have already noted, people were playing games in which they took on fictional roles for decades before D&D. One of the Marx Brothers references such in his autobiography, even! Arneson and Gygax were the first to sit us down at a table and play in a wargame framework, but they were not the first to have people playing pretend as someone else.

So, yes, we would likely have other RPGs without D&D. They just might look different than what we currently call "table-top role playing games". Maybe they'd come out of the parlor-game/murder-mystery game root. Or maybe someone would come at it from the classic boardgame root - Monopoly, but running around Middle-Earth. Or maybe SCAdians would have come up with an option for their form of play that didn't require hitting each other with sticks. Or maybe someone in Japan would develop a game in which people took roles from anime...

There's lots of options. To say that we "wouldn't have RPGs" without D&D is kind of like saying we wouldn't have airplanes without the Wright Brothers. Gygax and Arneson were great and all, but not such singular geniuses that nobody out of the billions of others on the planet would come up with an idea.

Yeah but before that you had things like bookshelf mystery games with elements of RP and historical re-enactment, and maybe stuff that was a bit larpy. The blueprint laid down by D&D is what became the hobby. I have not doubt we can keep going back and quibbling precisely over starting point zero (to stick with my music analogy, the way some might point to Black Sabbath's debut as ground zero for metal but others might point to Blue Cheer or others to Led Zepplin I). But I think the impact of D&D is pretty clear on the hobby.

I don't know. I think this example is not particularly great. Some things are about 'who will be the first to make X'. There was a clear need, desire and expectation that we would make flying machines. I don't think that was there with RPGs. There were games that accidentally trod into this territory. And whether one thinks Arneson or Gygax are singular geniuses isn't really the point. It is more about the right game at the right time, catching the right culturally wave and leading to the hobby we have today. I genuinely think without that, you wouldn't have anything like we understand RPGs to be today. You might have some other hobby that grew out of bookshelf games or historical re-enactment. But would it have caught on in the same way? Would it be anything like what we do at the table with RPGs. I think you can draw a pretty straight line to D&D and what came out in the hobby after

 

[TiQuinn]

It depends if games like Braunstein would’ve been taken outside of the historical milieu by others besides Gygax and Arneson. Listening to the When We Were Wizards podcast, I get the sense that others were starting to think along these lines, which is why it became so urgent to Gygax that he get D&D out first.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

I am going to do the necessary plug for the book, The Elusive Shift, if you want a good history of how the idea of how roleplaying games developed at the beginning.

I touched on some of these issues here-

D&D General - And You May Ask Yourself- How do I play D&D? Commercialization and the Closing of OD&D

This is the second in three essays based off of Jon Peterson's book, The Elusive Shift ("ES"). While I will be discussing concepts he raised, I will also be extrapolating from his concepts with some of my own thoughts in these essays. That means some of these conclusions are my own, after...

www.enworld.org

I think that the problem a lot of people have today is that they don't understand the D&D wasn't some monolithic single thing at the beginning. Instead, it was a gestalt that different communities appropriated in a variety of fashions.

In a weird way, I think that if it hadn't been D&D (say, it was En Garde) it would have the same general trajectory- the community would have adapted it to its use, and then there would be later calcification in the approach as commercialization set it.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I think that the problem a lot of people have today is that they don't understand the D&D wasn't some monolithic single thing at the beginning. Instead, it was a gestalt that different communities appropriated in a variety of fashions.

In a weird way, I think that if it hadn't been D&D (say, it was En Garde) it would have the same general trajectory- the community would have adapted it to its use, and then there would be later calcification in the approach as commercialization set it.

To be clear I wasn't saying that D&D emerged in a vacuum or was created whole cloth from nothing. My point was more that:

1) All of us who are in the hobby now, especially anyone making games, is here because D&D got big, and we either were exposed to RPGs through D&D itself or by a game that followed D&D.

2) I think it is far from certain that any of the other games being produced in this community would have hit with the same success and traction that D&D had ---a lot of that is marketing, luck, etc. I think there is a strong likelihood such games would have simply remained in their small corners of the hobby similar to bookshelf murder mystery games. Is it possible something very similar to D&D could have emerged in D&D's absence and also took off? Sure I think so. I just think D&D's success was far from a certainly, and that D&D was far from inevitable.

3) There is nothing wrong with recognizing the significance of D&D. I don't play D&D anymore. I play almost exclusively other systems at this point (and when I do play D&D it is usually 2E so I can use the old Ravenloft books). I also make games that aren't d20 or D&D in any way. But I understand that most peoples frame of reference for RPGs is D&D. I just personally find it counterproductive when people try to promote non-D&D games, even my own, by going after D&D in a negative or dismissive way. Most groups today still seem to be playing D&D or D&D derived games (pathfinder is essentially D&D for example). I am eyeballing that of course. I dont' know what the percentage is. But I know when I would go to game stores or conventions to display my own games, most tables were D&D and pathfinder (granted I haven't done that in a while so there may have been a shift in the past few years)

 

[payn]

To be clear I wasn't saying that D&D emerged in a vacuum or was created whole cloth from nothing. My point was more that:

1) All of us who are in the hobby now, especially anyone making games, is here because D&D got big, and we either were exposed to RPGs through D&D itself or by a game that followed D&D.

2) I think it is far from certain that any of the other games being produced in this community would have hit with the same success and traction that D&D had ---a lot of that is marketing, luck, etc. I think there is a strong likelihood such games would have simply remained in their small corners of the hobby similar to bookshelf murder mystery games. Is it possible something very similar to D&D could have emerged in D&D's absence and also took off? Sure I think so. I just think D&D's success was far from a certainly, and that D&D was far from inevitable.

3) There is nothing wrong with recognizing the significance of D&D. I don't play D&D anymore. I play almost exclusively other systems at this point (and when I do play D&D it is usually 2E so I can use the old Ravenloft books). I also make games that aren't d20 or D&D in any way. But I understand that most peoples frame of reference for RPGs is D&D. I just personally find it counterproductive when people try to promote non-D&D games, even my own, by going after D&D in a negative or dismissive way. Most groups today still seem to be playing D&D or D&D derived games (pathfinder is essentially D&D for example). I am eyeballing that of course. I dont' know what the percentage is. But I know when I would go to game stores or conventions to display my own games, most tables were D&D and pathfinder (granted I haven't done that in a while so there may have been a shift in the past few years)

Saying a game isnt a direct derivative of D&D isnt being negative to D&D.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Saying a game isnt a direct derivative of D&D isnt being negative to D&D.

I understand that. I wasn't saying that it is being negative to D&D to not make this connection. I was talking about people who get negative or dismissive about D&D in order to promote non-D&D alternatives. My point is just that, from my perspective, it seems to have opposite of the intended effect (it makes people more defensive about D&D and less interested in trying other games)

And I am not a sea lion.

 

[Sepulchrave II]

I tend to think of D&D as the inevitable result of historical processes - that something similar would have emerged, regardless.

Whether that other thing would have had less - or more - social traction is a much harder thing to gauge.

 

[TiQuinn]

I think it is far from certain that any of the other games being produced in this community would have hit with the same success and traction that D&D had ---a lot of that is marketing, luck, etc. I think there is a strong likelihood such games would have simply remained in their small corners of the hobby similar to bookshelf murder mystery games. Is it possible something very similar to D&D could have emerged in D&D's absence and also took off? Sure I think so. I just think D&D's success was far from a certainly, and that D&D was far from inevitable.

I kind of wonder if D&D hadn’t taken off, we were only three years away from Star Wars and the big sci-fi craze of the late 70s, and maybe the major RPG that we’d be talking about today would be something more space opera-like.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I kind of wonder if D&D hadn’t taken off, we were only three years away from Star Wars and the big sci-fi craze of the late 70s, and maybe the major RPG that we’d be talking about today would be something more space opera-like.

That is an interesting thought. In my dream alternate universe it would be a kung fu craze game

 

[overgeeked]

It's worth pointing out that D&D is an altered and commercial version of Dave Arneson's Blackmoor.

I'm sure we were on the cusp of someone hitting on the idea and making it commercial. If it wasn't Gygax, it would have been someone else. Perhaps someone in Dave's circle. Dave Megarry took the dungeon aspects of Blackmoor and created a boardgame, Dungeon! from his experience playing in Blackmoor.

Otherwise, it likely would have developed as a peculiar offshoot of improv theater. The modern form of which can be traced back to Viola Spolin in the 1940s. Her foundational work on the topic, Improvisation for the Theater, was published in 1963. After all, RPGs are long-form improv theater games with dice and far too many rules.