#evolution of rpgs

Perhaps the most surprising fact I have learned over the course of this project is that Gary Gygax was widely considered "the rules guy" among the wargaming clubs of Minnesota and Wisconsin around 1970. In this (one and only) sense, he was quite progressive: pushing for miniatures wargames to exit their folk/oral tradition and join the modern world of recording and publishing. So when Gygax read Blackmoor's "battle reports" in one of the wargaming zines, he asked Dave Arneson to visit him and demonstrate the game – whereupon he immediately suggested they collaborate to create the manuscript that would eventually become Dungeons & Dragons. But I found this story surprising because, in reading through the original 1974 version of D&D, I can find no trace of this supposed "rules guy". Just like the Chainmail rules before them, OD&D's rules are written with a miniatures wargamer audience in mind – which is to say, they assume that the reader is used to designing a new system, from scratch, every time they decide to play a new scenario. OD&D is completely unusable unless the reader is prepared to personally contribute an enormous amount of potentially game-breaking design choices. So to compare OD&D to, say, any of Avalon Hill's board games is like comparing a set of guitar strings to a music album. Even with regards to what is actually provided in OD&D, the quality is abysmal. The core concept of the game is so poorly explained that it would be hard for a complete neophyte to tell how any of the material is meant to be used, and that material is frequently unintelligible due to the ambiguities and obtuse phrasing. It is little wonder that such an amateurish-looking effort was rejected by Guidon Games, Avalon Hill, and indeed every other publisher Gygax sought out. Instead, with the help of Don Kaye, he co-founded Tactical Studies Rules so as to publish D&D independently. The final iteration of the rules (now referred to as the "white box" version) was rushed to production, without Dave Arneson's approval, in order to have it ready for GenCon – the humble first step in Gygax's years-long effort to cut Arneson out altogether.

And that, my friends, is the ignoble story of how the first commercially-published role-playing game came to be.

Dave Arneson was a miniatures wargamer who did not like having his authority challenged. He preferred to referee rather than compete, but he didn't like being held accountable to a system of rules, nor having to answer for the historical realism of his rulings. In 1971, he started a fantasy wargame campaign, Blackmoor, that could satisfy his needs. Blackmoor's only definite rules were his own caprices, and any inconsistencies could be excused as easily as "a wizard did it". He borrowed concepts and mechanics ad hoc from the likes of Braunstein, Chainmail and Outdoor Survival, and certain modes of play would sometimes stick around for a while, but Blackmoor was chiefly whatever Arneson wanted it to be on any given week.

In 1969, Dave Arneson launched the Napoleonics Simulation Campaign, a one-time play-by-mail mega-game meant to simulate all of the political, economic, and military dimensions of the Napoleonic Wars. It was, by my reckoning, the logical conclusion of the implicit principles of the folk/oral tradition of miniatures-wargame design culture: a Frankenstein's Monster of bespoke rules assembled without regard for whether they form a coherent or functional whole. The need for both land and sea battles obliged Arneson to employ multiple sets of incompatible mechanics (all adaptations produced among the members of his own gaming circle). To track the overall state of the wars across those battles, he thoughtlessly appropriated the mechanics of a Diplomacy variant – despite the design of Diplomacy being completely at odds with his other rules. Arneson appointed a "Personality Coordinator" to keep track of which military and political figures were being governed by which players, despite that being seemingly irrelevant to the game state. He also implemented an "experience" mechanic, whereby miniatures that survived multiple engagements would receive permanent upgrades to their "morale" rating – provided, that is, that the controlling player submitted written, in-character "battle reports" to Arneson, highlighting the unit's involvement in those battles. The idea that veteran units should have superior morale stats compared to fresh conscripts was not new, but Arneson's game was the first in which individual units could evolve from one battle to the next. He would later adapt that concept into the "experience points" and "character level" mechanics that are now commonplace in RPGs. This hodgepodge of untested subsystems was naturally rife with inconsistencies, which were smoothed over by the capricious rulings of its unchecked referee – Arneson himself – a fact that eventually led several of his players to mutiny and quit. For those that stuck around, the campaign's pace was glacial: plagued by postage delays, the endless drafting of letters and reports, and the fact that every round of the strategic-level game involved dozens of discrete battles – every single one of which required Arneson to arrange an in-person session between players who, in some cases, lived in different cities. Over the course of nearly four real-life years of play, they only managed to resolve three years worth of simulated history before the campaign finally collapsed due to lack of interest.

One of Avalon Hill's early distributors for Tactics was a publisher of military textbooks named Stackpole Books. By the 1960s, both Stackpole and Avalon were aiming to dabble in non-military topics in order to broaden their audience. When the prolific board-wargame designer Jim Dunnigan boasted that he could design a simulation of any topic, Avalon Hill's VP challenged him to make a game about "getting lost". The result was 1972's Outdoor Survival – which Stackpole Books was happy to distribute alongside books about camping, fishing, and the like. Just like a wargame, Outdoor Survival tracks the player's spatial position, movement, health status, and logistical supplies – but in place of the dice rolls for attacking a target, the dice rolls in Outdoor Survival determine matters like orienteering and encounters with wildlife. These dice rolls would eventually become the inspiration for common RPG tropes like "wandering monsters" and "random encounters", since the likes of Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax adopted Outdoor Survival's rules and game board into their early RPG campaigns.

Click here for the index of my Evolution of RPGs posts.

One of the short-lived Avalon Hill competitors that I alluded to last time was Guidon Games, who in 1971 published a series of rulebooks called Wargaming with Miniatures. These were designed and written in the tradition of the miniatures wargaming clubs – which is to say that they were by no means complete or playable. It was an expectation that the audience for such rules was interested in simulating some particular scenario, whether from history or their imagination – and so the rules sought only to provide a platform for those fellow designers to complete their own creations. These were less Half-Life 2 and more Garry's Mod. The series included rulesets like Chainmail, designed by Jeff Perren and Gary Gygax, which covered medieval battles and included an ill-received supplement for battles involving fantastical monsters. Chainmail's fantasy rules would nevertheless go on to feature in the first fantasy RPGs. The series also included Tractics (a portmanteau of "tracks" and "tactics"), designed by Leon Tucker, Mike Reese, and Gary Gygax, a multi-part ruleset for battles set in the Second World War. Tucker, a statistician by education, was frustrated by the inability of six-sided dice to express finely-granular statistical probabilities, and so he designed Tractics around the use of twenty-sided dice. Dice like this were vanishingly rare at the time (and so most players would be forced to resort to drawing numbered lots from a bag), but Tractics started a lasting trend of niche hobby games that employ them, which eventually drove their wider availability.

In 1954, Charles S. Roberts founded The Avalon Game Company, (later redubbed "Avalon Hill") in order to publish his recently invented board game: Tactics, a game that was clearly remixing design elements from various games of the now centuries-old German tradition. Tactics is of no particular note to RPGs in terms of its design, but does represent a critical element of the cultural surroundings. It was the first ever commercially published board wargame in American history, and, being sold as a self-contained and complete product, it possessed strict and standardized rules (unlike the ad hoc rules typical of its contemporaries in the miniatures wargaming hobby). Avalon Hill's many subsequent games and its in-house magazine would come to set the gold standard for wargames everywhere. Their dominating presence galvanized the miniatures wargamers into forming their own competing publishers, and therefore into codifying their smattered folk rules and common practices into more discrete, definite game titles.

Click here for the index of my Evolution of RPGs posts.

Ever since toy soldiers have been widely available, a common way of playing with them is to line them up and fire toy projectiles at them. In 1913, science fiction novelist H. G. Wells published Little Wars, a codified set of rules for a wargame based on this toy-soldier-projectile concept. Wells' rules were highly anachronistic in terms of simulation, and were chiefly concerned with keeping the game light and easy for its presumed target audience of young children. Though Little Wars was not the first set of rules for a toy-soldier-projectile wargame, it was the seed from which decades of similar wargames emerged. This lineage of wargames bears significance to the later design culture of RPGs in only one key respect: the wide use of "folk" and DIY rules. The wargamers of this niche did not really play any one consistent or standardized "game" (except, perhaps, in tournament contexts). Rather, they developed a shared pool of common practices and rule-sets from which they would construct new games on an ad-hoc basis. Especially through the 1950's and 60's, it would not have been terribly unusual for a given wargamer club to locally design a completely unique game for every new scenario they wished to play. Wargamers meeting new opponents from outside their local circle might need to do some negotiation to settle on a balanced design before playing. Occasionally, popular clusters of rules would see publication in the enthusiast zines (the typical pre-internet method for communication between isolated gaming groups), and it's through those that we can trace their evolution back to Little Wars – but it's better to understand them as a continuous, collective trend, rather than as a succession of discrete titles.

The essential aesthetic premise of Diplomacy is that a competitive game is exciting when it's not clear who is going to win, when the winning position could be overturned at any moment and everyone is striving for victory right up through the final turn. The essential dynamic premise of Diplomacy is that you can elegantly achieve this state of uncertainty by allowing (and incentivizing) multiple losing players to pool their resources in order to tear down the leading player. The more it seems like any one player is destined to win, the more their enemies unite against them – an organic negative feedback loop that sees the "apparent leading player" constantly changing. Designer Allan B. Calhamer drew thematic inspiration from the Congress of Vienna, where the idea of an international "balance of power" reflected his gaming experiences with Hearts. Calhamer's friends played with a house rule that losing players would be declared victorious if they could force a tie between the leading players (so that "kingmakers" are incentivized to remain engaged and aggressive, and leading players cannot ignore them). Calhamer combined these inspirations with a set of simple, practical, and abstract mechanics that are meant to reduce or eliminate any gameable advantage except those derived from the inter-player dynamics: coalitions, deceptions, and diplomacy. The result, published in 1959, is something that feels downright primordial – a distillation of the social aspects of competitive gaming that would go on to influence (directly or indirectly) the design virtually every strategy game that has been designed since.

Click here for the index of my Evolution of RPGs posts.