The Roots of Modern Role Playing Games
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The Roots of Modern Role Playing Games By Jamie Lake English 12 Mrs. Moneypenny / Mr. Hovatter May 17, 2009 Lake i Have you ever played a role-playing game? Think carefully – you may be surprised to find that you probably have without realizing it. This is because not every role-playing game has the crowd or the dice and computers normally associated with the genre. In fact, every game is, in effect, a role playing game, because you are assuming a role to achieve some purpose. The crowd doesn’t end there – did you know that strategists used to use the earliest form of role- playing games to plan out and practice how battlefield scenarios might work? (Darlington) Even actors, who perform for people on stage every day, have achieved a core concept in modern role- playing games – taking up an imaginary stance for the sake of having fun. Even if this connection didn’t exist, we are surrounded by news of what is going on in the role-playing field every day. South Park, a popular comedy show, has parodied games such as Pokémon and World of Warcraft. (Parker, Stone). The man heralded by many as the father of modern role-playing, Gary Gygax, had an article posted about him worldwide when he died as well. Gygax himself was very unusual in his history and personality. His parents emigrated from Germany before he was born. He was a high school dropout, without even a GED to his name. He was obsessed with fantasy worlds that existed in the works of writers of his time; Jack Vance and L. Sprague de Camp, popular fantasy and science fiction writers lined his bookshelves from a relatively young age. He was a buff of Middle Age mythology, and he loved many of the beliefs and superstitions of that era. (Gale) Later in life, these would become inspiration for Gygax’s success story. He would read almost any science fiction or fantasy writings placed in front of him, save for one author which Gygax detested with an almost fiery passion: J.R.R. Tolkien. Gygax constantly told people that Tolkien was not a bad writer, by any means, but he was not the least bit believable in what he Lake ii wrote about. Gygax felt that Tolkien lacked a historical accuracy that could tie his myths into a believable state and make readers feel that his world was real. (Gale) Gygax created his first game, Chainmail, in 1968. It was focused in a realistic setting, somewhere amongst the chaos of the Middle Ages. It was a war game, as were many games of the time, with a number of flexible points to allow for players to come up with their own campaigns. It was not popular at first, but slowly caught on at the local scale and spread out enough to give Gygax enough confidence to want to make games for a living. This alone, however, would never be enough to place Gygax in the annals of role-playing history, if not for a man he met at a wargaming conference in 1968, a man named Dave Arneson. (Darlington) Arneson was unknown when Gygax met him at the conference. He was just a player of Chainmail who had come up with his own variation. What made Arneson’s idea unique was that players, instead of relinquishing everything they had gained at the end of a campaign, could keep their characters, armies, and land. These retained items could be taken from campaign to campaign, increasing in strength and ability. The people attending this conference, Gygax among them, were very impressed, and Gygax offered Arneson a deal to create a game with him. This game was finally named just before the first rulebook was published. It was Dungeons and Dragons, and it was quite possibly the biggest turning point in role-playing history. (Darlington) Dungeons and Dragons was released just in time to cash in on the craze generated from the release of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. All of the fans of this story wanted some way to act out the events in this plot, and D&D (short for Dungeons and Dragons) was there to deliver. It was immersive, it was cooperative, it allowed for characters to be created and kept for just about any purpose, and it was generally regarded as very frustrating to learn the rules to. (Darlington) Lake iii Gygax never intended for new players to pick up his game and play it. Rather, he expected war gamers who had previously enjoyed Arneson’s variation on Chainmail to play, which caused the rules to rely on prior experience. The original D&D rulebook purportedly had statements mentioning that this or that works like it does in other games without really going into detail. The end result was that there was no “right” way to play D&D. Fan newsletters and magazines began nationwide in an attempt to present what each person thought was the best possible way to play the game. (Darlington) Meanwhile, strife between Gygax and Arneson, primarily over unpaid royalties, caused the couple to split. Arneson’s contributions to D&D’s development were almost entirely struck from the record, a fact evident through the lack of name recognition amongst modern players. Gygax , along with a group of investors, created his company Tactical Studies Rules (TSR, for short) in 1973. This company picked up production of D&D even as Arneson quit his partnership with Gygax. D&D’s popularity increased quickly, guaranteeing success for the budding company. (Gale) Many other games, similar in style to D&D, sprouted up and in turn influenced other game creators. Tunnels and Trolls, released by Ken St. Andre in 1975, introduced clear-cut rules for role-playing games to follow. Traveller, released just as Star Wars hit theatres, is hailed even now as having an amazing design, with the ability to create anything from a single item to an entire universe to play in. Perhaps the most notable game from this time frame, however, was Chivalry and Sorcery, (Darlington) As one historian has noted: “There is no denying it is realistic: the rules and the style are designed to recreate France in the late 12th century, rather than D&D’s weak approximation of Tolkien’s pseudo-medieval setting. In particular, they described not just a world, but a society; Lake iv players had to fit their characters into a detailed feudal code complete with the nobles, serfs, and the huge presence of the Catholic Church.” [sic] (Darlington, 1998) The rules may have been a little too specific. A single campaign couldn’t be played out in just a couple sessions, like most games of the time. It took anywhere from a week to a couple months to play out. There wasn’t any dungeon crawling, as players of D&D were used to, but there was an endless amount of work that had to be done just to stay in character. Players could spend hours just building up popularity with a lord to gain a new title. Overall, it was just too time consuming to be fun, and disappeared almost entirely in the mid-eighties. (Darlington) Individual RPG gamers slowly began to realize that they weren’t alone in their hobby, and began to unify as a unique subculture that exists even today. Nobody had to be alone when there were all of these people, however widespread, that seemed to enjoy the same things. Conventions sprang up, some large, some small. Game developers realized that they had a tangible market, and society as a whole began to wonder what it was that made these people so happy. The players stopped being oddities and enigmas, becoming more along the lines of “those geeks… who [carry] around all those little dice.” (Darlington) Thus, D&D, along with TSR, progressed. It had only two other major obstacles to overcome, which hit at almost the same time. In 1979, Dallas Egbert, a teenage prodigy attending Michigan State University, ran off. He left behind a nearly incoherent note, indicating that he was considering suicide, that he was going to the steam tunnels around the University, and something unintelligible about D&D. Fortunately, Egbert was found, but bad press about the incident led to D&D being blamed when, a year later, he committed suicide. While, even now, D&D’s influence can’t really be refuted, Egbert was under a lot of stress, doing drugs, and Lake v notably unstable. These contributing factors, however, were neither known nor publicized until much later. (Darlington) D&D was immediately blamed for the entire situation. Presses rolled nationwide – D&D is a cult, made to destroy your home and children, led by that evil Gary Gygax. Everyone in the RPG field did what they could to deny these claims, but the irreparable scar of D&D as a cult following had been made. There were book burnings, churches and schools banned the game and anything related to it from their grounds and, perhaps the worst thing, many hobbyist dealers with D&D in their store were boycotted into bankruptcy. Things only needed a small nudge to go over the edge, and that nudge came at a landslide from Irving Pulling. (Darlington) Pulling’s case was similar to Egbert’s in that he was unstable and under stress. This culminated in his suicide in June of 1982, when he used his mother’s gun to take his own life. His mother, Pat Pulling, blamed D&D for her son’s death.