Back in October I was tasked with hosting a remote panel for an Israeli role-playing game theory group about the history of Dungeons & Dragons, with the documentary film Secrets of Blackmoor, and the book Playing at the World as starting points. My qualifications were mostly my having watched the film and read the book, and being interested in the subject.
Secrets of Blackmoor uses interviews and a bit of documentary evidence to trace Dave Arneson's development as a wargamer, and ultimately, as the first dungeon master, in the context of the Twin Cities group of miniature wargamers, while Playing at the World focuses on contemporary documentary sources to get a broader understanding of how D&D and early tabletop role-playing came to be, weaving a story from wargaming, the fantasy genre, psycho-dramatic role-playing, and the influential board game Diplomacy. To focus the conversation, we decided to stick to the immediate history of D&D.
The following is a translation from Hebrew of the framework I wrote up to get things started. As with any good panel discussion, the conversation started in earnest before I finished covering everything.
Introduction
In January 1974, a game called Dungeons & Dragons was published. It came out as a boxed set, with three instruction booklets, and a few loose pages with tables. The front of the box described its contents: "Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures." But in truth, it was the first role-playing game product.
This discussion is going to wrestle with the question: "what is D&D made of?" Hopefully it will allow us to learn about the conditions required for a role-playing game - or at least, this particular role-playing game - and to derive a few lessons relevant to creating innovative games in a hostile environment.
What did Arneson and Gygax bring to Dungeons & Dragons?
A good starting point for the question of what D&D is made of is the names written on the front of its box, as well as on the booklets contained within: Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson.
What did they bring to D&D? Let's start with the common elements: they both brought many years of experience in miniature wargaming - creating terrain, painting soldiers, setting them out and fighting with them, in accordance with rules which they either adopted from elsewhere, or formulated themselves. They even worked together previously on a ruleset for Napoleonic naval warfare. They both also took part in play by post variations on the influential political board game, Diplomacy, which originally dealt with the era just before World War I. Some variations dealt with the Napoleonic wars - Gygax created one of those, and participated in a campaign that Arneson ran based on it - while others dealt with Medieval and fantastical themes. They both also brought a deep interest in the Medieval and fantastical settings, which became more popular in the 1960s and '70s as a result of the cheaper paperback publication of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.
Dave Arneson
What did Arneson in particular bring to D&D? He brought experience with an attitude towards wargaming rooted in Prussian Kriegsspiel, which emphasized the position of referee. The referee is the person who decides what the premise is for the battle, what information is known to which of the players, and how to deal with what the players want to have their subordinates do in the game, whether the rules have accounted for these possibilities or not. He also brought experience in Braunstein-style freeform play, developed by David Wesley, which focused on group dynamics between characters who were played by individual people. These repeated attempts to push the boundaries of what was possible in wargames eventually brought about the Blackmoor fantasy campaign, which introduced a critical aspect of D&D: an adventure undertaken by a collection of characters played individually by players and managed by a gamemaster (not a dungeon master yet - this term came later). The participants in the dungeon adventures in this campaign were really excited about this novel implementation of the refereeing principles developed in Arneson and Wesley's circle, and after this was presented to Gary Gygax, he was taken in by it as well.
Gary Gygax
What did Gygax bring to D&D? First and foremost, rules: the Chainmail rules for Medieval battles, which he developed with Jeff Perren, and included the famous appendix for games with fantasy units, and became the initial mechanical basis for combat in Arneson's Blackmoor campaign, and therefore to the mechanics in the first tabletop role-playing game; experience in developing and designing rulesets, which allowed him to translate Arneson's tools into something that other people can use; and experience in board games, which got him used to thinking of these rules developments as something commercial, which can be sold. In addition to that, his love for the fantastic was stronger than Arneson's - he was so focused on the fantastic that he promoted it even in the face of backlash and public expressions of disinterest and hostility from the various wargaming communities, and even though this preoccupation distracted him from marketing an earlier game by the company he created to publish D&D, Tactical Studies Rules.
Secrets of Blackmoor and Playing at the World
The book and movie which form the basis for this discussion fill out many more details in the story of the formation of D&D, and the development of the role-playing game product afterwards.
Secrets of Blackmoor
The film is mainly based on interviews with people close to Arneson, and comes with a certain agenda to correct the lack of attention that he seems to have suffered from, even though he was one of the two creators of this influential, and eventually, profitable game - as far as the filmmakers are concerned, he was the more important contributor. But there is one point, appearing towards the end of the film, that is vital for understanding the wider context: Greg Svenson, one of the first players in the Blackmoor campaign, says that after D&D was published, the participants in the campaign didn't feel like there was a big difference. They felt that they were continuing to play Blackmoor, but with slightly different rules. All that changed was that other people could play this same game that they were playing.
You cannot replicate Dave Arneson
That's a critical point: had this experience not been converted into a product that people can buy, it would have been stuck as something that is hard to replicate without either knowing Arneson personally, or someone who understood what to do from experiencing Arneson's game. This is especially true since Arneson tended not to explain the rules he used to his players, but instead asked them to focus on how he described the world, and how they wanted their characters to react to it. The fate of similar attempts at role-playing games, sometimes more expansive ones, coming from science fiction and fantasy fandom, was similar. You had to know someone who knew someone from the Society for Creative Anachronism, or some improv group going in a role-playing direction, to get a similar experience. A box with rules as a product, as a game, was like the Apple II's draw over the mainframes, in terms of accessibility to the general public - in Gygax's case, to begin with, it was mostly focused on wargamers like himself, but from there it spread out to science fiction and fantasy fandom, and to a much wider hobby.
Playing at the World
Jon Peterson's book provides a wider context than Secrets of Blackmoor, explaining some of the points I brought up. It goes deeper into the long history of Kriegsspiel games from which Arneson eventually got his approach to refereeing; investigates the history of the fantasy genre as it crystalized towards the time of D&D's creation, which in the author's view, was especially adapted to creating a target audience for an experience that would carry them into an imaginary world; looks into the history of games which pushed into group dynamics and discussion, like Diplomacy and its derivatives; and then takes all of these and connects them into a deeper explanation of what D&D was, why it was created when it was created, and where it, and role-playing games as we know them today, went from there.
Theoretical Questions
Since this group is focused on theoretical rather than historical discussions, we can ask different questions than who did what. For example: what do we think about the claim, that recurs both in Secrets of Blackmoor and in Playing at the World, that the fact that characters can do whatever their players want them to do is the critical element for the transition into a role-playing game? Do we agree with this? Does this conform with more current theories about role-playing games?
What about accessibility to the public? I think that opening the experience to the public, as much as it was partial, requiring then and now constant updating with respect to the audience to which they are being opened, as well as to the tastes of TSR and then Wizards of the Coast, is still critical when attempting to bring more people into this hobby. How important is it to adapt this accessibility to new media, such as through recorded and live actual plays and podcasts?
And how important is the personal and immediate experience to role-playing games? Is there a qualitative difference between playing by post and playing in person? Would it be interesting to compare with Tony Bath's Hyborean wargaming campaign, which came before Blackmoor, where the main dynamic was strategic decisions by post on behalf of characters, which Bath and another referee would adjudicate through discussion and board and miniature wargames between them, without a concurrent and immersive involvement of the various players, instead updating them through in-world and out-of-world reports sent after the fact?
No comments:
Post a Comment