Teaching 'The History of TTRPG's'

#1

So a few friends of mine have been showing some interest in tabletop games. As far as I know, none of them have ever played any sort of tabletop RPG, so I’m wondering how to introduce them to this entirely new hobby, BUT–

We’re all history graduate students at a university, and I thought it could be kinda fun to give them a brief little lecture on the history of RPG’s, the fundamental ideas of what even are RPG’s, etc. whenever we get together, in the style of the kind of lectures we see and give as students and TA’s. If giving/hearing a lecture on the history of anything sounds like the total opposite of fun to you, well, what can I say, that’s how we are =P

It’s really not meant to be anything in depth, just sort of a 10 minute “RPG’s 101” thing to give them some really basic info before we really start with whatever game we play. I’ve been brainstorming what points I’d want to hit, but I was wondering what other people would come up with if they had to give a similar mini-lecture.

I’m really curious because I have to say I’m fairly young/new compared to a lot of folks who have been in the scene a lot longer than I have, and I think there’s a whole world of 80’s/90’s/00’s RPG’s that I’m really only vaguely aware of.

Just really off the top of my head, you’d have like:

  • What is a tabletop roleplaying game… super basic concepts, intent, rules/mechanics to simulate X, polyhedral dice, etc.

  • Origin: war games, Gary Gygax, D&D (not gonna get into any controversy about if he really invented D&D in this fun lil’ lecture, I’d say…)

  • Layering in the ‘role-playing’ element on top of combat/tactics games, playing a character/telling a story, influenced by genre books, films, etc.

  • 90’s RPG scene offering popular genre alternatives to D&D-- Shadowrun, World of Darkness, etc.

  • Recently: ‘indie’/story games, PbtA, OSR, etc.

What points would you touch on if you were giving like a really broad, completely “Intro to RPG’s”, 101 kind of lecture for some people? Importantly, assume they have some goodwill to listen to you, but you’re probably not going to hold their attention for too long =P

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#2

It’s not the most critical history, but as far as getting a sense for the timeline and influences I recommend looking at the Designers & Dragons series. It consists of four volumes that each cover a decade of history (the 70’s, 80’s, 90’s, and 00’s). I’ve only read the first two but I feel like they do a fairly good job of covering the origins of TTRPG in war gaming, how early designers got their start and some of the differences in their systems, and sort of a “corporate history” of the different product moves many game publishers made.

I have less guidance on how to condense all of this down into a lecture, but I’d love to see your slides or notes if you end up giving the talk.

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#3

This is a fascinating topic to me.

The basic two questions that come up and must be considered are:

  • “To ME, what are the basic elements that make a roleplaying game?”

This gets at your philosophy of “what is this about?”

Is it fundamental to the hobby/art form that you play a character, for example? Or is it more important that a story is told? Must it have elements of challenge? Must there be a GM?

What is important to you about this world of TTRPGs, and where are its boundaries?

  • “For the AUDIENCE, what are the curious about, and what will they want to hear?”

Are we focusing on game design and innovation (who invented what when)? The social implications (e.g. gaming as creative outlet or as therapy)? The history of genre and media and nerd culture? How they are different from other gaming traditions?

Are we more interested in where this all came from (Gygax, wargames) or how it’s working these days (with conventions and online games influenced by RPG history and streaming Twitch gaming)?

With a 10 min limit, you’ll have to pick your topics very carefully.

…

John Harper’s 5-min RPG demo comes to mind as a good thing to reference (or even include). Anyone have a link to that?

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#4

I find the why of TTRPGs fascinating, perhaps not entirely as a historical topic, though certainly the birth out of Kriegspiel and ultimately Braunstien is fascinating enough, but the fact that TTRPG covers so many potential ways and reasons for playing. World building, story creation, a game of chance or excitement, competitiveness, even didactic learning tools. It’s fascinating to me what people want from a game and how that informs very different mechanics and types of experience.

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#5

Have you seen this timeline of different concepts in RPG design?

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#6

As a weird nitpick, while I appreciate your desire not to get into the “who created D&D” debate, I think it would be best to present that as “Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, between them, created D&D” – erasing Arneson and giving Gygax full credit seems inappropriate and inaccurate, and calling it a collaboration is probably the nearest to the truth any of us are likely to get.

My personal “bullet points” timeline (Note: This is a terrible ‘timeline’ since I’d have to look up dates for almost all of it) is:

  • D&D created by Gygax and Arneson, with roots in both wargames and “basically make believe with some dice” (Mid 70s)
  • Derivative and reaction games in the late 70s. Tunnels and Trolls, Runequest
  • The 80s; The beginnings of “character focused” games. Dragonlance and the drift of D&D, Pendragon. West End Games d6 games going for the cinematic angle with Star Wars and Ghostbusters.
  • The 90s; White Wolf, the collapse of TSR
  • The d20 boom around 2000
  • The Forge and true “story games”
  • Modern day :stuck_out_tongue:

I also second the recommendation for Designers and Dragons if you want to take a more indepth look at the subject.

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#7

I tend to agree on the Gygax front - the guy spent a lot of effort building his own legend and brand. Arneson, David Wesley, Jim Dunnigan and others undoubtedly had a huge amount of influence creating the ideas and practices of TTrpgs. Gygax’s own approach of actuarial exactitude and taxonomy is certainly a huge part, and his organizing seems to have really made the hobby grow - but he wasn’t alone.

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#8

Totally fair about Gygax. It’s a subject I’m pretty uneducated about, but I certainly wasn’t trying to erase any of the other people involved. Just putting Gygax in my list was more, “Gygax is the name you hear and I know there’s a lot of discussion about other people who were involved but I don’t really know about it and certainly won’t get into it here in this little presentation.” I can absolutely include all the other people’s names though ^___^

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#9

I think Arneson is particularly worth noting along with the Braunstien game under David Wesley. Simply because they represent strong injection of the roleplay aspect to Gygax’s wargaming. We don’t really know how Braunstien was played but the inclusion of non-military characters (university proctors and town mayors) suggests a more open and nuanced world then the fantasy wargamming of Gygax. Of course Arneson was deeply involved in that as well, but there’s an element of wondering where a Arneson led TSR would have gone?

There’s a few books of history on this stuff already. Blogs and Forum discussions also have some details to fill in as well.

The thing that fascinates me is how much of the entertainment present can be traced to early TTrpgs and to D&Dism. The entire default of fantasy today is almost more D&Dism then Lord of the Rings and it seems like one can trace a huge amount of computer games and culture to it as well. While the 1960’s Tolkien craze is one thing, D&D really brought fantasy as a genre to a place it is today. Even the mechanics of later D&D editions seem to directly inform the narrative of a lot of contemporary fantasy novels.

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#10

Fun fact: Dave Arneson was a student of history.
So that alone should be a reason to mention him :wink:

In some way you could say he, Dave, invented the role part and Gary the play part. :smiley:

Keywords to DnD history:

  • Braunstein
  • Blackmore
  • Gencon
  • Dungeons and Dragons
  • TSR
  • Advanced Dungeons and Dragons
  • Dragon magazine
  • Dungeon magazine
  • Jenell / Paul Jaquays worked on DnD and later Quake (to show parallels / intersections of computergames and RPGs)
  • Satanic Panic
  • DnD the TV series
  • 2nd Edition
  • Tracey Hickman for Ravenloft and Dragonlance (esp. the novels = cross media strategy of TSR)
  • Pool of Radiance as Computer game as well as Adventure
  • “First Quest” A DnD module accompanied by an Audio CD
  • Magic the gathering and WotC
  • Dragon Dice - a TSR Collectible Card Game
  • TSR downfall
  • 3rd Edition and Acquisition of TSR / Development of OGL which lead to the OSR
  • World of Warcraft
  • 4th Edition
  • Pathfinder
  • 5th Edition

Other than DnD:

  • Empire of the petal throne
  • Castles and Crusades
  • Sandy Peterson’s Cthulhu
  • Games Workshop and Warhammer / WFRPG
  • World of Darkness (Vampire, Werewolf, Magus, Changeling etc.)
  • Shadowrun
  • Cyberpunk 2020
  • FATE
  • Apocalypse World

OSR(posdible due to opening up licensing for d20 = OGL):

  • OSRIC
  • Labyrinth Lord
  • Swords and Wizardry
  • Lamentations of the Flame Princess
  • Basic Fantasy Roleplaying

Local Developments:

  • Germany: The dark Eye
  • Sweden: Drakar och demoner=> Trudvang Chronicles, Frian Ligan

Other:

  • G+ / Google Hangouts as central communication platform
  • MeWe is home to some OSR folks
  • Gauntlet - here we are
  • Youtube as a source of information for gamers and platform for actual plays
  • Twitch for streaming actual plays
  • Roll20, Fantasy Grounds, Astral for online play
  • DnD Beyond
  • Discord
  • AnchorFM for Podcasts

This is from the top of my head. I hope you don’t mind that I do only write keywords, but I am typing that on my tablet :smiley:

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#11

Given how short your talk is, and the complex early history, it might be best to just credit Gygax and Arneson as co-creators and leave it at that.

One interesting piece of trivia is that the working title Arneson and Gygax used for D&D was The Fantasy Game (not to be confused with The Fantasy Trip by Steve Jackson).

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#12

You should check out the RPG history chapters in Jose Zagal and Sebastian Deterding’s Role-Playing Game Studies: Transmedia Foundations (some chapters are available online) as well as Erik Mona’s chapter in Wardrip-Fruin and Harrigan’s Second Person in addition to Peterson’s Playing at the World which is admittedly a thick volume.

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#13

I feel like @Airk is dead on the money. There’s only that much you can convey in 10 minutes and I’d spend that giving a high level overview of what this hobby meant across time and space. This way your audience can pick what slice they find interesting and dig deeper. Focusing mostly on D&D beats like Thomas_Junk did doesn’t do ttrpg justice and may leave an impression that D&D is some sort of stick everything else has to be measured against.

There was a massive shift in the types of games people gravitated towards over the years. These movememts were reaction to open questions such as: how comprehensive the rules should be? is there a difference between player and character? what is the role of GM? who has what kind of agency and when (prep/play)? do we focus on characters, story or world? can we have an universal system or should the subject matter be reflected in game mechanics?

These are the sorts of questions historian would probably ask when looking at a history of, say, Europe and its formation through dynamics between politics, workforce, social structure, etc. Maybe, I’m not a historian. :wink:

//edit
If you plan on having a slide deck prepared, please share, that would likely lead to some great conversations!

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#14

I’d say historically and still by volume D&D is the “stick everything else has to be measured against”. D&D is for better or worse the biggest TTRPG and has the strongest claim to being the first. While there’s been interesting alternatives from the start like Empire of the Petal Throne, and continue to be, it’s still the property that has the largest following and is synonymous with TTRPGs in the public eye.

In our own corners of the hobby this might not seem to be the case, but I think any ‘historical’ discussion of TTRPGs is going to largely be a historical discussion of D&D, to do otherwise would be much like presenting a History of North America that quickly shifted to discuss only Ottawa or Alaska.

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#15

Discussing ttrpg history from the perspective of D&D is like discussing world history from the perspective of a single country. Like, say, the one that was alies with Italy since the Ancient Rome. It’s interesting but it’s not the whole picture. But I guess you’re right, complete picture may not be the goal here.

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#16

Another source for information on the early RPG scene is Shared Fantasy by Gary Alan Fine, an ethnographic study of the players of MAR Barker’s Empire of the Petal Throne game at Minnesota University, written in the late ’70s and published in 1983. (Summary here.)

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#17

I don’t really see the point of a “D&D centric” history; D&D is still just one game, so there are large periods of time when there’s not really much going on with it. The historical comparison to countries in history might be apt, if counties did nothing for most of their existence, but they don’t, so it’s not.

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#18

I don’t know your friends (the audience), and what they’re expecting from this intro/lecture, but I’d say that speaking passionately about the part of the hobby that excites YOU is probably going to be easier for you and more fun for them than attempting a through and balanced overview.

I think sharing your passion might be a better way to go than to attempt an academically balanced argument. You’d never please everyone anyway! Speak to what you love and what excites you, and why.

Tell some personal stories; share how the hobby has affected your life and others’. People respond to stories better than straight information.

#19

They’re history grad students…I imagine treating the topic rigorously is fun for them :smiley:

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#20

I agree that focussing mostly on DnD leaves less room for other systems. But the history of DnD or better of TSR is worth telling. It is full of tragedy.

I do not know if there was any company in the history of the hobby that was as successful and crashed as hard.

The history of DnD is the history of the hobby exemplified, pars pro toto. When WoW impacted DnD sales, it impacted the hobby as a whole.

DnD is not the most important system but it tells the story best.

And even if one does prefer other systems - as I do - one has to acknowledge DnDs place and rank in the history as well as in the present time. Like it or not.