I'm always interested to read about the roots of the modern tabletop roleplaying game. It usually leaves me speculating how things might be if history's quirks had tilted in a different direction.
QUESTIONS
What would modern games look like if Arneson hadn't been developing Civil War / Napoleonic naval wargames and thinking about ironclad ships having an armour 'class' against guns? A player being upset about their character getting one-shot by a troll gave us the concept of 'multiple hits', and thence the nearly-ubiquitous 'hit points'. Even there, except for another quirk of history, the default might still be the original Arnesonian system where hit points are fixed and characters only get harder to hit. Or maybe we'd have wound systems, something GURPSy, something WFRPy, who knows?
If Braunstein games hadn't been deemed a 'failure' by their creator, would tabletop roleplaying have sprung from there? If Kriegsspiel had become a big civilian fad, would tabletop roleplaying have developed from that, a hundred years early? If 'player character' wasn't a term of art, would it be 'avatar' or 'incarnation' or 'paper man' or 'general'?
If the Outdoor Survival board game hadn't come out when it did, would early gaming have used hexes at all? Would we expect gritty cartography and actual navigation, wargames style? Or a higher level of abstraction than hexes?
What if we didn't have Hammer Horror imports, and a ton of Christian motifs over a paper-thin veneer of polytheism? What if Gygax hadn't changed the "curate" class to "cleric", or "cunning" to "wisdom"? What if the thief hadn't become the fourth character archetype?
THINGS LEFT BY THE WAYSIDE
It used to be that fighty characters (fighting men) developed superpowers that were social in nature. There was just SO MUCH advanced play based on retainers, hirelings, kingdoms, armies, that is unusual in modern tabletop gaming. In fact, a brief rant:
For the last few decades the big roleplaying games have made combat the focus of play at all levels, and have usually made combat mechanically complex, so it takes a lot of time at the table. The consequence is an imperative that all characters be equally good at fighting. I'm sad to see the fighting man's initial niche gone. I'm sadder to see their higher-level niche - all the charismatic leader stuff - wither on the vine too. Did players stop enjoying that? Did GMs not enjoy running that? Or was this change led by designers dropping frameworks that seemed non-essential to play?
So now any default fantasy game is full of mages who are exactly as good in a fight as the mundane fighting specialists, and then have a wealth of straight-up magical powers and things to do outside fights. (I realise this is not a modern complaint.)
There are some weird dynamics in (many) modern games. A lot of the big, sweeping differences between character types have disappeared. In the big name games, an enormous ecosystem of small quirky differences have sprung up, alongside a focus on the character rather than the experience of play (some people have some derogatory names for this). Your typical character can do a dozen well-defined fiddly little magical/mystical/supernatural things from backgrounds and races and classes and feats and archetypes and so on. I play a few games and hear about many more, and almost never encounter a mundane fighter. Certainly not one whose shtick is military command. Funny to think that the 'Loyalty Trait' was an integral numeric score in original D&D.
So was 'Ego', come to think of it. Magic intelligent weapons were a big deal. Mostly swords. Swords with alignment, swords that cast spells, swords that spoke more languages than anyone else in the party. Swords with more (or more meaningful) tiers of intelligence than player characters had.
Everything is subject to fashion, I suppose. Reference frames shift. Standard modes of play shift. What was 'The Dungeon' is now 'A Megadungeon', and not just because a roomful of monsters is ten times more likely to be approached with combat (which in turn takes ten times longer).
SEEMINGLY MISPLACED FOCUS
I am puzzled by a trend in modern roleplaying games publishing. I keep seeing them focus and double down on two things that are very specifically NOT a roleplaying game's forte:
- In many games, writers try to make narrative, story arcs, linear plots, character beats, etc, a huge deal. This is an import from non-interactive media that has never made sense to me. It's harder to have them than not have them, and there's no payoff for that: it makes things less fun for the players (in my experience, at least). People have complained about 'the railroad' for close to fifty years yet I still see it loom in every other published adventure.
- Many tabletop game designs develop complex mechanics and dice maths, the kind that a computer would handle really well, and then focus on squeezing and contorting all roleplaying situations to have the GM use those mechanics and math (exactly like a computer game would do). Arguably the tabletop role-playing game's only advantage over other games and interactive media is that it is fundamentally adjudicated by a human referee, yet there seems to be so much drive towards treating GMs like machines. Maybe I've had bad luck with what I've been reading lately.
SETTINGS
Whenever I read old-school play notes I'm struck by how much of a classic medieval-Renaissance-saga feel they tend to have. Not in the sense of being actually authentic to any particular time period, but they don't seem laden with modern sensibilities that I see baked into games and settings.
Modern defaults for a fantasy setting which I regularly notice:
- There is a market economy, everyone uses coins, and every settlement has shops selling many ready-made goods
- Many leaders rule by the will of the people, not by force or threat of force
- Some kind of competent police force exists
- Everywhere is cosmopolitan, and people are upwardly mobile
- Every settlement or person in a game has to be something to be interacted with, and if it's not then it's a 'misdirect' or a 'red herring'. Even though it's verisimilitudinous to have three dozen villages between a town and the next point of interest, few GMs mention those, possibly because their players would for some reason feel obliged to explore them for hours and hours
- The average person (let alone player character) has all the freedoms of someone in a modern industrialised western country, and few of the responsibilities or obligations common in a less libertarian society
- People value the kinds of things they value in modernity
- Large towns nestle up against tracts of wilderness that would be useful farm land. Corollary: settlements are scattered everywhere, far apart, relatively undefended from monstrous threats, magical disasters, and banditry. If you read about some of the lengths people went to historically when faced with the 'threat' of mundane wolves, people being blasé about ogres in their environment is jarring
- Religion seldom comes up in every life, rather than being central to absolutely everything, despite most settings having plenty of evidence of real afterlives and divine powers
Obviously not all these elements are strictly modern notions; obviously we're talking about fantasy to begin with; obviously plenty of games and settings DO try to evoke a pseudo-historical feel, but it's still striking to me.
It's convenient to have these notions baked into a setting. It makes it easier for players to get into things. I wonder if that's the reason, or if players and GMs are just unaware of what things are like in an era without mass communications, powerful centralised government, widespread secondary and tertiary industry, etc.
FINAL THOUGHTS
...On the other hand, tabletop roleplaying games are bigger than ever this decade, and I am as pleased as punch that the gates are wide open. It is my genuine hope that people are finding games and styles that work for them.
As Dave Arneson wrote shortly before he passed, "Work with what works for you."
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