Throwaway Line in GNS Essay: Ron, what were you thinking?

[ejh]

"Arising as it did from wargaming in the middle 1970s, the earliest RPG design reflected its Gamist + Simulationist roots. However, within a year, design philosophies split very fast across a brief Renaissance of largely-forgotten games that spanned nearly all of the GNS spectrum...."

I would love to hear what you were thinking of as that brief Renaissance, Ron!

[Valamir]

As would I.  Arising from some comments I made about GURPS and CoC solidifying and codifying the "standard" format of RPG design, Ian and I have been exchanging some PMs about the rather eclectic assortment of games that existed at the time (and from which gaming might have taken a very different looking course).

A discussion on some of the variety of forms and formats that existed in the early days would be quite welcome.

[AnyaTheBlue]

Traveller, Metamorphosis Alpha, Villains and Vigilantes, Tunnels and Trolls, RuneQuest, The Fantasy Trip, Chivalry and Sorcery, Bunnies and Burrows, and En Guard! were all published pre-1980.  I suspect he's maybe talking about some of them.

If you take a general survey here, you've got skill based systems (RQ), dice pools (T&T), and even a system with a design goal of making static characters in order to more accurately reflect real life (Traveller).

If you push the timeframe to include 1980, you get Top Secret, Space Opera,  Rolemaster, Bushido, Dragonquest, Morrow Project, and BRP 'proper'.

Champions shows up in 1981, giving you point-buy effects-based generic character construction.

(I'm taking my publishing dates from memory and verified by John Kim's excellent Encyclopedia: http://www.darkshire.org/~jhkim/rpg/encyclopedia/ )

You've got an awful complete set of mechanics and very diverse settings already encompassed by the nascent RPG 'industry'.

Of course, Ron may be talking about a broader time frame or something.

[Ian Charvill]

The other strand that I think shoukd be added here is this: Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks (I understand these are about to get a big relaunch, with TV spots and a play for the 'Harry Potter' demographic).

I think they were a great gateway product for gaming.  They presented a very simple gamist system which was later abstracted into a separate role-playing system.

Interestingly the system was produced as a mass market paperback.  There may have been more than one book released (I think the core one was called simply "Fighting Fantasy!" but I'm dredging my memory here.

Around the time, there was also a mass market paperback RPG called Maelstrom (no relation to the later system of the same name) which used a card-based resolution system (simply the cards from 1-10 drawn at random, you could substitute a d10 pretty easily).  It was an Elizabethan England thing, with a pretty decent freeform magic system.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi there,

Dana nailed'em, along with Fighting Fantasy (yay, Seven Serpents!) as mentioned by Ian, High Fantasy, and the whole output of Metagaming. High Fantasy was published by Jeff Dillow, and Metagaming, for those who don't know, was Steve Jackson's first gaming company (Wizard and Melee were the first stepping stones of The Fantasy Trip; see also amazing wargames like Ogre, WarpWar, and Chitin). I also think some of the magazines and fanzines of the time can be counted as well.

There were even a few others, too, including a couple of pre- or contemporary-V&V superheroes games and a few popular but never-published homebrew fantasy games (FRAP, I believe was one of them). I'm not quite sure when Toon was first published, but it was awfully early; ditto, James Bond.

Best,
Ron

[Jonathan Walton]

Also don't forget that "Choose Your Own Adventure" books were out by 1979 and Joe Dever followed with "Lone Wolf" in 1984.  I don't think there's any way I would have jumped headfirst into roleplaying if I hadn't read those books growing up.  "Choose Your Own Adventure" was especially cool because it had stories targeted at both male and female audiences and mostly based on historical and literary genres.

http://www.gamebooks.org/cyoalist.htm

[Mike Holmes]

Which of these early games is Narrativist?

Mike

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Mike,

For bits and pieces of Narrativism, I'd point to some of the supplements for Tunnels & Trolls as I have in the past. Actually, Grailquest from Metagaming presents some echoes of this issue as well (perhaps pre-echoes of Pendragon too, now that I think of it).

But these are solos, so what can I be talking about? My argument is really about playing rather than text. I mean that the texts (of whatever sort, solo or not) give clues that some people were playing these games in a Narrativist fashion. And now that I've chatted with Mike Stackpole about it, I'm less speculative than I was when I wrote the essay.

I'm extremely intrigued by a lot of what I read in Dave Arneson's accounts of playing Blackmoor, although a lot of that is hard to avoid projecting into.

I can make a pretty good case for early Champions being Narrativist-compatible (and secondarily supported as such as well), but that'll have to wait for my Ode to Champions essay - which is currently roughed out but not yet finalized, by the way.

So, is there a Prince Valiant or a Dust Devils lurking back there in the late 70s? No, I don't think so. But I have some pretty good clues in both text and interview that playing along those lines was happening. And the breadth of game mechanics available then is really broad, as Dana points out, so a kind of ferment between play preferences and published works seems to have been happening as well.

Best,
Ron

[AnyaTheBlue]

There were even a few others, too, including a couple of pre- or contemporary-V&V superheroes games...

John's got Superhero 2044 before V&V.  I didn't start gaming till 1981, so anything that came out before 81 was birthed in the formless mists of the Dawn of Role-Playing Games...

I'm not quite sure when Toon was first published, but it was awfully early; ditto, James Bond.

John has James Bond 007 in 83( http://www.darkshire.org/~jhkim/rpg/encyclopedia/byyear/1983.html ), and Toon in 84 ( http://www.darkshire.org/~jhkim/rpg/encyclopedia/byyear/1984.html ) along with Paranoia and MERP.

That meshes with my own memories pretty well.

Geez, Warp War.  I had forgotten about that.  I played that a couple of times with my friend Lee in Jr. High.  Didn't MetaGaming do Invasion of the Air-Eaters, too?