After
some time together, playing various war simulations, Dave Arnoson decided to
set his next game in a small medieval hamlet,
and, instead of a large troop
moving scenario, it was a series of "door to door" encounters. The
player wouldn't be a general (off the field) giving orders, he'd be a lone
operator (or a leader of a crack team) that would have to infiltrate the town
and find the damsel in distress, or the bad guy, or the monster with the
treasure, or whatever, through rolling the dice and role-playing your individual character. (Side Note: I go into this aspect of the game in my MIND GAMES entry). He
used the Chainmail rules to resolve close quarters combat, and it was a
hit. Gygax
loved the idea, and started running his own lone adventurer games,
heavily based on the pulp fiction he grew up with in the 40's, namely Conan the
Barbarian's sword and sorcery stories, HP Lovecraft's
Horror mythos,
with a sprinkle of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings thrown in (which were
very popular at the
time). They started publishing their games under the banner Tactical Studies
Review (TSR) and shipped them off to other gaming
clubs, and BOOM, by 1974, Dungeons and Dragons was born. Story goes Gygax got the title of the game
from his 10 year old daughter, who, reportedly, is quite a good
gamer.
Gary Gygax admitted to reading HG Well's
instructions and ran TSR games with the understanding it was, essentially,
'public domain' material. Not to bore you with too much detail, back in the early 70's, TSR took Well's articles on miniature war gaming, and
built those generic castles and towers (Blackmoore, Greyhawk etc) into
detailed city states, fantastic locations and so forth. Ten years later, these imaginary locales became the primary game boards for thousands of avid role playing fans.
TSR games would give you a map of a town , with a
background history, and tell you it was run by individual governors, lords and
wizards, with their own agendas, powers (life bar, inventory , skills, and
political alignments), enemies and allies, and then you (the Game Master) tossed
your players into the mix, inventing the first "sandbox" game, where the
player's choices would trigger a series of built in
consequences (tables of 'random encounters' are included just to keep
things interesting). So, effectively, you can
play this one game (ex. City State of the Invincible Overlord) over and over, and there will be
variations, because of the element of chance (dice rolling), and the choices of
the players (role playing) will be different every time. And since it's
different every time, you, the Game Master (the guy running the game) will need
to use your imagination, because there are things players will do that
are not covered in the rules, because you can't anticipate every
outcome. In essence (and this
how we get away with this now-a-days), the Game Master will have to make
up his/her own rules (or versions) to the
game. To some that ran in my circles, this was the birth of game theory, DARPA, and
legal plagiarism.
Remember George C. Scott in Dr. Strangelove,
as the general, running around the war room, saying nuclear war heads were
launched, and are real, because "it's on the big board..."
? In that movie, it's easy to understand the psychological shift from a WW II
grand scale view of the world, to a personal local pride
(even an imaginary hamlet). Because, really, in the game of life, there are no
rules. But in a game that mimics a fantasy life, there are rules...lots
of them...and one of the rules is "make it up", because as long as it's "on the
board ", it's real.
True, military generals (Genghis Kahn had all his maps and
spies) and people running RAND (standing on a bulletproof glass floor
with a blinking world map, showing how much fuel is moving across the Atlantic
Ocean, using toy warships) have been running these types of scenarios for
years. There are tons of files marked "What if ? Then this !" in government
agencies across the globe.
But none of them were really examining the rapid decay
and deforestation of Sherwood Forest after the death of Robin Hood. Or
if the Joker did in fact poison the water supply before Batman could stop him,
and took over Gotham City. Or what would happen if the Universal Movie Monsters
from the 30's and 40's grew fifty feet tall and attacked New York. Here's a
scripted example:
"Can you imagine how many people they would need to eat to
stay alive...Wait ! I'll look that up in this 1970's Game
booklet, under the listings gargantuans / titans (50 ft and up). It has a
bunch of stuff here... How much they can lift, how long they can travel, how
much damage they do and... how much they weigh..."
The reader, back then, was
assumed to be a genius gamer, (or shunned outsider, depending on what photos
your looking at) and can therefore extrapolate how much food it would take
.Sometimes they'll say, like in the dragon
listings, "eats 4
donkeys in a sitting", but you'd still have to look up the weight of the donkey
(it's listed) and then decide,"how often do they eat?" Before you know it,
your writing up new rules (sometimes referred to as 'house rules' )
for the daily dietary needs of giant monsters.
Just for fun and flavor: Giant
Dracula must drink three swimming pools worth of blood a day, preferably through
a giant straw, or begin to diminish in power, and slowly, painfully die, at
heightened levels of insanity, (he is 50 feet tall) in say, 100 years
from now. Nobody was running
that game scenario, except these guys...and they'd have down to the
milliliter, just to appeal to their British counterparts. Yes, Dungeons and
Dragons is big in the UK, France, Germany, Australia, and Russia etc...Special shout out to all my readers there...Thanks for tuning in...