spewagepipe

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Plumbing the Depths: Aesthetic Goals and Tastes

My post yesterday was a little more, uh... hostile... than was necessary or helpful, so I wanted to circle back and come at it without the weird pretence of sarcasm.

Almost all RPGs – including the RPGs that the folks from the thread claim to enjoy – use attack rolls to automate the blow-by-blow of a fight, but the player is expected to handle the broader tactical decisions. If we were to create analogous gameplay for "solving a mystery", then we'd use investigation rolls to automate finding evidence and interrogating suspects, while leaving the broader task of drawing inferences and following leads to be handled by the player.

For good or ill, that is exactly how mainstream RPGs handle mystery play. But for the folks in that thread, the analogous mechanics were not acceptable: the moment-to-moment clue-finding should also be the responsibility of the player, they argued. And fair enough – why not? But, if we follow that logic, then by analogy, you'd want to do the same for attack rolls, surely. You'd want a system where players describe how their characters are attacking and parrying, and have the GM rule on the effectiveness of those actions according to context.

I can't tell if that sounds like I'm trying to present an absurd case, to show that "these jokers didn't think it through". But in fact, I remain terribly disappointed that there has never been even a single published OSR system that works this way. So much that, a few years back, I personally designed and tested a prototype of this very combat system. The play-testers all thought it was great fun, even.

Next, let's take a look at the opposite idea: what if we automated the higher-level "tactics" through a dice roll? In one fork of that thread where the joke fell apart, one of the authors confessed that they thought the idea of a "tactics" skill was "a ridiculous proposition and not viable at all". But not only is it totally viable – it's been tested, proven, and become an enormous influence on indie RPG design ever since.

Here are some of the tactical "moves" from Apocalypse World. Check the image alt text if you want clarifications about the significance of each.

The saddest thing to me is that one of the thread authors claims to have played Apocalypse World – so that person, at least, knows that this is not some absurd joke.

So here is the point I actually wanted to make yesterday, but didn't: both of these extremes result in fun, internally-consistent designs that are, of course, chasing extremely different aesthetic goals. But the folks who wrote the joke thread were not interested in exploring the possibilities of RPG design. They were reacting to a disagreement over tastes by presenting their personal preference (i.e., for a typical OSR game that inconsistently employs dice without regard for whether they are actually helping to support its focal gameplay) as a kind of objectively superior form of play, while framing folks who might want anything else as delusional (i.e., wanting supposedly non-viable systems), a poseur (i.e., attending RPG sessions just to scroll TikTok instead of play), or both.

Hopefully I've demonstrated, by example, that this presentation is incorrect, and we can skip the boilerplate lectures about gatekeeping and "wrongbadfun".

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Haha, yeah – you know what else? If someone's character concept is that they're, like, "really good at fighting", we shouldn't hold it against them that IRL they're out of shape. They should have, like, a "Strength" stat, and like, an "Attack" rating, and if they roll high they just automatically deal damage to their target. Oh, and maybe they want the character to be like an "evasive ninja", even though in real life they're slow or clumsy – so they should have some kind of skill like "Dodge" or "Dexterity" or whatever and it makes it so that they don't get hit by things! Hahaha.

How absurd, right? Thank goodness that OSR games never use dice rolls modified by statistical values to automatically decide the outcome of events in the game. Only people who play tower defence on their phones during RPG sessions would use mechanics like that.

Oh. Wait. No, that's just how the overwhelming majority of tabletop RPGs work, isn't it? OSR games included. (see the alt text of the images for more elaboration)

If you need investigation and perception skills so you can play a character who can search a room thoroughly in a way that you as a player can't, why not have more? why not a Questioning skill so that you can play a detective who can always find out what people are hiding with a minutes of talking to them (five minutes with a target + a successful Questioning check makes them either reveal everything they know about a topic of your choice or have the GM tell you they're hiding something about it). Video games do this by exposing the entire dialogue tree to the player, but TTRPGs usually don't.

But we can go further. Why not an Inference skill so your character can put clues together even if you can't (a successful Inference check requires the GM to tell you a relevant conclusion that can be drawn, or at least part of one, from information that you already have?

With that, you could adapt the 4e skill challenge system to cover mystery gameplay, or elaborate on it to make a mystery cover a complete adventuring day.

That way, a clever, focused, logical character won't be punished by being denied the ability to solve a mystery just because their player spent the entire session playing tower defense on their phone, and GMs can plan a scene where the PCs put together all the clues they need to get to the climactic set-piece CR-appropriate boss fight without having to worry about what happens if they don't find all the clues or put them together wrong because they have Inference checks to back them up. In fact, one could even head this off entirely by simply rewarding them with clue tokens for completing the right encounters (and making the necessary Investigation and Questioning checks) and having their characters put the clues together with an Inference check at the end without bothering overmuch with the details of what the clues are (so that players don't have to deal with lore dumps the DM put into the world and can just interact with the numbers on their character sheet if they so choose).

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An Analogy for RPG Experiences

Here's a non-rhetorical question: Within the medium of RPGs, what is the analogous counterpart of the album, film, image, app, or text? What is the product of the artistic endeavour – the mass-distributable artifact that allows someone to experience the artist's work?

If we think of an RPG like other tabletop games, the answer might be the rulebook, which theoretically contains the rules by which the author expects the game to be played. But the far more popular perspective within RPGs is that the Game Master can and will ignore and override the rulebook while devising new rules of their own, in real time. The rulebook author's ideas will only manifest if they are deliberately enacted by the GM – and so the GM is the de facto creator of every facet of their campaign, rule system included.

Rulebook authors who share this perspective will deliberately avoid stepping on the GM's toes: offering only a perfunctory regurgitation of either the trad or classic play style and perhaps some advice, examples, or templates to serve as a starting point. Key structural elements of the design, including the means of achieving any implied aesthetic goals, are left as an exercise for the reader.

Unfortunately, because the GM's rulings are improvised live, it becomes fundamentally impossible to recreate the experience of their campaign for mass distribution. Some folks might gesture toward Actual Play shows like Critical Role, Dimension 20, or The Adventure Zone as examples of mass distribution, but I am compelled to draw a distinction here: you can spectate Critical Role, but you cannot participate in Critical Role. To play Matt Mercer's campaign requires Matt Mercer – substituting any other Game Master would fundamentally alter the experience (as many fans of the show who try D&D have discovered).

You and I can talk about our respective experiences of Abbey Road, Jurassic Park, The Starry Night, The Lord of the Rings, Disco Elysium, or Feast for Odin – but not of D&D. Not unless we were in the same campaign, under the same GM. Otherwise, there's no consistent work of art that we both experienced.

Now, tragically, there are RPG systems that are complete and intentionally-designed to deliver a certain reliable experience – but even folks who "play" them will often never get to see that vision, because their GMs (having learned the mainstream tradition) will disregard the rulebook as a matter of course. I fear that it's only the fully GM-less RPGs like Fiasco, Alice Is Missing, For the Queen, and Dream Askew that are consistently played as their designers intended.

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I've been brewing some new posts involving discussions of some of the take-aways from the gaming history series that I ran – and then People Make Games just went ahead and posted this fantastic video summarizing many of the key ideas as they pertain to the modern scene. ONE COMPLAINT: At 27:11, Quinns parrots the "Gygaxian" version of the origins of D&D, which was largely a total fabrication by Gygax in order to discredit Dave Arneson during the long, bitter court battle over Arneson's royalty rights.

The "dungeon siege" rules in Chainmail essentially consist of nothing more than: if a player wants to use sappers, then the referee is supposed to keep a secret record of the tunnels on grid paper, and provide only verbal descriptions of the tunnels to that player. Tunnels of this sort are meant to burrow under outer defences and then either cave them in or re-emerge inside the defensive line, so the map was expected to consist of a handful of short, small, mostly straight-line passages. It was never really meant that the tunnels would be acting as a genuine combat environment.

Gygax claimed to the courts that, in at least one game, sapper tunnels breached the dungeons of a fortress – and the resulting mayhem was such fun that Chainmail players tried to make it happen more often. As far as I was able to dig up, there is zero evidence or corroboration that this ever happened.

What is true is that when Arneson experimented with dungeon delves as a gameplay mode in his Blackmoor game, he made use of the same general technique: he recorded a secret dungeon map on grid paper and only gave verbal descriptions of it to the players. It's plausible that he got this technique from Chainmail – it's even possible that the entire "siege tunnels breached into a dungeon" story actually happened at some point, and that it influenced Arneson somehow. But I think the far more plausible explanation is just that "drawing a secret map on grid paper" is both obvious and trivial – and that anyone seeking to do what Arneson was trying to do would have done the same.

By contrast, there is a mountain of evidence that Arneson's dungeons were largely inspired by fantasy fiction (e.g., The Shadow People by Margaret St. Clair, The Scarlet Citadel by Robert E. Howard, et cetera). He figured out how to fit them into his game largely on his own, and later Gygax helped to transform his idea into a commercial rulebook. But the way that PMG presents the story is exactly how Gygax would prefer it: with no mention made of Dave Arneson whatsoever. In my opinion, Arneson was unoriginal, dull, and also a huge, petty, asshole – but the one and only good thing he ever did for the world was to make the world's first dungeon crawling game, so I feel like we've got to at least keep the story straight in that regard.

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I can’t resist wading in here since both “defending 4E” and “dissing progress clocks” are among my personal pet topics.

Part 1: On 4E's Skill Challenge System

The basic structure of combats in D&D (and its ilk) largely amounts to battle of attrition by dice rolls: roll well and you score "hits", which inch you towards victory; roll poorly and you "miss", which inches you towards defeat. Well, strictly speaking a "miss" doesn't have any inherent effect – but since your enemies are trying to hit you in return, you will start to lose the race unless you are making constant progress.

Since the stats that are used to calculate the odds of a hit are usually static over the course of a battle, this series of dice rolls has, by default, all the thrilling strategic depth of a game of Snakes & Ladders. The monotony must be deliberately broken by the creative intervention of the players (especially through the Dungeon Master's level design), in order to create tactical opportunities that shift the flow of an ongoing battle.

One of 4E's more impressive accomplishments was making combats dynamic by default. Players manage an array of attack "powers" that each carry some unique tactical wrinkle: a temporary change in odds here, a disabling status ailment there, and so on. But the real ingenious feature is that each power, once used, goes on cooldown, and cannot be used again in the same fight. So on every turn, each player is obliged to introduce a new, different wrinkle to the fight. Dungeon Masters can still try to spice up a fight through the level design – but if they fail to do so, the system will pick up the slack.

So what happens if you just... don't do any of that?

Enter the 4E skill challenge system, which implemented the same “conflict of attrition” structure of combat onto what, in other editions of that game, would usually be handled with a single decisive roll. So, in a skill challenge, rolling well leads (by degrees) to victory, and rolling poorly leads (by degrees) to defeat – except that this time, there are no unique powers that go on cooldown, and no possibility for the DM to deploy funky terrain or weird monster powers that could shake things up. The system was, as a result, pretty uniformly tedious and disappointing.

As 4E went along, a variety of dubious solutions arose in an effort to bring skill challenges into a kind of pseudo-parity with the combat mechanics. These included having the DM prepare lists of specific power-esque effects for various skills, and/or putting skills (or certain applications of skills) on cooldown after use (in the same way as the combat powers behave). None of these methods were ever developed enough to actually correct the issue on a systemic level.

Part 2: Compare/Contrast Blades in the Dark's Progress Clock Mechanics

The biggest difference in BitD is that middling and poor rolls introduce “complications” to the scenario. These, in theory, create tactical wrinkles that can punctuate the monotony. Unfortunately, they typically don’t – mostly because there is only a very narrow range of complications that are capable of doing this, and the rules of BitD don’t provide any reliable procedures for identifying or generating complications of the correct type.

Indeed, the most obvious kinds of complications are unsuitable. Injuries, stress, heat, and incrementing separate danger countdown clocks usually won’t lead to any immediate/inherent change in the strategic situation at hand (except in the most extreme cases). When the players suffer those sorts of consequences, they tend to just ignore them: these effects are “just the price of bad rolls”, so they curse their luck but carry on grinding away at the primary goal clock.

The GM could instead introduce an obstacle that prevents players from progressing that primary clock – but doing this is tantamount to just extending the primary clock. The players will spend however many additional rolls are required to resolve the obstacle, and then go back to grinding. The same goes for consequences that affect one of the various levers of BitD’s elaborate action-roll mechanic – things like temporarily increasing or decreasing the probability, effect level, or position associated with certain actions. These will briefly force the players to recalculate which action type is optimal, and then they get right back on to grinding. Both of these methods can create a convincing illusion of dynamism, but I found that the effect was not reliable.

The only kind of complication that consistently motivates the players to vary up their actions is one that creates a new threat or opportunity that temporarily supersedes the players’ other priorities. If, for instance, their character’s lives are suddenly at stake, then they will try to split their attention between putting out the proverbial fire and carrying on with their focal grinding.

If the GM can prepare or improvise as many complications of this latter type as there are segments in the clock, then they can probably keep the players from falling into a rut – although I found that, in rare cases, even this didn’t work and at least one specialist character would be relegated to grinding while the others defended them. And even then, this all assumes that the players are actually rolling complications! High rolls in BitD don’t generate any complications at all – and a smoothly-executed score is quite devoid of drama or excitement.

Long story short: In practice, the system is basically a side-grade from 4E’s skill challenges. It’s a little bit more flexible in various ways, but complications aren’t enough to reliably create compelling strategic variation, so they’re no better at systemically fixing the monotony than any of the other methods that 4E tried.

For the record, though, BitD’s clocks are not copied or inspired from 4E’s mechanics – they come from a different lineage entirely. The idea of using a generalized progress track for all contexts is a frequently recurring design conceit in various RPGs across many different design subcultures. And in case you’re wondering: no – I have never seen it actually work.

Part 3: So What Can We Do Instead?

The most powerful and reliable answer, tested and proven in various games and already mentioned in the reblogs of this thread:

Don't use an abstract "pacing" system. For the aesthetic goals that most RPGs are chasing, counting beans doesn't add much value. By decisively resolving stakes instead of getting embroiled in conflicts of attrition, you make the game lighter, faster, and more varied without sacrificing any of the depth.

Stop generalizing. Abstraction often eliminates the unique texture of each situation, which is where most of the variety would otherwise be coming from. Instead, create a collection of bespoke subsystems that cover the common scenarios inherent to the game's aesthetic goals, so that you can give each one some specialized attention and draw out the unique qualities that make it relevant and interesting to those aesthetic goals.

This is the approach of my most favourite RPG, Apocalypse World, which boils down each subsystem into an elegant, streamlined "move". Moves in AW (and other PbtA games, by extension) tend to resolve the critical stakes of their respective situations in a single dice roll. You thus can't ever get stuck "grinding" in AW – every move results in definitive changes to the fictional strategic situation.

3E D&D's skill descriptions function in the same way, albeit in my opinion they are nowhere near as elegant, consistent, relevant, or fun as AW's moves. I actually think that the sheer awkwardness of how 3E handled those skill subsystems is part of why 4E moved away from the idea – but in retrospect, what was needed was to refine them, not an abandon them.

Which is why I find it almost painful that 4E actually did recreate the same idea in another form. 4E's "magic rituals" and "martial practices" are the exact same style of self-contained situational subsystems – and they're a clear improvement, even, being both neatly standardized and fairly well integrated into the other elements of the system. Unfortunately, 4E also treats them like completely optional side-content and constantly forgets that they exist at all. The "martial practices" in particular were treated like a total afterthought – they weren't introduced until fairly late in 4E's run and they were never given any proper development afterward. Instead, as 4E went along, the designers seemingly just doubled down on trying to fix the skill challenges.

Also, I feel obliged to say that while it's deeply buried and relegated to "side content" status in much the same way, even 5E has an obscure re-implementation of 3E-styled skill-moves. They're hidden in The Xanathar's Guide to Everything sourcebook as Tool Proficiencies and Downtime Activities sections. If I'm not mistaken, the latter mechanics have even since been incorporated into the standard rules for 2024, but I honestly can't be bothered to waste any more of my time reading D&D rulebooks.

One last thought: while Apocalypse World certainly has some of the best designed moves (i.e., subsystems) of any RPG, it also triumphs over D&D in one other critical regard: combat is not treated as a special exception. It is given the same treatment as every other subsystem, i.e., highlighting the key dramatic stakes while keeping it fast, light, and decisive.

In retrospect skill challenges were kind of the worst part of D&D 4e and it's actually kind of a blessing that they sucked.

Like I'm not fundamentally opposed to the idea of out-of-combat minigames, but the model of "players narrate things their characters do and roll checks that make an abstract meter go up and once the meter fills they win" isn't actually the way to make out-of-combat activities feel engaging. And it's ironic that the devs of 4e doubled down on needing to have skill challenges be the framework under which out-of-combat activities worked in 4e, because D&D 4e had in its very first Player's Handbook a perfectly serviceable set of skills with codified uses and interactions that in and of themselves provided enough of a toolkit for the DM to build interesting challenges that allowed for expressions of system mastery using those tools. They could've simply done more with them.

Anyway I like it when a game tells me "with an Athletics check of this DC your character jumps THIS MANY feet" because then it makes me go "how do I optimize my character for jumping"

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Spewage Overflow: History Research

Holy shit, this has been a pretty wild ride. Thank you to everybody who has been liking and reblogging my posts for the last [checks watch] three months? And I guess a big "you're welcome" to @aelia-aelia who requested that I do this. I am hereby announcing that SpewagePipe's "history blog" era is at an end (for now).

It has been a lot of fun – honestly I'm even a little disappointed that I never ended up diving into the history of, like, the different flavours of playing card games or some of the old, big-name, mainstream tabletop games like Stratego and Battleship and whatnot. Those are all crazy deep veins of board game lore, if you wanna go look for yourself. But! It has also been kind of exhausting, which is why I'm gonna stop for a while now. The Index that I wrote says that I'm supposed to go on to talk about how RPGs have developed since D&D – which is fascinating stuff as well, and I definitely still want to write that material – but it's a whole different beast, and after three straight months of the this I definitely need a change of pace.

And over the last three months, there has been all manner of stuff that I wanna be talking about instead, but that I couldn't find time for amid all the research and the drafting and redrafting for these history articles! I have been busy developing two new RPGs (including the one I codenamed "Firmament" and one other that isn't quite ready for the public eye just yet). Also, I wanna finally get back to talking about the game design theory that this history has been providing context for.

Anyways, thanks again to everybody who has been reading along! My asks remain open if anyone has any burning, unanswered questions.

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The Evolution of RPGs: Dungeons & Dragons (OD&D)

Perhaps the most surprising fact I have learned over the course of this project is that Gary Gygax was widely considered "the rules guy" among the wargaming clubs of Minnesota and Wisconsin around 1970. In this (one and only) sense, he was quite progressive: pushing for miniatures wargames to exit their folk/oral tradition and join the modern world of recording and publishing. So when Gygax read Blackmoor's "battle reports" in one of the wargaming zines, he asked Dave Arneson to visit him and demonstrate the game – whereupon he immediately suggested they collaborate to create the manuscript that would eventually become Dungeons & Dragons. But I found this story surprising because, in reading through the original 1974 version of D&D, I can find no trace of this supposed "rules guy". Just like the Chainmail rules before them, OD&D's rules are written with a miniatures wargamer audience in mind – which is to say, they assume that the reader is used to designing a new system, from scratch, every time they decide to play a new scenario. OD&D is completely unusable unless the reader is prepared to personally contribute an enormous amount of potentially game-breaking design choices. So to compare OD&D to, say, any of Avalon Hill's board games is like comparing a set of guitar strings to a music album. Even with regards to what is actually provided in OD&D, the quality is abysmal. The core concept of the game is so poorly explained that it would be hard for a complete neophyte to tell how any of the material is meant to be used, and that material is frequently unintelligible due to the ambiguities and obtuse phrasing. It is little wonder that such an amateurish-looking effort was rejected by Guidon Games, Avalon Hill, and indeed every other publisher Gygax sought out. Instead, with the help of Don Kaye, he co-founded Tactical Studies Rules so as to publish D&D independently. The final iteration of the rules (now referred to as the "white box" version) was rushed to production, without Dave Arneson's approval, in order to have it ready for GenCon – the humble first step in Gygax's years-long effort to cut Arneson out altogether.

And that, my friends, is the ignoble story of how the first commercially-published role-playing game came to be.

Click here for the index of my Evolution of RPGs posts.

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The Evolution of RPGs: Blackmoor

Dave Arneson was a miniatures wargamer who did not like having his authority challenged. He preferred to referee rather than compete, but he didn't like being held accountable to a system of rules, nor having to answer for the historical realism of his rulings. In 1971, he started a fantasy wargame campaign, Blackmoor, that could satisfy his needs. Blackmoor's only definite rules were his own caprices, and any inconsistencies could be excused as easily as "a wizard did it". He borrowed concepts and mechanics ad hoc from the likes of Braunstein, Chainmail and Outdoor Survival, and certain modes of play would sometimes stick around for a while, but Blackmoor was chiefly whatever Arneson wanted it to be on any given week.

Most often, Blackmoor was structured like an MMO in tabletop form: a persistent, open-world, sandbox game where players could drop in and out at any time. The most common mode of play consisted of typical wargame battles: the aristocratic "heroes" (and their NPC soldiers) defending Blackmoor Barony against the invading forces of the often-monstrous "baddies". But, like Braunstein, players were given all manner of roles on both sides of the conflict, including merchants, thieves, wizards, vampires, and more. Arneson would inject villainous schemes drawn from his favourite fantasy fiction, but there was no particular "story" to Blackmoor and the characters were little more than avatars for their players, motivated entirely by pragmatic efforts to enrich and empower themselves.

Expanding upon the morale advancement mechanics from his Napoleonic Simulation Campaign, Arneson tracked all manner of ratings and statistics that a character could improve in Blackmoor – including, for instance, martial prowess, or the ability to cast magical spells. We therefore have Blackmoor's experience level systems to thank for the emergence of things like level-grinding and Skinner-Box gameplay.

The far more positive aspect of Arneson's legacy is the invention of dungeon crawling. Conceived as little more than a fanciful diversion, Arneson introduced a set of subterranean labyrinths beneath the baron's castle filled with monsters and treasures from the mythical underworld, and sent his players down to chart it.

The small physical space and sparse contents of dungeon rooms constrained the array of meaningful actions that a player might perform at any given time. Arneson found, therefore, that he could better predict and prepare for what would happen, allowing him to design dungeon spaces with intention and purpose – while also making his arbitration more consistent during play. Players, meanwhile, were met with reliably mysterious and thrilling situations that simultaneously featured clearer goals, and clearer actions by which those goals could be achieved, than the wide-open sandbox above. Restricting the possibilities had paradoxically enhanced player agency, increasing their engagement and satisfaction.

Arneson's players so much preferred dungeon crawling that they completely lost interest in their other objectives. Eventually, the first Blackmoor campaign concluded when the "baddies" simply conquered the barony while the heroes were busy raiding the dungeon. In turned out that, with the dungeon, Arneson had accidentally created a compelling, focused, coherent mode of play – a well-designed game – and there was nothing in the rest of his meandering, unruly, fantasy world that could possibly compete.

Click here for the index of my Evolution of RPGs posts.

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The Evolution of RPGs: The Napoleonic Simulation Campaign

In 1969, Dave Arneson launched the Napoleonics Simulation Campaign, a one-time play-by-mail mega-game meant to simulate all of the political, economic, and military dimensions of the Napoleonic Wars. It was, by my reckoning, the logical conclusion of the implicit principles of the folk/oral tradition of miniatures-wargame design culture: a Frankenstein's Monster of bespoke rules assembled without regard for whether they form a coherent or functional whole. The need for both land and sea battles obliged Arneson to employ multiple sets of incompatible mechanics (all adaptations produced among the members of his own gaming circle). To track the overall state of the wars across those battles, he thoughtlessly appropriated the mechanics of a Diplomacy variant – despite the design of Diplomacy being completely at odds with his other rules. Arneson appointed a "Personality Coordinator" to keep track of which military and political figures were being governed by which players, despite that being seemingly irrelevant to the game state. He also implemented an "experience" mechanic, whereby miniatures that survived multiple engagements would receive permanent upgrades to their "morale" rating – provided, that is, that the controlling player submitted written, in-character "battle reports" to Arneson, highlighting the unit's involvement in those battles. The idea that veteran units should have superior morale stats compared to fresh conscripts was not new, but Arneson's game was the first in which individual units could evolve from one battle to the next. He would later adapt that concept into the "experience points" and "character level" mechanics that are now commonplace in RPGs. This hodgepodge of untested subsystems was naturally rife with inconsistencies, which were smoothed over by the capricious rulings of its unchecked referee – Arneson himself – a fact that eventually led several of his players to mutiny and quit. For those that stuck around, the campaign's pace was glacial: plagued by postage delays, the endless drafting of letters and reports, and the fact that every round of the strategic-level game involved dozens of discrete battles – every single one of which required Arneson to arrange an in-person session between players who, in some cases, lived in different cities. Over the course of nearly four real-life years of play, they only managed to resolve three years worth of simulated history before the campaign finally collapsed due to lack of interest.

Click here for the index of my Evolution of RPGs posts.

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The Evolution of RPGs: Outdoor Survival

One of Avalon Hill's early distributors for Tactics was a publisher of military textbooks named Stackpole Books. By the 1960s, both Stackpole and Avalon were aiming to dabble in non-military topics in order to broaden their audience. When the prolific board-wargame designer Jim Dunnigan boasted that he could design a simulation of any topic, Avalon Hill's VP challenged him to make a game about "getting lost". The result was 1972's Outdoor Survival – which Stackpole Books was happy to distribute alongside books about camping, fishing, and the like. Just like a wargame, Outdoor Survival tracks the player's spatial position, movement, health status, and logistical supplies – but in place of the dice rolls for attacking a target, the dice rolls in Outdoor Survival determine matters like orienteering and encounters with wildlife. These dice rolls would eventually become the inspiration for common RPG tropes like "wandering monsters" and "random encounters", since the likes of Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax adopted Outdoor Survival's rules and game board into their early RPG campaigns.

Click here for the index of my Evolution of RPGs posts.

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Evolution of RPGs: Chainmail and Tractics

One of the short-lived Avalon Hill competitors that I alluded to last time was Guidon Games, who in 1971 published a series of rulebooks called Wargaming with Miniatures. These were designed and written in the tradition of the miniatures wargaming clubs – which is to say that they were by no means complete or playable. It was an expectation that the audience for such rules was interested in simulating some particular scenario, whether from history or their imagination – and so the rules sought only to provide a platform for those fellow designers to complete their own creations. These were less Half-Life 2 and more Garry's Mod. The series included rulesets like Chainmail, designed by Jeff Perren and Gary Gygax, which covered medieval battles and included an ill-received supplement for battles involving fantastical monsters. Chainmail's fantasy rules would nevertheless go on to feature in the first fantasy RPGs. The series also included Tractics (a portmanteau of "tracks" and "tactics"), designed by Leon Tucker, Mike Reese, and Gary Gygax, a multi-part ruleset for battles set in the Second World War. Tucker, a statistician by education, was frustrated by the inability of six-sided dice to express finely-granular statistical probabilities, and so he designed Tractics around the use of twenty-sided dice. Dice like this were vanishingly rare at the time (and so most players would be forced to resort to drawing numbered lots from a bag), but Tractics started a lasting trend of niche hobby games that employ them, which eventually drove their wider availability.

Click here for the index of my Evolution of RPGs posts.

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The Evolution of RPGs: Tactics

In 1954, Charles S. Roberts founded The Avalon Game Company, (later redubbed "Avalon Hill") in order to publish his recently invented board game: Tactics, a game that was clearly remixing design elements from various games of the now centuries-old German tradition. Tactics is of no particular note to RPGs in terms of its design, but does represent a critical element of the cultural surroundings. It was the first ever commercially published board wargame in American history, and, being sold as a self-contained and complete product, it possessed strict and standardized rules (unlike the ad hoc rules typical of its contemporaries in the miniatures wargaming hobby). Avalon Hill's many subsequent games and its in-house magazine would come to set the gold standard for wargames everywhere. Their dominating presence galvanized the miniatures wargamers into forming their own competing publishers, and therefore into codifying their smattered folk rules and common practices into more discrete, definite game titles.

Click here for the index of my Evolution of RPGs posts.

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The Evolution of RPGs: Little Wars

Ever since toy soldiers have been widely available, a common way of playing with them is to line them up and fire toy projectiles at them. In 1913, science fiction novelist H. G. Wells published Little Wars, a codified set of rules for a wargame based on this toy-soldier-projectile concept. Wells' rules were highly anachronistic in terms of simulation, and were chiefly concerned with keeping the game light and easy for its presumed target audience of young children. Though Little Wars was not the first set of rules for a toy-soldier-projectile wargame, it was the seed from which decades of similar wargames emerged. This lineage of wargames bears significance to the later design culture of RPGs in only one key respect: the wide use of "folk" and DIY rules. The wargamers of this niche did not really play any one consistent or standardized "game" (except, perhaps, in tournament contexts). Rather, they developed a shared pool of common practices and rule-sets from which they would construct new games on an ad-hoc basis. Especially through the 1950's and 60's, it would not have been terribly unusual for a given wargamer club to locally design a completely unique game for every new scenario they wished to play. Wargamers meeting new opponents from outside their local circle might need to do some negotiation to settle on a balanced design before playing. Occasionally, popular clusters of rules would see publication in the enthusiast zines (the typical pre-internet method for communication between isolated gaming groups), and it's through those that we can trace their evolution back to Little Wars – but it's better to understand them as a continuous, collective trend, rather than as a succession of discrete titles.

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The Evolution of RPGs: Diplomacy

The essential aesthetic premise of Diplomacy is that a competitive game is exciting when it's not clear who is going to win, when the winning position could be overturned at any moment and everyone is striving for victory right up through the final turn. The essential dynamic premise of Diplomacy is that you can elegantly achieve this state of uncertainty by allowing (and incentivizing) multiple losing players to pool their resources in order to tear down the leading player. The more it seems like any one player is destined to win, the more their enemies unite against them – an organic negative feedback loop that sees the "apparent leading player" constantly changing. Designer Allan B. Calhamer drew thematic inspiration from the Congress of Vienna, where the idea of an international "balance of power" reflected his gaming experiences with Hearts. Calhamer's friends played with a house rule that losing players would be declared victorious if they could force a tie between the leading players (so that "kingmakers" are incentivized to remain engaged and aggressive, and leading players cannot ignore them). Calhamer combined these inspirations with a set of simple, practical, and abstract mechanics that are meant to reduce or eliminate any gameable advantage except those derived from the inter-player dynamics: coalitions, deceptions, and diplomacy. The result, published in 1959, is something that feels downright primordial – a distillation of the social aspects of competitive gaming that would go on to influence (directly or indirectly) the design virtually every strategy game that has been designed since.

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The Evolution of RPGs: Careers

When the Parker Brothers sought to capitalize on the phenomenal popularity of The Landlord's Game, they specifically chose to publish a bootleg version of the game that had been cleansed of the undesirable "politics" inherent in the original version. As a result, a game that was designed to directly criticize unregulated capitalism was first transformed into a game about brutal capitalist competition (Monopoly), then became the best-selling commercial board game of all time, and then inspired a wave of games critically responding to those themes of unregulated capitalism. These include such stand-outs as Anti-Monopoly, Class Struggle, and today's game: Careers. There actually isn't a great deal to say about Careers that I didn't cover in On the Origin of RPGs, Part 2, except perhaps for the fact that the board, in lieu of purchasable property, features short tracks that detour off of the main loop, "careers", each with its own unique spaces and effects. Other than the influence that it had on David Wesely's ideas about varied and secret objectives, however, Careers has not been a particularly historically significant board game in its own right.

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The Evolution of RPGs: The Landlord's Game

The Landlord's Game was invented in 1902 by Georgist activist Elizabeth "Lizzie" Magie, in an effort to educate the public about how the seemingly-obtuse Georgist land-tax would cure the problems of capitalism. Magie, despite having no noteworthy background in gaming, turned out to be a game design prodigy. She single-handedly innovated multiple long-standing design elements and created the single most influential commercial board game of all time.

The Landlord’s Game appears, at first, to be structured like a simple race game in the vein of Pachisi or Goose, but one of Magie's most influential innovations was the idea of a looping circuit: Upon reaching the end of the track, players simply start a new lap. Victory is decided on the basis of the play-money that is lost and gained as the players land on the various spaces. The original rules prescribe five laps, but the game can be shortened or lengthened to taste.

Race games are already tedious, so repeatedly looping the track might have been downright Sisyphean – except that Magie's board is highly dynamic. Another influential element of her design was a space where players draw a random event card from a deck, such that the space’s effect is always unique. But almost all of the track spaces in The Landlord's Game are subject to some change: players can buy a "title deed" for most spaces that then forces any subsequent players who land there to pay "rent" to the owner.

Players earn a modest "wage" for each lap they complete – but not enough to keep pace with the escalating taxes, fees, and rents. When you can't pay, you start losing turns locked in the "Poor House", which can see you functionally eliminated from the game. To win, you must charge more rent than your opponents, so that they end up in poverty instead. As the rulebook notes, this system (modelled after real-life capitalism) will eventually drive all but one player to ruin.

But players can vote at any time to adopt the Georgist "Single Tax" policy, which means that rents are paid to a new “Public Treasury” instead of to the owners of title deeds. At the same time, all of the spaces that charge taxes or fees become free of charge (either immediately or gradually as the public treasury grows). Portions of the public treasury are used to increase the players’ wages, and whenever a player would otherwise be sent to the “Poor House”, they instead move to the nearest public sector workplace (where they earn additional wages).

The overall effect of the Single Tax mode is that poverty is eliminated, and it is no longer possible to brutally extort one’s opponents. The game shifts into a much friendlier – and tighter – race to see who can make the most wealth, rather than who can cause the most harm. Unfortunately, the Single Tax mode has not survived into the modern era: as if to prove the inherent cruelty of real-life capitalism, the Parker Brothers company first refused to publish The Landlord's Game, and then later stole the design. They stripped Magie of her inventor's credit, erased all traces of Georgism from the game, and published it under the now much-more-widely known brand Monopoly.

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The Evolution of RPGs: The Checkered Game of Life

The Checkered Game of Life, the first board game ever devised by mogul-to-be Milton Bradley, was invented in 1860 as an improvement over The Mansion of Happiness (which at the time was one of the only other mass-produced board games available in America). As the rules explain, life is a combination of chance and judgment, and so whereas The Mansion of Happiness is a game of pure chance played on a linear track, Life is instead played on a grid. The spin of a six-sided teetotum restricts the player's movement to either the vertical, horizontal, or diagonal (signifying the way that opportunities are unpredictable), but the ultimate choice of which space to land upon is up to the player (signifying their own agency). The object of the game, rather than to reach the end of a track, is to earn 100 points by visiting certain point-yielding spaces on the board. The spaces, and their names, also reflect a shift in values: players are rewarded for pursuing public office, industry, education, and personal happiness, rather than only for observing puritanical discipline.

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