It's a shame that D&D is held up as the sole example of tabletop RPGs, because I think there's so little roleplaying in most D&D sessions that it's barely recognizable as a "roleplaying" game. It's all been shoved out to make room for the "hardcore" gamers who only care about stats and damage rolls. Granted, that's not exactly what the article was about, but that's what most of the comments seem to be about, so...
WARNING: LONG POST AHEAD. PLEASE DON'T SAY "TL;DR" OR YOU MIGHT HURT MY PWECIOUS WIDDLE FEEWINGS.
Erik Robson said:
It's an entirely worthwhile question -- why didn't collaborative interactive fiction ("role-playing games") appear anywhere in documented human history until 1974 A.D.?
Saying that "roleplaying games" didn't come along until 1974 is misleading. Yes, tabletop, pen & paper, dice based combat RPGs didn't come along until the seventies, but role-playing has existed ever since kids started dressing up as their favorite fictional characters, and running around yelling "Bang bang, you're dead!"
Now, I was born in 1986, so I wasn't around to witness the birth of D&D, but I have a sneaking suspicion that what really gave rise to dice-based combat was lawyering. Kids playing cowboys & indians on wooden horses in their backyards would get into arguments that went something like this:
"Bang bang! You're dead!"
"No I'm not! You missed!"
"No I didn't!"
"Did too! I hid from it!"
"You can't do that!"
"Already did!"
Then one of the other kids would suggest tossing a coin to see who was right, and then someone decided to put rules on how many coins would be tossed and handicaps and so on, and before long, someone created dice-based combat. This happened to be released just as LotR mania was hitting another crescendo, so the pre-packaged story was heavily influenced by "high fantasy."
This caught on because of the appeal of dice-based combat to kids who couldn't agree whether a given finger-shot had hit or not, but also because of the freedom of making your own character, thereby author-inserting yourself into the world of LotR or whatever the latest craze was.
From the stories some veteran gamer friends of mine told me, it was designed to be all about the combat, but it struck a chord with a different, unexpected demographic. This crowd could best be described as "casual artists," people who wanted to be authors but didn't have the energy to finish entire books on their own, so they collaborated on organically grown storylines. This turned RPGs from "An adventure in coming up with flimsy pseudo-stories to make an excuse to string together a series of repetitive turn-based dice combat" into an interactive storytelling medium.
Of course, most of this transferred into other tabletop RPG books written by different people, small independent books. This was because D&D, due to it being the biggest and most popular tabletop RPG, attracted the self-styled "hardcore" gamers who didn't give two shits about roleplaying, and still only cared about stat-building and wiping the floor with opponents in combat, as well as looking down their noses at anyone who had the almighty nerve to play for *gasp* fun. These were the precursors to the "Teh Hardcorez" video gamers of today, who pat themselves on the back for thinking that saying "Nintendo sold out to the casual gamer" is a valid criticism of the Wii. That was no problem, though, since there were still plenty of smaller games floating around that got ignored by the Hardcore gamers because they weren't popular or "serious" enough for them, much like today.
Then, someone computerized RPGs. But they weren't roleplaying games, they were game engines that replicated the dice combat and stat-building. So, in other words, CRPGs completely departed from what made RPGs so great (organic story growth, creating your own characters) and only preserved what many of us view as "necessary evils" (level grinding, stat-crunching). I wouldn't have nearly as big a problem with this if they wouldn't CALL themselves "RPGs" and just called themselves "Stat Adventure Games" (SAGs?) or something like that.
Tangential Rant: More recently, some CRPG designers have been trying to cater to the real roleplaying crowd by offering a "moral choice system" and trumpeting about how you get to build your own character and choose their allegiances. But thanks to hardware limitations, what this almost always comes down to is just making the same two or three choices over and over again, it's just a glorified dialogue tree. This patronizing faux-nonlinearity is just plain insulting to those of us who like REAL roleplaying. As it stands, we don't have the hardware capability to create a decent artificial GM, and until we do, I'd rather we not try and throw up a cheap substitute.
This, more than anything else, is the reason that I enjoy "J" RPGs: Because "J-RPGs," for the most part, don't put on feeble pretensions to being anything other than SAGs. I either want RPGs or SAGs, I don't want an SAG trying to pretend to be an RPG.
(sorry about that tangential paragraph, but given that Yahtzee just did another JRPG-flame for this week, I'm foreseeing a lot more of the tired "WRPGs vs. JRPGs" arguments and I wanted to stick my opinion on that in here somewhere ^_^
. Anyway, I'd like to see an article about THAT difference between CRPGs and real RPGs.
cessarano said:
Of course, back then, geeks and nerds read a lot more, and a lot of the geek favorites weren't pulpy Warcraft, Buffy or Halo novels. They were real genuine works that tried to convey true meaning and depth. The noir magazine writings of H.P.Lovecraft and others also contributed. Basically, people were well-read, and it transferred.
I don't think that's the problem. I think the problem is that a bunch of people nowadays have
started their gaming careers on WoW and Everquest, so when they start playing D&D, they apply an MMORPG mindset to the gameplay. D&D isn't any MORE influenced by pop culture now than it was then.
Me, I started checking D&D because I loved the movie
E. T. so much when I was a kid, and was curious about what the older kids were talking about, and that was my gateway into real roleplaying games. I never really cared for D&D, though, because to me it seemed more about stats than telling a story, and it was the smaller, looser RPG books that really opened my eyes.
To get back to the article for one brief moment, I like the analogy of Aeschylus, not just because of the drama analogy, but because of the notion of "subtle history," and how the instigators of real change often go unrecognized.
