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Post by Piper on Sept 20, 2020 7:53:30 GMT -6
In a recent streaming interview* Tunnels & Trolls (T&T) author Ken St. Andre (KSA) made an interesting statement. Ken claimed T&T was the first RPG as opposed to OD&D. I won't profess to know KSA well, but I do know from the few times we've spoken he has a lively and at times irreverent sense of humor. So, at first blush I considered this a minor gigging, all in good fun, at the elephant in the room that is D&D.
He did, however, go on to say that because D&D was basically a wargame with RPG trappings it really wasn't an RPG. This is a claim some of have made about other TSR games, e.g. Boot Hill, so it seems this observation is not entirely out of left field. From my POV what seems to draw many old-school players to D&D as opposed to T&T is its more wargame-y elements (e.g. movement rates in inches, movement based upon armor type, etc.).
I don't, however, agree with KSA's assessment, though I did get a bit of a chuckle from it. I see the Blackmoor campaign and its offspring OD&D as FRPGs by any reasonable definition of the term. I feel Boot Hill, as long as we're on the subject, is an RPG as well.
At any rate? What do you guys think? Do its strong wargame elements make OD&D more of a proto-RPG? I'm especially interested in what those of you who believe Chainmail was indeed intended to be used to play OD&D (in spite of both co-authors statements to the contrary).
----- *click [ here] to see it on YouTube |
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Post by derv on Sept 20, 2020 8:12:51 GMT -6
Depends on what you mean by roleplay.
It seems to me that many who play T&T adopt more of a story game approach to play. Perhaps a more accurate claim might be that T&T was the first in that sense.
Otherwise, totally unfounded claim. Roleplaying elements were already being applied to wargames prior to Blackmoor. The term RPG was adopted at random to describe D&D specifically. Not really as a precise label for what it does or is.
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Post by increment on Sept 20, 2020 9:20:13 GMT -6
At the end of the day, I came around to the view that the distinction between published rules and play in campaigns is what makes this such a hard question to answer. Lots of people did play D&D as a wargame, after it came out. Other people used D&D to play roles, but of course, people had used wargame systems to play roles before D&D came out, too. It wasn't until the term RPG was adopted -- as derv said, at random -- that people started fretting over what rules would best guide play towards role playing rather than wargaming. So if you're searching for firsts through the lens of published systems, and you want to find one that literally tells you to role play, you're necessarily going to pick one that came out after D&D - Ed Simbalist made arguments of this form back in the day. But if you want to identify the first published system that some group of people nominally used while role playing, there are no shortage before D&D to choose from. What the rulebooks say is too decoupled from what people do when they play for this ever to admit of some tidy answer.
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Post by captainjapan on Sept 20, 2020 12:45:28 GMT -6
Ken St. Andre is full of it. Did he never play Diplomacy?. That's as much a role-playing game as it is a wargame.
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Post by robertsconley on Sept 20, 2020 13:23:02 GMT -6
At any rate? What do you guys think? Do its strong wargame elements make OD&D more of a proto-RPG? I'm especially interested in what those of you who believe Chainmail was indeed intended to be used to play OD&D (in spite of both co-authors statements to the contrary). Greyhawk was a campaign centered around exploring the levels underneath Castle Greyhawk. OD&D were the rules developed from that campaign. The fact there are wargaming elements in OD&D represent the fact that Greyhawk was not the first or only campaign to solely focus on players playing individual characters. Gygax wrote for his audience, the wargamers of the early 70s. Because of these other campaign, like Blackmoor, he made sure that those elements were included alongside what he did in his campaign. Greyhawk was definitely not a wargaming campaign. With all due respect to Ken St. Andre, he doesn't know what he was talking about. |
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Post by asaki on Sept 20, 2020 15:41:02 GMT -6
I don't remember any rules in the game that specifically pointed at role playing, I'll have to give the 1st Edition a closer look. I think I only briefly skimmed through it/looked at the pictures.
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Post by hamurai on Sept 20, 2020 21:52:14 GMT -6
Maybe he's just hinting at the fact that the OD&D cover says "Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames", where T&T might have been advertised as a role-playing game from the beginning. Not sure about that, though. The cover of T&T 1st edition doesn't say so.
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Post by Zenopus on Sept 20, 2020 23:13:25 GMT -6
Men & Magic: (pages are from 1st print)
"Before they begin, players must decide what role they will play in the campaign, human or otherwise, fighter, cleric, or magic-user" (pg 6)
"Before the game begins it is not only necessary to select a role..." (pg 9)
"Prior to the character selection by players it is necessary for the referee to roll three six-sided dice in order to rate each as to various abilities, and thus
aid them in selecting a role" (pg 10)
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Post by Piper on Sept 20, 2020 23:14:40 GMT -6
Maybe he's just hinting at the fact that the OD&D cover says "Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames", where T&T might have been advertised as a role-playing game from the beginning. Not sure about that, though. The cover of T&T 1st edition doesn't say so. That's pretty likely. I'm thinking he was merely having a bit of fun with fans of D&D and not seriously making a claim. I thought it a worthy topic for discussion and I've really enjoyed the comments here. |
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Post by jeffb on Sept 21, 2020 8:13:17 GMT -6
Ken likes to push buttons when it comes to old guard D&D. And the more you react to it, the more Ken will push your buttons. It's quite obvious how dismissive Gary & Tim were of T&T , so I kind of don't blame him- he was very gracious in those early editions in thanking Gary, etc.
And some still are dismissive- Tim made a comment about T&T and the "character" (not RPG character) of people* involved with it a week or so ago on "Curmudgeon"- every time T&T comes up, Tim pretty much dismisses the game out of hand.
That said- Ken's approach/reaction was very different. And I can kind of see what he is saying-especially if you go from a 1975 perspective having just seen the LBBs and given them a read through. T&T was the same idea of play based on even greater abstraction, instead focused on the scene or story in a big picture format (no movement rates, no initiative and turns broken down to multiple "moves"), with a family boardgamer's perspective. T&T was more gamey and less "serious business". Even to this day D&D still breaks down to a tactical wargame and the whole rule-set is built around this aspect. T&T plays more like the S&S comics Ken was so fond of.
I find all the reactionary pieces - T&T, TPC/RQ, Warlock, fascinating- actually more interesting these days than D&D's pre- history/construction and which guy did what. I know that we deviated heavily with OD&D from the "midwest norms" though we didn't think anything of it or were even aware, until AD&D arrived and Gary started talking about uniformity. I often wonder had we been able to find a copy of T&T or TPC/RQ first, how different things might have been.
* I can only guess he was talking about Crompton or Danforth.
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Post by Finarvyn on Sept 21, 2020 12:00:07 GMT -6
A clever story, but I have a hard time believing that 40 years later we can change the narrative to that extent. Even if some folks were wargaming with OD&D, I believe that for most of us the OD&D rules were a quantum leap into something new and everyone at the time knew it. Whether the term "role playing" had been invented or not is unimportant because it was role playing back then and not wargaming. KSA has stated on many occasions that he wrote T&T to improve on what he felt were problems with OD&D's design and I have never seen any indication that T&T created a new form of anything. From the onset it was more of a D&D variant than a new form of entertainment.
Don't get me wrong, KSA had a huge contribution to the field of role playing. He didn't invent it, however, any more than I did by my making up house rules for my home campaign. I agree with Jeffb that this was probably his way to pull somebody's chain. He likes to do that! Now, on the other hand, if he wanted to make claims about his pre-OD&D Amber play-by-mail campaign and say that he invented role playing through that he might have a better case, as OD&D hadn't been printed yet. (Even then, "invent" is tricky as Arneson and Wesely were doing this stuff even before KSA did his Amber games.)
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Post by asaki on Sept 21, 2020 14:18:08 GMT -6
...I have never seen any indication that T&T created a new form of anything. Idunno man, the solo adventures definitely had a huge impact  One can argue that Choose-Your-Own-Adventure technically may have been invented first, but games like Fighting Fantasy are clearly derived from T&T. |
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skars
Level 6 Magician
Posts: 407
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Post by skars on Oct 3, 2020 12:03:30 GMT -6
...I have never seen any indication that T&T created a new form of anything. Idunno man, the solo adventures definitely had a huge impact One can argue that Choose-Your-Own-Adventure technically may have been invented first, but games like Fighting Fantasy are clearly derived from T&T. ...and so many PC games have used a variation of T&T simple CR/MR and save mechanics. I think Ken is just pushing buttons like many of stated but T&T certainly sits on the shelf as one of the first. For our group it was the game you played when other gamers werent around. Additionally, the idea of a "campaign game" from wargaming is ultimately what helped forge RPGs as we know them today. Clearly there was an influence on OD&D and vice versa as wargames have taken on more and more narrative feel as well. |
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Post by asaki on Oct 3, 2020 16:53:06 GMT -6
...and so many PC games have used a variation of T&T simple CR/MR and save mechanics. Yeah, I've heard Ultima was inspired by T&T...I don't really see it, but I'll take their word for it. And, in turn, so many games were inspired by Ultima, especially JRPGs. And, of course, Ken worked on Wasteland |
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skars
Level 6 Magician
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Post by skars on Oct 8, 2020 0:10:36 GMT -6
...and so many PC games have used a variation of T&T simple CR/MR and save mechanics. Yeah, I've heard Ultima was inspired by T&T...I don't really see it, but I'll take their word for it. And, in turn, so many games were inspired by Ultima, especially JRPGs. And, of course, Ken worked on Wasteland Totally. Take roguelike games as another example of how a simple mechanic or style of adapting a ruleset to PC games can change an industry for many years to come. Its not directly all Michael Toy, but he helped write rogue, which took influences from other games like od&d |
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tec97
Level 4 Theurgist
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Post by tec97 on Oct 13, 2020 9:04:12 GMT -6
A clever story, but I have a hard time believing that 40 years later we can change the narrative to that extent. Oh come on Marv - surely you’ve heard of ‘alternative facts’? |
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One can argue that Choose-Your-Own-Adventure technically may have been invented first, but games like Fighting Fantasy are clearly derived from T&T.
