Snippitts of Illusions

That's what tabletop roleplaying games should be. It's amazing to me that we even need to use that term: tabletop. Video games have become so pervasive, and rpg video games so popular that we now need a qualifier when throwing the term rpg out. Or people might misunderstand. 

Of course D&D is the grand-daddy of them all. Though many people who've never played have a huge misconception of what it is. It's been through many, many incarnations. The original publication, which came out in 74' came in three books in a small box and left a lot of stuff up to the players. The game itself comes from table top war-gaming. It was, and still is a fringe group, back in the 60's guys (as it was predominantly a male activity) would get together in dorm room basements and their own home basements and reenact battles from history. Some preferred Napoleonic, while others preferred antiquity, still others preferred the middle ages and it was a variant set in this time period that really got things going. Somebody grabbed onto the idea of coming up for some alternate rules for wizards. The first set of rules that included fantasy as part of the rules was Chainmail, published by Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren under the company TSR. 

The man that would eventually invent Dungeons and Dragons, Dave Arneson, eventually took this fantasy idea of warfare and stripped it down so instead of controlling entire armies, players would control a single unit, and one player would act as an arbiter and control more generic units. After showing the idea to Gygax (who apparently loved it) the two developed it into the game we now know as D&D, 

D&D inspired many, many, many clones. Some were direct clones, like Tunnels and Trolls. Others not so much, like Traveller a game set in space and was the first science fiction rpg. One really blew the doors off the way RPG's could be played, Call of Cthulhu, had the players protraying normal people getting caught up in the horror that was the Cthulhu Mythos. The late 70's and early 80's saw a boom in rpgs. There were a ton published during this time period. A lot of them seemingly out of peoples basements. I have a bunch of small press stuff. None of it's valuable, so no, I'm not sitting on a treasure trove. Yet despite all of these clones, send ups and games inspired from Dungeons & Dragons, it remained by far the most popular game of it's type. Until the 90's. 

Now some say that the World of Darkness, or Vampire: the Masquerade as it were was more popular than D&D during the mid to late 90's, and maybe it was, but I dunno. It certainly was popular, but I don't think it was more popular than D&D. It focused more on Roleplaying, stripping away the need for combat or exploration and settling on a much more political bent. It was pretty big by the time I graduated high-school, though for me D&D was still the go to game. All that being said the original company that published D&D, TSR, went bankrupt and it's properties were bought by Wizards of the Coast, the folks that publish Magic: The Gathering. They're still the folks publishing D&D. 

Now my preferred version of D&D isn't D&D at all, it's actually Pathfinder, which takes a rules set that was released for public consumption under what is called the Open Gaming Licence, which was an inspired move by Ryan Dancy, one of the developers for the 3rd (or 6th if you want to get technical) edition of the D&D. It allowed other people to take the rules and build off of them. Which is what the company known as Pazio did 4 years ago to come up with Pathfinder.

My personal introduction to gaming wasn't D&D. It was actually a game with the acronym MERP's: Middle Earth Roleplaying.

On a visit to Provo with the school band I came across a game store. I'd never been in such a place before and I marvelled at all the cool stuff that they had flooding their shelves. One thing that caught my eye was a book called Middle Earth Bestiary. Now I did not know what an rpg was at that time, although I had a friend or two that talked about them (D&D, specifically adventures set in the world of Dragonlance). I bought the book because it had cool illustrations and information on all sorts of monsters that were in Middle Earth. I was a sucker for both monsters and Middle Earth back then (I still am) so I spent some of the small stipend of spending money my parents had given me and bought that book. (Looking back on it that might be where my impulse buying of games, books and movies started.) Another friend asked me when I got on the bus if I played the game. I had no clue what he was talking about. He then mumbled something about MERP's and I thought long and hard about what that might mean on the long bus ride back to Roosevelt. I also look at my book of course.

I still have that book. It's not in bad shape, perhaps fair condition. The binding is still intact but there are a few creases on the cover and a bit of tearing on the top and the bottom of the spine. No loose pages. I still look at it once in a while. 

That summer I some how conned my mother into buying me the base game when we went to a family reunion in Salt Lake City. I then spent a chunk of the weekend explaining what the game was to people as they just didn't seem to grasp it. I still have all the books to that as well, though not the original box, sadly. 

I got my first copy of D&D about a year later, and the rest is as they say history. 

(For the record a year or so before I got any of the MERP's stuff I conned my father into buying me a game called HeroQuest. It's an awesome board-game that was published by Milton Bradley and I actually do have my copy still. I did lose some pieces, but Ebay has allowed me to pick up an additional copy with a few missing pieces as well as a couple of expansions about year ago, so yes I do still have a complete copy of that game as well. While not a true RPG in the technical sense, it does have element of RPG's, specifically early RPG's: dungeon exploration, each player  controls a character and one player is an arbiter that controls both the monsters and the "plot" of the game. Unlike a genuine rpg however there was no mechanic for advancement so your character never really got better as they went through the dungeons. There's also not a mechanic to handle things outside of combat other than searching rooms for treasures or traps. There are variants that have been published online over the years and there was a game published by Games Workshop called Advanced HeroQuest published at the same time that added some of those elements into the game. By today's boardgame standards it's a pretty simple game, but it still looks cool and if you have four people willing to play it with you it's good for a nights entertainment.)

There's a lot to this, the history of gaming. There's some pretty cool articles that detail it pretty well as well as a couple of blogs where the bloggers regularly interview folks that were there at the start of things. This was a very, very, very short crash course which probably left you confused, befuddled and happy i'm done.