Quote:
Originally Posted by malloyd
What if something with different mechanics were the first hit? I expect the answer is not much changes, game mechanics are less important than people make them out to be, certainly to anything cultural outside actual game play, and varied pretty freely even in the "same" games in the early days.
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I'm not persuaded that mechanics was particularly important early on, because all the mechanics of the time was more or less thrashing around.
Take D&D. The original D&D rules say that combat is to be run using Chainmail mechanics. Now Chainmail had three different and incompatible systems: One for units of twenty men clashing on the battlefield, one for single men clashing in sieges (and presumably in dungeons), and one for fantastic combat between heroic men and monsters. All three seem to have been incorporated into the D&D rules, and it wasn't always clear which one was being used. But none of them involved d20s; all of them used d6s. The d20s came in as an "alternative combat system," and then stuck.
So where did other stuff come from? Superhero 2044 had point build. Traveller had life paths. RuneQuest had skills, and also had hit points that were based on capacity to take damage and defenses that stopped you from being hit. You could not find any game of that era that was mechanically identical to any major game of our time. Rather, current games take a bit from A and a bit from B and a dash of X. If some other game had been hugely popular, only a few bits of it might have survived in today's mechanicsl