what if another role playing game had DnDs cultural Impact?

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Disliker of the mary sue

Here a thought for those people who can think of probable alteritive universe. What would be diffrent if another tabletop rpg had the massive cultural impact in society that Dnd had? Like if Vampire the Masquerade was the first or Gurps.

There are two independent bits in here.

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.

What if something with a different genre were the first hit? I think this one may be rather like what if planned economies worked. The "move around in a limited area and kill things with a few die rolls" central to dungeon delving is in fact central to its cultural impact because it's something that can be easily implemented on not terribly impressive computers, and it's the adoption of this as a standard plot by the computer game industry (and the overlap between the game industry and video entertainment) that produced the cultural effects. Tabletop games or even fantasy novels are niche products, it's the video games and movies (well OK, maybe to a lesser degree anime and card games) that get these tropes out into mass culture.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by malloyd

There are two independent bits in here.

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.

For an example of how game mechanical basics matter more than people realize, take a look at how people react to diceless-static, card-based and pure-resource-spending-based systems.

[whswhs]

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.

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

[Disliker of the mary sue]

I just kind of wonder since things tend to follow the leader that the world be different if like Vampire the masquerade or Fate somehow became the first big rpg. (let say for sake of argument if these books would even exist without dnd a guy brought a book back in time to the before dnd days and mass produced that book.) If roleplaying at the start was seen more as a story telling activity then like a thing spun off a war game.

Though as one guy I discussed this before int he past said, the 80's vampire the masquerade cartoon would be weird.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Disliker of the mary sue

Though as one guy I discussed this before int he past said, the 80's vampire the masquerade cartoon would be weird.

The D&D cartoon was pretty weird.

[Disliker of the mary sue]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

The D&D cartoon was pretty weird.

and then you have to wonder what the gurps 80's cartoon would look like in the universe it became the alpha rpg...

[robertsconley]

I wrote this alternate history where Traveller was the first roleplaying game in the 1940s.

http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=33581

[robertsconley]

Originally Posted by Disliker of the mary sue

I just kind of wonder since things tend to follow the leader that the world be different if like Vampire the masquerade or Fate somehow became the first big rpg.

You will have to figure out the point of departure and go from there.

For example in an alt-history D&D is still born because the disdain against fantasy among miniature wargamers grows strong enough to abort Dave Arneson's interest in running a medieval fantasy campaign called Blackmoor. Instead he decides to run a Braustein based on his love of the Hammer horror films. He runs several of these where the some players play the monsters and other play Van Helsing types and other kinds of investigators.

Eventually he recycles the Blackmoor name however now it is a lonely castle on the English Moor the home of Sir Fant a vampire who was once the lieutenant of Dracula himself. In the depths of the castle is are the Demon Frog God cultist that serve Sir Fant as his minion in exchange for protection and permission to conduct their unholy rites.

Sir Fant tentacles stretches across Edwardian Great Britain leaving the players to fight the conspiracy in a grand campaign against evil. This inspires others and eventually leads to a series of games that now considered the first tabletop roleplaying games.

[Johan Larson]

Right now table-top role playing is a small niche hobby. It was a pretty big thing back in the 80s with D&D, but it has shrunk dramatically since then. It also had some lasting cultural influence through its effect on computer RPGs; WoW owes D&D a hefty debt.

It's worth asking whether things had to go this way. Could role-playing be a large and respectable pastime today, if publishers and players had done things a bit differently?

I'm guessing the answer is yes. D&D, in particular, had some occult and diabolical elements that drew a lot of criticism. I don't want to say that the criticism was fair and reasonable (it wasn't) but it got enough traction to make the hobby appear less like harmless fun suitable for everyone and more like weird stuff for creeps and nerds.

And I think this could have been avoided. If the earliest RPGs had focused on something less likely to draw criticism, such as playing cops or even soldiers, I suspect the hobby would be viewed in a more positive light, and would be doing better now.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Johan Larson

And I think this could have been avoided. If the earliest RPGs had focused on something less likely to draw criticism, such as playing cops or even soldiers, I suspect the hobby would be viewed in a more positive light, and would be doing better now.

I doubt that that would have happened.

This was the first era when fantasy took off in a big way, becoming established as a recognized genre (this was before its later fusion with science fiction). The biggest single influence on this was The Lord of the Rings (and early printings of D&D had such obvious borrowings as hobbits, ents, and balrogs, later renamed to halflings, treants, and whatever balrogs got changed to); but Gygax et al. had also read Howard, Lovecraft, Anderson, Vance, Leiber, Moorcock, and others from whom they borrowed freely to produce a fantasy buffet from which you could put anything you liked on your plate. That big wave of new fantasy readers were the people who jumped onto D&D in a big way. And that carried along with it such traits as social awkwardness, fascination with myth and legend, and a touch of "freaking the straights." It was kind of an introvert's version of the occult imagery that attracted many extraverts to metal, and in fact there was some modest overlap.

There really was not, back then, a big crowd of fans of soldiers or police or spies who were eagerly waiting for a hobby of sitting in a room telling stories to each other. There were conventional wargamers, some of whom seriously resented the invasion of their hobby by D&D, and some of whom had played games with freeform storytelling aspects. But they weren't a big group and they didn't have growth potential. It was the fantasy fans who provided that.

The other thing I've seen since then that was sort of similar was the vampire fan craze that inspired White Wolf. Again, you had a key author, Anne Rice, and a game that borrowed from her but stirred in other stuff. So I think you'd want to look for other authors of the past seventy-five years who had big, enthusiastic, but slightly cult followings. I don't think you can discount the power of "we're onto something special" in terms of marketing/recruitment.