The deep history of roleplaying
Rob MacDougall is writing an irreverant Deep history of roleplaying games on his history blog. The first installment talks about a “proto-roleplaying game run by David Wesely in 1967” and the second talks about the move from square maps to hex maps to no maps.
- Deep history of roleplaying games
- “D&D’s lineage is more complicated than the standard wargames + wizards story would have it.”
- David Wesely
- “David Wesely is a wargamer, board game designer, and video game developer. Dave Arneson credited him with coming up with the idea of the role playing game.”
More gaming history
- Gary Gygax’s game
- Links around the net to people talking about Gygax.
- Poisoning the Magic Well: RPG Distribution
- Ron Edwards writes a short history of RPG distribution that’s fairly accurate to my recollection.
- Experience in thematic role-playing games
- Thematic games combine a love of rules with a love of setting. In these metagames, the rules are the setting, and the setting is the rules. Further, acknowledging the rules makes it easier to remove them. Such games are usually acutely aware that character advancement is a reward encouraging the actions that incur the reward and which move the game towards a specific conclusion.
- Experience in world-based role-playing games
- In the eighties and through the nineties, people started writing games where the world was more important than the rules. In theory, this should make for a different kind of character advancement as well.
- Experience in Generic Role-playing Games
- After D&D, it seemed as though anyone could write up game rules and publish them—and many did. From Tunnels & Trolls through GURPS, how did these games deal with experience and character advancement?
- Three more pages with the topic gaming history, and other related pages