What is the thing that we call a role-playing game?
Dungeons & Dragons (1974) has the distinction of being the first game in this modern genre, according to a broad if restless consensus. But anyone sifting through the game’s earliest rules will observe the conspicuous absence of role playing as a term. After experimenting with D&D just after its release, the Minnesota university professor M. A. R. Barker ventured that it “is not strictly a ‘war’ game” (WN 149). This contradicted the very cover of the product, which proclaimed itself “rules for fantastic medieval wargames campaigns,” but Barker was only the first of many to disagree. A whole community of fans soon rallied around the new genre of game that D&D had inspired, to which the label role-playing game would imminently become attached.
So D&D did not pin this label onto itself, which ostensibly deprives the genre’s foundational text of any authority over the definition of role-playing game. It may have established the category, but it did so unwittingly—it was really the game’s audience who perceived in it or perhaps projected onto it this quality they came to call role playing. It is therefore that community of early adopters we must investigate if we want to understand why they chose this label instead of another and what exactly they believed it meant.
Surely the first people who called D&D a role-playing game did so without any rigid definition in mind. They favored this term because it expressed something that they felt separated the game from its predecessors, something about the experience of the game that was for some the source of its irresistible allure and for others the root of its most frustrating absurdities. Rather than agonizing over how to classify it, players were far more preoccupied with practical questions about play. What is the right way to approach D&D as a player or a referee? How could the base design of D&D be improved? In the early disputes surrounding those questions, which often contained appeals to role playing, we can dimly see what different people thought they meant by role-playing game.
Fueled by their passion for the game, the community raced through the problem space of theory and design, making astonishing progress in only half a decade. It was an educated and inquisitive community, one that would inevitably become self-conscious about coining such a term of art. In the first five years of the hobby, the quest to understand role-playing games exposed the most important questions of role-playing game design and theory. But the community’s ambition to improve systems and practices drove much of the early philosophical investigation of role-playing games, more so than any academic interest in explicating games for its own sake. It might be more accurately stated that practitioners resorted to theorizing in an attempt to mend alarming divides that quickly emerged in the community, disrupting progress, and necessitating design experiments. Along the way, though, they developed some early and important ideas about what it might mean for a game to create a story.
The original D&D rules left so much unsaid, so much to the players’ discretion, that to play it was to reimagine it. Its introduction billed it as “the framework around which you will build a game of simplicity or tremendous complexity.”1 As one early adopter put it in August 1975, “D&D is an outline for a fantasy game. The gamesmaster expands on the rules.”2 Much of the early writing about role-playing games captures that process: it is a tangle of variant rule proposals, breathless play reports, staunch critical opinion, and designer’s notes. But a cluster of pioneering thinkers in this period crafted more considered essays that attempted to frame problems, define terms, and engage with prior literature. These key texts—by Lewis Pulsipher, Steve Lortz, Ed Simbalist, Glenn Blacow, and others—at first circulated in fanzines little read outside the insular and dedicated game community of the time. By 1980, the best of this literature had migrated to glossy trade magazines, where it reached a wider audience. Through the most prominent of those, The Dragon, Gary Gygax commanded a gravitas not to be underestimated, though his position as the steward of both the interpretation and evolution of D&D made him simultaneously the community’s most prominent authority and its most reviled object of censure. Innovation and subversion in this period grew with the stridence of Gygax’s orthodoxy.
Determining the practices that role playing identified would furthermore become a key goal for producers of early commercial titles competing with D&D. These designers wanted to establish not just what a role-playing game is but also what it should be and how a next-generation system might realize that potential. One reviewer in 1979 quipped that “nearly every set of role-playing rules except D&D bills itself as a ‘second generation’ game” (DW 2), and, indeed, before 1980 some already discerned a third generation of systems.3 Given that D&D originally attired itself as a wargame, some only grudgingly acknowledged D&D as even a first-generation role-playing game title. In this view, any self-proclaimed role-playing game could, by emphasizing and fostering role playing, improve on the genre’s dysfunctional parent. But what were they emphasizing exactly? Early role-playing games did not break off cleanly from the legacy of conflict simulation, and many new titles incorporated systems and product marketing that could arguably identify them as either wargaming or role playing.
A study might follow any number of threads in illustrating how early players invoked the term role playing in their efforts to complete the shift to a new form of game. The most illuminating of these areas relate to a fundamental tension in role-playing games introduced by the earliest designs, one hinging on how players participate in the resolution of game events. One of the signature features of D&D is that its play takes place in a conversation between players and a referee, where players explain verbally to the referee what they want to accomplish. This makes it possible for new players to join the game without knowing the rules. The referee, by translating each player’s statements of intention into game events, can let players feel as if they are in the situation of their characters, that they can attempt anything their characters are capable of—yet the secrecy and latitude required to exercise the referee’s function can also paradoxically leave players feeling as if their actions hardly matter, as if they are helpless spectators of the referee’s personal show. Some players felt it was the epitome of role playing to lose themselves in their characters’ situation, leaving it to the referee to sort out the resolution of game events; others, however, felt that they could not be said to play a role without understanding how—or even if—their choices were processed by the system of the game. The original D&D rules, being merely guidelines, lent themselves equally to either philosophy. In the name of optimizing for sometimes ill-defined properties such as realism, story, control, and immersion, role-playing game players and designers attempted to resolve the tension between those two approaches by altering how players interfaced with the game system. Comparing this early literature to debates still rumbling through the gaming community today amply demonstrates that the first philosophical problems to trouble role playing have proven the most enduring. Exploring these issues moreover sheds light on the fundamental question of why role-playing games have rules, and how those rules affect play.
Academics eventually began exploring the theory of role-playing games, with the first landmark study being the sociologist Gary Alan Fine’s book Shared Fantasy (1983), but practitioners have never entirely relinquished their claim on this endeavor.4 As the fanzines that carried the earliest theoretical works have receded into archival scarcity, much of the history of role-playing game theorizing in the crucial period from 1975 to 1980 is now little studied. Blacow’s essay from 1980 dividing players into four types, “Role-Playing Styles,” is widely known, but surveys of this literature characterize the period with language such as “there was still relatively little thought being applied to what constituted the act of role-playing itself.”5 Yet a close reading of the works in this neglected period brings us to a different conclusion and to novel insights into how and why the term role playing stuck.
It is hoped that this book will first and foremost serve as a guide to the key theoretical works of that period and as a summary of their conclusions. This critical literature builds on systems of the time, so to understand it we must further rescue from obscurity many published and experimental designs that have largely escaped the notice of posterity.6 It is not the ambition of this study to settle on a tidy dictionary definition of role-playing game but instead to show historically how the game community came to grapple with agreeing on one.7
Students of the more recent theory and practice of role-playing games may discover in this body of work some prefigurements of later thinking in design and criticism, couched in the vernacular that practitioners spoke at the time. Later theory did not engage with this literature, however, and without sufficient caution it would be easy to fabricate a dialogue based on parallels that might be significant or superficial, thus coloring our view of early thinking with later inventions. Pointers to potential parallels are therefore confined here to notes in order to give the early writers the space to speak for themselves. It is, after all, to be expected that these ideas recur cyclically in approaches to role-playing games if indeed the tension at the heart of their original design admits of no entirely satisfactory solution.
The organization of this book is loosely chronological. The first chapter explores the cultures of wargaming and science-fiction fandom, with a particular emphasis on character-playing precursors to D&D and early attempts to develop games with systems built around conversations. Chapter 2 looks in particular at the dialogue at the core of D&D, the sort of agency players have in the game, as well as the nature of statements of intention. Next, the basic system concepts “abilities,” “alignment,” and “experience” ground chapter 3 in a study of how the game community of the 1970s first understood the idea of playing a role. Chapter 4 tackles simultaneous discussions of the purpose of a referee or gamesmaster in role-playing games with regard to world building, system management, and story-telling. A brief interlude then explores skeptical arguments about the value of system design in games that are so open ended. The fifth chapter surveys the first crop of theoretical essays that attempted to define and situate role-playing games as well as the pressures introduced by the growing popularity of the genre and the changing demographics of the community. Finally, chapter 6 shows how the foundational concepts defined in the 1970s gelled at the start of the next decade into a point of maturity for role-playing games. An epilogue visits the conversations about the philosophy of role playing that recurred later in the 1980s, setting the stage for the modern era of role-playing game theory.