4 The Role of the Referee

If players are the people who do the role playing, what exactly is the function of a referee in a role-playing game? Although we must be careful about projecting authorial intention onto a set of rules that identify themselves as mere guidelines, we might still say with some confidence that Dungeons & Dragons assigns two separate tasks to referees: first, a pregame process of developing a world and its dungeons and, second, an in-game process of conducting the dialogue with players and running the system as they explore that world. How distinct these two tasks are depends on the referee: the referee keeps much information about the world a secret—the players wander the wilderness and descend the dungeons to learn their layout—so players might be at some pains to discern how much a referee has prepared in advance and how much was invented on demand. But regardless of when the world design happens, it is the primary creative activity that D&D assigns to the referee, as Gygax saw it: “It is up to that individual to devise a setting for his campaign and create all of the ‘world’ in which it is to take place” (EU 4/5). The second task, executing the system, we know from Gygax’s later comments, is intended to be a more impartial role, one through which the referee can largely “let the dice tell the story”—though being only guidelines, the rules leave much for the referee to fill in.

Barely a year after the release of D&D, Sandy Eisen, for example, filled in the blanks with a vow: “I will not permit the players (people who do not know about D&D yet) to discover the rules.” His conception of the role of the referee goes back to 1966, when Korns already knew that granting a referee broad latitude in the execution of a system could unlock a property more interesting than simple impartiality. Judges “are the only ones who need to be familiar with the rules,” Korns stipulated, as they “are used to isolate the players within the confines of the knowledge of their troops.” This is in some respects a corollary of principles dating to the dawn of Kriegsspiel, when Reiswitz hoped his game would instill in a player “the same sort of uncertainty over results as he would have in the field,” but Korns stressed that it is the referee in particular who delivers this property. The referee puts the player in the situation of the character, and there is every reason to think that this process was crucial to initiating the shift to role playing that Eisen experienced. But what Eisen saw was just a possibility in D&D, one way of exercising its guidelines—other referees could and did approach play differently.

Whichever attitude referees took toward involving players in the system, their role was central to the experience of the game. As Monsters! Monsters! explained in 1976, “Although the players’ own characters may enter the fantasy world, the players themselves can participate only through the GM. The more imaginative, articulate and painstaking the GM is, the more convincing his/her world will be and the more involved everyone will become.”1 But in some early implementations, even describing the referee as the sole conduit through which the players interact with the game world was far too restrictive. The first attempts to explain the purpose of the referee reveal what the practitioners of the time thought about the nature of role-playing games in a discussion that would stick out like a sore thumb in prior wargaming literature.

Early adopters recognized these games as a new and distinctive category, one that they knew required fresh thinking: as the fanzine Wild Hunt identified itself as a venue for referees, it carried some of the weightier considerations on what role the referee plays. Late in 1976, Jim Michie wrote in issue 10 about how role-playing games were “more closely analogous to real life games, such as company politics, the stock market, intersexual play, and the like, than to ordinary abstract games like chess, go, Monopoly or even Stalingrad,” a famous board wargame. Thus, to understand this emerging hobby, Michie insisted that “we must try to get at its roots to see what makes the game appealing” and discover “the methods through which we as game leaders can improve and expand the enjoyment shared by our players.” The first step in finding these roots was acknowledging, as he put it, that “the game itself has become, in the club at MIT at least, a game of social and psychological interaction” as opposed to a competition. Like McIntosh, Michie highlighted the player’s strong identification with the character: “Each player tends to project aspects of personality on the characters, aspects which he either admires or hates, depending on his nature,” and as a consequence “the player’s emotions closely interlocked into the life of the character(s) he is controlling.”

Stories turn out to be fundamental to the way Michie articulated the role of the referee. He observed that among players “there is a great interest in the story line of the adventure,” despite the appearance that the “action of the game is more or less random as designed originally” in the seminal D&D rules. Michie argued that rather than letting the dice tell the story, the referee must take that randomness and shape it into something the players can recognize as a narrative; the characters of a role-playing game are, for Michie, characters in a story. “By good management, the GM injects building suspense and growing uncertainty into the developing story as it unfolds. This leads to a series of building climaxes which stick in the imagination to form a memory of adventures shared by the group.” Once the group begins to internalize this emergent story, then retroactively “the random action of the past games imposed by the dice is soon forgotten as the tales of glory or agony borne grow in the memories of the participants.” Eventually, after multiple installments of an episodic campaign, “a history of saga-like grandeur begins to develop among regular players of the game.”

These “tales of glory” do not remain confined to the past: “the retelling of old hunts and old battles before the beginning of the next adventure adds color,” Michie explained, “and locks the imagination to the upcoming action.” In this respect, he proposed that role-playing games tap into something fundamental about our nature as human beings: “These aspects of the game appeal to what I think to be deep-seated tribal instincts in us, explicitly based in the story telling arts in our past. The shared tales build in us a tribal hunting-team spirit which reaches below our civilized natures, and binds us to a common tribal lore.” He argued that “the development of this tribal/team spirit is significant in the welding of a leader’s game into a world of consequence to its players.”

Tapping into the “story telling arts” is thus the vocation Michie saw for referees. He advised them, “We can begin to improve our own game by learning some of the arts of the story teller: the art of building a picture in the minds of players, the art of giving leading hints and suggestions so that they can begin to anticipate the suspected action about to be revealed, the art of building suspense, the art of the surprise and the reasonable result.” He went on to relate some techniques that would “create emotion, anger, sympathy, hate, love, etc.” in players and spoke particularly to studying fantasy literature to learn its rhythms.

Up to this point, he restricted “story telling” responsibilities exclusively to the referee. But then he underscored that this process involved more than just unilateral action by the referee—he saw a need for the referee to engage players in the creative process of the story. “Allow your own mental picture to interact and be guided by the mental picture that they appear to be following.” He even suggested delegating part of the task of representing the game world to the players: “To aid the players in getting their imaginations started, ask them to verbally fill in for the others their own partial description of the scene which you initially verbally sketch.” He cautioned referees against being overly prescriptive in detailing the game world for the players, “else you run the risk of destroying their mental picture.”

In addition to giving tips on key story-telling techniques for “building suspense, anticipation, and surprise,” Michie also gave some advice on what not to do: he found the development of a compelling narrative far more important than the execution of cumbersome system mechanics, counseling only to “use the dice to guide life and death decisions and to make quick decisions without breaking your concentration.” The referee must de-emphasize the system in order to isolate the players in the story. “When the game begins to work for you as described above, you and people playing with you will feel it,” he promised. “The game comes to life.”

Pieter Roos picked up this thread of advice to referees a few issues later in Wild Hunt. He stipulated in issue 15 that “the G.M. must be as the author and create a world that looks, feels, sounds and even smells real.” Roos knew that this can yield extraordinary results for the players: “If this is done right, the players should sense it, get the feeling of the universe in which their character live, and react to it. With a little co-operation from the players, the game can transcend mere amusement; the characters can come to live and breathe within a separate world for the span of a few hours. This can and should be the goal of the Gamemaster.” This sound very like Eisen’s vow to furnish a game where his players “lived the part,” suspending disbelief until they felt they were “in the dungeon,” without giving any thought to “wargame mechanics.”

In laying out these responsibilities, Roos described a function not only for the referee but also for the entire game that trancended even Michie’s ambitions. “The effect one is striving for, in more concrete terms, is the total immersion which can be obtained when reading a good book or viewing a good film. The person experiencing the book or film becomes lost in the sweep of action, oblivious to his real surroundings as he moves beside the characters portrayed before him.”2

This use of immersion followed only a few issues after Kevin Slimak wrote about “submerging yourself” into characters and again reflects the referee’s capacity to isolate players within a story. But, like Michie, Roos was aware that achieving such immersion requires overcoming many obstacles, especially the distraction of executing the system, and that “the difficulties with applying these to a role-playing situation are many,” especially because games are not “passive activities” like movies or books. “In the game, the participant must be aware of himself and his surroundings. He must keep track of the actions of the rest of the party and the G.M., he must maintain notes on several abstract quantifications of abilities. He must roll dice to determine the results of activities. All these activities break the enchantment, if you will, of the world created by the G.M.” Perhaps the ideal form of the game he envisioned would remain out of reach, “yet how can we know if we do not try?”

Neither the terms referee nor judge seems remotely adequate for the duties articulated by Michie and Roos. Tellingly, Michie never used referee in his essay, instead preferring leader. As with the contentious term role-playing game, different interpretations of the role of the referee motivated some designers to call the job by other names. Dungeon master became common on the West Coast by early 1975 and from there made its way into Tunnels & Trolls—though it might seem to limit the responsibilities of the referee to supervising the monsters, traps, and treasures found in a typical underworld. East Coast gamers of the day, such as Roos, preferred the older and more generic term gamesmaster, which admitted of many variations, such as gamemaster, games master, and game master; it would grace designs unlikely to dwell on dungeoneering, such as Bunnies & Burrows, Bushido, Gangster! (1979), and Villains & Vigilantes (1979). Some British games such as Heroes and Mortal Combat (1979) favored umpire, a term much used by earlier wargamers in the United Kingdom. Although in 1977 the text of Chivalry & Sorcery sprinkled around the terms referee and dungeon master interchangeably, by 1978 its designer Ed Simbalist would quip, “Chivalry & Sorcery talks about game masters, while D&D talks about dungeon masters. There is more to a fantasy world than dungeons” (APR 3). High Fantasy would stick with judge, as would What Price Glory?! and John Carter, Warlord of Mars (1978), a title that talks about role playing but is still firmly anchored in wargames. Space Patrol adopted the quirky Mission Master for its own usage, and that term would be borrowed, along with much of that game’s system, by Heritage’s Star Trek role-playing game The Final Frontier (1978). Starships & Spacemen games ran under the supervision of a “Starmaster.” Legacy calls the referee a “game operator.” There was as little consensus about the proper name for this role as there was about the nature of role playing itself.

As the setting of role-playing games burst out of the confines of the dungeon in the designs of the 1970s, the referee became a proxy for the richness of the world—or in some cases the game narrative—required to foster role playing. Some early designs attempted to aid or in respects even constrain the referee in this endeavor. Though a referee might bear the responsibility for deciding when to invoke mechanisms such as saving throws that quantify a character’s resistance to ill fortune, some systems did not favor the referee isolating players from those decisions and instead allowed players to decide when destiny would intervene. Taking that to its extreme, a few of the earliest products that would be called role-playing games even dispensed entirely with the referee, allowing players to exercise the system to generate their own flow of events.

Steering a Story

Mark Swanson observed in 1976 that “recently, D&D literature has been overrun with calls for gamesmasters to make their games more ‘realistic.’ Or, if not that mirth-provoking word, at least a coherent, complex world where characters have something else to do besides forever descending deeper and deeper into nastier and nastier holes in the ground” (AE 10). Swanson famously branded the previous year the “Year of the Gilded Hole” because many referees of the time limited their “worlds” to underground labyrinths improbably brimming with fiends and treasure, which characters raided for purposeless plunder.

Designing worlds was the referee’s job, a creative activity that the original rules very decidedly set above players. The project of world building in D&D traces back to Gygax’s wargame Chainmail, whose fantasy supplement explicitly encourages wargamers to “refight the epic struggles related by J. R. R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, and other fantasy writers; or you can devise your own ‘world,’ and conduct fantastic campaigns and conflicts on it.”3 The many taxonomies of D&D draw inspiration for monsters, spells, and so on from existing fantasy literature, but the rules endorse no particular author’s “world.” As such, the referee can decide how thoroughly articulated and considered the game world will be. In the foreword to D&D, Gygax invokes the fantasy authors who created the imaginary worlds of Nehwon, Barsoom, and Hyboria, inviting players to “enjoy a ‘world’ where the fantastic is fact and magic really works!”4 From Swanson’s account, we might gather that many of these early campaigns provided a less-considered setting than the game promised.

Halfway through the Year of the Gilded Hole, article in Wargamer’s Information 7 by Tim Waddell outlined a way to escape that perfunctory abyss. He had refereed D&D intently enough to know that “its potential knew no bounds.” The potential he envisioned included “a world full of fabulous treasures and terrifying monsters, full of staunch castles, little towns, foreboding dungeons, and evil secrets,” in turn “a world where anything is possible.” But he had to acknowledge that the degree to which D&D can deliver this in practice depends “on the amount of work the ref is willing to put in. It depends mostly on the ref. He is the game, so to speak.”

Waddell divided D&D campaigns into four “levels” of sophistication, beginning with level 1, which is very much Swanson’s “Gilded Hole.”5 Nothing exists but the dungeon, so if characters “want to buy anything, the GP’s are taken away, and they get the item automatically,” rather than playing through a dialogue of visiting an in-game town or merchant, say. Waddell firmly asserted of this basic level that “D&D was meant to be more, i.e., it doesn’t do the game justice.” In level 2 campaigns, there is “a dungeon, maybe even two or three, and some wilderness” mapped out in hexes. Level 3 adds to the mix “at least one town.” But it is at level 4, Waddell stated, that we reach the point “D&D was meant to be.” Here there are “several completely mapped towns, plenty of interesting townspeople, rumors, legends, history, etc. A total fantasy world.”

In an important sense, the depth of the setting has as much influence over how statements of intention are resolved as does the system. In a Waddell level 1 world, a player who says, “I sell the two goblin swords and the bronze goblet” might well hear the referee respond with the amount of silver received. In a world with a higher Waddell level, however, a referee might challenge the player with, “To whom do you sell those items, exactly?”— much like the referee would challenge a player who vaguely stipulates “I try to become king” to explain what steps she is taking. This might lead the player to a particular town, with a particular merchant, a spate of haggling, in what Mark Swanson might call a more coherent world. A lack of this coherence became jarring to people who felt like dungeon adventuring did not tell the whole story.

Waddell’s own campaign, he believed, had so far reached level “3⅔” though he aspired to evolve it into “a full-fledged 4.” He had filled a large map with “towns, rivers, mountains, castles, evil places, etc.” and then specified these in accompanying documentation. For each town, he recorded who lived in every mapped residence, providing for each “a biographical sketch of the person,” and for stores he listed the proprietors, inventory, and so on. He furthermore specified the laws, religions, important citizens, their secrets and dispositions, as well as “legendary people and places” that the players could investigate. Characters in his game “start in a town where they may purchase what they need, rent a room at the inn . . . then, by inquiring about the surrounding area,” they decide on a course of action, which may involve investigating some nearby “legendary place,” exploring the countryside, or even staying put in town, where Waddell offered alternatives to adventuring. “If luck gets too bad, they may have to get a job to keep from starving.” Career opportunities could lead the characters back into the story: “As a bartender they could pick up some cash and meet both townspeople and strangers from far away lands bringing strange rumors.” The notion that characters might focus on tasks other than defeating monsters in subterranean lairs, including working the crowd at an inn, promotes exactly the sort of interactions between referees and players that would inspire commentators to call D&D a role-playing game.

“This is the complete fantasy experience,” Waddell asserted. “This is Dungeons & Dragons” as it was meant to be. Encouragements of this form were not entirely absent from the original D&D rulebooks, which discuss the village of Blackmoor and the city of Greyhawk: “Both have maps with streets and buildings indicated, and players can have town adventures roaming around the bazaars, inns, taverns, shops, temples, and so on. Venture into the Thieves’ Quarter only at your own risk!”6 Arneson had provided a map and much detail of the town of Blackmoor in his article “Facts about Black Moor,” which would soon be augmented and reprinted in First Fantasy Campaign (1977) (DB 13). But it is important to note that Waddell’s proposition did not go unchallenged. Rick Loomis, who edited Wargamer’s Information, added a perplexed note to the end of Waddell’s article. “I don’t see why it is ‘unquestionably better’ to have a detailed wilderness,” Loomis submitted (Wargamer’s Information 7). “Suppose I just want to go down into the dungeon? Can’t you spend just as many hours, and just as much imagination, making a really good dungeon?” If the tactical situation of the dungeon is what the players really want to experience, why clutter the campaign with extraneous overworld personalities and verbiage?

Loomis failed to recognize that the creative license granted to the D&D referee proved irresistible to people who delighted in building worlds, especially those fanatics who had already lovingly elaborated their own fantastic worlds through fiction. But how essential to the role of the referee is it, really, to invent a personal world? Waddell acknowledged that a level 4 world would be “the result of hours upon hours of work by a ref with a reasonably fertile imagination,” and he therefore could excuse those many referees who only had time to run at level 1. Couldn’t you just borrow someone else’s world?

Soon, relief from responsibility for world design could be purchased, most famously in the form of Guide to the City State of the Invincible Emperor released by the Judges Guild in 1976. The eponymous city, with its innumerable dwellings, denizens, and idiosyncrasies, provided a first foothold in a complete fantasy world where players could have all manner of urban adventures. The Judges Guild positioned itself as a supplier to the harried referee, shouldering much of the pregame burden that D&D imposed. Referees too flummoxed to sketch even a Waddell level 1 dungeon could also turn to the marketplace: products such as Palace of the Vampire Queen (1976) began offering prepackaged “module” dungeons that made adventures into off-the-shelf commodities.

But even earlier, around the time that Waddell identified his four levels in 1975, the first published games influenced by D&D began testing to what degree the system design could itself dictate an exclusive intended setting, lifting any obligation on referees to devise their own worlds. Empire of the Petal Throne traded on the depth of its setting: we might fairly say that the game existed for the sake of its designer’s imagined world. M. A. R. Barker had detailed his world Tékumel in works of fiction published in the journals of science-fiction fandom since the 1950s, and he saw in D&D an opportunity to introduce more people to his creation. Petal Throne specified its setting to an unprecedented degree, as Waddell’s level 4 was effectively Barker’s starting point: he had already long since fully articulated his cities, their key inhabitants, a rich world history, and even an invented language.

Barker is surely the first to have demonstrated that a game can provide access to a specific imaginary world just as well as a work of fiction, if not better. In the section titled “To Prospective Referees,” Barker emphasized that it is the referee’s responsibility to run Tékumel as Barker defined it, not as a spin-off world of the referee’s invention: “The first priority for a would-be referee for Tékumel, thus, is familiarity. All of the background Sections should be read over several times” until the referee has thoroughly absorbed this imaginary culture.7 But even so, it remains the referee’s responsibility to control the flow of events within the constraints of the overall world and narrative, and in that sense, Barker promised referees in a section titled “Developing a Scenario” that “the world of Tékumel is at the disposal of the referee, and it is up to him to people it with all the enjoyment of good fantasy.”8 The prespecification of a world thus does not completely eliminate the creative responsibility of the referee. But where Waddell said of a D&D referee who creates his own world that “he is the game,” one might hesitate to say the same for a Petal Throne referee, who must diligently channel Barker’s baroque vision.

To understand Barker’s creation, we must postulate another level beyond Waddell’s 4, where the referee or a designer defines not only a world but furthermore a situation in that world that the characters will encounter. Waddell himself implied this step when he positioned his starting adventurers in a particular town and circumstance within his game world. But this creative task can go beyond specifying an initial condition and involve a longer-term plan for the direction of game events. Barker pushed beyond Waddell’s categories by providing in the game’s rulebook not just a world but also an outline of a story that characters will encounter. “For convenience’s sake,” Barker wrote, “it is assumed that all player characters arrive in a small boat at the great Tsolyáni port city of Jakálla.”9 That is the way the rules state that characters enter the world of Tékumel, where they then “may attempt to sell the small boats in which they arrive from their (presumed) barbarian homelands.” All such arrivals, including castaways, are “housed in one of the Imperial resthouses in the foreigner’s quarter,” where they gradually learn about the society of Tékumel through interaction with nonplayer characters. A lavish map with a detailed key shows the city of Jakálla and its major features. Venturing unsupervised into Jakálla proper when not on official business can easily lead one to commit a random faux pas resulting in unceremonious execution.

Barker’s Petal Throne thus went beyond specifying a setting or even a world to make a particular narrative integral to its system in an almost authorial fashion. The high-level premise is one of barbarian characters integrating themselves into Tsolyáni society: all human characters who reach the fourth experience level are granted imperial citizenship and will by that time presumably have been sufficiently indoctrinated into the ways of Tékumel through exploration of the setting. We might be forgiven for inferring the game itself to be just a pretext for a Tsolyáni immersion course. The outline of this story fills the section of the Petal Throne rules titled “Starting the Game,” and no alternative ways of playing Petal Throne are suggested by the system. Citizenship is, for a starting character at least, the object of the game, although play does not necessarily end when it is achieved. But what if players were not interested in becoming citizens of Jakálla? This begins to raise new questions that D&D does not: To what degree does a setting, one constructed by a referee or a game designer, impose a narrative direction on players? And in what sense do player actions determine the story of a campaign?

Some referees felt an obligation to bring the situation of the world to life in a historical context, which characters would then be thrust into, as a further responsibility beyond the basic design of a world. Mark Chilenskas had at the beginning of 1976 a Waddell level 4 world, a place with “a past and geography for foundation, folklore for flavor and social structure for interest,” which he even invested with “a direction.”10 He did more than just articulate his setting; he also set its events into motion in a way that he compared to authoring literature. He it is “here the gamesmaster fulfills his role as a novelist. We have nations and society, but where are they going? Will there be war, and if so, what is its outcome?” But Chilenskas wisely recognized that he was no novelist, that he was instead responsible for engaging players in his setting, and he worked diligently to foster “the ability of the players to affect the course of history in a meaningful fashion” (WH 7).

As the first commercial systems began calling themselves role-playing games, their designs specified a general setting, or a particular imaginary world, or even a specific story to varying degrees: for example, Bunnies & Burrows drew heavily from the setting of the novel Watership Down but left the referee to define the world, or warrens, where rabbits would adventure. Its rules even warn referees not to stray beyond specifying that world into plotting a specific direction for the game: “It is absolutely impossible to foresee what players will do in the game. The best-laid traps will be avoided, players will do what you least expect. . . . So save yourself the headaches of laying out too much detail of the future of the game; it’s more fun to let the game evolve for you as well as them anyway.”11 This shows a key side effect of advancing beyond Waddell level 1 games: when you release characters from the confines of a dungeon, dungeon design itself becomes a speculative activity because players will not reliably explore the areas of the game world that the referee has specified.

Referees might try to steer characters, gently or blatantly, into sanctioned spaces of the game, but that might provoke resistance. Mark Keller, writing in the Wild Hunt 13 in 1977, acknowledged that “how much the GM should steer the players is an interesting question.” Any sort of fixed scenario, such as a module, seemed to require it: “If they’re low-levels hired to do a specific job, their scenario is completely planned out, of course.” In general, he recommended more subtle indications to nudge a party in the direction that would serve the narrative. “Otherwise, I plant clues. Leaving town? ‘Why not stop at the tavern first for a last drink?’—and in the bar is a wanderer with a story of treasure glowing near the North Road.” Players can then choose to follow the lead or not—though if they opt out, it is ostensibly up to the referee to proffer an alternative. Or as the author of the E’a (1979) would put it, “If the players don’t want to get involved, don’t make them.”12

If responsibility for steering a story rests with the referee, the structure of that story, as Michie recommended, can fall back on the source literature that inspired the worlds and characters. Some of the earliest disputes among players of role-playing games focused on how referees might curate games that were too lenient on the players, but fantasy literature gave ample precedent for steering stories in that direction. In a 1977 essay called “A Defense of Monty Hall,” John Strang playfully puzzled over criticisms levied at generous referees. He pointed out that fantasy stories tend to display conspicuous generosity to their protagonists: “Most of the adventures and myths and fairy stories that D&D and C&S derive from are pretty Monty Hall.” In fantastic literature, power and riches often accrue unearned rather than through arduous endeavors, so Strang felt justified in asking, “What does Bilbo (a first level hobbit) do to earn Sting and the One Ring?” He then showed how fairy stories such as “The Widow’s Son” heap rewards on characters for incidental acts of charity rather than heroic feats of arms. “Fantasy,” Strang must conclude, “is a pretty Monty Hall situation” (AE 29).

For Strang, the connection of role-playing games to stories posed an interesting question about realism—even though Mark Swanson had already deemed realistic a “mirth-provoking word” when applied to fantasy gaming—because, as Strang put it, “the question isn’t so much one of ‘should the FRP game scenario be realistic’ but rather ‘which should it be realistic to, the realistic wargame or the patently unrealistic world of fantasy?’” Whereas some referees might endeavor to simulate a reasonable fantastic world, others might instead replicate the narratives of fantasy. So, for Strang, the pejorative Monty Hall accusations epitomized the divide between the two cultures and how on one side of it “a lot of DMs are still uncomfortable with fantasy and want realistic wargame stuff.”

Fidelity to source literature had effects on game designs that borrowed little from the Tolkien set. Superhero ’44 brought role playing to the superhero genre, and with that genre comes certain formulaic restrictions on the course of events. “Villains will always try to capture a hero” rather than killing him outright, for example, and subsequently “they usually put him in a death trap and leave (they are very squeamish and don’t wait around).”13 A later superhero game, Villains & Vigilantes, takes this a step further: “If our game was to be based on comics and comic book style characters, we should follow the Comics Code.”14 A number of constraints on play fall out of that decision. As the rulebook explains, “According to the Comics Code followed by the major comic book publishers, villains in comics cannot be portrayed as the type of person one would want to be or become,” so “players may NOT be villains and ‘chaotic’ behavior on their parts will result in the loss of Charisma points.”15 Although superheroes enjoy freedom of decision, the ethical calculus in early superhero role-playing games focused on simulating the types of stories about superheroes that appeared in comic books, and used alignment-correction mechanisms to encourage players to comply.

Just as it was possible for a premade setting to relieve a referee of the responsibility for inventing a world, so too could a design lift the burden of steering a narrative out of the referee’s hand. The starkest example is the Fantasy Games Unlimited (FGU) title Flash Gordon & the Warriors of Mongo (1977), written by the company’s founder, Scott Bizar, in concert with the science-fiction and fantasy author Lin Carter. Flash Gordon was surely the first self-described role-playing game to license a preexisting media property, with all of the backstory that entails. Although the game takes place on the world of Mongo, the purpose of the system is no longer to simulate a world but instead to simulate a particular type of story, where the players take on the roles of characters in the story. Flash Gordon goes beyond merely defining an objective of play—it even specifies a clear victory condition that ends the game, something anathema to D&D. Yet it had no trouble proclaiming itself a role-playing game, and we would be at some pains to disqualify it.

The introduction to the rules of Flash Gordon quite starkly begins, “It is the intention of these rules to provide a simple and schematic system for recreating the adventures of Flash Gordon on the planet Mongo.” Although the adventures themselves are purportedly “free-wheeling and widely varied,” they all have the “final goal of overthrowing the evil government of the Emperor Ming the Merciless.”16 Thus, not only is the Flash Gordon system built around a specific world, but the design itself scopes play to a specific type of story in that world: one where the characters aspire to defeat Ming. That is simply a premise for the game that all players must accept. Characters have four randomly determined characteristics, and based on those roles each player selects one of three character classes according their prime requisites: a warrior favors combat skill, a leader requires charisma, and a scientist needs scientific aptitude. There are no other quantified character attributes of any kind. In the course of play, a character may become wounded, but there is no concept of hit points; rather, the nature of the situation determines the wound effect and its resolution. The system is stripped down to a bare minimum.

A world map shows the various regions of Mongo that the party traverses on their way to confront Ming—but the actual progress of the party through the story of defeating Ming is tracked on a separate “schematic map.” The Flash Gordon rules emphasize that “our schematic or representational outlook simplifies the situation to make a game playable without the extremes of paperwork necessary in most role-playing games.”17 In some respects, play resembles a traditional board game in that the “schematic” map depicts a set of concentric rings broken into segments, each of which represents both a territory in the world and the particular adventure the parties in that location will experience. The rulebook describes the perils within each segment of the schematic map, enumerates the strategies players may employ to overcome those perils along with any necessary die rolls, and finally specifies a reward characters will receive once they successfully advance to the next region. The reward frequently translates into a boost to a characteristic, though it may also entail enlisting new soldiers allied to the party’s cause. Parties may choose a direct route to Ming through conduits defined on the schematic map, but a more circumambulatory approach will allow characters to accumulate the rewards and allies necessary to secure victory. However, even the most circuitous route would surely resolve within a single evening’s play, and thus we should understand Flash Gordon as a game without an episodic structure, instead featuring a single replayable scenario composed of the scenes designated by the schematic map.

What does a referee actually do in Flash Gordon? The players start at a random location on the schematic map, but from that point forward they choose where they move, and thus the narrative flow between encounters is selected by the players rather than by the referee. The rules say the “referee or gamemaster” is the one who “determines the dangers encountered by the player characters” when they enter areas,18 but “determines” seems to mean “consults the rulebook.” Action resolution is very different from the traditional dialogue of D&D: the system is focused on resolving situations with a simple die roll rather than by refining statements of intention such as “I’m going to escape” into actionable tasks. No secret information is involved, so surely players could run the game themselves, without a referee to parrot the rules. Perhaps what is left as the referee function when you take away world building or even control over the flow of events is, as Sandy Eisen might have it, the power to isolate the players in the situation, to grant them the luxury of ignoring the rules, even rules as simple as they are, to submerge themselves into the characters. Thanks to the reductive power of the dialogue, the players have little visibility into how complex—or not—the considerations are that the referee takes into account before relating the results of their actions.

Flash Gordon furnishes an early example in which the referee’s creative contribution to a role-playing game is unrelated to building a world or even determining the flow of events but must instead lie in more intangible aspects of how the dialogue is presented. To paraphrase Monsters! Monsters!, the referee’s responsibility extends to convincing the players of the reality of the world by explaining what they see and hear around them. This is where Michie and Roos would argue that the way the referee articulates the world is itself a creative responsibility. A referee can always rely on the “story-telling arts” in conducting the dialogue to create a compelling dramatic situation out of even the most rudimentary system.19 Ken St. Andre, the designer of Tunnels & Trolls, wrote an early review of Flash Gordon where he acknowledged the “enormous potential” of the game but also complained, “Unfortunately you will have to do most of the imaginative work yourself, as only the barest skeleton outline of various situations is described in the book” (SN 29). Perhaps he meant that the referee would have to exercise the latitude to go beyond the rules in order to make the game interesting.

It is hard to even rate a work like Flash Gordon on Waddell’s scale because Flash Gordon did not aim to provide a “coherent” world in the sense that Swanson described. Why would it? Flash Gordon stories are not about shopping for equipment in towns or about downtrodden adventurers tending bar when strapped for cash. Owing to their origins in comic books and film serials, they are formulaic adventure narratives. Surely that also holds true for much of fantasy fiction—Conan would gladly perish before taking a straight job. Merely designing a detailed world does not necessarily encourage adventuring: the referee and the players must create an environment where characters will become the protagonists in a compelling story. To achieve this effect, the dramatic course of a story need not adhere so closely to preordained events as does the Flash Gordon game: freed from the constraints of recycling a specific media property, a game design could schematize the direction of a story in a way that allows the players and the referee more creative control.

Merle Rasmussen’s design drafts for Top Secret contained various iterations of a flowchart, “Schematic Diagram of Game Plan,” which showed the structure of stories in the secret-agent genre that the game emulates. Each node in the flowchart shows a sequential stage in the narrative; a note suggests that “a token can be moved from block to block” to track an agent’s progress through the story, as in a board game. Once an agent character is created, the agent is assigned to a particular bureau of service and then briefed on an allocated job. The agent then travels to a location and attempts to find the target in order to fulfill the job. This might or might not involve committing a crime, but once the job is done, the agent needs to make a getaway. As the constraints of the genre require, this cannot go smoothly: from the “Getaway” the agent must move to either the “Complications” node—which is ominously shaped like a pistol—or the “Capture” node. A captured agent will be summarily executed or jailed; from “Jail,” a jailbreak may be attempted, which leads the agent back to the “Getaway” node. The agent ultimately either succeeds and receives “The Payoff” or ends up on the coffin-shaped node called “R.I.P.” From that node, the only possible move in the schematic is to return to character creation. In practice, any Top Secret game could be mapped onto this structure: Rasmussen gave an example of a mission where the Jackal must “hijack a tank located on a fishing trawler off the coast of Asia,” and in the early iteration the game the “Fulfill Job Assignment” node relies on resolving those broader goals rather than on breaking them down into tasks for resolution: the Jackal has “a 35% chance of getting on the trawler and a 75% chance of unloading the tank” (DR 40). Failure means a hasty getaway and possibly “complications.”

Where once a game would furnish a map of a world, now instead it furnished a map of a story. By the time Top Secret made it into print in 1980, it no longer included this schematic—though Rasmussen did reprint it in a contemporary issue of The Dragon (DR 40). It provides an indication of how early designers began to think in terms of simulating the formula of a story rather than merely trying to simulate a world that players can wander around in. These designs were, as Michie and Roos would hope, trying to integrate the structure of stories into the system of play. Missing any of Rasmussen’s nodes in the secret-agent genre story would result in a failure to conform to the source literature just as inserting the wrong weaponry in a wargame involving a particular historical period would be a failure of “realism.” Moreover, any constraints and parameters imposed on a gamed story will trickle down to influence the fate of the characters who inhabit it—and thus guide how roles must be played.

Destiny’s Mark

If designing worlds was the intended purview of the referee, the question of how game events unfolded was a bit more complicated. Players could have their own personal goals, even if they were no more atypical than becoming a “superperson,” and those goals could conflict with the direction in which a referee or designer tries to steer the story of the game. Michie, writing in 1976, already knew stories could not be entirely top down, that referees had to take cues from players. Referees had techniques that could help them keep players in the game, but the question inevitably became whether that decision really belonged with the referee in the first place.

The path to becoming a “superperson” could be arduous, requiring a character to overcome many episodes of peril. To rise to the highest rank required that an adventurer many times stand the hazard of the die. An unfortunate roll could swiftly end the career of a budding King Conan, so to give players the time needed to develop long-term destinies for their characters, role-playing game designs included mechanisms for preventing sudden death. Hit points were the most prominent and pervasive. But one mechanism in particular became central to the design questions surrounding the respective responsibilities of the player, the referee, and the system, and to the equally entangled questions about stories, destiny, and chance: saving throws.

D&D inherited saving throws from the wargaming tradition, most directly from Chainmail. Saving throws in D&D act as a crucial check against powerful spells: unlike blows with a melee weapon, spellcasting requires no “to hit” roll by its caster; instead, the target of a spell gets a saving throw, which might halve or in some cases negate the spell’s effect. Saving throws also let players override the effect of poisons and certain other negative status conditions. A failed saving throw could mean death and with it perhaps the end of a character’s story. Yet the original D&D rules offer little by way of explanation for why saves exist or what properties of the game world they model. They are, like hit points, a mechanism that keeps characters alive and thus prolongs adventures; just as higher-level characters gain more hit points, they similarly have better odds of making a saving throw.

The earliest imitators of D&D usually retained the device of saving throws or something very like them. Tunnels & Trolls calls them “saving rolls” and explains, “From time to time, the D.M. will ask you to make a saving roll for your character, always when there is a chance that something bad will happen to you.” Tunnels & Trolls has a character attribute for “luck,” so saving throws in its system explicitly depend on chance: as the rules put it, “there are situations from which only great good luck can save you.”20 They describe a saving throw as something rolled by a player reactively, at the referee’s request, when misfortune looms.

But sometimes behind what appears to be luck hides the hand of providence. Bunnies & Burrows has some very striking text surrounding saving throws and the role of the referee employing them. The authors write, “Through years of Gamemastering, we have found that it helps the games for the GM to be flexible in the use of Saving Throws. Rigid adherence to Saving Throw rules tends to be very deadly, with less fun for the players.” The rules consequently recommend that referees practice a bit of divine intervention, as Gygax would have called it. They explain, “We may shade die rolls just a bit in certain key situations, so that a rabbit may survive to play again.”21 Rather than letting the dice tell the story, when the destruction of the character is on the line, the referee should exercise discretion and “shade” the results of rolls to preserve the lives of characters—and note that there is no mention here of Gygax’s restriction on doling out such a reprieve only to characters who have earned it, nor of what might make a situation “key” other than that it is potentially lethal.

The Bunnies & Burrows rules recommend that such adjustments to the die roles “nearly always should favor the players” rather than nonplayer antagonists, which privileges the players above the forces controlled by the referee, implicitly encouraging the referee to treat the game cooperatively rather than as a competition. Crucially, Bunnies & Burrows also warns that the referee must not let players depend on a referee “acting the part of God too much”—instead a referee must “let the players retain the illusion that they determine their own fates.” When the time comes for divine intervention, would-be deities must practice it in secret: for players, the dramatic uncertainty of the game relies on the “illusion” that it is the dice that decide rather than the discretion of the referee. Thus, players cannot be parties to the execution of the system when the referee decides to “shade” the roll. Blacow would corroborate the perils of disillusionment in the Wild Hunt 17, remarking, “I can’t see much interest in a game where you know the DM will go out of his way to keep you alive, acts like Santa Claus, and otherwise operates a ‘can’t-lose’ situation.” This can make players feel as if they have no freedom of decision, no ability to make meaningful choices—a consequence that results when players become too isolated from the system.22

Referees who tacitly preserved the lives of characters might have goals of their own at stake in these games, such as destinies planned for characters. At the beginning of 1976, Mark Chilenskas reported in Wild Hunt 1 that “I have found it useful to assign people a secret mission in life.” For example, he imagined that a thief’s purpose might involve stealing some “highly prized artifact.” But selecting a purpose for a character requires more than just recognizing the obvious objectives of the class: “You should also try to match the purpose to the personality of the person possessing the character.” Chilenskas saw purpose as something that the referee gradually introduces to the player: it should unfold like the layout of a dungeon map. “I feel the character should initially have no knowledge of his secret destiny. The gamesmaster should bring it out slowly, through encounters and legends, books he has read and places he has seen. . . . Eventually, no matter which course he follows he will hear more and more about the task I have set aside for him.” Discovering one’s own secret destiny became a potential premise of the game, though not every player would appreciate having greatness thrust upon him or her so flagrantly, as Chilenskas acknowledged: “Of course a player could choose to ignore this, which is fine, he has his own life to lead. Some people probably would resent having a goal that they had to accomplish.” But Chilenskas was confident that “finding one’s true destiny is a challenge few can resist.”

Referees require nothing but fluency with the story-telling arts to give players a purpose, as Chilenskas described, but system mechanisms can also be deployed to direct characters toward a destiny. This was best expressed in the era by the “Intentionality” mechanism of Legacy, which might be seen as an attempt to wrap a system around the concept of a secret “purpose” assigned to characters by referees of the sort Chilenskas proposed. To use the Intentionality system, the Legacy rules stipulate that the referee “must establish a series of general Intentionality trends or currents at the same time that s/he is designing and creating the game environment” in such a way that these Intentionality currents “indicate the general directions in which the game operator wishes the game to go.”23 Where applying a bit of “shade” to a saving throw might help avert the catastrophic end to a story—namely by preventing a potentially game-ruining death—Intentionality offered a finer tool for nudging players into specific actions and events.

Intentionality in Legacy is a quantified attribute of characters, either player or nonplayer, as well as of certain items. As the rules put it, “Intentionality is a motivational force which tends to influence the likelihood of things happening,”24 so, practically speaking, it modifies die rolls when events related to these Intentionality trends and currents are at stake. This provides a more formal framework in which the referee can influence die rolls when necessary to steer the game in the desired direction—and, moreover, can do so more openly, without risk of shattering illusions. To corral the potential abuse of this mechanism by the referee, the rules suggest committing to paper a “statement of effect” that the referee keeps secret from the players and that determines when die rolls will be modified by the Intentionality current.

Entities in the game with an Intentionality statistic higher than 2 are termed a “nexus,” and those at 10 or higher a “primary nexus.” The rules give an example where “a player character with an Intentionality of 12 is being partially directed and steered by an unknown statement of effect for a Primary Intentionality Nexus. The player has noticed that his/her ability to recognize and avoid poisonous plants has increased, and that his/her general appreciation for plants and their value seems to have been enhanced. Clearly the player is receiving die roll modifications as high as +100 for certain types of situations, but s/he is as yet uncertain of what these are. The major clue seems to be that they involve plants.”25

Players, as the Legacy rules suggest, can be “partially directed and steered” by Intentionality, which the referee secretly manages. Because players know the results of die rolls, they will notice when they undergo such a dramatic modification; Intentionality thus provides players some visibility into a system that lets referees steer a story. One can also easily imagine uses of this mechanism that would encourage the story to move toward particular themes or events. Although it does not deprive players of freedom of decision, everyone likes to succeed, and the bonuses that Intentionality provides would certainly pique players’ curiosity and influence their decisions, perhaps more effectively than Chilenskas’s “purpose.” One early reviewer of Legacy wrote of the Intentionality system that it “can only be described as a quantification of Destiny” (DW 2).

The fragmentary and opaque Legacy system surely saw little direct uptake, though its innovations would influence further design and play, and it serves as one indicator of how the referee could lightly manage the destinies of characters. Saving throws never became entirely free of this fateful connotation either, though it would not be until the publication of the Dungeon Masters Guide in 1979 that Gygax would explicate the purpose of saving throws in the D&D system. In his own estimation, saving throws in wargaming were always about destiny because a saving throw “represents the chance for the figure concerned to avoid (or at least partially avoid) the cruel results of fate.” Speaking to role-playing games in particular, he contextualized the inspiration for saving throws very much within the tradition of sword-and-sorcery literature, namely in the sorts of escapes that heroic figures perform that allow for “continuing epic” tales. Because in fantasy stories “some of the characters seem to be able to survive for an indefinite time,” Gygax argued, we have the same expectation in fantasy games that “the player character is all important,” and thus “he or she must always—or nearly always—have a chance, no matter how small, a chance of somehow escaping what otherwise would be inevitable destruction.”26

Gygax saw that the ultimate rationale for these daring escapes is the generation of a satisfying story. He wrote, “The mechanics of combat or the details of the injury caused by some horrible weapon are not the key to heroic fantasy and adventure games. It is the character, how he or she becomes involved in the combat, how he or she somehow escapes—or fails to escape—the mortal threat which is important to the enjoyment or longevity of the game.” Gygax here placed the emphasis not only on the characters but also, more importantly, on the story of the character’s actions: player characters “are in effect writing their own adventures and creating their own legends.”27 The purpose of saving throws, one might say, is to preserve the lives of characters in order to keep the story alive—and thus the saving throw does not model a property of characters or the world but instead a property of fantastic narratives.

At the end of the day, however, a saving throw is just a die roll: it offers only a chance, sometimes quite a remote one. Behind the scenes at TSR, designs offering a more radical approach to modeling adventure narratives were already under development in the 1970s, ones that let players take a more active role in preserving their own destiny. The year before the Dungeon Masters Guide came out, during work on the pioneering espionage role-playing game Top Secret, Merle Rasmussen elected not to include a saving-throw mechanism. He discussed this decision in person with Mike Carr during the summer GenCon, and then in October wrote to TSR design manager Al Hammack that “since there is no ‘saving throw,’ often a character dies or is seriously harmed with no chance to resist,” so Rasmussen proposed “a non-gametested pair of survival traits called ‘fame’ and ‘fortune.’”28

The “fortune” trait, Rasmussen explained to Hammack, is an expendable resource assigned to every beginning character that simulates “beginner’s luck.” He gave the following example: “When a lethal bullet should strike the character, he can use one ‘fortune’ point to deflect it. However, once used, ‘fortune’ points are gone.”29 Rasmussen’s proposal went beyond merely permitting a die-roll chance to survive and granted players the ability to undo a deadly event retroactively: a control over fortune that no games at the time had yet bestowed onto players as a quantified system element. Here the player could spend one of these “fortune” points to act as fate and change the course of the game’s story, trumping the dice. “Fame” points behaved in a similar way, but they accumulated with character experience and modeled how, in spy stories, the renown of a secret agent might act as a counter to undesirable game circumstances—it would not be a satisfying story if some famous character met an ignominious end unworthy of his or her legend. In real life, no amount of fame deflects bullets: this is a system that models a property of stories rather than physics.

Hammack wrote back, “Mike [Carr] and I both like the ‘Fame’ and ‘Fortune’ traits: it’s a really super idea.” Recognizing the need to maintain some dramatic uncertainty in the minds of players, Hammack offered one slight tweak to the “fortune” design: “We suggest that the exact amount, however, be determined by a secret die roll of the administrator (say one roll of a 10-sider with perhaps a minimum number being 2 or 3). In this way the player would literally never know when his luck was going to run out!”30 This design strikes a key compromise between Rasmussen’s initial reach for player control over system execution and a nagging doubt that keeps the players in suspense, thanks to secret information hidden by the referee.

Top Secret would not see print until 1980, so these innovations remained internal to TSR for the time being. But other designers studying the problem of adapting role-playing games to settings other than heroic fantasy lighted on similar alternatives to saving throws—ones rooted in cinematic conventions, and ones that empowered players to intervene when disaster struck, rather than relying on a referee to “shade” the results. Once upon a Time in the West (1978) identifies its rules as “about fifty–fifty based on real life and ‘Spaghetti’ Westerns” and divides gunfighters into four status ranks, the highest of which, named the “Protagonisti” after the main character in those Italian films, has skills that come straight out of the movies.31 These include not just a “sixth sense” but also an ability intended to prevent death from “a lucky shot from a Peon,” the lowest rank of gunfighter. “When a Protagonisti receives a wound, and dices for effect . . . if the result is not to his liking he may re-dice, only once.” But the rules provide an immediate caveat that for exceptionally cinematic conditions, “such as re-creating the finish of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid . . . the rule could be extended so that Protagonisti can have three dice attempts.”32 It is up to the player, rather than the referee, to invoke this mechanism, and a re-roll might risk a pessimal outcome, but it makes possible a victory worthy of a movie climax.

The design of the hybrid game Commando (1979), which shipped in a box containing one booklet of wargaming rules and another of role-playing rules, includes similar systems that explicitly incorporate what Eric Goldberg, in a design note, would call “the ‘unreality factor,’ which allows characters to get away with the same outrageous maneuvers that heroes routinely pull off at the climax of the movie, comic book, etc.”33 Rather than simulating a realistic world where commandos conduct raids, Commando is realistic to the rhythms of heroic narratives based in that setting.

Commando awards characters a Hero Rating, which increases with the successful completion of missions. A character who reaches the level of a “TV Hero” receives a Hero Ability chosen by the player. Some abilities include straightforward increases to attributes, but other options offer more fantastical bonuses. In the mold of a D&D Paladin, a character can “Establish Good Terms with an Intelligent Horse,” like the Lone Ranger’s Silver. Other offerings include a “Sixth Sense for Danger,” an ability to be in the “Right Place at the Right Time,” or the good fortune that comes with the “Luck of the Irish.” Perhaps the most intriguing of the Hero Abilities is “Engaged to a Striking Paramour” because it effectively grants the character immortality with the excuse that “love conquers all,” but only fleetingly. “Basically, the character is considered immune to any lasting damage or change,”34 but it comes with a duration limited to only three missions, as the love, or love interest, of an action hero presumably shall not endure.

Once a character reaches the Hero Rating of a “Major Novel Hero,” which is just one level shy of a “Big-Budget Movie Hero,” the player may invoke the right to a Miraculous Escape once per mission. Like the “Fame Points” conceived by Rasmussen, a Miraculous Escape may be declared by the player “immediately after any one combat action resulting in the Character receiving Wound Points or being killed.”35 In order to perform a Miraculous Escape, the player must make a die roll similar to a saving throw: cast the dice against a 36-option table, with only rolls of 2 and 18 resulting in a “crap out” failure to escape. For each of the remaining 34 possibilities, the system specifies a particular Miraculous Escape, ranging from the plausible to the preposterous to the downright metafictional. In a plausible result for a roll of 8, the “Enemy Gun Jams.” For a roll of 22, a passing golf ball “hit with tremendous velocity from a golf course several miles” away collides with the fatal bullet in midair, deflecting it. For result 30, “The Great Director yells cut, ending all action. A retake is necessary; begin the Game-Turn gain, replacing all Men at their previous positions and removing any Wound Points suffered.”36

In parallel with these efforts, other designs began to expand the connotation of saving throws beyond merely reacting to avoid negative consequences; these systems instead allowed players a saving throw to perform extraordinary actions. Space Quest (1977), for example, defines saving-throw values as the “indicators of the probability of a character succeeding in some extraordinary feat, or staving off the effect of some horrible hazard.” The rules allow saving throws to be rolled for “feats of strength” or “bursts of speed,” but only under the right circumstances: “Only conditions of great and imminent peril allow the superhuman exercise of abilities to resist fate.”37 Again, the term fate recurs in these descriptions of the function of saving throws, along with the idea that players can twist the fates of their characters in crucial moments. Whereas earlier systems had the referee requiring a saving throw, Space Quest suggests that players can demand one themselves in an attempt to summon that “superhuman exercise of abilities.” The producers of Space Quest would incorporate similar systems and language into their next game, Bushido, the following year.

As some games moved away from the heroic-fantasy concept of a saving throw, designers of the 1970s explored new ways to grant players a degree of control over the course of play that allowed them to override the system and under certain circumstances to assume a power similar to the discretion that the referee could exercise over the resolution of events. It was no longer a matter of the referee letting “the players retain the illusion that they determine their own fates” while fudging die rolls—instead the system delegates to the players the responsibility for deciding when to fudge die rolls, within constraints managed by the referee. These and similar mechanisms began to show how a system could grant players in a role-playing game something more like the status of authors of their story.

Unsupervised Adventure

Taken to its extreme, how much control could players ultimately exercise over the course of a game? If the referee is what stands in their way, then perhaps the referee could be eliminated entirely. It might seem as if this would disqualify a design from being a role-playing game, but titles with this property emerged almost immediately and were sorted by critical consensus into the same bucket as D&D.

Among the earliest titles grouped under the label role-playing game, En Garde has the distinction of providing in 1975 a system that does not mention a referee at all. There is no question of a neutral arbiter designing the world or steering destiny: the rulebook specifies a world and the chances that characters will succeed in it. Everyone plays swashbuckling European gentlemen adventurers of the seventeenth century who aspire to gain status points to advance in social level. Players may explore any of a number of paths to advancement, such as a military career, in the process accumulating influence, winning duels, carousing, and so on. Dice that players throw against tables in the rulebook decide the results, and the interpretation of these rolls is subject only to the mutual supervision of players, who are free to collaborate or compete within the game’s framework.

Although the character-generation and progression systems of En Garde borrow from D&D, its refereeless structure owes more to the multiplayer format of Diplomacy. En Garde is broken into turns, each of which models one week of game time: “For each week of the game, all players, after a short negotiation period, secretly note their personal actions for the week,” which gives them the opportunity to arrange competitive or cooperative activities with each other. “A player need not keep his word to other players, but must do what is written on his calendar,” En Garde reads, paraphrasing the sentiments of the Diplomacy rulebook.38 Diplomacy emerged from an operations-research community that had referred to certain political wargames as role-playing games since the mid-1960s, so it is perhaps no coincidence that the Diplomacy-inspired En Garde would encourage the attachment of that label to the new genre of games following D&D.

The division of En Garde games into strict turns, at the end of which players simultaneously reveal their actions following an interval of collusion and role playing, replaces the dialogue loop of D&D, where players propose statements of intention, and the referee explains how those actions have altered the game world. That necessarily meant that En Garde discarded the discretion of the referee, the opportunity to exercise judgment when a player proposes to attempt some unanticipated action, in favor of a more rigid scope of agency. Playing a role depends hugely on the amount of freedom a character has: in these unchaperoned games, choice is limited in crucial ways in order to compensate for the lack of a referee who can broadly interpret the players’ will.

The absence of an En Garde referee left a gap that players familiar with D&D immediately felt. Mark Swanson observed of the game in A&E 9 that “large amounts of die throwing occur continually, without a gamesmaster to act as the ‘voice of destiny.’ At least in the groups I’ve been involved with, this resulted in boredom and neglect.” In practice, however, some players of En Garde imported the assumptions of D&D into its play—although the design does not mention a referee, nor does it bar one. Charles McGrew explained in A&E 16 that although “En Garde as written isn’t much more than a game of mathematics,” actually “any D&D ref can spice it up a lot.” He then gave a colorful narrative account of swashbuckling debauchery from his local game, clearly embellished by the influence of a referee.

En Garde set a precedent for refereeless role playing that sufficed for its Renaissance setting, but that model would prove difficult to apply to dungeon adventures, where the referee must keep secret information—the dungeon architecture and population—away from the prying eyes of players. Two early techniques were contrived to solve that problem: first, systems in which players generated dungeons dynamically while exploring and, second, systems where some new physical component of play revealed the secret information to players selectively on a need-to-know basis.

These refereeless systems existed mostly to support solo play; the difficulty of recruiting both a referee and a stable of players led to numerous early experiments with solo role-playing games. When TSR published the first issue of Strategic Review at the start of 1975, it included a feature titled “Solo Dungeon Adventures,” which let players randomly generate an underworld literally as they explored it. This followed a precedent in the baseline D&D game that effectively permitted solo adventuring in the wilderness on the Outdoor Survival (1972) board, complemented with charts for determining encounters, as this introduced no practical requirement for referee oversight because the wilderness board is public rather than secret information.39 With the “Solo Dungeon Adventures” addition, a player could similarly start a dungeon map in the middle of a page of graph paper and randomly generate underground passages, chambers, traps, adversaries, and plunder in real time during the exploration process.

In solo D&D, the randomness of the dungeon-generation tables serves as a surrogate for the gradual process by which the referee would ordinarily reveal the secret design of the dungeon. In some areas, the procedures for a solo game required no amendment to the rules other than reassigning responsibility for executing the system to the player rather than to the referee. The original D&D rules encourage the referee to check for random encounters, for example, and when this results in an encounter, to then consult tables in the D&D rulebooks to generate a random wandering monster: those responsibilities carry over unchanged to the player in the solo game. Whereas George Phillies wrote that D&D “reduces to you vs. the gamesmaster and the dice,” the solo rules provide a way to drop the referee out of the equation, at least within this narrow scenario of dungeon adventuring.

The results could, however, prove chaotic. One report in A&E 4 from Robert Sacks complained that “the two times I tried D&D solitaire, I rolled a room without any other entrances, and every time I roll for a character, I get a Cleric.” Leaving the entire dungeon structure to chance could lead to comical absurdities and abruptly truncated adventures, although the solo rules recommend that when the result of a layout roll bursts free of the page or violates the previously generated structure, you “amend the result by rolling until you obtain something which will fit with your predetermined limits.”40 But surely unsupervised players would be sorely tempted to tweak the results in all sorts of other ways that an active referee would never permit, often leading to a solipsistic and unsatisfying experience.

Those who found randomly generated dungeons confounding could avail themselves of another approach to refereeless role-playing games: this one required introducing a new game element to maintain the necessary secret information and reveal it selectively to players. Today, that would obviously be a computer, but in the mid-1970s computers were hardly household items. However, in the summer of 1975 intrepid experimenters on the PLATO computer system, an early intercollegiate computer network famous for its graphics capabilities and playful culture, produced an implementation of D&D that permitted a single character to explore a dungeon and defeat monsters to gain experience points and treasure, all without the benefit of a human referee. The game that is today known as pedit5 (1975) serves as one of the few examples with some contemporary documentation from the era. Its dungeon is static and designed into the program, but the computer randomly generated the abilities of each new character—though players could “reject this hero and ask for another” if the characteristics generated were undesirable.41

In exchange for obviating the need for a referee, these early computer adventures necessarily limited the scope of agency of players, arguably more so than either En Garde or solo D&D. Not only could players not propose actions to a referee, but the programmer, in the seat of the designer, effectively had to anticipate and incorporate all possible actions, which in the case of pedit5 reduced to the most rudimentary forms of attacking, spellcasting, and dungeon movement. Then again, if a game aspired to furnish only a Waddell level 1 adventure, the proverbial “Gilded Hole,” how much more agency did it require apart from the basics of exploration and combat? These earliest PLATO dungeons had clear victory conditions, such as obtaining 20,000 experience points in pedit5. Computer dungeon adventure games would proliferate in the late 1970s as the microcomputer revolution opened up new possibilities for commercial software in the space, but in 1975 only a small community of gamers had access to a system such as PLATO.

A more widespread tool for eliminating the referee entered the market in 1976 with the release of Flying Buffalo’s Buffalo Castle. It combined a dungeon description with a gamebook format; although the celebrated second-person Choose Your Own Adventure book series did not start until 1978, Buffalo Castle could draw on still earlier precedents, including the Tracker Books series. Buffalo Castle relied on the Tunnels & Trolls system and provided small rules changes intended to make the game compatible with a “solitaire dungeon.” For example, it restricts characters only to first-level fighters and parties only to a single character. As in solo D&D, players are instructed, in lieu of a referee, to execute rolls for wandering monsters themselves.

As a sort of configurable dungeon adventure transcript, Buffalo Castle begins its dialogue with a simple second-person choice: “You are facing a large, gloomy castle, with three large wooden doors. If you choose to go in the left door, turn to 4A. If you wish to go in the center door, go to 8A. If you wish to go into the right door, turn to 12A.”42 The book effectively offers statements of intention to the player in a multiple-choice format. Every numbered page contains several alphabetical (usually A through F) game nodes, each giving a referee description of the result of the choice: some nodes describe the space a character has just entered, others a treasure found, still others the nature of a trap that the player has triggered or the actions of a foe encountered. In nodes that indicate that a combat ensues, players will direct the tactics of both sides, tabulating any wounds and experience that results on a character record sheet. Players navigated until they perished or found an exit, much the way that D&D scoped any dungeon scenario. Buffalo Castle became the first of many such modules that Flying Buffalo would produce, and with the fame of the Choose Your Own Adventure book series numerous other game companies developed competing solo-module franchises.

By exercising a modified preexisting system within a very narrow scenario, these gamebooks turned scenario design into an authorial practice. The situation that a player reads in each node is, in essence, the referee side of the dialogue, not unlike the incidental descriptions of rooms or situations that a referee would improvise during play, but often more elaborate. The review by Steve Jackson in Space Gamer 9 stressed that “Buffalo Castle is well-written, with the wit and imagination that characterizes a really good FRP game.” We must, however, take that in the context of the example Jackson offered from the game, which is a node reading: “You have tripped the ‘stink’ trap. You are squirted with essence of skunk oil. Your charisma is reduced by 5 for the rest of this trip, and by 1 permanently.”

Early textual node-navigation games and computer games quickly increased in diversity and sophistication as they cross-pollinated. By the end of 1975, Mark Leymaster had already computerized the solo dungeon–generation principles from Strategic Review into a program that created a textual description of running through a random dungeon; by the end of the 1970s, Flying Buffalo would adapt similar techniques into its Computer-Generated Dungeon product, which dynamically generated a node-navigation booklet such that every printed copy contained a different dungeon. More famously, adapting textual node-navigation principles to the computer yielded classic text-adventure games such as Adventures and Zork.43

All of these developments occurred as role-playing game began to gain currency in the community, and so confusion about the scope of the term could only grow as the diversity of practices collected under its name increased. Nor did this result solely from the exigencies of solo play. Although much of the development of referee-less games focused on the solo player, some early role-playing games specified multiplayer modes without referee supervision. When Steve Jackson began releasing solo modules for his Fantasy Trip products, starting with Death Test (1978), they supported a one-player mode, a two-player mode, and a multiplayer mode and could operate with or without a referee.

The presence of a referee was sometimes held against titles that did not identify themselves as role-playing games. In some wargaming circles, a referee who could bend or mend rules was sometimes condemned as a mere Band-Aid for covering design blunders. A critical review of TSR’s space-colonization game Star Empires (1977) in Space Gamer 14 enumerated a number of problems and inconsistencies in the rules before exclaiming, “But wait! All is not lost! They recommend a referee, and referees are magical: They can modify game rules to make them playable, and can rule out impossible situations, and can do all sorts of wonderful and nasty things.” A referee could be seen as just pixie dust sprinkled on an incomplete or incoherent system, a way for a designer to explain away deficiencies in the design that would need to be resolved in a refereeless system. A system without a referee required more rigor.

Or perhaps a referee could serve as training wheels. The second edition of Superhero ’44 notes at the outset that “it is possible to play without a referee,” though it cautions new players that “it is best to at least start with one.”44 Its foreword indicates that the game has its roots in an alternate-universe D&D campaign, but we can in Superhero ’44 discern clear signs of the influence of En Garde. Superhero ’44 campaign play, for example, stipulates that a player create a “weekly planning sheet” that enumerates the activities that he or she will undertake during that interval, which may include routine patrolling, training, or schooling, “day job” work, research, or even participation in lawsuits resulting from any damages to the city prior superheroism had precipitated. The game is tightly coupled to its setting: the island city of Inguria in the year 2044, which has its own politics, factions, geography, and so on—even the zones that players can patrol are marked on a hex map in the rules.

In refereed play of Superhero ’44, the referee collects these weekly planning sheets, executes the system, and then returns them to the players. For the most part, these referee duties are clerical in nature, without any need or opportunity for discretion—except for combat scenarios, which occur in play when superheroes encounter crimes on patrol. The only essential feature required to eliminate the referee was a means to generate and decide these criminal interventions, and so the “Solo Rules” published within months of the initial release of the game contain a “Synthetic Scenario Machine,” which employs dice to generate crimes, with their perpetrators, locations, witnesses, and so on.

Game Designers’ Workshop produced En Garde before it started marketing its products as role-playing games—but by the time it released the three-volume science-fiction game Traveller in 1977, it knew well what to call such a game. As we might expect given the player experience of En Garde, Traveller acknowledges that the question of whether role-playing games are individual, Waddell level 1 scenarios, or full campaigns of scenarios, or solo games, is all just a matter of player preference. “There are three basic ways to play Traveller: solitaire, scenario, and campaign. Any of these three may be unsupervised (that is, without a referee; the players themselves administer the rules and manipulate the situation).” Traveller is clear, though, that “the main thrust of the game is the refereed or umpired situation. An independent referee allows a large degree of flexibility and continuity often not possible when players themselves control the game. A referee inserts some measure of uncertainty in the minds of the players as they travel through the universe.”45

What ultimately made it possible for a role-playing game to circumvent a referee? In notes appended to Commando, Greg Costikyan proposes the general theoretical principle that “true role-playing games can be divided into two general categories (with some overlap between the categories occurring): closed-system role-playing games and open-ended role-playing games.” Games of the latter category require “a Gamesmaster to invent a world, construct adventures for the characters, and provide new rules as necessary to round out his world,” though they “are designed not so much to limit the Gamesmaster, as to provide a flexible framework of rules to be amended as he desires, and which aid him in the construction and operation of a world.”46 This follows the referee-centric “free” Kriegsspiel tradition of miniature wargames that formed a cornerstone of D&D, in that the Commando system is merely a set of guidelines shaped by the players and referees. But “a closed-system role-playing game, by contrast, may not even require a Gamesmaster.” Costikyan cites En Garde as the obvious example of such a game, where “the rules cover every eventuality that may arise in the course of play; they are a closed-system not requiring outside interference.”47 No doubt Costikyan also had in mind his multiplayer fantasy adventure game Deathmaze (1979), which “requires no gamemaster, but pits the players’ skills against an un-gamemastered game system.”48 The same sentiment would seem to apply to Buccaneer, which makes no mention of a referee, and of course to various gamebooks and computer games. The latter adhered to the “rigid” Kriegsspiel precepts that had stood at the opposite end of the spectrum from the open practices of “free” Kriegsspiel, and their application to role-playing games amply demonstrates how the legacy of wargaming still dominated critical discussion at the end of the 1970s.

Costikyan acknowledges that even games that require no referee cannot obstruct the intervention of one, which means those games can “readily be developed into an open-ended role-playing game,” just as early players grafted a referee onto En Garde. The temptation to transition to an open-ended system arises, he says, because closed systems are “ultimately limited.”49 Even if published rules were to explicitly forbid the use of a referee, no design on paper has the power to prevent players from instating a referee who can commandeer the system and modify it arbitrarily.

Closed systems impart crucial insight into the purpose of the referee in early role-playing games precisely because they can function without a referee. A referee satisfies the potential need for new rules, or for someone to smooth over broken or confusing systems. As an arbiter of fate, a referee may even need to “shade” functioning rules that lead to an unsatisfactory outcome—but only tacitly, while simultaneously letting “the players retain the illusion that they determine their own fates,” as Bunnies & Burrows puts it. The referee’s ability to deliver results without having to explain how or why the results were achieved goes back to nineteenth-century Kriegsspiel, where the referee’s decision was summarily protected from dispute. And, following Eisen’s vow, this property of deferring the system to the referee, and allowing players to experience the immersion of acting as their characters, was deeply entangled with how players understood role playing.