5 Toward a Philosophy

So, really, what is the thing we call a role-playing game? Once a new term enters the vernacular or an old one gains a new connotation, there is a great urgency to tame it with a philosophical definition. When the term encompasses a novel and poorly understood phenomenon, this endeavor will not proceed smoothly. Role-playing game embarked on the journey to define itself with every conceivable disadvantage, and the quest to define it would predictably languish in a labyrinth of contested assumptions for decades.1 That road began with a small group of essayists in the 1970s who attempted in polemical form rather than through design to engage the question of what these games were and what they should be.

The breadth of the design space that early adopters identified with role playing in the 1970s was enormous: it ranged from extremes of openness to rigid constraints, from systems entirely subordinate to a referee to systems that required no referee, from games pegged to a particular story to games that provided a sandbox world for players to explore. But other factors transcending design also influenced how people understood role playing—namely, commercial factors. At the end of 1976, barely a handful of commercial titles proclaimed themselves to be role-playing games; over the next two years, an upheaval of industry priorities rocketed that number into the dozens. We must speak vaguely about the total sum because there were no accepted criteria for admitting a title to the nascent category—we might say there were around 50 by 1980. Before published designs routinely self-identified as role-playing games, this was solely a matter of external critical opinion, but when the label began to carry commercial implications, the decision to attach it to a product could depend more on marketing than on philosophical rigor. This leaves us with a number of oddities and corner cases that we hesitate to classify.

Take the case of Madame Guillotine. First released by Gametesters in the United Kingdom in 1975, the title was acquired by Fantasy Games Unlimited and reissued in the United States the following year with a new commercial identity. Some of the earliest advertisements for Bunnies & Burrows gave a double billing to Madame Guillotine, calling it “abstract role-playing in the Reign of Terror.” Madame Guillotine is in a class of multiplayer political board games such as Kingmaker, all of which owed a certain debt to Diplomacy. Two to six players take on the characters of particular figures in the French Revolution, such as Robespierre, and attempt to curry favor with factions of society by reacting properly to the various crises that naturally arise in such a period of turmoil. There is a prescribed diplomacy phase where players can confer and inhabit those historical roles to the degree they see fit. A review of the FGU version in the beginning of 1977 assented, “This is another role-playing game, such as TSR’s D&D and GDW’s En Garde” (CP 77). Like En Garde, Madame Guillotine loads its role-playing component into a diplomacy phase, though in Madame Guillotine players can win by securing enough victory points and are restricted to playing a small cast of historical personages. So should we consider Madame Guillotine a role-playing game?

The opposite difficulty arose for products that did not advertise themselves as role-playing games but found themselves shoehorned into that category. Once upon a Time in the West, a title first published in 1978 with the subtitle Rules for Gunfight Wargames, laid no claim to membership in the company of role-playing games. But after TSR rebranded its Wild West ruleset Boot Hill as a role-playing game in the summer of 1979, the designers of Once upon a Time felt market pressure to do the same. In an introduction to the game’s supplement, The Return Of, Ian Beck re-creates a heated conversation with his publisher, where he asks, “Who says Once upon a Time in the West are role playing rules?” The publisher gently informs him “everybody” does “’cause that’s what they are.”2 The designer is forced to concede this point, but only warily because he loaths fantasy and the role playing associated strongly with it. The publisher’s incentive in this matter is clear: role-playing games sold much better than wargames in 1979. So the design of Once upon a Time now included campaign rules catering directly to, as Beck puts it, “‘loonies’ out there who actually wish to try to live longer than a single game.”3 But was there any greater justification to label Once upon a Time in the West a role-playing game than its ancestor the Western Gunfight Wargame Rules?4

Many published games hedged their bets, especially those that kept a foot planted firmly in conflict simulation. Both Tradition of Victory and Commando marketed themselves explicitly as hybrid games by shipping as two demarcated booklets: one of wargaming rules and one of role-playing rules. Studying which rules got sorted into which booklets can reveal something of how designers saw the distinction between the two genres. It is more difficult still to classify earlier transitional wargames such as Warriors of Mars (1974) and Knights of the Round Table (1976), which offer in a single rulebook basic conflict simulation rules bundled with progressively more complex campaign rules that incorporate key features we identify with role playing. No one reading the first two chapters of Knights would see anything more than a medieval wargame system, but the rules beginning in the third chapter introduce elements that steer character behavior, stipulate that referees generate maps and situate various Arthurian adventures on them—or simply roll for encounters on random tables—and administer long-term campaigns in which “the fortunes of the characters rise and fall.”5 So does that make it a role-playing game?

Even more puzzling are efforts such as Elementary Watson (1978), a game that, per the back of the box, “combines the features of the traditional boardgame and the contemporary role-playing game.” It takes a detective board game in the tradition of Clue and adds a referee who presents the situation, knows the solution to the crime, and answers arbitrary questions posed by the players. The game plays out almost entirely through those inquiries; the board serves only as a map of London to track the position of characters over time, as some questions may be asked only at particular locations, such as “Are there fingerprints on the parlor doorknob?” The game has little by way of characterization other than a handful of unquantified skills that players select for their characters, such as disguise and anatomy, which they may invoke as areas of expertise when posing questions to the referee. Ed Konstant stipulates in the designer’s notes at the end of the rulebook that “players should be free to use their imaginations to their fullest as long as they follow the guidelines of the rules.”6 Should we understand Elementary Watson as a role-playing game or not? It was arguably the first published title that explicitly set out to marry the role-playing concept to a game system outside the tradition of wargames and conflict simulation.

In just five years of design energy following the release of D&D, the community made astonishing progress in exploring the new space it had identified around role playing, though none of that work seemed to make these games any easier to define. Commentators inevitably brought with them to this process their own assumptions and goals: finding a point of equilibrium that best emphasized the qualities prized by fans—be they immersion or role playing or story—required the intervention of a sort of critical theory of role-playing games that informed future design and shaped play. Most of the early critical discussion centered on D&D—even when writers desperately tried to steer the conversation toward one its competitors. But that reveals the most formidable difficulty faced by theorists: drawing any boundary around a game that admitted of such adaptability and revision.

At first, theoretical literature addressed the small but passionate community of fans who contributed to the hobby press of the day, a group that took upon itself the task of resolving the philosophical problems necessary to understand and improve role-playing games. By this point, the community’s vibrant tradition of criticism on the subject of role-playing games had spread across a broad range of periodicals. Each of the four coastal hotbeds of role playing now had its own communal fanzine: Alarums & Excursions based in Los Angeles, Wild Hunt in Boston, Lords of Chaos in San Francisco, and APA-DUD (also known as Pandemonium) in New York. Similar ventures would emerge as far away as the United Kingdom (Trollcrusher) and Australia (Morningstar). A&E would retain by far the most diverse stable of writers, though the most ardent fans contributed to as many of the APAs as possible. For all that, the community engaged in this discussion remained insular: in the fall of 1977, A&E printed only 400 copies, and Wild Hunt barely managed 150.

Bear in mind, though, that at the start of 1976 D&D had sold a little more than 4,000 copies and that community engagement kept pace with the spread of the game. As the commercial hobby gained momentum, this discussion began to spread from the hastily assembled amateur fanzines of the mid-1970s to glossy offset magazines produced by the major game companies. Publishers began to glean that their readership wanted not only to explore game mechanics but also to engage in a critical exploration of the nature of role-playing games and what they mean to people.

Games Workshop solicited such essays for its fanzine Owl & Weasel—with Andy Evans’s “Reality in Fantasy” being the first it published, in issue 18. Evans wrote broadly about the promise that Dungeons & Dragons offered: that “we could all live a character through the equivalent of Lord of the Rings and games would have reached a height never before achieved or imagined in that dim and distant past when one man first bet with another on which way a particular bit of flint would fall.” A role-playing game, to Evans, offers the chance to “make decisions as if you really were in that situation and facing those problems.” He recognized it is “a new class of game,” one in which “it is not necessary even to know the rules.” He added, in words that echo the guidance Eisen gave just a year earlier, “In fact, it is better if you don’t and make your decisions simply as if you were in that situation.”

Starting with its debut in the spring of 1976, The Dragon carried bimonthly pronouncements from Gary Gygax and his colleagues in Lake Geneva, but it also ran freelance pieces, including some that considered the broader situation of role-playing games. Take, for example, Tom Filmore’s article “The Play’s the Thing” in The Dragon 11. Filmore began by asserting that “role playing is a side of D&D which gives it much of its flavor,” explaining that “as our character grows in experience and memories, so does his depth of personality, becoming more individualistic and unique.” He encouraged exploring motives for adventuring and creating a “colorful background” for each character. Although Filmore knew that some game systems already provided “tables for discovering background information and randomly giving each character various advantages and disadvantages,” presumably including abilities and alignment, he meant something more: those systems are “just the raw data, it is still the player who must incorporate it all and reflect it in his playing of the character,” providing something like the “breath of life” noted by Dick Eney. Filmore promised that if you “personalize your next character,” it will make the game more “satisfying” and will “extend the game down hundreds of new avenues.” Seductively, he urged, “Let yourself go. Try to be someone you are not and see how it feels.”

Games Workshop followed the lead of The Dragon with its own glossy magazine White Dwarf in 1977, which ran essays on the philosophy of role-playing games from its first issue. In 1978, Flying Buffalo de-emphasized its own primitive newsletter Wargamer’s Information in favor of the polished Sorcerer’s Apprentice, which carried a variety of critical literature. The Chaosium had published essays in its fanzine Wyrm’s Footnotes in 1978 but then redirected them to its professional magazine Different Worlds in 1979. Different Worlds in particular poached the most prominent authors from the APA fanzine community to write its articles, especially those dealing with the philosophy of role-playing games. Through the wider circulation of these magazines, the ideas of the hobby community of the late 1970s reached a larger audience than the APAs of earlier years did—The Dragon circulated an average of 6,000 copies a month in 1977 and more than 10,000 in 1979.

Many game designers who participated in this hobby-wide discussion insisted that some fundamental shift had occurred between D&D and more recent titles—but the exact turning point remained elusive. Given the open-ended system of D&D, how could one prove that a variant of D&D could not be devised to support any given criteria proposed to mark this shift? Thus, these competing designs did not stop at merely identifying themselves as role-playing games but also began sorting themselves into “generations.” Although no consensus prevailed on the exact qualities that separated second-generation games from their forebears, the simplicity and underspecification of D&D became the most obvious targets of criticism. The shadow of the two cultures loomed large over this debate as “games people” and “story people” jockeyed to dictate the hobby’s core tenets. Accounts of role-playing games of whichever generation inevitably revolved around a familiar set of controversies: the referee’s control of the played system, the obligations associated with playing characters, and the control that players have over the direction of a game. But these accounts more fundamentally began to explore why we play these games in the first place.

Wargamers Counterattack

Faithful wargamers monitored the ascendance of Dungeons & Dragons with understandable suspicion. The first detailed articulation of their concerns came from Lewis Pulsipher, a long-standing wargamer who, like Gary Gygax, Mark Swanson, and Kevin Slimak, was a prominent member of the International Federation of Wargaming and several regional clubs prior to the foundation of TSR. Pulsipher’s fanzine Supernova tracked science-fiction and fantasy games of the early 1970s; it was a rare venue that covered experimental games in science-fiction fandom, such as Midgard and Elsinore.

In 1975, Supernova 25 ran a review of D&D. Pulsipher tacked on to that review a brief informational note explaining that D&D “is not a game for someone who cannot get away from the ‘competition’ idea; luck plays too large a part for the game to be a fair struggle of mind against mind,” as in a traditional wargame. He called it “a ‘fun’ game rather than something to play ‘for blood,’” though he acknowledged its growing popularity among both nonwargamers and wargamers alike.

By July 1976, Pulsipher had absorbed the early reports of D&D play in A&E, which he attacked with a piece of his own in A&E 13, commenting on the state of the game: “I am a fringe SF fan, but I play D&D as a wargame (I hate luck) and consequently I find many of the things reported/suggested in A&E ridiculous.” He had come away with the impression that “stfen DMs,” which in the argot of the time refers to referees in science-fiction fandom, “tended to control the game completely, overtly or not.” The notion that a referee might control the game covertly recalls the “illusion” that Bunnies & Burrows referees retain even as they “shade” die rolls. Such referees rescue players from lethal situations, whereas Pulsipher believed that those “players would be massacred in a skill-oriented dungeon.” But Pulsipher did not argue for more lethality as such: “That a dungeon is very dangerous or has high casualty rates does not make it balanced. When death is nearly meaningless, who cares about dying?” Pulsipher instead advocated for games where “entire parties are wiped out if players seriously err” and where death results in penalties to experience totals even when characters are resurrected. Finally, Pulsipher addressed Glenn Blacow’s early concerns about striking a balance between generosity and lethality, which had just appeared in the previous issue of A&E, arguing instead that the only meaningful distinction is balanced versus nonbalanced, where “the problem comes when people try to mix the two types.” Pulsipher advised that “Glenn would be better off ignoring those who don’t prefer his own style.”

Whatever his early experiences were with the game, Pulsipher found himself playing with unfamiliar groups when he left the United States to study abroad in England. Although he had turned over editorship of Supernova to Flying Buffalo, he continued to report on “gaming in Britain” for it, and he noted in the May 1977 issue that “fantasy gaming is very popular in Britain,” though because “there are comparatively few wargamers in Britain,” it transpires that “D&D is dominated by SF fans even more than American D&D.” The distinction between the two cultures spanned the Atlantic Ocean, but even on another continent Pulsipher remained adamantly opposed to the approach that science-fiction fandom took to D&D. He lamented, “I must be the only real proponent of wargamers D&D—skill and believability, not a silly substitute for getting drunk—in the country” (SN 27). What could he mean by calling a game “a silly substitute for getting drunk”?

In the summer of 1977, Pulsipher began writing for the newly founded periodical White Dwarf, the house organ of Games Workshop in Britain. Pulsipher’s contribution to the first issue, a piece called “D&D Campaigns: Part I—Philosophy,” explicitly set out to settle the fundamental question that divided the story people from the games people: “Is D&D a talking-book or a serious wargame?” Pulsipher’s answer was that “Gary Gygax has made it clear that D&D is a wargame, though the majority of players do not use it as such.” His article is largely a counterattack against the emerging nonwargame interpretation of D&D and a defense of a more player-driven approach to the game.

Pulsipher began his argument by proposing a player typology, one that cut stark and familiar battle lines in the community: “D&D players can be divided into two groups, those who want to play the game as a game and those who want to play it as a fantasy novel.” This lent further credence to the popular supposition that community disagreements about D&D play were rooted in the different cultures of wargaming and science-fiction fandom. Pulsipher held this opinion in common with many others, though no one had yet articulated the matter as clearly. Jim Cooper, writing at the end of 1976 in Quick Quincy Gazette 3, was well aware that there were “two ways of playing D&D,” and he intuited that play “does seem to be a mixture of characterizing and straight-out battle, with variety due to degree of either, and ratio of combination.” Others had explicitly found the roots of the debate about generosity and lethality in the assumptions of the two cultures. In A&E 18, Sean Cleary noted that “around here [the MIT Strategic Games Society] there has been a steady push for harder dungeons” and the associated lethality, but he observed that West Coast science-fiction-fan dungeons he had visited “leaned to a player oriented dungeon rather than a monster oriented one.” After lamenting some referees’ willingness to disburse treasure according to the tables provided in the D&D rules, which Cleary deemed overgenerous, he blasted “the philosophy of ‘the dungeon is for the players’”—that is, that dungeons exist for the sake of advancing the players’ characters. Cleary was well aware of the two cultures behind such philosophies but admitted, “I don’t know if this philosophy is of the ‘fan’ type”—that is the science-fiction fan—“or the ‘wargamer’ type.”

Pulsipher stressed in his White Dwarf essay the “escapism” inherent in approaching D&D as if it were some sort of enacted fantasy novel: those players experience a “direct escapism through abandonment of oneself to the flow of play,” which he contrasted unfavorably with “the gamer’s indirect escapism”—that is, “the clearcut competition and mental exercise any good game offers.” He used the pejorative label escapist or, more commonly, silly/escapist to designate those players who wanted to abandon themselves to a fantasy narrative in contrast to the “game-players” who strove to engage in a competitive contest. By separating players into two camps this way, Pulsipher recalled similar dichotomies proposed in the wargaming community in connection with disputes over realism and playability or the threefold model advanced by Thornton. Pulsipher’s motivation for proposing this distinction was less philosophical than polemical: he hoped to persuade British gamers, whom he saw as thralls of science-fiction fandom, to embrace his preferred wargaming play style, even if he had to shame them into doing it.

Pulsipher admitted further subdivisions in his categories of players. Among the games people, some prefer fighting monsters, but others focus on solving puzzles, dealing with riddles, traps, mazes, and so on. He condemned the overgenerosity and grossness of some campaigns in familiar tones: for him, any “parties of eighth to twelfth level and higher” give offense, with their “innumerable magic items.” Although the players in such campaigns will be bored in a less power-driven game, Pulsipher perspicaciously speculated that “players accustomed to a more subdued campaign might be delighted or terrified by the rewards and dangers of the situation which would bore the supergamers.”

He also saw two camps among the escapists: there are “those who prefer to be told a story by the referee, in effect, with themselves as the protagonists, and those who like a silly, totally unbelievable game.” The former results from “manipulation of the situation by the referee, however he sees fit.” To a seasoned wargamer, the absence of control this implies could only inspire horror: this is how we should understand his earlier remark about D&D players who “want to play it as a fantasy novel,” a passive stance difficult to distinguish from mere spectatorship—a mirror image of the “immersion which can be obtained with reading a good book” that Roos recommended so heartily. The latter “silly” play style results from contrivances such as “magical decks of cards, buttons, levers, and so on—lottery D&D,” where chance takes the place of the referee’s whim in depriving players of their right to make meaningful decisions.

At his most generous, Pulsipher submitted that “there is nothing inherently wrong with the silly/escapist method,” though he judged, “it is a strange way for game players to act.” But he then went on to condemn it roundly: “I personally consider the silly/escapist style to be both boring and inferior for any campaign.” He argued that “even in a fantasy game, moderation and self-discipline are virtues necessary to top refereeing. While campaigns may be run on other bases, I believe that a skill-game campaign is likely to satisfy people more in the long run. Some people prefer luck and passivity, but they are seldom game players.” Finally, he heaped one last insult on the “silly/escapist” approach that explained how he connected this play style to intoxication: “If you feel a need to get drunk and/or stoned, however, try lottery D&D, the similarities are surprising.”

Pulsipher’s disparagement of a nonwargame approach to D&D as “silly,” let alone stupefying as a narcotic, reflected an opinion that he surely shared with other veterans of conflict simulation. In the spring of 1977, a published title such as Realm of Yolmi could still stress in a section called “The Spirit of the Game” the hardline Gygaxian view that the referee should “let the dice tell the story.”7 We might contrast this attitude with that of Wayne Shaw, a seasoned wargamer, who around the same time circulated an essay called “From Whence Did This Grow?” in Lords of Chaos 2, in which he expressed a very different perspective. “I play Dungeons & Dragons as an exercise in creative story telling, not, note, as a war game. Oh, I enjoy complex battles as much as the next person, but I was a wargamer before I was a D&D player, and in the sense of playing it as a war gamer, there are other games I prefer much more.” And even Kevin Slimak, who practically defined the adversarial relationship between the player and referee, had begun to revise his viewpoint after playing in Los Angeles science-fiction fandom circles late in 1976. “I find myself more and more feeling that any character that I have is really a cooperative effort between me and the DM whose game/games he’s been in,” he wrote (WH 9).

As the battle lines formed over the best approach to D&D, the detachment required to see both sides of the issue was often wanting. In 1972, Fred Vietmeyer, responding to similar typologies in the wargame community of that time, had warned that “for one type of player to place his own viewpoint as superior to another’s hobby enjoyment is simply being too egocentric.” No doubt Pulsipher’s assault on the “silly/escapist” crowd won few converts. But it did reflect the community’s growing sensitivity to the divide and the need to acknowledge it when recommending approaches to play.8 Writing in A&E 28 toward the end of 1977, Howard Mahler could refer to “the old question of the different aspects of playing D&D,” where “one split might be between a characterization aspect and a wargaming aspect.” Although Mahler professed that he enjoyed both, he knew that he could not make recommendations about play without first identifying which camp in that divide he was addressing, which led him to preface simple advice with cumbersome caveats such as “What I am about to say definitely has little if no applicability to campaigns in which characterization is more important (as opposed to equal or less) than the wargaming aspect.” People had begun to sense that there were fundamental and incompatible philosophical divisions that commentators needed to tiptoe around.

Pulsipher’s initial philosophical salvo was lengthy enough that it spilled over from the first to the third issue of White Dwarf. This next installment focused squarely on the fundamental design decision that made possible the excesses he lamented: on the tension between referee latitude and player control over the operation of the system. Pulsipher stressed that “the referee is neither infallible nor completely impartial” and that “any referee can kill any party if he really wants to,” so the interaction between the player and the referee must necessarily give the party the opportunity to succeed. To avoid despair, the referee must foster “a sense of control by the players of their own fate” and its corollary “participation by all the players,” both of which require “reducing referee interference.” In support of that goal, Pulsipher insisted that players be allowed to “roll their own attack and saving throw dice,” that “each person be permitted to decide what his characters do,” and that the players should enjoy “extended time to think about what they intend to do,” up to the point that they can even “change their minds about what they intend to do (before they are told results, of course).”

Although Pulsipher knew the arguments for depriving players of access to the details of system execution, he attested that the advantages “of letting players roll their own dice are that the sense of participation is vastly increased.” Here he echoed John Boardman in the most cogent rebuttal to Eisen’s vow: when it comes to inducing desirable experiences in players, the sense of participation yielded by involving players in the system trumps the feeling that the player lives the part of the character. Pulsipher also cannily noted that “when players roll their own dice they can’t blame the referee for poor results! This can be more important in a campaign than might be expected.” Without any knowledge of how the system is executed, players have no insight into how much discretion the referee is exercising: by rolling their own dice, they usually glean a general sense of how well or poorly an attempted action has gone, especially for very high and very low results. This is not to say that Pulsipher opposed the referee altering any of the published rules, but he insisted that the referee “make sure players know about a change before it affects them” and even recommended that the referee “discuss rule changes with players before making a final decision.” He expected every player sitting around the table to know and understand the system.

You get the sense that Pulsipher wanted players to hold their characters at a certain distance from themselves. He rejected the sorts of time limits on the formulation of statements of intention previously endorsed by Sheldon Linker and others. Insisting “this is a game, not training,” Pulsipher wondered why a referee would require players to respond within the time constraints that characters operate under: “The characters in D&D,” who are “career adventurers,” would “know by reflex what they’re supposed to do.” But “why expect someone who plays this weird game once a week to have the same reactions? It’s ridiculous.” Here Pulsipher raised a familiar and crucial question about the scope of the simulation: the degree to which a player is expected to think for or think like the character. And although Pulsipher dismissed the role of the caller completely, he was willing to allow other players to interfere with an incautious statement of intention. “If a player impulsively says, ‘I’ll pick up the skull’ and the others immediately tell him he shouldn’t, who does the referee pay attention to?” Provided the player is willing to listen to hastily shouted reason, or, indeed, if the situation permits the other characters to restrain a reckless companion by force, then an ill-advised statement of intention need never acquire the force of action. “Again,” Pulsipher averred, “I do not expect the player to be as disciplined as the character.”

Pulsipher forbid referees from lying to players and stressed that players need the opportunity to glean sufficient intelligence about their situation to formulate actions. Detection spells give players “information they must have to control events,” and this information is necessary to make “the most basic of all D&D player decisions”—that is, “to fight or avoid a fight” because “if there is no way to avoid a fight, for lack of information, players are hamstrung.” The judicious use of information-gathering system tools, when combined with careful questioning of the referee will, Pulsipher submitted, “enable players to have some control over the game.” Yet in the vein of Mahler he noted how completely referee discretion dictates the amount of information players will receive. “If the players are given sufficient decision-making opportunities then the sense of control can be established. No skill-oriented campaign can succeed if the players are unable to make decisions which significantly alter the course of an adventure, and they cannot do this if they are unable to obtain information before they act.” The value in granting players the wisdom to make informed decisions is in the “sense of control” it imparts: without that sense of control, players can feel helpless—or, worse, passive, deprived of the means to steer the game.

Pulsipher would not have to wait long for Gygax to reaffirm their shared sentiments on the relationship of stories to games. For The Dragon 31, Gygax penned a long essay called “Books Are Books, and Games Are Games, and Never the Twain . . .” While it in part counseled referees to reject appeals to fantasy literature as an excuse for overpowered characters, Gygax framed this in a larger argument about the unsuitability of preconstructed narratives for games, contrasting the passivity of readership with the agency of role playing. “A fantasy adventure game should offer little else but the possibility of imaginative input from the participant,” Gygax stressed, and given that the best of adventure literature is “so complete as to offer little within its content for reader creativity,” we can infer that “novels fix character roles to suit a foreordained conclusion,” whereas “game personae must be designed with sufficient flexibility so as to allow for participant personality differences and multiple unknown situations.” Surely this applied to any referee who deprived players of agency in the manner Pulsipher feared. In Gygax’s view, a game campaign steered to a narrative would be dull, predictable, and confining, provided it goes beyond the “sketchy story line” necessary for something like an adventure module. Gygax could not imagine drawing a compelling game from the narrative of the Lord of the Rings trilogy because, for him, games introduce a flexibility that would necessarily give evil the opportunity to triumph, and so “the ‘Ring Trilogy’ is quite unsatisfactory as a setting for a fantasy adventure game.” Games, for Gygax, just are not like stories.

Pulsipher would continue to contribute similar pieces to White Dwarf and the major print periodicals as the initial popular wave of D&D crested in the early 1980s, but his views in these earliest essays reflect some of the first substantive critical thinking about role-playing games to reach a wide audience.9 Circulating these ideas in a glossy magazine such as White Dwarf made them available to a far wider audience than earlier discussions in fanzines, which necessarily triggered further discussion. Once the first pioneers stuck their necks out with essays toward a philosophy of role-playing games, a philosophical dialogue started to emerge around controversial points.

Pulsipher was so committed to the idea that D&D was a wargame that he never used the term role-playing game in his early essays, despite the fact that others liberally applied it to D&D in that first issue of White Dwarf—including the magazine’s publisher, Ian Livingstone, in his inaugural editorial. There is some irony that another short piece in that issue effectively equated role playing with a certain sort of wargame: Andrew Holt wrote that “there is also much to commend in D&D, the general concept is an inspiration, and it has made the ‘role-playing’ game, and the free Kriegspiel in general, respectable and popular.”

Advocates of “free” Kriegsspiel quickly expressed opposition to Pulsipher’s stance. A letter from Peter Tamyln in White Dwarf 10 addressed “playing D&D as a ‘game’—see Lew Pulsipher’s articles” as being a matter of adherence to “a rigid set of rules” foisted on players and the referee alike. In the vein of Sandy Eisen, Tamyln objected, “However, that sort of play does not really exploit D&D to its full potential. The players are not really ‘role-playing’, they are maneouvering their pieces in a form of personalized wargame. In order to enjoy the full flavor of role-playing, I believe it is necessary to play D&D as a Kriegspiel, i.e., a game in which the rules are known only to the umpire and the players make decisions as they would in ‘real’ life.” This view reinforced the connotation of role playing as an alternative to participation in the system, wherein players simply generate statements of intention without any sense of how the referee resolves them. Tamyln rejected Pulsipher’s arguments for granting players access to information about the system and instead contended that the only thing players need to understand beyond their characters is the game setting: “In this sort of game it is essential that the players have access to any information (e.g., social customs) that the characters would have and that, after allowing for such things as magic, has enough internal consistency for the players to make rational decisions and not be caught out by loopholes in the rules.”

This disagreement about approaches to D&D could now be articulated in both extreme positions and various middle grounds. A year after Pulsipher’s article, the British fanzine Underworld Oracle enumerated in its fifth issue three distinct methods of play. In the first, “the D/M is completely in charge, making all the die rolls necessary, and more or less relating a story to the players,” which involves “telling them what results their actions have, and allowing the players’ visual imagination full flow.” In the second method, “players are encouraged to take a fuller part in the structure of the game, making their own die rolls for hits and saving throws,” which reduces the referee’s workload. The third method transposes D&D into something more like a board game by displaying the tactical situation with miniature or counters, which “allows players to see exactly what is happening and correspondingly, to appreciate the danger that the character is in at any given moment.” In the more parsimonious modes, “various other details may be given or withheld from the players,” including factors such as “the number of hit points that a character has left after melee” or “even the level that a character is at.” Although the first method is “a very good introduction to the game,” it might make it difficult to mentor players into prospective gamemasters ready “to start refereeing a game themselves” because they will have been playing “without any idea of the game mechanics.” And what if, like Sandy Eisen, players introduced through the first method feel as if they have lost something as they transition to the second or third method?

Definitions and Controversies

One can readily appreciate why wargamers sometimes struggled to wrap their heads around this emerging game genre. An essay by Len Kanterman and Charles Elsden called “Introduction to Yourself: Dungeons & Dragons for Beginners,” which appeared in Campaign 81 in the fall of 1977 began with the promise, “This article has been written for those conventional wargamers who have heard strange rumors of a fantasy game called Dungeons & Dragons,” with a mind to “help any such hardy newcomers avoid some of the pitfalls entailed in commencing an activity that is quite unlike any other game.”

After reviewing the obvious differences—the lack of a board or victory conditions, the unusual dependence on statements of intention—the essay posited that a D&D game simply serves a different purpose than a wargame: “D&D may provide a path of insight into one’s own thoughts and his relationship to the others.” It necessarily reveals something of the nature of people, Kanterman and Elsden contended, when “players become actors, ones with unfinished scripts.” Deep personal insights become unlocked because “players act in a void of mystery” that extends from the nature of the game world to the system executed by the referee: “We suggest that players who do not intend to lay out their own dungeon set-up should not read they rules!” Instead, they urged “participants to approach it as role-players. Ideally, the player should attempt to get inside his character, understand his motivations, and then react in various situations as he imagines his character would.” The authors maintained that D&D is not so much a wargame as a process of introducing you to yourself: “Like the psychodrama games of the mid-sixties, designed to put one in touch with one’s self and his fellows, D&D can become a vehicle for increased self-knowledge.” Whatever Kanterman and Elsden saw in D&D, it was no wargame but instead a tool of self-realization: “from the realm of fantasy, we can safely reflect upon our inner selves.”

How could you wrap a tidy definition around a game like that? A few months before Pulsipher’s essay appeared in White Dwarf, Pieter Roos had already informally defined a role-playing game as “one in which the participants assume a character and act within that role.” A year later, one of the earliest role-playing game theorists dedicated an essay to a more expansive definition of the term.

Steven R. Lortz stipulated in his article “Reflections on the Structure of Role-Playing Games” in the Chaosium’s fanzine Wyrm’s Footnotes 5 in the summer of 1978 that “a ‘role-playing game’ is a game which allows a number of players to assume the roles of imaginary characters and operate with some degree of freedom in an imaginary environment.” Although Lortz immediately acknowledged that the definition is broad, he explained that “after a bit of consideration it becomes apparent that the scope of possibilities inherent in role-playing requires a broad definition.”

Lortz’s definition of a role-playing game, like Roos’s, depends on the activities of players but says nothing about referees. Late in his piece, Lortz hastily added that “most role-playing games require that someone assume the role of the imaginary environment. This person is known as the ‘game-master,’ and the other players involved in the game are called ‘players.’” The earliest critics of the genre deemed En Garde a role-playing game, so Lortz might understandably have gravitated toward a definition that omitted the referee entirely. But given that a referee was required to allow players to remain ignorant of the rules, a quality that Kanterman, Elsden, and others deemed essential to role playing, Lortz’s definition drew a boundary around the practice that differed from other contemporary opinions.

Lortz’s ambition for his essay extended beyond just defining role-playing game to providing a broader critical vocabulary for the common concepts associated with the genre.10 He distinguished concepts such as a “campaign” from a “game” or a “session,” giving crisp accounts of each: a “session,” for example, is “a number of moves or sequences played out at the same place in real space and time. A session is usually several real hours long and occurs at a convenient gathering place.” By contrast, a “‘campaign’ is a game that is played out over the course of a number of sessions, involving the adventures of an on-going cast of characters in one particular universe, and usually mastered by a single game master.” Intriguingly, Lortz also alluded to how “moves” in the game are “linked by a continuing flow of dramatically significant action,” and it is in this respect that Lortz saw a break from the genre of wargames, which “generally represent a single major dramatic action which is played out on a single scale” rather than the character-driven flow of drama across a campaign that he saw in role-playing games.

In 1979, Lortz would expand on all of these themes in an article series that began with the first issue of the Chaosium’s glossy magazine Different Worlds, starting with a reprise of his earlier piece under the title “What Is a Role-Playing Game?” It added a few terms to his critical lexicon, such as scenario, which he defined as “a closed-ended amount of play, usually occupying no more than one session.” He gave far more emphasis to the role of the referee, whose responsibilities permeate the description of play. The revised article also appended a section titled “Move Structure in RPGs,” which provided a detailed critique of one exchange in a dialogue centering on a statement of intention as the effective “move” of a role-playing game. Lortz first identified that “a move is a segment of play which represents a specific amount of game time,” as determined by the time scale, and so in game design “the object of move structure will be to accommodate all of the imaginary interactions possible within a given amount of game time.” Within a move, he saw two parties capable of acting: the characters and the environment. The former’s actions derive from the players, and the latter’s actions from either a referee or the system; the characters may trigger a response from the environment and vice versa. Thus, Lortz broke down the move phase into four parts: first, an “Encounter Phase,” where the referee determines if any events arise from the environment and “also gives the players any new information” about the environment that has arisen since the last update; second, an optional “Players’ Consultation Phase,” in which the players may talk among themselves to negotiate a plan of action, if the situation permits; third, a “Player-Character Action Phase,” in which “the players indicate what action their characters are performing” through statements of intention and in which “the game-master and the players . . . use the game’s resolution systems to determine the outcome of the player-characters’ actions”; fourth and last, an “Environment Response Phase,” in which the referee must “determine what reaction the environment makes” to the characters’ actions, if any.

In Lortz’s move structure, the first and third phases most obviously correspond to the classic conception of the dialogue, where in the first the referee describes the situation in the game and then in the third the players submit their statements of intention. Lortz’s account differs from the way Totten described the effective turns in Strategos insofar as Totten did not anticipate a party of colluding players who might optionally require a second phase for deliberating on how to act. Lortz placed significant emphasis on enabling “all of the players to become sufficiently involved,” even breaking down his Player-Character Action Phase into one where the referee goes around the table hearing which action each character is performing, a collection of statements of intention that Lortz called “a cycle.” He made no mention of the concept of a caller and instead noted that “each player-character has free-will and should be able to do as he sees fit during the Player-Character Action Phase.” But Lortz definitely understood this agency as a reactive one: where Totten’s informal description puts the player’s statement of intention first in the turn and covers how the referee decides on the result, Lortz had the referee describe the situation first and solicit an action from the players, which then may have various consequences.

As an investigation of the formal structure of role-playing games, with an emphasis on defining terminology and modeling play, Lortz’s initial Different Worlds article effectively inaugurated a new branch of scholarship. To help illustrate his critical principles, Lortz supplemented this apparatus with a complete role-playing game of his own invention. Lortz called the system “Cannibals & Castaways” and billed it as “the world’s simplest complete role-playing game.” It is undoubtedly simple and short: the rules span only around three columns, spread out over a couple pages.

“Cannibals & Castaways” is a fitting choice both to illustrate Lortz’s definition of role-playing game and to highlight the difficulties such a definition can face. Per his definition, the game does indeed allow “a number of players to assume the roles of imaginary characters,” in this case the number of players being one and the imaginary characters being undifferentiated castaways. At each turn, the player will “operate with some degree of freedom in an imaginary environment,” though that degree is not a large one because it depends on whether a die rolled each turn heralds the arrival of either a potential rescue ship or menacing cannibals. In the case of a ship, the player has only one sane course of action: the character will attempt to contact the ship. In the case of cannibals, the player may elect either to attack the cannibals or not—literally no other player decision is made in the course of the game, and the system resolves any attempted attack with a single odds-based die roll. Finally, just as Lortz’s definition de-emphasizes the role of a referee, the function of the game-master in “Cannibals & Castaways” is exclusively to roll dice at preordained times: as with Flash Gordon, this responsibility can be reassigned to the player without compromising any secret information. The referee is totally impartial—insofar as he or she has no discretionary powers to exercise whatsoever. “Cannibals & Castaways” is literally a game where the referee must “let the dice tell the story,” what Costikyan would call a closed-system role-playing game.

After explaining the system, Lortz gave a brief example transcript of the game, and it is here that he showed the playing of roles: in the dialogue, where the player is largely isolated from those bare-bones rules. In the example, when the game-master rolls a six, indicating a ship has appeared, she improvises, “Looks like you may be in luck today, you spot a tramp steamer just off the reef.” The player then replies, “We light a fire and try to make smoke signals,” though in fact the player has little choice in what he does, only in describing the manner in which he does it because the rules encourage that an attempt be made to contact the ship in this case. We might ungenerously say that role playing seems to mean to Lortz only that the participants have some obligation to embellish the diced events with little verbal details such as “tramp steamer” and “smoke signals,” even though these utterances in no way alter the outcomes of the game. “Cannibals & Castaways” transpires in a dialogue, but it is a far cry from the dialogue of a Kriegsspiel wargame or D&D, wherein a player makes arbitrary statements of intention and the referee has broad latitude to interpret these actions and determine their consequences for the game world.

Should “Cannibals & Castaways” qualify as a role-playing game? Lortz received some corroboration from other early role-playing game designers: Steve Jackson, for example, argued in Different Worlds 2 for a very expansive understanding of the genre, that “the most popular board game ever developed in the US is pure role-playing. Yes . . . Monopoly. Consider: each player takes on the role of a cheerfully rapacious real-estate tycoon.” Jackson argued that his own first design, the tank wargame Ogre, was in fact a role-playing game, even though he “didn’t (consciously) realize it at the time” he made it. Runequest designer Steve Perrin suggested in the next issue that “any game is role-playing,” seeing little distinction between the role playing he does today and what he had done as child. A letter from Brian Wagner in Different Worlds 4, however, curtly rebutted this broad a scope for what role playing is. Wagner began with Lortz: “I strongly disagree that his Cannibals & Castaways is a RPG.” In Wagner’s vision, there are three necessary conditions for being an RPG: a character creation system for individuating characters; a progression system for advancing characters; and “some world or universe” that the characters exist in. Lortz’s game does not fulfill the first two of these conditions. Wagner continued, “I also disagree with what Steve Jackson said in DW #2 about Ogre and Monopoly being RPGs. I just can’t see it. If you want to go as far as saying games like that are RPGs exactly where do you stop?”

One could play Monopoly and, following Lortz’s example, have each player dramatize the game events into a sort of cohesive narrative after every die roll, every sum paid, and every card drawn. But as Andy Evans had already pointed out about Monopoly in 1976, “You are never really in the same situation as a Property Tycoon, you are only playing within the rules of a game created artificially by the designer” (Owl & Weasel 18). With sufficient ingenuity, one can dramatize any game, even a game of tennis, into a personal narrative: nothing prevents tennis players from assuming the roles of imaginary characters, maybe space aliens, and declaring the tennis court to be some imaginary environment, maybe one of the moons of Jupiter, and each player can exercise their freedom to hit balls where they choose and dramatize the events afterward as a volley of planetary bombardments, all without altering the rules of the game or the outcome.11 The explanatory power in any definition lies largely in how it lets us decide what to include in the category a word designates—so what would be the criteria that demarcate role-playing games from other games in Lortz’s model?

Dave Arneson, like Wagner, thought that progression was essential to the concept of role-playing games. In the closest he came in this early literature to offering a definition, he wrote in Different Worlds 3 that “RPG is, I feel, a game where the individual character can enhance his abilities and station within the game through the characters used in play.” If we understand that enhancement to mean a progression system, this definition would admit of some ready counterexamples among self-identified role-playing games, including Metamorphosis Alpha, but Arneson considered progression a disqualifying omission: “Many so-called RPGs only pay lip service to it by including characters that can never develop but are always the same. That’s not RPG in my book.”

But Arneson’s remarks would come two years after Peter Cerrato had blamed the experience-point system for a lack of role playing in his circles. And Brian Wagner was refuted in a letter in the fifth issue of Different Worlds, which insisted that “Steve Jackson’s Ogre is an RPG!” The prominent differences of opinion on the subject inspired Clint Bigglestone to observe that “no two people appear to agree on exactly what ‘role-playing’ is” (DW 3).

Having established baseline definitions for key terms, Lortz then built on these in further installments of his “Way of the Gamer” series in subsequent issues of Different Worlds. His second essay, “Dramatic Structure of RPGs,” revisited the earlier hints he had dropped about how moves and dramatic sequences differentiated role-playing games from earlier wargames (DW 2). Although he acknowledged that “an RPG can be thought of as being related to the legitimate stage, where true role-play exists in the form of ‘improvisational theater,’” he found that a closer analogy to the actual operation of a role-playing game is the cinema. Just as “a movie is composed of a large number of individual still photographs known as ‘frames,’” he posits that “a game is composed of a number of ‘moves,’ which are frozen images of an imaginary time.” As his first essay established, “moves” consist of the interchange of statements of intention and environmental changes, but here Lortz proposed that just as in a movie the “stills are ordered into ‘shots,’ ‘sequences,’ and ‘scenes,’” so too in a role-playing game “activities are ordered into ‘sequences,’ which are numbers of moves occurring sequentially in game time, played out on the same scale, and linked by a continuing flow of dramatically significant action.”

For Lortz, it is the necessity for “dramatically significant action” that connects role-playing games to motion pictures and that illustrates a clear break from the previous traditions of conflict simulation. He explained that at the time of the cinema’s introduction, it was simply a novelty, as “a movie consisted of nothing more than a simple shot of something like a locomotive steaming toward the audience,” but eventually pioneers such as “Edwin S. Porter conceived the idea of stringing a number of shots together to tell the story of a daring train robbery.” Intriguingly, Lortz presented that act as more editorial than directorial. Lortz similarly postulates that “the art of running an RPG lies in the game-master’s ability to order moves and sequences into a dramatically satisfying whole.” He recognizes that this means that “the first artistic skill a game-master needs to learn is the ability to recognize a sequence of moves,” which requires that the referee “become familiar with the components of drama, and the form these components take in a role-playing game.” That requires studying dramatic art in general—a lesson that Michie had recommended as far back in 1976, so that we referees could endeavor “to improve our own game by learning some of the arts of the story teller.”

As an example of “an abstract structure of a dramatic situation,” Lortz gave the following: “A protagonist existing within some sort of environment finds itself in conflict with some part of that environment. The nature of this conflict gives rise to some concrete objective which the protagonist must attain. During the protagonist’s attempt to achieve the objective, complications occur which raise the question as to whether the protagonist will succeed or not.” For a default fantasy adventure game such as D&D, he argued that “the basic conflict between the characters and the world stems from the fact that the characters are neither economically, nor politically, as powerful as they would like to be.” Lortz explained that we can quantify economic and political power through commodities such as gold pieces and experience points, and in the attempt to acquire them “complications arise in the form of nefarious creatures who inhabit the underground labyrinth and prey on characters venturing into their domain.” But the resolution of that conflict unfolds across an entire campaign: for the purpose of running the game from moment to moment, the referee must instead focus on the motivational question behind each dramatic sequence: most commonly, “the intensely dramatic, immediate question as to whether the characters will succeed, or even survive, against some specific being or condition encountered in the souterrain.”

Lortz instantiated these motivating questions within the context of a dungeon adventure. These range from uncertain matters such as “Will the characters reach the surface?” or “Will the characters be able to get eight hours rest?” to very tactical matters along the lines of “What lies behind this door?” In each case, Lortz scoped a “sequence” to the resolution of its motivating question. Resolving a sequence is very different from the resolution one finds within the scope of any given move in a game, where a player poses a statement of intention and the referee reports the result according the system: in the scope of a dramatic sequence, more expansive intentions such as “I’m going to escape”—or maybe even “I try to become king”—are indeed the very matters at stake, things that would resist traditional system resolution. All this is not to say that every moment of the game must hinge on some pivotal question: Lortz further admitted that in addition to “dramatic” sequences, there are also “transition” sequences “in which some low-key action, such as peaceful travel, is being carried out” or when the characters “rest, heal or research spells.” His examples show a necessary interspersing of transition sequences between intense dramatic sequences, but the motivation for a game ultimately rests on its resolution of dramatic uncertainties. “If there are no questions left unanswered, the game-master and the players know it’s time to set new goals for the characters, and start a new adventure.”

In light of this later essay, we can look differently at the rudimentary event-resolution system that Lortz provided for “Cannibals and Castaways.” What mattered to Lortz was resolving the motivating questions of the dramatic sequences in the game. Will a ship be sighted? Will the cannibals attack? Will the castaways prevail in combat? Rather than focusing his system on simulating all of the underlying skills and activities that might underpin those actions, he instead tuned it to resolve the motivating questions. Flash Gordon does this for a more elaborate story and factors various abilities and conditions into event resolution, but it strikes the same path to resolving dramatic sequences scoped to the nodes of its schematic map.

In his assessment of the dramatic structure of role-playing games, Lortz anticipated many far later theories of game design and play.12 We might generously say that Lortz’s work was ahead of its time, as the readership of Different Worlds did not heartily embrace his attempts to engage them in philosophical consideration of role-playing games. A letter to the fourth issue puts it quite bluntly: “I suggest you get rid of this ridiculous series by Stephen L. Lortz. He discusses RPG in the most abstract terms possible for no discernible purpose. I can’t bring myself to finish either of his articles so far, simply because they are totally incomprehensible and, even worse, boring.” Another reader similarly reported, “I don’t know why I don’t like it but I find that I am unable to finish the column.” Lortz in fact targeted his work at critics and designers; in his first essay, he suggested, “If you’re going to write your own rules, or even just talk about RPGs in general, you’ve got to ask yourself, ‘What the heck is a role-playing game, anyway?’” But despite the lack of interest evinced by some readers, he did manage to get his definitions and ideas out into the intellectual commons at this crucial point when role-playing games had begun to forge their own identity.

When in 1979 Greg Costikyan offered a definition of role-playing games in Commando, it more or less echoed Lortz’s: “A role-playing game is a game in which several players assume the role of a character or person in an imaginary (or simulated) world.”13 But where “Cannibals & Castaways” presents what Costikyan would call a closed-system role-playing game, the second issue of Different Worlds showed us a diametrically opposed open-ended design philosophy though Costikyan’s “Lord of the Dice.” Where Lortz deprived the referee of discretion and latitude, “Lord of the Dice” was predicated upon assigning the referee personal responsibility for virtually all functions that would ordinarily be specified in the system by a designer. Its rules occupy only around half a page of the issue, which surely spoofs Lortz’s claim to have invented the “world’s simplest role-playing game.” But the reaction “Lord of the Dice” inspired was no joke, and before long people were taking it quite seriously as a model for what role-playing games should be.

Simbalist’s Paradoxes

Many early essays on role-playing games were written with a commercial agenda, to elevate new products and to denigrate the genre’s parent, D&D. The partiality of this literature does not necessarily rob it of insights, however. Perhaps no one attacked D&D as ferociously as Ed Simbalist, and although his own design work may not have lived up to the theoretical framework he built for his polemic, his articulation of the nature and potential of role-playing games is practically a manifesto for the story people of the 1970s.

In 1977, Chivalry & Sorcery advertised itself as a game that made significant conceptual improvements on D&D. Its authors, Ed Simbalist and Wilf Backhaus, explain in the rulebook’s introduction that their design “began innocently enough with a discussion about the vacuum that our characters seemed to be living in between dungeon and wilderness campaigns” and about their dissatisfaction “over the limited goals that were available to our characters.”14 This led to the development of “Chevalier” (1976), an unlicensed D&D supplement spearheaded by Simbalist with the assistance of Backhaus and others in his circle in Edmonton, Alberta. It attempted to simulate an authentic, realistic fantastic medieval setting, one which models far more than just a subterranean quest for blood and treasure. Like many before them, Simbalist and Backhaus eventually made the decision that their variant rules in fact belonged in an independent game rather than remaining an extension or modification to D&D.

“One might say,” Simbalist argued in 1978 in an A&E 37 essay called “Fantasy Role-Playing: The State of the Art” “that FRP has gone through three generations of development in considerably less than a decade.” In his account, “second generation FRP games were essentially cleaned up versions or revised variants of first generation rules.” He cited the Arduin Grimoire as a prominent example, but he even assigned early games with crisp, simple systems, such as Bunnies & Burrows, to this epoch on the grounds that they were “eminently playable.” Perhaps he would count his own “Chevalier” among them. But those second-generation games, he argued, ultimately “owe their existence almost entirely to players who developed new systems and approaches or else modified existing systems to permit a broader scope of play” than D&D originally allowed. The implementations of these informal variant designs eventually reached a threshold of difference where the experimenters recognized they “were no longer playing D&D as it was designed to be played.” This, he maintained, “turned D&Ders into FRPers.”

But Simbalist’s core point is that the shift to this second generation was imperceptible to many and that players themselves rarely acknowledged that they had transcended D&D. “Caught up in the excitement of FRP,” he explains, “players elevated D&D to a cult and placed the game on a pedestal. In fact,” Simbalist insisted in phrasing that echoed Costikyan’s assessment of the situation, “any experienced player worth mentioning was playing a game far different from D&D.” Along similar lines, Simbalist elsewhere maintained that “few experienced fantasy role players are really playing D&D as it is printed in the rules. Variant games are played instead” (APR 3). As the designer of a competing game product, Simbalist understandably fumed at the supposed dominance of D&D over the fantasy role-playing game community. “I am tired of hearing people say that they are ‘D&Ders’ when they are FRPers (fantasy role players)!”

Simbalist saw a starker division between such second-generation variants, easily mistaken for D&D, and what he deemed the third-generation games, which “were in the business of generating secondary worlds from the beginning” (AE 37). These secondary worlds “were the worlds of fantasy literature,” which have, as Simbalist relayed to us from Tolkien, an “inner consistency of reality.”15 By this definition, Simbalist believed that “the first third-generation FRP game of note was Empire of the Petal Throne” because it “provided a total world, a complete package which even included the language of the peoples inhabiting an imaginary world in deep space.”

Situated on a timeline, Simbalist’s three generations faced some sequencing challenges: Petal Throne well predated the Arduin Grimoire and Bunnies & Burrows and indeed had circulated in a playable draft form by the summer of 1974. But Simbalist spoke here more to formal properties than to a chronology. He found the Petal Throne rules “far more rationalized and integrated with the needs of role-play” than D&D. He deemed Runequest another third-generation example because it brings to life the world of Glorantha. Effectively, he argued that any system designed to convey that literary “inner consistency of reality” while simulating a fantastic world had the hallmarks of his third generation.

This literary connotation of realism, which recalls Strang’s account of realism as fidelity to the “patently unrealistic world of fantasy,” is more a measure of the specificity and consistency of an imaginary world than of its believability. Its articulation heavily informed the design of Chivalry & Sorcery. Simbalist wrote in A&E 31 that “to simulate something, there must be a clear conception in depth of what you are simulating.” In order to achieve that depth of understanding, the Chivalry & Sorcery system encompassed so many contingencies in character generation, in combat, in the operation of magic, and in aspects of medieval life that it quickly developed a reputation as an exhaustively complex, even overwhelming approach to role playing. Simbalist proudly boasted that “of all the new FRP rules, C&S is at the leading edge of FRP gaming, for it is most concerned with providing for complete role-play” (AE 37). And, he added, “role-play, by definition, is simulation.”

In what sense could role playing be simulation? Not a sense that a wargamer such as Pulsipher would recognize, surely. Simbalist considered his own game’s commitment to realism, which “makes a coherent and integrated campaign possible in a world setting,” as a key indication that “illustrates that absolute void that separates Chivalry & Sorcery from Dungeons & Dragons” (APR 3). Of course, Simbalist had to acknowledge the sense of ownership attested by referees such as Waddell, who had built elaborate environments for their D&D campaigns: “Some campaign designers will say that they have set up their own worlds. That’s right! You have; D&D and TSR didn’t! You designed your world and probably with little or no help from the rules! You created the systems necessary to give that world some semblance of realism and consistency” (AE 37). The referee bears the entirety of this burden because, Simbalist proposed, “the vast majority of D&D rules in both the original and in the new revised set of rules are geared to the single-minded activity of generating virtually isolated forays into the dungeon.”

For Simbalist, world design and system design ultimately had an unavoidable interdependence. “Rules are designed to do particular things,” he wrote (APR 4). “If the design did not include concepts and systems required to do certain things, massive alteration and revision of the rules is needed to do those things.” As such, he proposed in A&E 37 that “a game’s underlying philosophy affects everything that the game’s systems do or fail to do.” And if the underlying philosophy of D&D does not embrace the “simulation” that role playing requires, we might well wonder if we should even call it a role-playing game.

Paradoxically, however, Simbalist simultaneously believed that the underlying philosophy of role-playing games is steeped in alteration and revision. Exhaustive as the design of Chivalry & Sorcery is, Simbalist labored under no illusion that its system encompasses all possible eventualities. The first page of the Chivalry & Sorcery rulebook gives the standard disclaimer in rulebooks of the time, that players of the C&S system “may ignore all elements that are not relevant to their needs and aims.” In A&E 37, Simbalist expanded on this to the effect that all “rules are made with meddlers in mind—particularly in FRP gaming—because role-playing games take on the flavor of the group playing a campaign. No two campaigns are alike. C&S rules are designed with player modifications anticipated and indeed encouraged.”16 How this argument could square with his insistence on rules “designed to do particular things” requires further explication.

To some extent, Simbalist merely acknowledged the reality on the ground. Every designer familiar with the community of the late 1970s had to know that referees expected and exercised this freedom to meddle—Gygax himself explicitly invited referees to “change the bloody rules to suit yourself and your players,” and that invitation was universally accepted. “At Origins and in my correspondence,” Simbalist continued in A&E 37, “I have become acquainted with the trend that many serious FRPers are following. They pick and choose and adapt whatever systems they wish from whatever role-play rules they find to their liking and which satisfy the needs of their campaign.” It was Simbalist, with some encouragement from John T. Sapienza, who elevated that very principle to the status of the primary rule of role-playing games, perhaps their only inviolable rule, one that spans all systems. In A&E 38, he cast it as the “Gamer’s First Law: if a rule is silly, change it or ignore it—just so long as everyone knows that’s what your preference is ahead of time.”17

But the prerogative to fix “silly” rules did not render design itself a pointless exercise. For Simbalist, the design spaces that D&D passed over in silence are so crucial to role playing that their absence is qualitatively different. He argued that “the myth of D&D is that it is open-ended, that one can do everything with it. The fact is that D&D was not designed to do much outside of a dungeon environment” (AE 37). He perceived in Dave Arneson’s recently-published First Fantasy Campaign a glimmer of how D&D could have encompassed a true campaign world rather than merely serving as a vehicle for subterranean aggression and acquisitiveness. “Let’s be honest. Many players have come to regard FRP as nothing more than monster trashing and backstabbing one’s opponents. Count out the loot and retire your character back to your notebook in anticipation of the next raid. It’s fun at first, but after a while dungeon-crawling becomes a juvenile and limiting activity.”

Unsurprisingly, Simbalist’s philosophy attracted some criticism from the wargaming culture. He faced predictable resistance from the likes of Lewis Pulsipher, who damned Chivalry & Sorcery in White Dwarf 5 with faint praise, deeming the game “the fantasy role-playing expression of wargamers who favor realism and simulation while D&D is the expression of playability fans who want a good game.” Simbalist, no doubt remembering Pulsipher’s player typologies in White Dwarf 1, painted his critic a “GAMER as opposed to a ROLE PLAYER,” explaining the distinction as “gamers play to win; role-players to enjoy the give-and-take of personal interaction with the other people around the table” (AE 35). Gary Gygax, who knew well the endless debates about realism and complexity in the wargaming community, argued in a letter to White Dwarf 7 that when it comes to fantasy, “‘realism’ in a game must go out the window,” and he repeated similar remarks in his provocatively titled essay “Role-Playing: Realism vs. Game Logic; Spell Points, Vanity Press, and Rip-offs” in The Dragon 16, in which he would not risk promoting Simbalist’s competing title by mentioning its name.

If anything, the resistance Simbalist encountered only stirred him to more radical philosophies. In his two “Kismet” essays in early 1979, subtitled “The Game Master as Fate” and “Role-Playing Modes of Gaming” and published in A&E 43 and 44, Simbalist succeeded in articulating a philosophy of story in role-playing games that departed significantly from prior thinking. He achieved this largely by assailing the core wargaming principle that a referee should or even can act impartially. First, Simbalist defined two modes of refereeing, which he called an “adversary mode” and a “role-playing mode” or “discretionary mode.” The adversary mode revisits the “player versus referee” conflict that Gygax, Slimak, and others articulated in 1976; Simbalist defined it as games in which “the role-player is regarded as a seeker after experience and loot who must successfully pass all of the tests which the DM sets for a character as he penetrates into the depths of the dungeon or wilderness.” This game is necessarily competitive because “players either compete with each other or with the DM.” Simbalist understood that consequently “the DM is placed in the contradictory position of interpreter of the rules and referee, on the one hand, and active participant or Enemy on the other.”

This adversarial relationship thus created an apparent conflict of interest, but not all of Simbalist’s readers immediately agreed that it posed a practical problem. For example, Paul Mosher rejected in A&E 45 the contention that “the D/GM cannot remain impartial.” But in A&E 47 Simbalist offered a formidable rebuttal to the claim that that it is possible to adjudicate a game without bias by letting the dice tell the story, as Gygax put it.

Simbalist argued that a referee ultimately controls the flow of events in a role-playing game and thus dictates the occasions when dice are rolled, so the decision to create situations when it is necessary to consult the dice is always just that: a decision made by the referee. When a referee “chooses to let the dice decide, he is just as responsible for the consequences as if he exercised personal discretion” to determine the outcome, Simbalist thus concluded (AE 47). A referee who pretends to the impartiality of dice while driving characters into deadly situations resembles the fictional assassin Anton Chiurgh of No Country for Old Men, whose willingness to spare victims if they win a coin toss—a metaphorical representation of the utter randomness of life—lets Chiurgh fancy himself as impartial while he gleefully hunts and slays his targets. The immediate tactical matters resolved by chance, for Simbalist, are entirely overshadowed by more overarching fundamental choices that no referee leaves to chance.

But, more importantly, letting the dice tell the story struck Simbalist as an inherent contradiction: How can rolling dice against tables of probability based on some model of simulation result in a story? “If one could tell stories through the application of random factors alone, the greatest novels, etc. would be written by computers,” he mused in A&E 47. “The dice are idiots,” and “the idiots of randomness will blindly apply mathematical formulae, and that’s the end of it.” Simbalist insisted that “they cannot have an awareness, a feel for action unfolding in an FRP adventure as a sensitive, thinking, aware human being can.”

As in Michie and Roos’s earlier thinking and in Lortz’s contemporary essays, the referee’s responsibility for the flow of events seems, for Simbalist, to extend beyond the common definition of the term referee. In his first “Kismet” essay, Simbalist noted that the role-playing game referee “does not stand aside from the game like a referee in football or hockey,” one who will “intrude only when an infraction of the rules occurs.” Rather, “the DM dominates the whole proceedings.” Simbalist enumerated the many powers that a referee has in the role of an adversary—knowledge of the world and the characters as well as control over when dice are rolled, if not their outcomes—and urged “that DMs should face the reality of their positions. To pretend complete impartiality in an adversary mode of play is to let in all the evils and abuses that make for bad role-playing.” Whereas Gygax characterized the referee as “the arbiter of fortune,” Simbalist portrayed the referee as the embodiment of fortune itself, as the role of fate, and as such a referee necessarily takes sides and steers the course of the game in a considered direction.

Only in the second “Kismet” essay did Simbalist unpack his “role-playing mode” of refereeing and what he believed the responsibility for fate truly means in a role-playing game. He spoke from his personal experience, in language similar to that used by Tom Filmore, explaining that “role-playing to the crowd I game with is literally slipping into the persona of the character and acting as he would. It’s a form of acting and I’m expected to provide the stage for their performances. They really get into their parts too.” In the course of role playing, a character “will from time to time be faced with CERTAIN death. At that point the skill of the GM as story teller is put to the test. A good story will not end before its time. So also might be said of a good role playing campaign scenario.”

When faced with this situation, Simbalist argues that the “story teller” referee “accepts his role as Fate and responsibly works out a solution which does not result in the character’s death.” What Simbalist envisioned here goes far beyond the “shade” that a Bunnies & Burrows referee should cast over a lethal saving throw. It may include all sorts of quiet changes to the game situation that the system generates: a random encounter roll that calls for six skeletons instead delivers only two, or a crushing damage roll might be reduced to a glancing blow. “Where,” Simbalist elaborated, “the game systems thwart my view of the truth of the moment and deny me the goals I have set for the particular scenario or for the campaign as a whole, I IGNORE THE RULES.”

With this dictum, Simbalist went well beyond his “Gamer’s First Law” of fixing a design that is “silly” in implementation, as even a sound design could sometimes yield a result incompatible with a referee’s goals for the story. Simbalist justified this intervention on the grounds that “a story has to be going some place. There is a structure known as the plot. Characters have a role to play in the unfolding of that plot” (AE 44). Here Simbalist, like Lortz, directly confronted the core dogmas of the wargaming tradition. Lewis Pulsipher had urged referees never to tamper with events, recommending that “the referee must think of himself as a friendly computer with discretion” and that “referee interference in the game must be reduced as much as possible” (White Dwarf 3). To ensure no bias creeps into play, Pulsipher even counseled that “the referee should not make up anything important after an adventure has begun” but should instead rely only on the notes and systems devised before playing in a session.

Pulsipher’s vision was perhaps stricter than even Gygax’s—the latter back in the day at least acknowledged that sometimes “Divine Intervention” should be used to save a character’s life, though he reserved this latitude only for cases “when fate seems to have unjustly condemned an otherwise good player” (SR 2 (2)). Gygax permitted the ignoring of a deadly die roll to prevent unfair punishments, whereas Simbalist allowed it for a different purpose, to preserve the overall narrative that the referee intends for the campaign, which trumps all other concerns for him. But like the “shade” in Bunnies & Burrows, this must be done tacitly, behind the figurative referee’s screen, because the referee must guide the story along, as Simbalist put it, “without lessening the tension and anxiety felt by the player whose character is threatened by a certain death” (AE 44). Simbalist stressed that “players should never know when GM discretion is being exercised” and that they “cannot be allowed to count on Fate to step in and save their characters from the consequences of stupidity or miscalculation” because that would spoil what Bunnies & Burrows calls the players’ “illusion that they determine their own fates.”

By centering role-playing games on the campaign story, Simbalist moved the focus on system execution radically away from players and even designers and instead onto a management of the flow of events hinging on the referee’s dramatic skill. His emphasis on preserving the story anticipated but vastly exceeded the sentiments that would appear in the Dungeon Masters Guide a few months after Simbalist’s “Kismet” essays in 1979: where Gygax would invoke Conan’s narrow escapes in his explanation of saving throws, Simbalist talked about the more formulaic tale of Sinbad. Simbalist related that “Sinbad is destined to triumph over the evil Mage who has usurped power in Baghdad and holds the nation in bondage. He will rescue the princess, marry her, free his people, and engineer the downfall of his enemy. Kismet. Fate” (AE 44). For Gygax, the system is obligated only to provide “a chance, no matter how small,” of survival, whereas Simbalist looked to the referee rather than to the system and assigned the referee the responsibility for casting any “shade” necessary to drive the story in a satisfying direction, all the while performing any sleight of hand necessary to convince the players that the referee is impartially executing the system—to preserve Pulsipher’s “sense of control by the players of their own fate,” though here it is an illusory sense.

But would players really retain the necessary state of dramatic uncertainty? Curiously, Simbalist concluded his second “Kismet” essay with a note about one of his own characters, a certain Erik Bloodaxe, whose “Wyrd (destiny) was to die after a great slaying of enemies. His sole goal is to attain Valhalla.” It seemed as if Simbalist’s character had some “purpose” in the sense that Mark Chilenskas assigned to characters in his campaign, but it was not a hidden purpose—as a player, Simbalist was fully aware of it. He expressed confidence that the referees would never deprive Erik of this destiny: “Wyrd has decreed and the GMs in our campaign respect that fate and will not give him an ignominious death.” Apparently, his certainty about the preordainment of that character arc did not diminish his own satisfaction with the game; it instead became the game’s premise. “So far I have been denied my destiny, and I still live. I will have my fate! . . . This I know because the GMs in our group will not let it be otherwise. I await only the manner of it.”

How a player could know and to some degree dictate his character’s destiny in a game where referees maintain the illusion of simply executing an impartial system, rather than steering a story, posed an apparent paradox. But Simbalist’s “Kismet” essays provided the most considered defense of the philosophy criticized in Pulsipher’s White Dwarf 1 essay which had divided D&D players into “those who want to play a game as a game and those who want to play it as a fantasy novel.” Without doing any great violence to the argument, we can map Simbalist’s “adversary mode” and “role-playing mode” onto Pulsipher’s two respective extremes. It would be hard for Simbalist to deny that he advocated for games that permitted “manipulation of the situation by the referee, however he sees fit,” a great sin in Pulsipher’s eyes. Anticipating a backlash, Simbalist preemptively volunteered, “I realize these are only my opinions, and I know there will be objections. Some prefer the adversary approach, and that’s all right. It works, and it is fun too” (AE 44). He stressed that his more story-driven style is “best suited to ongoing campaigns in which friends gather week after week to enjoy themselves” rather than to solitary scenarios with strangers. Through long experience developing their collective play style, his local group had grown a bond of trust that convinced Simbalist that the referees were responsible caretakers of his fate. Simbalist refused to limit the story to wondering what lies beyond “the next turn of the corridor” when instead you could look “to the time when a character is revealed as the true King, exiled in his youth to save him from the evil uncle who has slain his father and usurped the throne.” Such epic character arcs become possible for “the players who submerge themselves in the reality of our fantasy.”

Simbalist’s philosophy did indeed meet significant resistance from a community that sharply disagreed about the proper approach to role-playing games. As he was to discover in A&E’s public forum, all of this talk of destiny was difficult for the community contributors to countenance or even comprehend. John Strang complained, “I would hate to be in a campaign where my play was scripted in advance by the GM; further some of the best campaigns I’ve been in were ones wherein all my characters got killed off in various ways” (AE 45). The strongest pushback in that same issue came from Bill Seligman, who put his foot down firmly: “Now, this design philosophy business has gone too far. It is one thing to discourse on the adversary relationship between a DM and his/her players, but this business about character destinies and the GM supporting them unbalances the game enormously.” Seligman saw a wide gulf between an author’s story-forging work and a game referee’s oversight: “In a story, the hero has to win and bed the heroine to satisfy the readers. To satisfy the players, the DM has to reward the players when they are clever, destroy them when they are stupid,” and mete out similar consequences appropriate to the characters’ in-game actions. “Your vision of destiny playing should be left to the scriptwriters of B movies,” Seligman told Simbalist. “Come and play with us human beings!”

But in his A&E 44 arguments, Simbalist had stressed that “Kismet is unpredictable from the perspective of mere mortals” and that “while he lives his charmed life, the hero is not immune to misfortune, only to death itself.” So, in a rejoinder to Seligman in A&E 47, Simbalist recommended distracting players with an in-game punishment that does not obstruct the progress of the story toward “the destiny which the GM and players are working out for their characters.” He enumerated a number of such circumstances: “I have seen magic swords dissolved in the blood of a fearsome monsters (cf. Beowulf) as the price paid for Fate stepping in to dispatch a nasty and so save an otherwise dead, dead, dead character. Characters have ended up in the game limbo of a galley for several years before escaping—the price of being captured instead of killed outright. Fortunes have been paid in ransoms.” He gave an example that would resonate with Chivalry & Sorcery devotees: a mage whom the dice would have bumped into the certain death of a lava-filled chasm but who, through Simbalist’s invention, “managed to grab a handhold some feet down the face of the cliff. Kismet. Fate. Only he had to drop his focus to save himself—and any C&S player knows the anguish that loss brought.” When the dice fail a player, Simbalist counseled that the referee interpret that failure not as something that prevents the arc of the story from moving forward but instead as a consequence distractingly negative enough that players will never suspect fate is playing favorites. This clarification might not resolve Simbalist’s paradox, but it could at least obscure it.

For Simbalist, these techniques were in the service of a higher calling: he insisted that “FRP is an art form” and that “only the DM/GM can tell the story of an adventure,” not the dice (AE 47). But although the referee tells the story, this is not to say that players are disenfranchised because “the player ultimately chooses the destiny of his character; insofar as he provides a viable and reasonable story line, the GM’s task is to assist the character to realize his destiny by providing experiences which logically and honestly test the character’s worthiness to attain it.” It is the player’s responsibility to provide that fundamental premise for his or her participation in the game, and it is the referee’s responsibility to nurture that premise. But a game design itself can never substitute for a referee because a referee “can note and process data no game system could handle—the numerous intangibles that are the hallmarks of FRP gaming like personal interaction between the participants, character motivation, or the success of a line of action that arose spontaneously during the adventure.” In Simbalist’s view, the referee has the foremost place in the implementation of role-playing games, something far beyond the reach of mere system design.

No one familiar with Chivalry & Sorcery could fail to notice that its rulebook contains nothing like the principles that Simbalist expounded at such length in his essays on kismet, story-telling, and the idiocy of the dice. This discrepancy perhaps points to a deeper paradox that helps explain why designers and players lavished such attention on role-playing game philosophy: as able as Simbalist was to explain in an essay what he believed a role-playing game should be, a system translating those principles into rules proved elusive. When the Bunnies & Burrows rulebook enshrined the principle that referees should modify the situation to serve the story without alerting the players, did its text not alert the players? Perhaps only David Feldt’s game Legacy at the time truly tried to resolve that contradiction, with its system of Intentionality enabling the referee to influence and steer events. But translating story structures, something like Lortz’s dramatic sequences and motivation questions, into a system presented greater difficulties. If simulating the fatefulness of stories is essential to role playing, which system would best encourage that?

Rather than bake these principles into rules, Simbalist instead planned to publish his guidance on running and playing role-playing games separately from his game designs, in a multivolume set to be called The Compleat Role-Player’s Handbook, the first book of which he promised would be available at GenCon in 1979, to be released simultaneously with the Chivalry & Sorcery supplement Saurians. From his mentions of the series in A&E, we know that he was writing it with Backhaus and Wes Ives and that it was to have a chapter about referees who “slide into an obsession” with their own fantasy worlds and who “resent any serious penetration into” them by players, leading them to deprive players of any real freedom of decision. But no installments of the Handbook series ever seem to have appeared, and what we know of Simbalist’s philosophy survives largely from his fanzine essays.

The Generation Gap

Although the community had trouble establishing an agreed-upon definition of role playing, it was easier for commentators to agree on what role playing was not. Early in 1979, Glenn Blacow warned of a growing schism in his circle at MIT. Happily, he believed there were some players who were able to “engage in true role-playing: living within an unfolding world-story and abiding by the (generally unwritten) assumptions by which it was run” (WH 39). But other players remained defiantly disinterested in the role-playing dimension and instead obsessed over finding “minimax strategies that ignored the alleged personalities of their characters.” Linking this latter tendency to a background in wargaming, Blacow called that group “Ego-Trippers,” a pejorative designation Simbalist had already used in Chivalry & Sorcery in 1977.18 Blacow observed of this dreaded faction that “their existence has become more and more evident over the past year.” We can hear in his description of those “Ego-Trippers” their obsession with participating in the system, observing and controlling the numbers, but in the true role-players, Blacow argued, there is instead a trust and acceptance of “generally unwritten” principles that govern the game.

In the summer of 1979, this apparent divide in the role-playing game community was dramatically exacerbated by a sudden change in the hobby’s composition. James Dallas Egbert III disappeared from his university that summer, an event widely presumed to result from his participation in fantasy role-playing games—which it did not. But the resulting media attention paid to D&D ignited a fad that would attract millions of players to the hobby over the next couple of years.19 The crush of new, often younger players surfacing at tabletops marked a generational shift: many were too young to have previously participated in organized science-fiction or wargaming fandom and thus numbered among the first generation of “native” role-playing gamers.

The new demographic attracted to D&D upended the long-standing constitution of the two cultures, with a marked rise in participation by girls and women.20 In the aftermath of the Egbert incident, Bill Seligman watched with interest when a reporter from Seventeen magazine attended a meeting associated with a New York City fanzine to ask the young women present why they played this controversial game. For A&E 53, the final issue collated before the end of 1979, Seligman wrote his own “Essay on Role-Playing,” which was inspired in part by the interviews he had witnessed and no doubt by his prior exchange with Simbalist about the storytelling approach to refereeing. His initial question was not “Why do people play a fantasy RPG?” but rather “When we play an FRPG, what do we expect? To have a good time? Yes, but this is a very subjective matter.”

Seligman perceived a division among his players very similar to that noted by Blacow: between those interested in seeing their characters advance in power and those who seemed more satisfied with games that offered compelling experiences rather than lavish rewards. In their early encounters with role-playing games, Seligman explained, “many players, and I admit that at one time I was one of them, had no other goal than to become as powerful as possible no matter what the means.” After he attained further experience with the potential of role-playing games, new vistas opened to him. “But is this sort of ultimate search for ultimate power the only form of interesting experience one can find in an FRPG? I feel the answer is no.”

Rather than casting role-playing games as a competition pitting the players against the perils devised by the referee or a story curated by the referee to lead characters to their destinies, Seligman argued, “As I see it, the best kind of Role-playing/Dungeonmastering relationship (for yes, a relationship it is—it is people playing with people, not dice playing with spaces on a piece of cardboard) is one where the players, through the persona of their characters, explore the creative abilities of the referee, through the fantasy world the DM creates, supports, and maintains” (AE 53). In a manner reminiscent of Michie, Seligman saw something essential in the relationship between the players and the referee, a relationship fueled by players adopting characters and interacting, through the game’s interpersonal dynamic, with the imagination of the referee. This is a starkly different emphasis than Simbalist’s assignment of the impetus for the story to the referee; here Seligman held that the impetus begins with the players and emerges naturally as they “explore” the situation the referee conceives.

Seligman believed that such exploration requires that the players be unencumbered by the operation of the system. He took exception to the proposition, recently touted by Lewis Pulsipher in White Dwarf 3, that players should roll their own attacks and saving throws. Seligman insisted instead that “the players should be as divorced from the mechanics of playing D&D . . . as possible” (WD 5). If referees take responsibility for any necessary dice rolling and computation, they can simply report results such as “You hit him, and now he’s down to half the strength he was when you first encountered him.” Seligman believed this “forces the players to consider the situation in a more realistic way, and increases the enjoyment of the game. Nobody except math nuts like to sit around a table and fool with numbers all day—the idea of the game is medieval adventure, not statistical numbers.”21

These views clearly fell within the longest-standing tradition of critical thinking about the relationship of players to systems, extending back to Eisen’s vow in 1975 and earlier to “free” Kriegsspiel. But Seligman’s twist was that separating players from the mechanics of executing the system during play did not bar players from collaborating with the referee in the design of the rules. Seligman’s own system, which he circulated through the fanzine Dungeoneer, provides an example of how this might be achieved. As early as 1978, Seligman proposed a magic and skill system that dispensed entirely with a system-driven list, instead staging spell and skill invention as a joint venture between players and referee.22

But in “Essay on Role-Playing,” Seligman had to concede that this creative opportunity did not appeal to a certain demographic in his local group.

A couple of my players, partly to test out my system to the limits and partly because that is their playing style, are “minimax” players. For those of you who don’t know what that means, a minimax player is one who looks for and takes every possible numerical advantage the system will give him, regardless of what he has to have his character do to take that advantage. Since I feel my system has to take the minimax players into account as well as the players who primarily role-play, I raised no objections to this.”

This description may go some way to explaining why Seligman was so eager to distance players from the execution of the system.

Blacow had already complained about “minimax” players as “Ego-Trippers” who “ignored the alleged personalities of their characters” out of an overriding desire to become as much of a superperson as possible. Seligman similarly portrayed the “minimax” player as someone who exercises the system with no regard for its implications for playing a role. This must strike us as the flip side of the view Kevin Slimak expressed when he bemoaned those players who treated “role-playing as an excuse for not thinking, or worse, thinking of ways to do the wrong thing.” Seligman was struck by how players who came from a nonwargaming background, especially female players, took more naturally to the role-playing style that he championed—but it was an era when participation by women in the community was conservatively estimated at single-digit percentages.23

The minority presence of women in the community resulted partly from the lingering effects of wargaming’s demographics but also in part from the inherent misogyny in sword-and-sorcery fantasy literature, which carried over into role playing.24 As wargamers turned to role playing, what they found in the fantasy canon did not lead them to a more inclusive stance. Nancy Jane Bailey, exploring the question of “why more women do not play FRP”—and prefacing her remarks with the warning that “this tirade will be sort of feminist”—emphasized that the source literature of D&D consists of “macho type stories” where “the women in them are either recreational only, or some stereotypical scheming sorceress type.”25

There is ample evidence that fantasy role-playing games at the time followed these literary precedents. For a period look at what women might have found even in a female-led effort such as A&E, Dave Nalle’s contribution to issue 52, which features commentary from members of his local gaming circle, including Tom Curtin and Nick Knisely, opined broadly about the problems of including female players in games. Nalle spoke unfavorably of how “the passivity of the female player is contrasted with the aggressiveness of the mature male player.” But that is merely a warm-up for the abusiveness of Tom Curtin’s piece, which singled out another A&E contributor, Deanna Sue White, for her previous narrations of her campaign, describing the violation and death of her character and her children in graphic terms, snickering “Have you ever been in a real dungeon?” Lee Gold, for her part, threatened to fine these “insulters” on a per paragraph basis. A widespread backlash—one response suggested that Curtin “missed getting his rabies boosters shot” (AE 54)—ended Curtin’s contributions to A&E. In A&E 58, Bob Traynor judged that “he is branded anathema forever.”26

Jean Wells, a TSR staffer, wrote openly in The Dragon about the “discrimination and prejudice” as well as the “unfair and degrading treatment” that women could face in the community (DR 39). Kathleen Pettigrew described the main problem facing women entering the hobby was “the cliquish, ‘club’ attitude held by a majority of gamers (i.e., men),” such that “the majority of gamers (men) still react with at least hostility and/or contempt when they have to play with or against a woman” (AG 1 (1)). As a champion of several tournaments, she found the preconceptions she encountered intensely frustrating. Convinced of the futility of fighting the prevailing culture but refusing to quit, she felt the best response was simply to ignore it. “To all of those who have quit or never even started because of this attitude problem, all I can do is ask that you give gaming another chance—it’s worth it.”

One female player who regularly contributed to A&E was Margaret Gemignani, and she articulated that worth through a very expansive, almost mystical view of role playing. “If your game does not include an extensive amount of role playing,” she advises in issue 57, “you are cheating yourself.” She explained, “When you role play in fantasy, you open new worlds to yourself,” as “in all of us is the gift of the dreamer, the song of the bard, the joy of living a dream.” Gemignani advocated for designs where players can advance through role playing as well as through the more traditional D&D paths of slaying monsters and accumulating treasure: “Fantasy role-playing should earn as much experience as hack and slash operating.” However, even Gemignani must concede that these are known points of contention in the community. She cautioned, “Don’t assume that you know the One True Way, that your way of playing makes the most sense and everybody else is mixed up and should get lost.” But for people who valued role playing the way she did, it was easy to see how the situation could quickly devolve into an “us vs. them” polarization.

The drive to become a superperson reportedly dragged down role playing in many groups, and commentators linked it especially to recent adopters. A report from Carl Groppe in 1980 complained, “I have noticed a tendency for Fantasy Role-Playing not to have any role-playing. This distresses me” (AE 57). Groppe laid the blame for this at the feet of novices, and although he stressed that “they aren’t all kids,” that surely implied that many of them were: “a gaggle of them can stifle attempts at true play.” Like Gemignani, Groppe feared that “there’s no incentive for good role-playing” built into game systems, such as experience earned for role playing. But even if there were, competition “quantified in my character vs. yours” missed the point for him: “Nobody wins at a good role-playing experience alone; everyone works together to produce a favorable experience.”

Where Blacow had seen the influence of wargaming over the minimaxers plaguing MIT, Groppe encountered similar tendencies in younger players with little prior experience, those who first encountered role-playing games as part of the wave cresting the end of the 1970s. It was around this time that the pejorative term munchkin entered the role players’ vocabulary. The Wargamer’s Encyclopediac Dictionary (1981) defines a munchkin as “a young wargamer, generally under 14 or 16 years of age,” in contrast to the grognard, “a wargamer who has been in the hobby for a very long time.” Seligman called out the “Munchkin Hordes (crowds of D&Ders less than 15 years old),” noting that in the post-Egbert world, these newcomers “give us some idea of what the hobby will become if popularized” (AE 58). By 1980, he could already allude to restrictions in place in New York groups “to hold down the number of Munchkins” because the problem they posed was “a severe one.” Describing the Origins convention in 1979, Sapienza would remark, “As I looked around the hall, I was rather startled to realize that the average age of the audience was 20 years younger than my own—too young to drive in most states. It appears that the biggest influx into FRP is in the high school (and younger) crowd.”27

The fact that the term grognard already existed at the time hints that the generation gap was a recurring phenomenon, another inheritance from the legacy of wargaming. Strategy & Tactics defined grognards in 1974 as gamers “who have been in for nine or more years” (ST 47). Four years earlier, when an editorial in Wargamer’s Newsletter 95 (1970) mentioned that a Leicester wargaming club had disbanded due to the disruption caused when many younger members joined, it had unleashed a heated debate over ageism in the hobby. One commentator wrote that “the truth is, there is no place for the immature among a club that otherwise consists of serious minded adults,” complaining, “I’ve seen wargames degenerate into a fiasco when boys of 17–22 years of age have started chasing each other, fighting, kicking bits of paper around and so on.”28 These sentiments inevitably triggered a backlash from letter writers identifying themselves with asides like “Indignant 18 Year Old,” who insisted that age is no sure indicator of maturity. They argued that “unless younger players are allowed to mix with older players (and do not form the bulk of the club) the experience of the older players will never get the chance to rub off on the younger player so that he can mature accordingly” (WN 99).

It is unsurprising that a similar debate about ageism coursed through the role-playing community late in 1979. Gary Reilly, a D&D player from upstate New York, complained in The Dragon 29 that he had trouble finding like-minded players in his area: “Most of the campaigns (and there are mighty few to begin with) consist of younger adults (??) whose personalities, motivations, approaches, etc. do not mesh with mine.” He was eager to “make contact with other ‘mature’ (in the sense of sophistication) players.” Dragon editor Tim Kask replied, “You know, a good deal of the younger players play the way they do because they don’t know any better,” as if it were the older players’ responsibility to take the young under their wing rather than to shun them. Kask would expand on this theme in an editorial the following year on “age chauvinism” , where he observed that “one side, older players, wants nothing to do with ‘kids’ whatsoever. The other side, younger players, wants to know why they are being discriminated against and looked down upon” (DR 36).

Whether the blame fell on munchkins or grognards, ego-trippers or minimaxers, the reaction against practices that impede role playing had an impact on how role playing defined itself. Sandwiched between an aging generation weaned on wargames and an emerging generation not yet jaded by the rush of progression, the original “clique” of D&D players began to circle its wagons, in the process excluding people they saw as not like themselves. Seligman was quick to call others “munchkins,” but when he first contributed to A&E in 1976, he was only 17 years old, barely outside the age range of this hated demographic. Many of the earliest adopters of D&D had begun playing as teenagers and were by the end of the decade college graduates. We inevitably lash out most harshly at the failings in others that we know we have exhibited ourselves. With sufficient exposure to the game and with the maturity of age, the early adopters of role-playing games fervently renounced the desire for power that many readily confessed had motivated them when they first began playing. But the perception of a generation gap connected with “ego-tripping” would become another factor that served to delimit the practices of role playing from other, putatively less-mature activities.

Just a Game?

Simbalist’s insistence in 1979 that “FRP is an art form” was a step beyond M. A. R. Barker’s realization in 1974 that D&D is “not strictly a war game” because it challenges whether the term game is an adequate description of it. Jack Harness had compared D&D to “impromptu improvisational theater” all the way back in 1975, and Dave Hargrave had proposed that we should consider “character role playing and living theater as an art form in fantasy gaming” back in 1977 (AE 28). Earlier that year, Superhero ’44 agreed on the fourth page of its rulebook that “somewhere along the line fantasy games began to resemble improvisational theater.” By the time Simbalist chimed in, Steven Lortz had recently observed that “nearly everyone is aware of the fact that RPGs are an art form being born in our time” (DW 2). The promise that consumers could partake of an exciting breakthrough in the arts even became a talking point for marketing, as the Chaosium’s founder Greg Stafford would say to White Dwarf 17 in an interview the following year: “This is the birth of a new art form and we intend to continue leading the field in innovation and quality.”

Thus, we should not be surprised that when Clint Bigglestone’s article “Role-Playing: How to Do It” appeared in Different Worlds 3 in 1979, it prominently featured a section called “Art of Role-Playing,” which defined role playing as “the art of being that whom you are not.” As advice to prospective players, Bigglestone shared some techniques for successful role playing, beginning with principles familiar from the commentary of the time: for example, he urged players to “work out a relationship (in terms of both conscious and sub-conscious thought processes) between the character’s characteristic scores and what impact they have had on the character’s life.” He stressed the importance of playing flawed characters rather than shallow superpeople: “it’s the limitations you have to work with, and work around, that make role-playing so much fun.”

For Bigglestone, one honed the craft of role playing by experimenting with diverse roles, which he compared to the task of a method actor. He urged players to select a cultural background for a character, a set of motivations, and potential inhibitions that drive their behavior. The “diversity of cultural values is one of the things which makes role-playing fascinating,” he argued, and he recommended researching different real-life cultures and social classes to inform performance. For more advanced role playing, he proposed that players explore characters very different from themselves, with an unfamiliar “moral orientation” or a diametrically opposed personality: “if you are an introvert, play a loud-mouthed extrovert.” He was most careful about suggesting that players experiment with characters of a different gender or sexual orientation, advising them to engage with people different from themselves: “Don’t go it alone. Talk to your spouse, lover, sibling, parent, friend, etc. about what it’s like to be of their sex.” Similarly, “for those of you who are straight/gay, take the same steps with regard to communicating with your gay/straight friends and relatives.” Bigglestone strongly cautioned players not to “rely on stereotypes (not even from comedy) for your models. They’re seldom accurate, and almost always demeaning.”29

For Bigglestone, the distinction between a player and a referee is less a qualitative difference of function than one of degree. The article’s section on the role of the referee is called “Playing a World,” and Bigglestone explained that “being a GM isn’t too different from being a player, except it’s about two orders of magnitude more work” because a GM controls not only a character but also “an entire world, and every sentient being” in it. A secondary responsibility is “making sure that the players role-play their characters,” which may mean advising “players in handling the reactions of their characters if the players are unsure of themselves.”

In addition to “how to do it,” Bigglestone had strong feelings about how not to do it. In italics, he stressed, “You must remember, at all times and all situations, that it is just a game!” The characters in role-playing games “exist to entertain you and your friends and expand your experience horizon.” So he advised that “if you become too attached to a character, to the point that it would emotionally affect you if something happened to that character, then get rid of that character!” Once players take their characters’ situations personally, all sorts of emotions can bleed over into real life.30 Bigglestone concluded, “It’s a wise player and GM who knows when it is time to stop playing and re-enter the ‘real’ world. That should be done whenever a player, or players, have stopped being able to distinguish between the actions of other players and the actions of the characters of those players.” This is a corollary to a sentiment that Hargrave expressed in 1978 in the second installment to his Arduin series, Welcome to Skull Tower, where he justified referee intervention by observing, “It seems that this type of game makes people truly identify with their characters, which is as it should be, but it also seems to make some people think that their character being killed is a personal attack on themselves.”31 Simablist saw this distance from characters as a mark of sophistication: “I submit that hardened role-players are capable of divorcing themselves from their characters to a degree often unsuspected by most GMs.”32

In a rebuttal to Bigglestone, Sapienza did not find the distinction between player and character so simple to draw. Sapienza rejected the notion that role playing can be reduced to simple theatricality: “I don’t RPG in order to stretch my acting skills” (DW 5). He furthermore refused to treat his characters as if they were “no more than a tiny square of cardboard, whose death or psychological mutilation is of no concern to anybody.” Emotional attachment for Sapienza was crucial to his engagement with the character. “RPG is a psychodrama; your character is yourself, in a number of deep and not-fully-understood ways, regardless of the ways in which it differs from the real-world player.” He elaborated that “RPG characters are people, and you should hurt when they hurt, if only a little, or you aren’t really playing a role, it seems to me.” Sapienza had argued as early as May 1978 that “FRP is a form of psychodrama” (AE 34), and even before Kanterman and Eldsen’s essay “Introduction to Yourself” in 1977 we can find players insisting that they “like to play D&D as psychodrama for some of our characters” (AE 13). Simbalist would also echo that sentiment in the first issue of Different Worlds. Steven Lortz’s essay “A Perspective on Role-Play” three issues later included a brief prehistory of role playing, beginning with the therapeutic psychodramas of J. L. Moreno and covering various modern uses in the behavioral sciences.

Treating role playing as psychodrama implied that it might not be, as Bigglestone insisted, just a game. Eric Holmes, a professor of neurology at the University of Southern California, wrote the article “Confessions of a Dungeon Master” for Psychology Today toward the end of 1980, which gave his own take on what role-playing games really deliver. As he also happened to be the editor of the Basic Set, the introductory D&D product TSR released in 1977, Holmes spoke with some authority. “The world of Dungeons & Dragons,” he posited, “is produced by its social reality. It is a shared fantasy, not a solitary one.” A group of players “agrees to accept that world,” and when they do, “the fantasy has become a reality, a sort of giant folie á deux, or shared insanity.”

The “deep and not-fully-understood” psychological relationship between players and characters was the subject of some speculation in game designs. Bushido cryptically advises that “the nature of the PC is subtle and his relationship to the player is a curious one.”33 As Steve Jackson humorously wrote in his introduction to Monsters! Monsters! in 1976, “Be warned: these games have a tendency to take over your mind. At least, they do if you play them right.”34 But that sentiment would carry a weightier connotation in 1979 than it did in 1976. The private detective investigating James Dallas Egbert III’s disappearance was memorably quoted saying of D&D that “in some instances when a person plays the game ‘you actually leave your body and go out of your mind’” (DR 30).

Just months before Egbert disappeared, Gygax presciently downplayed the relationship between players and characters, claiming in The Dragon that Dungeons & Dragons “provides a vehicle which can be captivating, and a pastime in which one can easily become immersed, but is nonetheless only a game” (DR 26). Unsurprisingly, the Egbert incident provoked TSR to reiterate this more emphatically: Tim Kask wrote in The Dragon on September 11, 1979, “Games are simply games, meant to be amusing diversions and a way to kill time in a fun fashion, and nothing more” (DR 30). Denying any deeper reality or significance behind the fantasy of D&D became a constant refrain in TSR’s publicity. Gygax in particular would insist in The Dragon 33 that “heroic fantasy has long been one of my favorite subjects, and while I do not believe in invincible superheroes, wicked magicians, fire-breathing dragons, and the stuff of fairie, I love it all nonetheless!”

Yet, despite the disavowals, the community remained uncertain about the relationship of real-world players to these fantastic situations. Larry DiTillio submitted a curious article called “Painted Ladies & Potted Monks” to The Dragon 36 which describes his experience as a referee at the GrimCon convention in San Francisco in the fall of 1979. DiTillio reported, “As we all know, a large percentage of those who enjoy fantasy gaming are youngsters between the age of 12 and 16. They appear in gargantuan hordes at every con, madly seeking games in a fashion that is best described as True Chaotic.” Older referees, he related with chagrin, either “shun these kids as players, or patronize them contemptuously.”

DiTillio for his part welcomed younger players: he ended up refereeing for a group that included some of his older friends as well as five young players, “the oldest about 14.” In the first level of DiTillio’s long-standing dungeon, there was a certain room called the Inn of Ootah, where behind a series of shimmering portals “exotic women and men . . . beckon seductively.” A character could render payment and pass through these portals to be “left quite alone with the delicacy of his choice.” When the GrimCon party discovered this dungeon, DiTillio reports of his five younger charges that “it was painfully apparent that not one of them had ever encountered a dungeon room where outright sensual activity was offered.” This resulted in “nervous giggles” and one younger Paladin averting his gaze.35 When DiTillio’s older friends opted to sample the fare, however, the younger Paladin inquired of the referee “if partaking of the ‘delicacies’ would be against his alignment.”

“The question floored me,” DiTillio recalled. “For one frightening moment I was in a situation of responsibility that related to more than just a game of D&D.” He continued, “Think about it, you adult DMs. Think how your fantasy activity touches your real life, then consider yourself at 14. . . . If you’d been a D&D fanatic at the time, I would guess that many of your attitudes toward right and wrong would have been molded by your game experience, even if only subconsciously.” DiTillio eventually gave the young Paladin an answer that “wasn’t profound but it was honest. I told him if he considered sex evil it was, though in my opinion it wasn’t.” The young Paladin opted not to pay for those services. At a later time in the same adventure, however, the party encountered a monk smoking a hookah, and after posing a similar question about the potential alignment penalties for drug usage and receiving a similarly permissive answer, the Paladin did inhale that mild-altering substance.

“I fully realize that my Paladin friend is intelligent enough to make his own decisions in these matters,” DiTillio acknowledged; “nevertheless, I can’t help feeling that our role-playing interaction will have an effect on those decisions. In D&D we play a character, but invariably that character contains elements of our own selves.” The weight of these interactions, DiTillio believed, depended largely on age: “For adults, those selves are already firmly fixed; for younger players those selves are still being shaped by every experience they have, including D&D.”

Surely DiTillio understood this sudden responsibility in the context of recent events. James Dallas Egbert III was only sixteen years old, still within the dictionary definition of a “munchkin,” when he disappeared from his university that summer of 1979. Never mind that his disappearance had nothing to do with role playing, the possibility that it might have was more powerful than the reality. As the game became more popular among younger players, did its design or implementation incur some moral responsibility toward those players, if only not to warp them? Community opinion was unsurprisingly divided on the subject. Margaret Gemignani wrote in A&E 49 that “FRP is not supposed to be kid’s stuff. The players are supposed to be adults.” But others called for trying to help indoctrinate the youth. Dan Nolte decried the elitism of the role-playing community in the face of the game’s popularity, noting that “FRP has seen its greatest growth in this younger age group because it is less set in its patterns and thus more receptive to new ideas” (AE 60). Nolte thus counseled outreach: “Do FRP a favor!! Take a fugghead munchkin to lunch” and help him improve his craft: “we have, though our example and attitude, the ability to influence the attitudes of an entire generation of FRPers.”

But DiTillio’s article elicited a very different, and very singular, response from Douglas P. Bachmann in “The Problem of Morality in Fantasy” in The Dragon 39. Bachmann noted that DiTillio had “raised some interesting questions which touch the deeper dimensions of role playing. In short, he suggested that we are doing a bit more than ‘playing’; we are forming attitudes towards real life.” Bachmann politely but firmly insisted, however, that DiTillio had mishandled the young Paladin’s inquiry. “The point here is that the question was not about right or wrong; it was about the appropriate response of a character. The question was: Do Paladins engage in such activities? The question was not: Is it right or wrong?”

Bachmann’s objection initially appears to concern the conflation of the Paladin’s “in-character” or “in-game” alignment quandary with DiTillio’s “out-of-character” moral judgments. But then Bachmann took a stranger turn. The Paladin’s question “that was actually asked was straight out of Faerie,” he claimed. Bachmann then engaged in a short digression on the subject of Faerie, which, he said, “is a strange world. It is not familiar or comfortable to us. It is weird, awe-ful, wonder-ful . . . the art of Fantasy is not concerned with real-life evil, or science, or quickies or getting high. It is concerned with the profound mystery behind and within life, nature, and the human soul.” Bachmann challenged DiTillio on a far more fundamental question about the nature of role-playing games: he argued that “fantasy will not tolerate teaching or preaching. Nor will Faerie accept the imposition of moral concerns from ‘real life.’” DiTillio’s error was in presuming any connection between human morality and the morality of fantasy.

Bachmann’s argument built on an article that he had written the previous autumn for Moves 47 called “Fantastic Reality.” In that earlier piece, Bachmann explained that “‘Fantasy’ is an art form designed to enable Man to enter Faerie,” regardless of whether we encounter that fantasy in a story or a game because, for him, “games are acted stories.” And, significantly, he argued that “there is a very close relationship between Fantasy, mythology, religious experience, and ritual.”36 Bachmann saw a role-playing game as a tool for self-discovery, much as Kanterman and Elsden had expressed in their essay “Introduction to Yourself” in 1977. In the first issue of Different Worlds, Kanterman took this notion a step further, arguing that “the original D&D brings one amazingly close to the archetypes of Jungian psychology (the wise old man, the young hero), and may help us peer into our ‘collective unconscious.’”37 Bachmann thus saw a dungeon adventure in a very different light than Simbalist: where Simbalist deemed it “a juvenile and limiting activity,” Bachmann quoted Mircea Eliade on the meaning of such adventures: “Descending into an underground chamber is ritually and symbolically equivalent to . . . a descensus ad inferos undertaken as a means of initiation” (MV 47). The idea that people return from such an experience with greater power and wisdom is, for Bachmann, an explanation for the intrinsic appeal of the original game, but it achieves its true purpose only when players are “channeled” by the system in the right direction.

Bachmann’s rebuttal to DiTillio represented role playing as a tool that allows access to “Faerie.” He cited Joseph Campbell’s work The Hero with a Thousand Faces as evidence that the “assumption underlying all Fantasy is that a character is going to become a hero or heroine” and that with this assumption comes “an inherent morality,” but it has nothing to do with the sort of morality that DiTillio congratulated himself for espousing (DR 39). Bachmann bluntly asserted that “if someone uses a fantasy game or novel as a soap box or a pulpit, that person has . . . turned a form of art into a form of propaganda or pornography.” By way of conclusion, Bachmann expressed his belief that “as we struggle to discover the reality of Faerie and the proper forms of Fantasy, as we design game mechanics which are true to those realities, we will discover our souls, we will make ethical decisions . . . we will be transformed.”38

But barely pausing for breath, in the very next issue of The Dragon, Bachmann resumed his argument in a lengthier article, this time pivoting from DiTillio to a new target: Gygax himself. Titling his essay “Believe It or Not, Fantasy Has Reality,” Bachmann immediately attacked Gygax’s disavowal of fantasy. Pointing to Gygax’s proclamation that he did not believe in the “stuff of faerie,” Bachmann countered that in that case there would be “no way to justify any game system” because “if all fantasy is just make-believe, all fantasy game systems ultimately are based on designer prejudice, arbitrary choices or game balancing needs.” He insisted instead that “we play fantasy games because we at least hope that we are doing something more than playing make-believe.”

It is one thing to talk about all this in theory and another to show through a design how it might work in practice. Bachmann concluded his article with his promised vision of “game mechanics which are true to those realities”—a short role-playing game system, just a few pages of material but enough to illustrate his vision. When Lortz had shown earlier how to develop “motivational questions” necessary to transform role-playing games into dramatic sequences, he had based his example on characters satisfying their desire for power—which might not strike everyone as compelling or “dramatically significant.” Bachmann substituted for that aggression and acquisitiveness the Quest Pattern from the Hero with a Thousand Faces, which supplies a very different dramatic motivation for games: “The first object is the transformation of character into the hero, and the second is the restoration of life in the hero’s world.” Bachmann explicitly stated that his system offers “coherent mechanisms which provide an adequate structure for playing out this Quest Pattern and for achieving High Fantasy.”

Bachmann did not propose merely to delineate a system simulating some spiritual process—his was a design intended to guide participants through an actual spiritual process. To achieve that, with a show of easy fluency in the designs of the day, his rules weave together many elements familiar from the innovations of the 1970s. In place of alignment, Bachmann included a variable quantified attribute for “Character,” which ranges from “Abhorrent” (1) to “Illustrious” (20), anchored somewhat in Chivalry & Sorcery. As in Heroes and Bushido, high Character bestows a bonus to experience awards, and low Character exacts a penalty. It is not easy to progress as a character in his system if your actions are vile in the eyes of Faerie; violating oaths, say, can result in significant reductions in Character. It is this morality, the morality inherent to Faerie as he saw it, that Bachmann’s system guides its players to honor.

The transformation into a hero that Bachmann hoped to achieve is not an endless road to becoming a superperson: in his system, you can lose experience by simply making it home from an adventure because “the power one gains on an adventure can, in reality, be easily dissipated when returning to the Primary World.” Following the Quest Pattern, Bachmann devoted much attention to this “Home Area” and the boundary that exists between it and the world of Faerie; returning to the Home Area is the seventh step in the pattern. We might even say that Bachmann saw the eight steps in the Quest Pattern as a series of dramatic sequences, each with its own motivating question, which form a sort of flowchart for the story of an adventure.

To steer characters on their destined journey to heroism, Bachmann provided acknowledged adaptations of the Information and Intentionality mechanisms of Legacy, rebranded here under the names “Legends” and “Doom,” respectively. A referee uses them in concert to steer players along the Quest Pattern and into the resolution of motivating questions; “The combination of Doom and Legends has the potential of really opening fantasy games up to the rhyme & reason of Faerie.” Bachmann gave the “Legend of the City of Gold” as an example of a Legend topic that players might investigate over the course of a campaign, and for a Doom proposed that a character “will someday come to the City of Gold and find that he was born to be the New King.” His phrasing here must remind us of Simbalist, who wrote in his second “Kismet” essay about the moment “when a character is revealed as the true King,” and there is considerable overlap between the flavor of fantastic realism that Simbalist aspired to implement in his games and the one systematized by Bachmann’s design. When a character’s actions relate to her secret Doom, she receives considerable bonuses on actions such as making ability checks, influencing nonplayer characters, and using key items. For Bachmann, Doom is an expression of the fact that “the world is not a vacuum into which players step and do anything that pops into their heads.” As in much of Bachmann’s system, the Doom Modifier is also tightly bound to his version of alignment, Character: high Character earns a bonus to the Doom Modifier of 50 percent or more, whereas the lowest Character inflicts a one-quarter penalty to the Doom Modifier.

In “Fantastic Reality,” Bachmann even followed Simbalist in quoting Tolkien regarding the “inner consistency of reality” and cited the importance of generating an inhabitable and credible “secondary world.” Although he recognized that Chivalry & Sorcery admirably attempted to depict the fantastic, in his opinion “the result was unfortunate,” failing to deliver an “Other World” and instead giving us a detailed historical setting: “Can a society which is dead be a means to that which is forever alive and timeless?” Crucially, Bachmann showed how the tools pioneered by Legacy could be applied to the contradictory incentives of managing a character’s destiny without turning the exercise into the linear implementation castigated by Pulsipher, where the players are merely “told a story by the referee, in effect, with themselves as the protagonists.” Bachmann carefully noted in “Believe It or Not” that though these mechanisms may steer players, they do not deprive them of free will: “You can choose which Legends you will pay attention to, and your Doom Modifier still leaves you plenty of freedom.”

Bachmann had his system model not just players and their destiny but also the impact of the players’ decisions on the secondary world. He developed a measurement he called the “World Pattern Balance,” which quantified the susceptibility of the very fabric of reality to distortions resulting from immoral or disharmonious actions, such as theft in the former case and magic use in the latter. Although this mechanic surely derived from the Cosmic Balance in the Chaosium’s board game Elric (1977), Bachmann retuned it to the purposes of a role-playing game as an instantiation of the Quest Pattern. Battles especially upset the order of Faerie. As the World Pattern Balance value trends higher, various perceptible consequences will reverberate through the campaign. At low values, this may just take the form of seeing comets shooting through the sky at night; later, the moon may turn green. At higher values, perpetual winter, crop blights, plagues, and even earthquakes may follow, decimating the land. The arc of the campaign story and the character’s journey permeate the rules of Bachmann’s game, providing an interworking of system and setting tailored to his own ritualistic conception of role playing.

Whether Bachmann succeeded in granting the mundane world access to the realm of Faerie is a question best left to players of his game. But in Bachmann’s system we find a convergence of theory and design that had eluded Simbalist and earlier commentators. If Gygax’s dismissal of the reality behind fantasy made his design choices arbitrary, Bachmann’s rules were anything but: for all their brevity, they cohered to direct a specific experience for players, one that expressed the underlying meaning Bachmann found in role-playing games. Although Bachmann’s goal was a rather esoteric one, his curated anthology of rules for steering characters and worlds marked a sort of culmination of the first five years of design energy invested in role-playing games. Bushido had shown in 1978 how to tune a system to drive characters into a setting, but in 1980 Bachmann pointed the way to systems tooled to channel players into very specific experiences.

If we line up Bachmann’s vision next to Sapienza’s, next to DiTillio’s, next to Bigglestone’s, next to Gygax’s, the radical pluralism of approaches to role-playing games demonstrates the futility of trying to define or optimize such a diverse practice. Was fantasy role playing a ritual, or a psychodrama, or a teaching tool, or an art form, or just a game? To all appearances, a role-playing game is such a plastic thing that it can assume any of those shapes. We thus inherit the difficulties in defining what is artistic, or therapeutic, or tutelary, or mystical, or even ludic, when we hazard charting that labyrinth.

Any definition broad enough to encompass activities so diverse would have little explanatory power. The core problem was that D&D inspired this genre through a “framework around which you will build a game of simplicity or tremendous complexity.” What the philosophy of role-playing games required was not a pithy definition but a theoretical framework to house its limitless possibilities.