6 Maturity

Douglas Bachmann positioned his system as a variant for Chivalry & Sorcery, but he concluded his piece “Believe It or Not” with guidelines for adapting the rules to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Surely he could have grafted his ideas onto any number of other contemporary designs. There is some irony in Bachmann’s second choice, though, because Gygax positioned AD&D in a very different way than the original product. As its three books started to roll out in 1978, the AD&D system heavily downplayed the latitude of the referee and the use of variant systems in favor of a strict adherence to the core rules disseminated by TSR: AD&D was not meant to be just a starting point but a complete system, in stark defiance of the Gamer’s First Law and virtually all of the latitude that existing role-playing games offered to referees.

The preface to the Players Handbook stresses the degree of “uniformity” of experience Gygax intended the system to convey. In The Dragon 43, responding to a fan who expressed reservations about the rigidity of the Advanced system, Gygax wrote, “You seem to have D&D confused with AD&D. The former promotes alteration and free-wheeling adaptation. The latter absolutely decries it, for the obvious reason that Advanced D&D is a structured and complete game system aimed at uniformity of play world-wide. Either you play AD&D, or you play something else!” To borrow Costikyan’s terminology, Gygax represented D&D as an open-ended role-playing game but AD&D as a closed system. This new uniformity surely aimed to counter claims such as Costikyan’s that the diversity of house rules meant there really was no such game as D&D and to eliminate the widespread incompatibility of playstyles.

In a review of D&D in Games magazine in the summer of 1979, Jon Freeman opined that “D&D is, in fact, less a game than a design-a-game kit.”1 This is true in the obvious sense that the original rules did not provide a game playable out of the box but instead a set of instructions for a referee to construct dungeons and run adventures: some assembly was required. But in a more fundamental sense the invitation in the first rulebooks to extend and modify the system can make the product seem like a toy requiring much more assembly than just dungeon architecture, something that would not work unless referees thoughtfully filled in the blanks in the rules—especially compounded with the versatility of the dialogue, which might force referees to improvise system on the spot in response to unexpected statements of intention. The Advanced system sought to rectify the design gaps in the original game and, in concert with modules as accessories, to form a consistent and standardized game that worked more or less out of the box.

But was it really possible to standardize the play of a role-playing game? Freeman knew well that “TSR and other companies grind out prefabricated dungeon diagrams, monster lists, and encounter charts by the bushel,” but he had little hope this would create genuine uniformity of experience across games. “Since there is no limit to the other ingredients that may be steeping in the DM’s cauldron,” he stated in his review of D&D, “it is scarcely surprising that no two of these sorcerous brews are alike.” The players around the table exercising the rules always bring something with them that will make every game unique.

Gygax hoped that by expanding the system into plump rulebooks and outlawing variants he could narrow the game into a closed system. When TSR first began to telegraph this strategy at seminars during the summer conventions of 1977, Scott Rosenberg worried in A&E 26 that the community had something at stake in this decision. Rosenberg held that “the errors, inconsistencies, and general lack of coherence of the original TSR rules were a blessing in disguise” because without them people would always have treated the D&D rules as gospel rather than guidelines. “For usually, no matter how much a game designer tells people that his game is open-ended and that they should design their own rules, there will be a great majority of people content to play exactly the way the rulebook states.” But “TSR’s books forced everyone to improvise, and thus we have the magnificent diversity of systems and ideas prevalent in the D&D gaming field,” Rosenberg wistfully continued.

The incompleteness of the original rules forced early adopters to design their own game, as Freeman would have it: now Rosenberg feared that “they won’t have to once the spiffy new revised D&D comes out. It’ll all be there, in cold type.” Despite Gygax’s intentions, Rosenberg predicted the result would not be that “all DMs will suddenly abandon their own carefully-worked-out rules and adopt the revised TSR set.” Rosenberg prophesied that instead “a rift will develop in the D&D playing community between a large group of ‘standard’ players who will comfortably play TSR’s game, and a much smaller group of truefen.” This last word, truefen, a borrowing from science-fiction fandom, here for Rosenberg denoted the dedicated fans who would continue to hack the system no matter what proclamations came out of Lake Geneva, ignoring AD&D in favor of their own homebrews, unconcerned with being branded as outlaws, or at least outliers.

Throughout the 1970s, the sheer preponderance of optional rules available in fanzines and commercial products let practitioners substitute out virtually any component of the system. As Simbalist attested, referees would “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.” Even the core system of abilities and combat could be replaced while leaving the rest unchanged, as the Infinity System (1979) demonstrates: its rules are restricted to “character attributes, combat, weapons, skills, and vehicles,” and as such “it is easily inserted into any other system.”2 The modularization of systems into such components became part of their identity; in 1979, it could already be remarked, “Do you realize any FRP game is in reality a hierarchy of smaller games? For example, in D&D there is a combat game, a magic game, a guess the magic item game, a role play game, an experience game, a create character game, a find your way out of the maze game, an alignment game, etc.” (AE 51). Anything potentially could be swapped out. The genie would not go willingly back into the bottle.

The ineluctable fungibility of rules was not just a problem for Gygax and for D&D—it was a problem for the dozens of other commercial products that struggled to establish their own identity in the role-playing game marketplace as mature, second-generation designs. Charlie Luce observed in A&E 47 that not only had the fan community generated “enough variant material . . . on Runequest to rewrite half the booklet over again,” but “other people are melding systems from D&D, AD&D, C&S, RQ, Warlock, and sprinkles of Bushido, Gamma World, and Space Quest.” Luce agreed with Rosenberg that the community had learned to dump these systems into a melting pot because originally “Dungeons & Dragons was published with a great deal of unclear, ambiguous, contradictory, or just plain missing material,” and, as a consequence, “now, every DM or group of DMs that runs ‘D&D’ has a set of house rules, often to where the points of contact with [D&D] Books I–III and Greyhawk are tenuous at best.”

In the introduction to Adventures in Fantasy, no less an authority than Dave Arneson pessimistically surveyed the state of D&D a few months before the release of the Players Handbook. Arneson could only helplessly conclude that “the basic original spirit of the Role Playing Fantasy game has not been well looked after” and that “there have been few real improvements to that less than perfect original system.” The “added dozens of additional rules” put out by TSR and others constituted only “a chaotic jumble that buried the original structure under a garbage heap of contradictions and confusion.” This led to a situation where “any person without the aid of an experienced player was hard pressed to even begin to gain an understanding of the rules and even with aid it sometimes still proved to be impossible.” He positioned his own Adventures in Fantasy as the solution: a game spread across three rulebooks filled with complex calculations. But contemporary reports cast doubt on the degree to which he himself played by these rules and instead favored a more free-form approach to system resolution.

Jim Thomas’s prediction in 1977 that “nothing’s ever going to be more than a starting point” was apparently coming to pass. Charlie Luce believed that many of the “second-generation FRP games” on the market exhibited more “clarity and completeness of the rules” than the original D&D, but he feared that these second-generation titles were rarely given a fair trial as works independent of the existing D&D tradition (AE 47). As he put it, “A new game can be looked at by a FRP player in two ways: either as a new source of ideas for his very own lovingly hand-crafted campaign, or as a new game to play and enjoy.” But because of “the impulse to jump in and modify” the system, which was “nurtured and built up in the days of first-generation FRP,” there is a great deal of “carry-over of old prejudices” that inevitably returns play to familiar patterns rather than the exploration of new ideas, steering gamers toward adaptation rather than adoption. Luce sympathetically concluded, “I don’t think it would have been a very nice thing to take someone’s dream, that they took time and trouble to fit into a rulebook so that I could enjoy it, and chop it to pieces, to shove my own dream into it, without even bothering to try and enjoy it for what it is.” Luce positioned game designs as works of art that deserve to be encountered on their own terms rather than as collections of tools from which referees and player can extract implements one by one as a situation demands.

Some designers would be content even to see their tools tested instead of simply being ignored. In the second volume of his Arduin Grimoire trilogy, Dave Hargrave practically has to beg his readers, “Please try some of the rules that you have doubts about in game situations and game play. Only through actual playtesting can a rule or situation be fully explored.” His tone carries no small frustration about the state of game criticism when he complains, “Anyone can pontificate on rules and worlds that they have never tried and can never be proved wrong because the proof is only in the play.”3 When he wrote those words in 1978, Hargrave had not yet attempted to situate Arduin as a system independent of D&D; it was effectively just an anthology series of variant rules—and even those could and would be dismissed untested, or dismantled and reshaped by the community.

Because D&D originally trained people to approach a role-playing system not as a game but as a “design-a-game kit,” because it is such a plastic thing, because, as the “Gamer’s First Law” would have it, a referee is free to ignore or change any unsatisfactory rules, no closed system could immunize itself from the contagion of a compelling idea, nor could any unwanted practice insinuate its way into a resilient campaign. Whether we deem a design first generation or later, open or closed, it conforms in play to the receptiveness and prejudices of the referee and the players. Some designs openly embraced this quality or even heavily depended on it. The Commando rulebook explains that “role-playing games, more than any other type or genre of games, are intended to be suited to the individual Player’s tastes by that Player.” As such, Eric Goldberg, designer of Commando, does “not expect Players to play by my rules, but to use them as guidelines in structuring the game to their preferences. This process may take a couple of years, but the synthesization of the designer’s and Player’s views by the Player allows role play to achieve its purpose.”4 The system that results from the synthetization of the design with play, in all the myriad manifestation that entails, is the intended system of Commando—indeed, a system that can necessarily never be published because the system is actually a process delegated by the design to the players sitting around the table. But perhaps Commando simply acknowledges and anticipates the reality described by Luce: that any published set of rules is doomed, willingly or not, to undergo such a synthesis with existing practices of its players—as unfair to designers as that might be.

At the end of the 1970s, a confluence of circumstances—the James Dallas Egbert III incident, the appeal of the mass-marketed closed-system AD&D to teenagers, and the collective aging of the original role-playing gamers—led to a predictable discussion about “maturity” in role playing. This meant emotional maturity more than anything else: in his article “Whither the Munchkin?” in Abyss 13, Dave Nalle would note, “Fantasy Role Playing is being overrun by a new generation of players ranging in age from 7 to 70, and no matter what their chronological age, they all have a playing maturity age of 11 or so.” Foremost among the sins Nalle attributed to the “munchkin” was “strict adherence to AD&D.”

For someone like Bachmann, who believed that role-playing games should follow the pattern of the Hero’s Journey as laid out by Campbell, differences in play style similarly raised questions about maturity. In his Moves piece, Bachmann wrote, “In any case, when players complain about others who spoil a game by ‘ego tripping,’ they are feeling the frustration of not playing within this pattern. The pattern seeks to transform infantile egos into mature selves.” Without the benevolent steering of the Quest Pattern, players may drift into mindless, indigent criminality, what Bachmann called the “Grand Larceny/Aggravated Assault syndrome of gaming,” which he reduced to the handy abbreviation GL/AA. But attempting to behave that way on the Hero’s Journey is simply self-defeating, he argued: “the ego tripper in the Initiatory Pattern ends up dead, or a slave, or insane—just as he should.”

If Bachmann’s idiosyncratic perspective on maturity represents one extreme, there is ample evidence of how its opposite manifested. In another piece describing the benefits of role playing, “The Therapeutic Aspects of D&D,” Tom Curtin recounted the game’s efficacy in resolving depression and anxiety—though his argument is for the salubrious comfort found in self-indulgent and often sadistic diversion (AB 10). After describing the many difficulties he faced in real life as a senior in college, he reported, “I really feel rejuvenated after frying some deserving and obnoxious hobbit. It’s my favorite sport.” He described a session where his party viciously tortured a captured orc, repeatedly healing it with a gem of regeneration to forestall its well-earned death, and admitted, “It was cruel, but we relished the poor Ork’s trauma. This episode was a great way to work off the tensions of an Astronomy quiz.” How could Curtin and Bachmann be playing the same genre of game, even?

In the community’s public forums, this divide took on a darker and more vitriolic tone than the previous bickering familiar from the long-standing schism between story people and games people. Nalle stressed the need to repel the munchkin “menace” but conceded that “very few people can bear to just tell someone to ‘fuck off’” (AB 13). In A&E 59 , Sapienza related that this censure was a two-way street: “Recently I have received abusive letters from some young gamers. All I can say is that when they are older they may look back and realize it was precisely that kind of behavior that banned them from rapid welcome by more mature gamers.”

As the schism grew more pronounced, the need grew ever more urgent for a framework that accounted for the stark differences in the community. The umbrella of role-playing games covered too many practices and too diverse a set of philosophies to admit of any useful definition, but any accepted framework that could cordon off areas of disagreement would at least permit critics to assess the value of a design or an implementation for an interested subset of the community. In that light, it is perhaps unsurprising that the first landmark in the theory of role-playing games was a framework for understanding what assumptions and expectations players brought to the table.

The Blacow Model

By the time the fiftieth issue of Wild Hunt came out in the spring of 1980, Glenn Blacow had been playing D&D for about five years. In his contribution to that anniversary issue, he included an essay called “A Consideration on the Subject of Fantasy Role-Playing.” It presented a synthesis of the various attempts to reconcile different incentives in play going back to models proposed for wargamers in the early 1970s by early commentators such as Steve Thornton. Blacow’s “Consideration” is particularly elucidating because it defines role playing as one component of a broader model, as a property that exists in a tension with conflicting or complementary practices, thereby delimiting it from other things people do when they sit down to play at a game of D&D. The model of role-playing games Blacow presented would instantly become the most influential of the era.

Blacow did not presume to classify published designs or even to propose a player typology, though his categories would later serve those purposes as well. Following Simbalist’s notions that “role-playing games take on the flavor of the group playing a campaign” and that “no two campaigns are alike,” Blacow instead focused on the “feel” that emerges from play. He postulated that “the ‘feel’ of a game is determined by the interaction of four elements.” He clarified that, practically speaking, any given campaign or session involves some blend of the four “forms,” but as a means of introducing them, he first explained them in isolation, as “pure” cases.

The first form is role-playing. Blacow identified this form of game as one “wherein the PCs are by far the most important thing in the game.” All considerations about tactics or accumulation of power are secondary to letting the players inhabit their characters. It is a game form where “killing PCs isn’t just pointless, it’s counter-productive.” This type of game “tends to show a considerable degree of ‘cooperation’ between the players themselves and the gamesmaster,” where character actions have a significant influence over the flow of events. We might say that this form accords most directly with the philosophies expressed by Simbalist and, to some degree, Bill Seligman.

Blacow also added that “a ‘pure’ role-playing game is also the type most likely to develop the idea that the players have ‘fates,’” citing Simbalist’s “Kismet” essays, though he might also have drawn on Chilenskas’s “purpose.” He gave an example of a referee spontaneously altering a game situation, tacitly turning a magical axe into a nonmagical one, to preserve the life of a character set aside for a later fate. The “kill ratio” is low in such games because no one will kill characters in which the referee and “the players have invested much time, imagination, and love.” But in the pure forms of “role playing,” the world in which characters explore their destinies is only as developed as it needs to be to serve the characters: it “only develops background to any great extent if the PCs get interested/involved in it.”

The second form is wargaming. Blacow considered this the explicit inverse of the role-playing style because “the most important element here is the rules and mechanics of the game,” the systems that simulate a world—these are the incentives that Thornton associated with the “simulator.” Blacow stressed that players in this form must participate in the execution of the system, making “knowledge of every detail of the rules a vast help,” which results in “much searching for loopholes by the players, and eliminating them by the DM.” Because players understand the system, they have a reasonable expectation of how their intentions will be interpreted by the referee. Blacow characterized this form as one where “encounters are tactical problems to be solved by the players,” and in that sense the game is “a mental contest between the GM and the players” of the sort frequently discussed by Gygax, Slimak, and others at the dawn of the hobby: when players encounter monsters, their “tactical expertise . . . tallies remarkably well with that of the DM.” As such, these games are lethal, where “killing PCs is a large part of the point of the whole affair.” Lewis Pulsipher advocated for very much this understanding of D&D.

In this pure wargaming form, “the roleplaying aspect of the game tends to be minimal,” and, indeed, “developing a character’s personality may result in it doing things dysfunctional to its survival.” Again, this recalls early remarks, like Blacow’s own, on how in certain dungeons “rolled intelligence must be ignored to survive” and trying to play within the constraints of abilities or alignment will prove a career-limiting decision. Blacow stipulated, “This is probably the most challenging of the pure forms.”

The third form is ego-tripping. This term is familiar from Bachmann and from Blacow’s prior comments; Blacow explained that he chose this name to “avoid the dread term m*n*m*x.” As pejorative as minimax might have seemed, commentators on his model would quickly point out that ego-tripping is little better, and we would be hard pressed to identify anyone contributing to the critical literature who openly advocated for this form as a proper approach to role-playing games. Perhaps something like the self-indulgence espoused by Tom Curtin as he tortured imaginary enemies to blow off real-life steam effectively represents it. Blacow noted that in this form “the average PC is simply the player’s personality decked out with a few labels that purport to be such things as profession, alignment, etc.”

“The major drive of these games is the search for power for the characters,” Blacow explained. “The PCs strive for levels, magical devices, special abilities, divine favor, etc.,” even if they have to “murder one another for these.” Competition among players can motivate violent exchanges between party members: they may resort to assassination “just to keep other characters from being as powerful as their own.” Blacow observed that “the DM often joins in the ego-tripping and competition, just to prove to the PCs that he can be grosser than they are.” He called ego-tripping “the most competitive form of the game,” and this surely corresponds to Thornton’s “competitor” archetype.

Intriguingly, although Blacow disparaged “pure” ego-tripping, he would go on to argue that it is “probably the most common form of the four.” Indeed, he maintained that it was the intended original form of role-playing games and that it remains a vital ingredient of play, even for mature gamers.

The fourth form is story-telling. Blacow observed that “some degree of story-telling is needed for running almost any successful FRP campaign” but that “purely story-telling games are rare indeed” as they are games in which players effectively lack what Pellinore calls “freedom of decision.” In their “pure” form, Blacow wrote, where “everything in the story is pre-written by the Gamesmaster, then there will be little flexibility in what happens. In such games, there is a distinct feel of the PCs just acting out an unwritten script.” This recalls Pulsipher’s disparagement of playing a game as a way of enacting a fantasy novel, which lacks “a sense of control by the players of their own fate.” Or, as Blacow put it, the realization of player intentions “depends on how much control over the game the GM is willing to allow the PCs.” However, in less pure forms, what Blacow called “more free-form versions,” the players and referee “cooperate in writing the script” as the referee provides a “steady input of events, history, and background, and what the players can manage to do affects the fabric of the universe.”

He stressed the world-building dimension of the story-telling game, its rich histories and backgrounds, vivid nonplayer characters, and the “believable reasons for things” that happen in the game. Although few would advocate for a “pure” story-telling game, Blacow ventured that Mark Swanson’s campaign, “if not ‘pure’ story-telling, certainly inspired that aspect” of Blacow’s own games. For this form to be playable, he emphasized that “it is an FRP form requiring a good deal of GM/player interaction and cooperation.”

By articulating these four forms, Blacow effectively summarized the critical discussion of role playing that transpired in the first five years of the hobby. But the explanatory power in the Blacow model did not reside so much in its consideration of these pure forms, which different voices had championed over the years, but instead in the observation that the dominant practice was “combined-aspect games.” Particular campaigns or gaming groups, he explained , tend to have a form that serves as the “original basis for the game,” but then they may “flower out” and add more elements.

Blacow maintained that “given the original rules available”—that is, D&D—the “Ego-Trip ” form is “what will develop from most attempts at starting a game.” Early players did identify progression as the objective of the game, a view that Gygax corroborated, and, indeed, when Gygax bandied around the term role playing at the time, it was in the context of that wish fulfillment. That a campaign would follow this ego-trip form, rather than what people later came to call role playing, echoes Peter Cerrato’s remarks in Wild Hunt 22 about how “the direct cause of the lack of role-playing is how the D&D level system is set up.” Blacow reiterated that “an attempt to run a straight by-the-book D&D or AD&D game usually results in a campaign of this sort,” as if to stress that the very design of D&D encourages the ego-tripping form of game, whereas other systems might not. Then Blacow’s argument becomes almost teleological: although games typically start with ego-tripping, “older games tend increasingly to grow more and more into other aspects of role-playing.” He tied this growth to the maturity of the game and, indeed, of the gamers, acknowledging that “mature may not be the best word, but I confess myself hard up to find a better one.” But as wary as he was of ego-tripping’s influence over play, he nonetheless acknowledged, “Nor is it likely that any game can operate without this element. People like feeling important, and FRP is one way of doing so.” Although he clearly felt ego-tripping must be kept in check, he argued that it contributes a considerable part of the original and indispensable allure of fantasy role playing. Blacow confessed that he, like Seligman before him, began playing with an emphasis on ego-tripping and even admitted that he still did some ego-tripping because “it’s kind of hard to avoid if one plays FRP.”

But ego-tripping alone was not sufficient to sustain his interest: “I will not play in some of the full-blown ego-tripping AD&D games available.” Blacow stressed that “I like to 1) role-play, 2) have some sort of challenge to it, and 3) do so in a world which has logic and consistency to it.” As a referee, he is “trying to balance the role-playing, wargaming, and story-telling aspects of the game so that it’s both playable and enjoyable.” Ruefully, he had to report, “I don’t always succeed.” By acknowledging the tension created by, say, the countervailing requirements of role playing and storytelling, of enabling player agency and keeping the player “isolated” in the referee’s game world, the Blacow model provides an account that embraces the fundamental tension and contradiction at the heart of role-playing game design.

Just as in 1972 Fred Vietmeyer, after reviewing Thornton’s typology of wargamers, argued that “for one type of player to place his own viewpoint as superior to another’s hobby enjoyment is simply being too egocentric,” Blacow too recognized the stark relativity of his forms. He let us see how each form looks to the devotees of the other forms. In the face of the blatant divisions in the community, Blacow perspicaciously noted that “players used to running in games dominated by one aspect of the four have very different attitudes towards games centered on other aspects, and this tends to lead to friction, name-calling, and misunderstandings.” He then tried out a few different perspectives by way of example. “To the role-player FRPer, the ego-tripping dungeon may seem remarkably shallow (‘hack n’ slash’), the wargame-oriented dungeon not only shallow but vicious, and the story-telling dungeon rather confining, restricting his character’s freedom of action.” Or for the ego-tripper, “the measure of the character is his level and magic supply, not what his character is (as is important in a purely role-playing game) or how skilled the player is (in wargaming-oriented groups).”

The community swiftly recognized the significance of the Blacow model. In A&E 59 , Sapienza announced that “Glenn reached an important philosophical insight into the nature of FRP and the reasons for a lot of the bickering that goes on in the fanzines over questions of realism, grossness, etc.” Sapienza connected this insight to the “munchkin” crisis as well: “It is pertinent to the young vs. old gamer question, too, for it can be shown that most younger gamers are playing a different game, which most gamers begin with but grow out of and tend to avoid thereafter, along with those who play that way.” It was, at long last, a model that let people identify the plural practices that had long hidden behind the opaque and controversial label role-playing game and thus begin to address and alleviate the stress this pluralism had caused in the community.

Blacow was not the only one to develop such a typology. At roughly the same time that his model appeared in Wild Hunt, Lewis Pulsipher published an article in Different Worlds 8 “Defining the Campaign: Game Master Styles,” which reprised his earlier essay “D&D Campaigns” in White Dwarf 1. With a few years more reflection, Pulsipher now coincidentally identified four different campaign styles: a “simulation” style focused on emphasizing realism; a “wargame” style that stages the game as a competition between the players and the world; a “silly” style of funhouse dungeons; and a “novel” style, which he indicated is popular among science-fiction fandom, where “the referee is, in effect, writing a verbal novel with players as semi-independent characters in the novel.” He sprinkled the article with other minor subtypes and divisions. However, Pulsipher only advanced this model polemically to advocate strongly for a simulation or wargaming approach to the game, still dismissing alternatives as “silly,” and it is likely for want of relativism that his typology failed to capture the same mindshare in the community as the Blacow model.

Had the Blacow model remained confined to the miniscule readership of Wild Hunt, it is likely it would have exerted little influence on posterity. But because Sapienza had secured an editorial position at Different Worlds, he recruited Blacow “to expand for DW” the original Wild Hunt essay. The revised version appeared in Different Worlds 10. It softened the language a bit: in place of “ego-tripping,” it listed “power gaming.” In this incarnation, the Blacow model reached a much wider audience and received widespread citations in commentary from that point forward.

By the end of 1980, we see Dan Nolte report in A&E 64 that “in recent issues of A&E several contributors have taken to using Glenn Blacow’s categories.” He felt that “enough of us have started using these terms that they might be thought of as an unofficial standard.” Nolte attested that the strength of the model lay in how “campaigns are a combination of various amounts of each of these approaches.” Accordingly, he recommended that “we can (should) categorize folks or campaigns only to the extent of ‘mostly X’, ‘primarily Y’, ‘hardly ever Z’ and so forth. In this way we might be able to avoid the stereotyping and self-righteousness (One True Wayism) that seems to plague nearly all categorizations.” And, of course, Nolte and others in the community proposed all manner of tweaks and corollaries to the model as well, in terms of both how it was both structured and applied.

Applying the Model

The success of the Blacow model no doubt owes much to its resemblance to a game system. Commentators quickly treated it as an attribute that modeled campaigns and players in the same way that game statistics modeled characters. It became, in short, alignment for players and games themselves. The question was, however, did it also delimit a confined space where “mature” players could move without losing the equivalent of their Paladinhood?

The Blacow model’s connection to alignment became apparent once the community began to visualize it in a manner similar to the two-axis alignment system of D&D. Jeffrey A. Johnson, a contributor to Wild Hunt, produced the first version of this in Different Worlds 11, hot on Blacow’s heels, in an article called “The Fourfold Way of FRP.” Blacow hinted that role-playing and wargaming stood as effectively opposing forms because in the former the character is indispensable and in the latter the character is disposable—so Johnson positioned them as two ends of a “realism” continuum on the x axis of his graph, where the wargaming side also represents “simulation” and the role-playing side delivers “pure fantasy.” For the y axis, representing “goals,” Johnson positioned story-telling against power gaming, as the former extreme indulges the referee’s will, or the “campaign goals,” at the expense of player agency, and the latter extreme indulges the players’ will, which Johnson glossed as “personal goals,” in a near-solipsistic fashion. The forms favored in any campaign can thus be plotted as a dot on this graph; Johnson suggested that this graph unified both Blacow’s and Pulsipher’s perspectives.

The two-axis model naturally led fans to identify their preferences by quadrant, just as players located their characters as “lawful good” or “chaotic evil.” Contributors to A&E would thus refer, in the shorthand that quickly appeared, to “St/Rp” and “Pg/Wg” to classify the opposing sides of the most prominent schism in the community. Most A&E contributors situated themselves and their campaigns in the mature St/Rp quadrant as advocates for story-telling, whereas the disreputable Pg/Wg quadrant was presumably home to boisterous, ego-tripping “munchkins” and dull minimaxing “grognards” alike.

Scott Bauer proposed an alternate visualization of the Blacow model, which is dated Christmas Eve 1980 in A&E 66. Bauer rejected Johnson’s “Fourfold Way” representation of the forms as extremes of bilateral opposition that “would introduce distortions.” Bauer explained, “While there is some truth in the notion that Power Gaming interferes with Story Telling, and Role-Playing interferes with Wargaming, it is incorrect to look upon these as opposites which never meet. Almost all games include something of all four orientations.” With this in mind, Bauer drew the same two-axis picture, plotted four points showing how far into each of the four forms a particular “playing style” goes, and then connected the dots and shaded in the resulting shapes.

In addition to avoiding the “distortions” Bauer mentioned, his visualization permits us to measure overlaps between playing styles as a metric of compatibility rather than simply to compare the proximity of points. Ultimately, Bauer leveraged these illustrations for a polemical purpose, to make the argument that in order “for FRP to continue to progress,” it must move toward campaigns emphasizing role-playing and story-telling over wargaming and power gaming. He happily conceded that he subscribed to a “One True Way” of approaching role-playing games and that “the cutting edge of FRP lies in the direction of Story Telling and Role-playing.”

In A&E 68, Bob Traynor objected that just as “alignment is rather inadequate to express PC/NPC philosophy, so is a campaign difficult to reduce to XY graphing.” Thus, he criticized Bauer’s model, pointing out that its shapes could not adequately represent games that emphasize both power gaming and storytelling simultaneously while downplaying the other forms, which he proposed is true of campaigns based on Empire of the Petal Throne. Rather than trying to visualize the Blacow model, Traynor wanted to understand how the community felt about its forms. In a “census” he conducted in that issue of A&E, Traynor posed 21 questions to A&E readers, covering not only topics such as favored systems, classes, power levels, and so on but also questions relevant to the Blacow model.

For example, Traynor inquired, “Do you prefer to have a wargaming campaign or a storytelling/emphasis on the role-playing aspects?” He also wanted to know, “Do you strive for detail in your campaign or do you prefer to streamline your world and not get bogged down?” He asked about the lethality of sessions, about how frequently characters are resurrected, and about both the average level of characters and the speed of advancement in local campaigns—all of which served as indirect indicators of power gaming, since bluntly asking “Are you an ego-tripper?” would likely yield no useful responses.

The next issue of A&E contained a logical extension of Traynor’s census: Don Miller’s “Inventory of FRP Orientation,” a questionnaire of nearly 40 statements that respondents were to rank from 1 (strongly agree) to 5 (strongly disagree). The assertions encompassed the spectrum of views previously articulated by combatants in the community schism; Miller explained that the inventory “has been developed to measure (attempt to measure) a person’s orientation in the game of FRP.” The fourth statement, for example, reads, “The GM controls fate, and may manipulate events any time; no dice roll necessary.” This is followed immediately by “The PCs are the most important aspect of the game.” Miller tried to identify every interesting or controversial statement that the community had entertained: touching on Slimak’s complaint about role players rolling dice to decide what to say, Miller posed proposition 22, “Players need to roll dice to determine their characters’ reactions,” which contrasted with 25, “Acting the part of a character is crucial to the game; even if it would mean the character’s death or the party’s capture.” For Simbalist’s concept of direct storytelling, Miller postulated, “A GM needs to preplan the campaign, develop an outline to follow; in essence, create a story for the characters to enjoy.”

Miller also endeavored to provide reasonable statements of opposition to the philosophies of role-playing and story-telling. “Encounters are tactical exercises wherein the players must outwit the enemy” serves as proposition 39. It is preceded by “A PC’s advancement in power is crucial, and should not be hindered by race, class, or by the GM.” For those who felt strongly that the system should be exercised as designed, proposition 34 reads, “Knowing the game rules is important if PCs are to survive.” Wargamers would likely endorse the impartiality of proposition 9, that “GMs should never refrain from killing off PCs, as they failed to survive the adventure.”

These questions ultimately served to measure the respondent’s attitude toward Blacow’s four forms. Although Miller expressed some early reservations about his sample size, by A&E 76 he was willing to summarize the data culled from the community. “The average of my results so far is as follows: R-P: 41.6; P-G: 24.6; S-T: 29.5; W-G: 32.9.” In his methodology, results higher than 40 are significant, so the readership of A&E at the time showed a disposition toward role playing. Power gaming scored lowest, though perhaps not as low as one might expect. It is noteworthy that wargaming scored higher than storytelling—readers were wary of sacrificing their “freedom of decision.” Miller gave an example of one respondent who scored “Role-Playing—40; Power-Gaming—12; Story-Telling—34; War-Gaming—27,” a more decisive rejection of power gaming and an elevation of story-telling over wargaming.

Blacow had revealed that the crisis in the role-playing game community owed to fundamental differences in the preferences and expectations of the people assembling around gaming tables. Although he suggested that player preference will (and indeed should) evolve with time and maturity, he made no attempt to get everyone on the same page. He instead assumed that the schism would endure but argued that, by recognizing the schism and its root causes, players could identify and acknowledge the opposing preferences of others. But if the Blacow model could not help players avoid incompatibility, then it would offer little beyond Kevin Slimak’s broad assessment in 1975 that “different people prefer different types of games.” Unsurprisingly, once the community saw the kinds of measurement that Miller could perform, they naturally began to look at preferences in the Blacow model as an indicator of compatibility. David Nalle would call for measuring “campaign compatibility” in this fashion through questionnaires similar to Miller’s (AE 80).

But the Blacow model also had applications beyond just measuring compatibility. In “Theory on FRP,” written as Miller studied responses to his “Inventory of FRP Orientation” questionnaire, he put forward the hypothesis that “players and GMs are influenced in their FRP playing orientation by the particular set of rules they are exposed to,” and that players “may be permanently prejudiced by their first indoctrination to FRP” (AE 74). This suggests that the particular designs that introduce players to the hobby have an unusual responsibility—and that those who came from prior traditions such as wargaming might carry baggage that would prove difficult to shed. Miller thus proposed a corollary to the Blacow model, a typology of systems rather than of campaign forms, which opposes complexity against simplicity and abstraction against reality. “Simplicity” emerges as roughly equivalent to the “playability” incentive familiar from wargame design, whereas “complexity” is its opposite, a deep breadth of simulation. In simple, free-form systems, referees have tremendous latitude and spontaneity; in complex, rules-heavy games, the mechanics determine outcomes rather than referee discretion. “Reality,” for Miller, meant attempting to present the game world as a detailed and articulated world in terms of its culture, history, laws, inhabitants, and so on, whereas he defined “abstraction” more loosely as “leaning toward a game atmosphere” or “a quality of reality simulated in ways which are fun or original” and ultimately “consistent with the game designer’s values and perspective of reality.”

Miller visualized his systems within a two-axis graph along the same lines as Johnson and Bauer, though he plotted a single point in the coordinate space for each game in a manner closest to Johnson’s diagrams. He located D&D as an abstract and simple game, though this must be understood in contrast to a title such as Chivalry & Sorcery, which he deemed to be complex and realistic. He stressed that the aim of this graph is not to identify some essential aspect of how these games must run but rather to show “how the game system will influence a player,” as “novices will tend to be oriented in their style of gaming according to the graph.”5 For example, he explained that “complexity distracts from role-playing, attention to the PC’s personality, inter-party interactions, and accomplishing a PC’s goals,” so players who cut their teeth on overly complex games may not favor campaigns of the role-playing form. Miller submitted that “designing a game system can be aided with the theory,” as designers who appreciate the implications of system design for the Blacow forms can tune their games to serve particular interest groups.6

Styling his contributions to A&E the “Journal of Aesthetic Simulation,” Miller saw that the “creative vanguard” of the hobby had achieved a zenith of sophistication. “I think we is growin’ up! I believe our hobby is entering a second age. Soon the days will be gone when rules were designed with an arbitrary sense of what ‘sorta seems right.’”7 His “Theory on FRP” extended principles previously articulated by Simbalist, how “a game’s underlying philosophy affects everything that the game’s systems do or fail to do,” into actionable guidance for designers to follow in yielding systems to deliver particular results.

Once Blacow had isolated the forms of role-playing games, the community began to pose crucial questions about how designs could encourage or discourage them. Although Bauer agreed with Simbalist’s earlier statement that “FRP is an art form,” he disagreed about which art it most resembled. Just as Miller related running a game to the vocation of directing a film or a play, Bauer maintained that “FRP is one of the performing arts, and so is closer to film and the theater than to literature,” even though fantasy literature served as the most direct inspiration for D&D at the start (AE 60). But although role-playing games are “closer” to movies and plays, Bauer found them a unique phenomenon worthy of its own identity, and this became his rallying cry for a revolution in role-playing game design: to “throw off the shackles of literary tradition and create a new form of FRP which will be true to the spirit of FRP gaming instead.” In this new form, storytelling must come in moderation, as Miller would put it: “GMs should also realize that the theme should not be rigid, and the story pliable enough for players to change it by their subsequent actions. Players come first, then the story!” (AE 78). Bauer argued for a game narrative negotiated between the players and the referee. In its ideal incarnation, which Bauer acknowledged “is probably impossible to achieve,” this design would transform the most fundamental relationship in the game: “the collaboration would be so successful that the distinction between GM and player would cease to exist” (AE 60).

Bauer knew well that the seed for his “new form of FRP” had already been sown in the implementation of existing role-playing games; he attested that it is “already present to large extent in games run by most good GMs” as “a sharing, a collaboration, between the GM and the players” (AE 60). When he wrote those words in the middle of 1980, one could point to a number of examples from over the previous five years: Michie’s practice of delegating the description of the world to players; Seligman’s spell-and-skill systems that let the player invent parts of the system; Simbalist’s philosophy that “the player ultimately chooses the destiny of his character,” whereas the “GM’s task is to assist the character to realize his destiny”; Feldt’s or Bachmann’s destiny-control mechanisms; and Bigglestone’s contention that the referee is just a player whose job is to “play a world.” Even some designs that renounced collaboration between the referee and players still offered a way to place them on the same footing. Legacy revels in the adversarial relationship that a properly scoped referee can have with players: “The more rules and limitations we placed on the game operator the more fun the game operator had running the game” because they had the effect of transforming the referee from “an all knowing and all powerful lord of creation” into “an extremely powerful player who could be bested or tricked if the players were good and sneaky enough.”8

Starting from Scratch

As the Blacow model taught us, those who aspired to perfect an art form of role playing had to coexist in the community with many players committed to other forms, including closed ones. At the beginning of 1981, Owen Laurior was refereeing weekly for two different sets of players, a more mature group on Fridays and then a younger group on Sundays, both of whom explored parallel versions of the same game world. Laurior was thirty years old at the time that he wrote in to A&E 66 to explain the differences he encountered running the two parties. The second group, which had been active for around a year, had two players around Laurior’s age, three players in their early twenties, but also a number of youthful players: Gwen, Lara, and Randy, ages 17,13, and 14, respectively. Laurior’s exasperation is palpable when he talked about Randy. “Randy is a munchkin. He loves to hack & slash. He is constantly talking, doing rash things, being a nuisance.” Like many subjected to the label “munchkin,” Randy was “able to quote chapter, verse and page number of several volumes of rule books,” and Laurior complained that “he often challenges me when I stray from the One True Way” into house rules.

From his position of relative maturity, Laurior had to acknowledge that Randy’s “enthusiasm and endless wild ideas are what keeps that group interesting.” This admission led him to a deeper, more introspective realization. “I remember when I was a kid, playing with toy figures—the 3” high plastic ones. . . . Sometimes I’d play with friends, usually by myself—but always the rules were the same” insofar as “there were no formal rules.” So Laurior had to “wonder if, for the munchkins who have discovered FRPG, our rules have supplanted this type of free-form playing. Despite its fantasy aspect, could it be that by forcing conformity to The Books, we and Gygax are actually conditioning a new generation to fit in, training them in the essentials of Bureaucracy?”

What purpose did the “formal rules” of a role-playing game serve? Some portion of the rules comprised combat simulation systems that might just as easily fill a wargame manual. As role-playing games sought an identity distinct from their warlike forbear, that of a new art form, the community became increasingly skeptical about the value of system: back in 1977, Jim Thomas had already predicted, “I don’t think new games/rules are going to make much of a difference in the long run.” Paul Mosher in A&E 65 would similarly question the importance of system. “What rules does the referee use? I submit it makes no difference what rules are used, but rather how they are interpreted and which rules are interpreted.” Mike Dawson would propose a year later that “a DM begins to progress in D&D when he starts to abandon rules, rather than when he begins to integrate them,” and, indeed, that “a good D&D DM gets to be a good DM in spite of the rules, not because of them” (AE 76).

Nonetheless, designers persisted in putting out rules. Jon Freeman was the first author to survey the current crop of self-identified role-playing games for a mainstream audience for a chapter in The Complete Book of Wargames (1980). Freeman found no dearth of published systems: he covered D&D; TSR’s side ventures from Empire of the Petal Throne to Boot Hill and Gamma World; major games by other publishers, such as Tunnels & Trolls, Chivalry & Sorcery, and Runequest; as well as a few minor releases like Superhero ’44 and Space Patrol. But even Freeman downplayed the value of these rules in a reaffirmation and refinement of the statement he had expressed in his Games magazine article published the previous year: “Even in theory, a ‘game’ like Dungeons & Dragons is less a game than a game system, and in practice it’s less that than a system for designing a game system.”9

The earliest adopters of role-playing games by this point had a great deal of experience with systems for designing a game system. Bill Seligman postulated in the spring of 1981, “The long-time contributors to the APAs have learned the metarules of FRP systems. That is, it is no longer a problem to come up with, say, a combat system: any GM worth his or her salt can design a combat or magic system in about 30 minutes” (AE 71). This led Seligman to ask, “What is left to an FRP campaign once the rules and metarules are tossed aside?” All that he saw remaining were fundamental questions about play, such as “How should a GM interact creatively with the players in the campaign?” Seligman’s answer inevitably depended on Blacow’s forms: “In a storytelling campaign, the players must be free to make their own story. Even in a power-oriented campaign, the players must have room to fail. In a wargaming campaign, one side or the other most lose eventually. In a role-playing game, the players must be given the full freedom of their roles.” But Seligman saw those forms as something outside the scope of the rules or even the metarules of a game.

For his part, Freeman concluded that in practice, when people sit down around the table, “the success of a role-playing game is least dependent on the particular set of rules that it’s based on.” He knew well that “it is commonplace for a dungeon master to borrow bits and pieces from this novel, that supplement, the other game, and his own imagination.” Therefore, what mattered most for Freeman “is the dungeon master, on whose personality, imagination, and judgment everything depends. A good DM can use the poorest set of rules to create a delightful adventure, while in the hands of an inept referee the best game will be doomed to mediocrity.” Whatever the dungeon master does with the rules, “much of any RPG system is invisible to the players.”10

Surveying the earliest role-playing games made Freeman acutely aware of a shared deficiency in their rulebooks: he observed, “With few exceptions, a role-playing game cannot be opened up, learned, and played in the normal way” that traditional board games can.11 This may serve as a gentle reminder of what the rules of a game are supposed to be: not just a bundle of charts consulted during play, but instructions clear and complete enough that newcomers should be able to read them and begin playing. A normal board game talks about taking turns, what phases occur in which turns, and so on, but none of that seems remotely applicable to a role-playing game.

In 1977, game systems started to appear that marketed themselves specifically as “basic” or “beginner” role-playing games intended to get players off on the right foot. Back when Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was under development, TSR had in parallel reworked the original game into the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set, edited by Eric Holmes. It reduced complexity largely by paring down the extensive taxonomies of the system to only those spells, monsters, magic items, and so on relevant to the first few levels of advancement. Many games attempted to capture the market for a simple, introductory role-playing game that would teach the uninitiated how to play. David Hargrave tried to compete with the Basic Set by reducing the zany charts of his Arduin Grimoire and its many sequels into the friendly boxed set Arduin Adventures (1980), marketed explicitly as “An Introduction to Fantasy Role-Playing/Adventure Gaming.” Even a very minor title such as Simian Conquest (1978) could aspire to that beginner’s niche, describing itself at the start of its 28 pages as “an introductory game to fantasy role-playing” that “has been designed to be learned in one evening.”12 Not to be outdone, both Uuhraah! and Buccaneer would detail their rudimentary systems in less than 20 digest-size pages. In his overview of the Basic Set in Complete Book of Wargames, Freeman praised the publisher for allowing the book to be edited “by someone outside the TSR establishment who knew a noun from a verb.” But he also stressed that if you hope to learn how to role play, “it’s still preferable to participate in an ongoing campaign” rather than trying to wring that information out of a product.13

Freeman likely wrote those words before the Holmes Basic Set included a sample module, Mike Carr’s In Search of the Unknown (1979), which explicitly aimed to teach new referees how to run an adventure. Unlike previous D&D products, In Search of explains first principles—for example, that the game operates in a dialogue—and instructs new referees on how to deal with their players: “You describe the situation, then await their decision as to a course of action.” It emphasizes the need for referees to allow the players to drive the course of the game: “It is crucial to keep in mind that this is a game based on player interaction and player choice. The game generally follows the course of the player’s actions—if not always their plans!” Or, similarly, “a good DM . . . does not attempt to influence player actions or channel the activity in a particular direction,”14 albeit that last point is curious advice to give in a module. But the return to first principles let D&D speak a language that would be familiar to its staunchest critics—such as Seligman, who insisted that the referee “interact creatively” with the players.

To new players, In Search of the Unknown offers equally fundamental advice about how to approach a role. “The fun of a D&D game comes in playing your character’s role. Take on your character’s persona and immerse yourself in the game setting, enjoying the fantasy element and the interaction with your fellow players and the Dungeon Master.”15 Although Roos had used the term immersion as early as 1977, it would become almost boilerplate in TSR product literature at the end of the decade. Similar text appears in the revision of Boot Hill in 1979: “Players should strive to take on the role of their game character and fully immerse themselves in the very enjoyable fantasy aspect of the game. If they do so, they will enjoy it even more.”16 We could say these sentiments transformed Boot Hill from a wargame into a role-playing game—but if we did, then perhaps the Western Gunfight system should rightfully displace D&D as the first commercial product in the genre.

In perhaps the most successful attempt to challenge the Basic Set, the Chaosium distilled the core rules of Runequest into a sixteen-page introductory booklet called Basic Role-Playing (1980), which it would first ship with the second edition boxed set of the game, and then with many subsequent titles, to provide modular system expansions to Basic Role-Playing for new settings. Basic Role-Playing defers on any questions of setting and strips the system down to its bare essentials: a set of ability characteristics, a diced action-resolution mechanism, scales for movement rates, a progression mechanic, and a combat system. The system could be minimized so because “the actual game rules are important only when there is some question of success or failure, for the rules are the agreed-upon ‘reality’ which makes the game world understandable.” Occasions to succeed or fail arise during play as “the players tell the referee what they wish or intend to do. The referee then tells them if they can or may do it, and if not, what happens instead.” The rules only intervene “whenever there is a conflict between what the player-characters wish to do and what the game-world seems to let them do.” The system makes allowances for “activities which are always successful under normal circumstances,” where a statement of intention turns into an automatic success, as distinct from “ordinary actions performed under stress,” which require a die roll, and from cases where a character “is pitting some characteristic of his against something else,” which require a contested roll.17 The resulting system is spare but feels complete, offering what Jim Thomas might have deemed a “starting point,” though very pointedly attempting nothing more. But even equipped as it was with a sample solo adventure, could Basic Role-Playing really teach someone to do what the community then called role playing?

When Randy would “quote chapter, verse and page number” from AD&D to Owen Laurior, was he deviating from Carr’s guidance to “take on your character’s persona and immerse yourself in the game setting”? Was he missing the point, that “the fun of a D&D game comes in playing your character’s role”? If, as Miller believed, the first exposure to a “game system will influence a player” and shape how he or she approaches games in the future, then Laurior would be right to worry over Ralph and his indoctrination through AD&D. This recalls familiar discussions from the dawn of the hobby about player participation in the execution of the system. Directing players to “immerse themselves” into characters may imply that fluency with rules is almost an impediment to play. This philosophy positions role playing on a continuum much like the x axis of Johnson’s graph of the Blacow model: as an extreme of “pure fantasy” opposed to the extreme of “simulation.” In this understanding of role playing, the more you immerse yourself in a character, the more divorced you become from participating in the execution of the system.

Invisible Systems

Maybe a rulebook would never be the answer to teaching people how to role play. Ed Greenwood—not yet famous for creating the Forgotten Realms—took up the question of how best to introduce people to D&D in an article for The Dragon 49 in 1981. Greenwood concluded that learning the rules is indeed an impediment to the process and that it is largely an avoidable one: “Players Don’t Need to Know All the Rules” is the very title of his article.

Sandy Eisen had learned D&D back in 1975 without reference to any system; his choices were instead “dictated by real-life considerations” in the game situation. Greenwood now recommended the same, but he had a name for Eisen’s method: “How can one play a game without knowing the rules? The answer, as D&D players know, is role play.” Greenwood represented “role play” as something one can engage in instead of knowing the rules—and perhaps as a superior alternative. “As a player, state what you (the character) are trying to do, and the referee (who knows the rules) will tell you what is actually happening.” The best way to introduce people to the game, he argues, is to keep them in character, so that “players know only that information which is possessed by their character as a result of upbringing, observation of surroundings, and adventuring.” Greenwood even proposed that the referee not share with players quantified statistics such as abilities or hit points, thus echoing the conclusions Peter Cerrato came to in 1977. Maybe all that players really need to know about their hit points in order to role play is something like “you bleed easily.”

As advice for beginners, Greenwood’s guidance is a logical extension of the principles recommended by Kanterman and Elsden in “Introduction to Yourself” in 1977, an effort intended to convince wargamers to open themselves up to a new experience: “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.” But like Peter Tamyln before him, Greenwood appreciated that this stance was ultimately rooted in wargames. He had seen a revision of the 1972 Strategy & Tactics article on the history of wargames packaged into the book Wargame Design (1977), which led him to quote how in Kriegsspiel the “players were separated and given only the information they could legitimately possess.” Greenwood even explicitly cited the work of Verdy du Vernois and the latitude the umpire possesses in the execution of “free” Kriegsspiel. He also knew of the dispute that arose in the nineteenth century over the power of the umpire, the “criticism of arbitrariness” that intensified as players had less insight into the system and how the referee resolved events. The parallel to the disputes of his day would not be lost on him: as Greenwood puts it, “‘Free’ Kriegspiel sounds something like the D&D game, and the ‘semi-free’ Kriegspiel sounds somewhat similar to the AD&D game.” We might then ungenerously cast Gygax’s move to close the system of D&D with the Advanced game as a retread of a century-old shift in wargaming playstyle. The legacy of wargaming cast a shadow that role playing had difficulty escaping.

Greenwood planned to use this total-immersion system only to indoctrinate new players—he hoped to introduce them gradually to the AD&D system as many rules would become self-evident in the course of play. After all, someone did need to know the rules, and new players might someday graduate to refereeing for themselves. But he saw a practical limit in how much knowledge of the systems players should have. “The problem of players who know too much ruins the fun of play like nothing else can,” especially those “who can quote chapter and verse from the Monster Manual (or worse, the Dungeon Masters Guide).” This not only gives studious players an advantage over their compatriots but also lets them, as Eisen—and Howard Mahler—knew well, “yawn their way through encounters that should be mysterious, and therefore both dangerous and exciting.” Playing in an immersive style requires a “thoughtful, prepared, infallible, impassionately fair DM—as of course, all Dungeon Masters are,” Greenwood knew. Only with such a referee can players be confident that what is happening behind the scenes is not simply arbitrary, free-form resolution at the whim of the referee.

But then again—what was so bad about referee whims? Robert Plamondon would capture as a principle in 1981 the maxim: “In the final analysis, all rules are arbitrary, and therefore suspect.”18 His fundamental intuition was that “arbitrary decisions can be more accurate than tables.” After 1980, players increasingly positioned “free-form” gaming as a challenge to the closed and complex systems associated with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and “munchkin” culture. Blacow had linked “free-form” to his story-telling form, for cases where “the GM and players cooperate in writing the script,” but in service of that goal most advocates for free form focused primarily on eliminating as much of the system as possible. Complexity reduction was one of the rationales expressed for the initial development of Tunnels & Trolls, but the trend came into its own in the wake of Chivalry & Sorcery and its exhaustive depth of simulation, which was soon exceeded by the sprawling AD&D system, necessarily triggering a backlash.

The runaway success of D&D lured countless competing commercial designs into the marketplace at the height of the fad in the early 1980s, but even the more considered efforts to invent a “new form of FRP” came up against fundamental limits exposed in the 1970s. Everyone knew the “metarules” and could devise more system, but it was unclear what value inventing new system would add—so increasingly players looked instead for things to take away. The more emphasis games placed on explaining the nature of role playing and storytelling, the less immediate the need for system innovation became: a new idea to replace a core mechanism might fail to get a fair hearing, as Hargrave and others had lamented, but a ruleset that simply abolished such a system element without replacing it had a different appeal entirely. For a game to dispense with some element of play required virtually nothing to be published—who needs 16 whole pages of rules? Traveller had provided a free-form system as early as 1978 and expended only two sentences articulating it. Costikyan’s tongue-in-cheek “Lord of the Dice” demonstrated a virtually free-form approach in 1979 at the cost of half a magazine page.

In the early 1980s, numerous players adopted various degrees of “free-form” games, sometimes explicitly citing “Lord of the Dice” as an inspiration. These sentiments came not just from players but also from designers: Dave Nalle ultimately had to confess that “there is no system (including YRS),” his own Ysgarth (1979) rule system, “with which I cannot find fault. My real aim is systemless role-playing” (AE 80). A truly systemless game would take free-form experiments to their logical extreme. However, it was not always clear what exactly “free-form” entailed being free from.

“Lord of the Dice” parodies the way a referee must make an arbitrary judgment when interpreting systems and die rolls, but, as its name suggests, its implementation still does require dice. Verdy du Vernois famously dispensed with dice back in the 1870s, replacing them with the referee’s judgment. In A&E 75, Jim Vaughn announced that he had restricted the use of dice solely to combat resolution in his game because “almost everything else a player must do depends on his knowledge and powers. I only wish I could find a way to cut die rolls out completely.” To this, Dan Nolte replied in the following issue that “eliminating die rolls entirely is possible.” He attested that he had “given some thought” to ways that even “diceless combat” might be achieved. Despite the impartiality that dice provide, excessive dicing had long been branded an enemy of role playing: John Strang in A&E 32 had criticized a design as “not role-playing or even roll-playing,” and many others exploited the same fortunate homonym, as Lee Gold would proclaim in A&E 45, “The GM’s true role is to guard the suspense/excitement/terror/emotional flow of the game and keep it role-playing rather than roll-playing.”

Quentin Long complained in A&E 76 that “FRP games may be regarded as glorified combat systems,” even suggesting that Runequest in particular “isn’t much more than a wargame on the man-to-man level.” He challenged the readership, “Can’t someone put together a game that doesn’t place so much emphasis on fighting? If anyone does, that game will truly be different and new (in contrast to all the endless rulebooks which claim to be original, novel, new, etc. but are in fact not).” Dave Nalle would assert in Abyss 21 that “the next step in role-playing, now that we are crossing the frontier of real character role-playing, is to move on to role-playing in the social rather than the martial context.” He cited “the vast range of non-violent adventure possibilities,” among which he listed “mercantile maneuvering,” “exploration and discovery,” “politics and religious hierarchy,” “espionage and thieves,” albeit one might observe that those areas have historically not been devoid of violence. But Nalle’s core message was that “force has traditionally been over-used” in D&D and games like it. Violence “has a proper place in the role-playing world, just as it does in the real world.” But, again, referees had already explored nonviolent adventures around their tabletops. A good example is Mike Kelly’s report in A&E 58 on how he has “for the last two years tried to run a basically peaceful game: not a game without confrontations or violence, but one wherein characters survive by their wits as often their weapons.” And he observed that he was not alone, citing recent reports from Sapienza as well as from Lee Gold’s husband, Barry, on campaigns that “rely very little upon violence.”

British players in 1982 tested the degree to which system could be eliminated, presuming a willing and able referee. Steve Gilham, then a student at Cambridge, lighted on the principle that “the game system inevitably influences play in the way that it defines the possible,” a phrasing very reminiscent of Simbalist’s philosophy, and from that he drew the conclusion that minimizing system expands the possibilities in play accordingly (AE 83). To determine how a minimalist system could affect gameplay, “there are probably some worthwhile experiments to make,” Gilham wrote, “and in FRP there isn’t going to be repeatability sufficient to let some other group do the work and accept the results.” The proof might be only in the play, but that would seem to entail that only the practitioners around a given table could benefit from the proof.

Nonetheless, Gilham and his local group contrived to conduct a number of experiments, which he recounted for the readership of A&E. In issue 85, he talked about an experimental superhero game that was “totally free form” and involved the “GM relying on written character descriptions, and whether he likes what we roll on a D20.” As an influence, Gilham had to call out an unsurprising source: “There is in fact a lot to be said for the ‘Lord of the Dice’ system—the semi satirical ‘free game this issue’ in DW 2.” Costikyan’s system pioneered the discretion implied by the judgment “whether he likes what we roll on a D20.” Gilham also shrewdly observed that superhero stories follow a narrow story arc and that “the established conventions of the genre (the good guys win, no-one dies) help in preventing GM abuse.”

Just as Simbalist had deemed an implementation where the referee steers the story is “best suited to ongoing campaigns in which friends gather week after week to enjoy themselves,” so Gilham noted that “the problem that exists with free-form gaming is one of trust. Without the cushioning effect of rules or conventions of niceness, it leaves great opportunity for personality clashes, in which what decides the outcome is not the gamelevel situation, but the various strengths of personality involved on a play level. Given a fair and trusted GM (or possibly preferably a team of two to even out any subconscious bias), this sort of gaming actually takes us full circle to the Free Kriegspiel that started off modern gaming.”

Or, as the case may be, to a “semifree” Kriegsspiel. Ultimately, rather than going entirely systemless, Gilham still retained a modicum of fixed rules: “I have found that a semi-free style, with a simple set of rules for life-and-death matters (whenever people are foolish enough to start a fight) handles a lot of things a lot faster than actual games with rules for every eventuality, even if these are general rules like RQ.” Having events depend on nothing but referee discretion creates an imbalance of storytelling that makes players feel powerless or, just as bad, all-powerful. Terms such as script immunity had entered the vernacular by 1981—for example, when Miller reported to A&E 72, “I am a GM that story-tells no doubt, but I find my players reacting in certain situations as if they realize they have script immunity.” Lee Gold would push back in the next issue, “I don’t believe in script immunity for PCs myself. (NPCs? Well, maybe.)” But the problem, which was as old as Kriegsspiel itself, was not so much the referee exercising “script immunity,” but the players realizing it, or even suspecting it. This doubt could creep in wherever referees worked their function, regardless of how much latitude the referee actually exercised, and assuaging it was more a matter of maintaining a convincing facade than specifying a detailed and rigid system.

Did even the people who knew AD&D chapter and verse really play it with scrupulous and exacting fidelity? The Dungeon Masters Guide tucked a few escape valves away in its fine print: the section called “Rolling the Dice and Control of the Game” offers referees considerable latitude. It restates Gygax’s earlier guidance on dice, permitting referees to overrule a “freakish roll” when its consequences fall on a worthy player: “You can rule that the player, instead of dying, is knocked unconscious, loses a limb, is blinded in one eye,” or suffers some other complication commensurate with the severity of the game situation. It moreover engages the familiar question of whether players should roll dice or even observe die rolls, asserting first that “it is correct and fun to have the players dice such things as melee hits or saving throws.” But then it gives referees the authority to seize the dice and make such rolls in secret when it serves their purposes, such as preventing players “from knowing some specific fact” or in order “to give them an edge in finding a particular clue, e.g., a secret door.” Effectively, this passage gives the referee the authority to ignore the system in favor of steering the story by fiat: “You do have every right to overrule the dice at any time if there is a particular course of events that you would like to have occur.” Finally, the text acknowledges that game situations may arise that the printed rules give no way to resolve, which the referee should handle by “assigning a reasonable probability to an event” and then dicing for it: “you can weigh the dice in any way so as to give the advantage” to a positive outcome, “whichever seems more correct and logical.”19 We would be hard pressed to distinguish between this resolution method and Costikyan’s “Lord of the Dice,” which saw print a few months before the Dungeon Masters Guide.

So what were die rolls for, in Gygax’s mind? One should not put too much stock in an anecdote, but an eyewitness’s report of Gygax’s well-attended seminar at the Games Fair convention in Reading, England, in 1983 included a telling aside. “Mind you—he horrified a few of the purists with one remark. Referring to the art of DM-ing, he told those assembled that a good referee only rolls the dice for the sound they make. He just decides what happens. You could have heard a pin drop.”20 At the table, perhaps even Gygax strayed closer to free form than to the purported rigidity of his Advanced game, in a striking reversal of his call in 1976 to “let the dice tell the story.” We might say that Gygax, like the wargame referee Livermore late in the nineteenth century, “was reported to disregard his own tables and charts as often as he consulted them.” After nearly a decade had passed since the release of D&D, the propensity of players to go “full circle to the Free Kriegspiel that started off modern gaming” can make it seem as if the shift from wargames to role playing was, after all, illusive.

The Elusive Shift

So, did Scott Rosenberg’s prophecy come true? Did a rift emerge in the community between the multitudes of players “who will comfortably play TSR’s game” in its closed Advanced form and the small band of “truefen” committed to innovation and openness? In a sense, yes—but the philosophical distance between the camps might not have been as vast as it appeared.

From the pages of The Dragon magazine, Gygax certainly spoiled for a rift, promoting the closure of the Advanced game most forcefully in the essay “Poker, Chess, and the AD&D System: The Official Word on What’s Official” for issue 67. Whereas in the original D&D “it is possible for material from outside that offered by TSR to be included in the game,” so that “such a game becomes ‘house rules’ poker, so to speak,” the Advanced system permits no such latitude or discretion, Gygax insisted. “The AD&D game system does not allow the injection of extraneous material.” But the antibodies Gygax cultivated in the Advanced system repelled only unsanctioned commercial products rather than curtailing the open-endedness of play. Improvising a rule on the spot to cover some unforeseen situation meant playing with extraneous system, and in a game driven by creative players the unforeseen could be the norm. It is easier to claim that a role-playing system is closed than it is to close a system.

Gygax’s words furthermore went out to a greater multitude than Rosenberg could have imagined in 1977: circulation of The Dragon hit 50,000 in 1981, on its way to 100,000 in 1983. Moreover, the consumers who bought these copies of The Dragon and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons grew ever younger over this period—and this was not just a matter of perception among the aging earliest adopters, either. Almost two-thirds of the copies of D&D purchased in 1980 went to buyers 17 and younger; the median age of a Dragon subscriber then was 16.21 Once D&D became a runaway commercial success, its market demographics, which were widely studied and publicized, trended sharply to the younger. By 1981, 60 percent of all TSR products would be purchased by or for players between the ages of 10 and 14—on the younger side of the “munchkin” margin.22

Dave Nalle’s was one voice that heralded Rosenberg’s rift. For Nalle, the popularization of D&D marked the end of an era, a shift from the reign of a small and sophisticated role-playing community to an era when those creative voices would be lost in a cacophony of dumbed-down obedience. In Abyss 13, he nostalgically pined, “There was a time when FRPing was a sort of elite movement, when only the brightest, most imaginative kids and adults took to it.” Now, in the grips of the D&D fad of the early 1980s, “fewer and fewer of them are going beyond the limits of AD&D. The result of this is the creation of a mass of D&D players who are less imaginative, less open-minded, and less mature in their playing style.” The honeymoon of role-playing games had ended, Nalle believed.

But not every hardcore fan saw role playing as an elite movement pushed to the fringes by TSR’s tyranny. In A&E 60, Dan Nolte condemned the “elitist view that we are too good for the mass population of ‘fugg heads.’” He observed that “every hobby of any complexity has marginal members, semi members, full members who just follow the flock, and a creative vanguard. Don’t be surprised that the last group is a small and sometimes lonely one. It always is and always has been.” There needed come no AD&D to create such divisions. Those experimenting with their own systems—or lack thereof—in the early 1980s may well have been in an avant garde, “but to say that we should limit the hobby to just the elite simply because they do not experience it to the same extent that we do is selfish, foolish and dangerous to the future of FRP.” This no doubt informed Nolte when he later argued that the pluralism of the Blacow model gave the community an opportunity to reject elitism, to “avoid the stereotyping and self-righteousness (One True Wayism) that seems to plague nearly all categorizations” (AE 64).

As with any insular, underground phenomenon—and you can hardly get more underground than dungeoneering—that is catapulted to mainstream popularity, role playing lost something of its chic in the eyes of many original fans by 1981. Early adopters viewed latecomers as conformists riding a trend they could not fully understand or appreciate. But role playing proved resilient to the genericizing forces of big business, because it was not like a traditional media property that broadcasted to its consumers—it was instead a platform for people’s creativity. Because role-playing games are such a plastic thing—because so much depends on the attitudes and preferences of the players sitting around a tabletop—adherence to printed rules always varied from group to group, and the creative vanguard could not restrict its membership to players who had gotten in on the ground floor in 1975.

Insofar as there was a rift, it started with the mass influx of new and youthful players untutored by the standing traditions of the two cultures. Most had never seen the original D&D game as published between 1974 and 1976, nor had they ever laid eyes on a gaming fanzine—they cut their teeth on the putatively closed system of AD&D. If, as Miller’s “Theory on FRP” held, “novices will tend to be oriented in their style of gaming” by the first system they play, this had serious implications for the entire hobby. Newcomers were perceived as a threat that motivated longtime practitioners to mount a fierce defense of their “mature” open playing style, of which the free-form abolitionist movement was only one predictable manifestation. As a necessary consequence of the views of Nalle, Simbalist, and others who evangelized on behalf of their “second-generation” role-playing games, D&D itself became synonymous in their circles with the negative qualities that the role-playing community associated with obnoxious youngsters and pedantic wargamers alike.

It was thus not some innovation that heralded a new generation of games but instead a new generation of gamers that created the appearance of a shift in role-playing games at the end of the 1970s. Their emergence cemented an avant garde committed to openness and innovation—though the boundary between that group and the masses would always be porous. The D&D fad brought many thoughtful players into the hobby after 1980 who, hidden among the ranks of the dreaded “munchkins,” soon connected with the community in A&E but simply lacked access to the fanzines and games that had captured the theory and practice of the 1970s. For example, in A&E 76 in 1981, Mike Dawson observed “the large switch in topics that A&E has gone through in the last 10 issues,” wherein “A&E has shifted its focus from RPG mechanics discussion to the concept of RPGs as an art form.”23 But surely no such shift had transpired; A&E had engaged fundamental questions about the nature of role-playing games nearly since its inception, and some simply joined the discussion late enough to misconstrue the situation.

A newcomer might even suppose that less-closed games had emerged only recently as a reaction to the supposedly ossified seminal rules of conflict simulation. The irony is, of course, that open-endedness was the cornerstone of original D&D play, and that property, as Rosenberg attested, granted the community the latitude needed to thoroughly explore the design space of role-playing games between 1975 and 1980. Optimizing for the qualities in the Blacow “St/Rp” quadrant had always been a matter of practice rather than adherence to “official” designs over this period. In A&E 73, John Prenis wrote, “We call this hobby Fantasy Role Playing, but role playing as we have come to know it was never planned for.” In his view, role playing was not built in to the original rulebooks; it was instead something that “just happened, as people with imagination began to dig deeper into the worlds that they had created.”

Though Prenis was no eyewitness to the authoring of D&D, he did have a point. Back in 1975, Gygax himself spoke dismissively about role playing as a factor in the success of the game and only came around to adopting the label after the community had thrust it upon the game. Arneson saw role-playing elements in many wargames played in the Twin Cities prior to D&D and even in games such as charades. But a survey of the historical use of role playing among early adopters provides good reason to think that role playing as the likes of Prenis understood it was a possibility that emerged in play in some places and not others, and it was largely the fan community who isolated it as a concrete phenomenon through a painstaking critical discourse that unfolded in fanzines. It may not have looked that way in retrospect, though.

For his landmark study Shared Fantasy: Role-Playing Games as Social Worlds (1983), Gary Alan Fine observed the fan community of the late 1970s with a sociologist’s eye and focused especially on the way players transitioned from their normal selves into characters. Insofar as Fine addressed the invention of role-playing games, he wisely represented it as a Kuhnian paradigm shift, a gradual change in attitudes and consensus rather than any singular event. But he effectively differentiated wargames from role-playing games with three factors: wargames are primarily historical tools for “replaying battles” of the past; wargames have “structured rules,” and thus player agency is “deliberately limited”; and wargames lack personal involvement, so that “one does not act as oneself in the game.” Although Fine hesitated to propose an exact date for when these properties accumulated, he seemed certain that “by the time of the publication of D&D, fantasy role-play games were being played.”24

No doubt all of the qualities Fine identified could be found in games by the time D&D came out: people had been gaming as characters since the dawn of hobby wargaming; games without structured rules harkened back to the “free” Kriegsspiel debates of the prior century; and any number of earlier games in the two cultures relied on fantasy and science-fiction rather than on historical settings. But are any of these features really necessary, let alone sufficient, conditions for marking the shift to role-playing games? Could one not build a Tradition of Victory game on replaying some historical battle? Do the deliberate limitations on player agency in Flash Gordon render it not a role-playing game? And what it means to “act as oneself” was a subject of ongoing controversy, where at least some understood it no differently from how one played Kriegsspiel or even Monopoly. Lortz, by way of contrast, differentiated wargames from role-playing games by pointing to the need to organize “a continuing flow of dramatically significant action” that resolves “motivating questions”—talk we would be hard pressed to find in earlier wargaming literature.

The preexistence in earlier wargames of properties such as the open-endedness of systems or acting “in character” does not entail that role playing as people came to understand it was planned for in D&D. The attachment of role playing to D&D was largely a historical accident; if some other term, such as adventure gaming, had instead dominated critical and commercial consensus, we can imagine similar difficulties around defining adventure to everyone’s satisfaction—maybe a very different set of properties would have been highlighted. But once the bulk of the community had settled on the term role playing, it became a prophecy that theory and practice then had to fulfill.

The validity of Fine’s assertion that “fantasy role-play games were being played” leading up to the publication of D&D thus has to hinge, somewhat paradoxically, on how role playing was understood in the community discourse following the release of the game. When we review the way early adopters talked about role playing in connection with abilities, or alignment, or progression, or stories, there emerges a very different set of properties that offset these practices from earlier wargames: the questions about players conforming to the quantified attributes of characters, the debates between Eisen’s vow to isolate players from the rules in order to trigger immersion versus giving them a sense of control over their own fates, or the wrangling over the degree to which the referee or the players steer the “dramatically significant action.” In many respects, these unresolved questions drew the boundary around role-playing games, and it is not at all clear that these questions preceded the publication of D&D.

The original D&D was, as Freeman put it, a “design-a-game kit,” and some of the games that people designed with that kit were the first things we call role-playing games. Those people usually identified the game they were playing as D&D, and it would be counterintuitive to differ with them. But Simbalist would furiously interject that it was the referees and players who actually designed the systems they were playing, at least the ones that enabled role playing—D&D was just the canvas on which the referee painted. Designing the system was a sort of metagame that D&D invited referees to join from the moment it identified itself as “the framework around which you will build a game of simplicity or tremendous complexity.” The “umpty-eleven” referees and groups that exercised the kit used it to make games that suited their preferences, along the lines of the Blacow forms, and role playing became the most celebrated of those practices. Role-playing games forged their identity in the wake of the release of D&D in the practices and interactions of its earliest adopters. The authors of D&D were of course parties to that process as it evolved, and in hindsight they could represent it as their plan all along, but the reality is less cut and dry—D&D was a tool that could have been, and clearly was, used to run wargames, and those like Pulsipher who used the framework of D&D to build games of that form claimed Gygax’s blessing.

Looking back at the original D&D rulebooks, with all their “errors, inconsistencies, and general lack of coherence,” it is easy to project onto them any of the forms Blacow delineated. One may surmise that the game originally belonged solely to the “Wg/Pg” crowd and that only later, perhaps around or after 1980, did mature thinkers intervene and repurpose the underlying principles of the game to suit their own “St/Rp” preferences—maybe even warranting the status of an art form. But the two cultures predated D&D, manifesting across a wide variety of activities in wargaming and science-fiction fandom, and although any given group of early adopters might belong more to one of those cultures than to the other, both philosophies coexisted in D&D play as far back as the historical records go. Attempts to recapture some single originalist philosophy of role-playing games more indebted to one of the two cultures than the other will therefore always be representative of only half the story of how these games were played by the first adopters.

This points to the fundamental explanatory power of the Blacow model: it shows us role playing as a possibility, one that exists in a tension with other ways that a game system can be used. In these earliest critical discussions, designing a true role-playing game was spoken of aspirationally: only people selling a “next-generation” system represented it as something solved for, usually only to meet counterarguments. The epic quest for a “new form of FRP” worthy of the name became the motivation for the existence of role-playing games as a genre, in a tradition sparked by D&D.

It is indeed difficult to mark any specific moment when the activities of the two cultures shifted into the thing we now call role playing—or even which products deserved to claim that label. Back in 1973, Mike Blake, one of the authors of the Western Gunfight rules, had sent an essay to the Wargamer’s Newsletter called “Yes, but Is It Really Wargaming?,” which set a marker for when the wargaming community became self-conscious that it had drifted into practices outside its original scope. In a 1982 essay called “But . . . Is It Role-Playing?” Eric Goldberg—lead designer on Commando and Dragonquest—asked in Nexus 1 whether products then in circulation truly “fulfill the meaning of the phrase ‘role playing.’” He conducted his own review of D&D, Chivalry & Sorcery, Runequest, the Fantasy Trip, and Adventures in Fantasy as well as of science-fiction titles such as Traveller, Space Opera (1980), and Universe (1981). His conclusion was pessimistic: “These games come with instructions for doing everything but role playing, which is largely left to the players’ improvisational talents.”25

Goldberg hinted that he saw an imminent “third generation” of role-playing games that would demarcate itself “by an emphasis on the encouragement of role-playing.” He cited as evidence elements such as “character records which require a player to indicate where his character lies between extremes of behavior (e.g., loyal–treacherous),” which he observed to “have sprung up in many places.” Such systems could indeed be found in recent designs such as In the Labyrinth (1980), but cues for role playing based on quantified alignment properties like loyalty go back further to the Arduin Grimoire of 1977; to the Judges Guild sheets that same year, with 20 positions between “ordered/anarchist” and “pure/corrupt”; to Grant Louis-d’Or’s personality traits in 1976; and to Blacow’s proposed subalignment categories in 1976. As an example of a recent system that provided adequate third-generation cues for role-playing, Goldberg cited Bachmann’s system in The Dragon 40—which had in turn repackaged the innovations of Legacy and other systems of the 1970s, albeit with greater clarity and, despite its brevity, arguably greater completeness. As with earlier design criteria batted around for a “second generation,” the defining features of Goldberg’s third generation seem less like markers of some recent shift and more like ideas that had been articulated practically from the moment role playing became linked to D&D. They lived in the state of play at some tabletops but not at others, regardless of which product the people sitting around the table would claim they were playing.26

Dungeons & Dragons offered us two systems in one, a game for players and another for referees. The first was a loosely defined game of dungeon conquest, one that Simbalist might have been justified in dismissing as a shallow trifle that led players inexorably to gilded holes and ego-tripping. Early adopters quickly escaped its sandbox and found goals more interesting than becoming a superperson. The second game system, what Freeman called “a system for designing a game system,” was the game for referees, and once role playing was linked to D&D, fostering role playing became the goal of that game. In a sense, every referee who leveraged that system to design his or her own game for play around the table—and every member of the creative vanguard bold enough to put rules in print—played in the metagame that Gygax and Arneson had invited them to.

And no one would desist when Gygax belatedly rescinded the invitation. The monumental popularity of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons system at the start of the 1980s stimulated the creative vanguard of the hobby into a defiant commitment to pluralism. The Blacow model, which charted fundamental tensions in playstyle, reified the community’s design space. Whether we call it a rift, a shift, or just drift, this point marked a period of maturity for role-playing games, a moment when they had succeeded in forging an identity for themselves. People knew the unresolved questions—the most pressing being whether players’ participation in the system helped or hindered role playing—and proposed no shortage of theoretical and practical ideas to address them, but there was no ready path to resolving the tensions, to that “new form of FRP” finally worthy of the name. Instead, in much the same way role playing lives in the state of play, role-playing games as a genre exist in the play of the metagame that Dungeons & Dragons started.