1. Dungeons & Dragons, 1:4.
2. Robert Lipton, Mixumaxu Gazette 38 (1975). The variety of interpretations of the game is a major theme of Edwards, “A Hard Look at Dungeons and Dragons.”
3. Simbalist, among others, would attest to a third generation, arguing of D&D that its “rules in fact discouraged role play” (A&E 37).
4. In “RPG Theorizing by Designers and Players,” Evan Torner discusses the difficulty of separating the “para-academic” theorizing undertaken by fans from the work of “aca-fans,” who consider largely the same material in academic contexts. Gary Alan Fine’s book Shared Fantasy marks a boundary point, as his study applied existing theory—in his case Erving Goffmann’s sociological frame theory—to the study of role-playing games, a precedent followed by subsequent academic literature on the subject. Not that this impeded fans after Fine from engaging with theory outside of established academic frameworks. The present work is probably best considered a para-academic study of pre-Fine fan theorizers. For a quick guide to the post-Fine theorizers, see Boss, “Theory Round-Up.”
5. Mason, “In Search of the Self,” 2. Although Torner presents a more nuanced view in “RPG Theorizing,” for space reasons it could not include much from drafts of the present work.
6. Appelcline, Designers & Dragons, vol. 1, is the standard reference, but it treats these games more from an industry perspective rather than from a philosophical perspective exploring stances expounded by designers and players. Most of these games are cataloged in Schick, Heroic Worlds. Peterson, Playing at the World to some degree addresses this period and the first applications of the term role playing to its games but covers little beyond 1976.
7. For reviews of previous attempts to furnish such definitions, see, for example, Zagal and Deterding, “Definition of ‘Role-Playing Games’”; Maccalum-Stewart, “Role-play”; and Mason, “In Search of the Self.” Perhaps the present study furnishes something more like a usage dictionary of the term, scoped to its time period.
1. See Fine, Shared Fantasy, 25–33.
2. Strategy & Tactics 42 gives an estimate of 100,000 at the beginning of 1974. In Little Wars 1 in the summer of 1976, Gygax suggested that the number then stood at around 300,000.
3. Avalon Hill General 12 (4). Note as well the contemporary remarks by Jack Greene in Europa 6–8 (1974), who affirmed that “this group of people called wargamers seem to be middle to upper class in background, white, male, bookish of nature” and that “there appears to be a racial split. I have met more women wargamers than black wargamers.” Greene briefly interviewed a pair of black wargamers about their experience in Campaign 71.
4. Peterson, “First Female Gamers,” gives some figures on gender diversity in wargaming and science-fiction fandom.
5. Gygax apparently complained privately in 1976 about the difficulty of participating in APA-style discussions due to way they referenced prior issues in comment threads. See Rod Burr’s note about this in Wild Hunt 5.
6. In “The Literary Edge,” Robin Laws speaks to the “unheralded moment” when the first player said, “I know it’s the best strategy, but my character wouldn’t do that,” when “an aesthetic concern had been put ahead of a gaming one,” as a crucial marker in the evolution of role-playing games.
7. A review of relevant Kriegsspiel literature can be found, for example, in Lewin, War Games, and Peterson, Playing at the World. A digest-size history of wargaming can also be found in Peterson, “A Game out of All Proportions.”
8. Anleitung, trans. Leeson, 6.
9. See Verdy du Vernois’s Beitrag zum Kriegsspiel.
10. See Strategos, 105f. See also Strategos N: “Anything which is physically possible may be attempted—not always successfully” (1).
11. Modern War in Miniature, 6.
12. Modern War in Miniature, 10.
13. Modern War in Miniature, 6.
14. Modern War in Miniature, 18–19.
15. Martin Campion and Steven Patrick, “The History of Wargaming,” S&T 33. The account of nineteenth-century wargaming in this piece is informed by Farrand Sayre’s Map Maneuvers. Note as well that Verdy du Vernois and “free” Kriegsspiel received a still earlier notice in Strategy & Tactics 22 in 1970, which described his game as similar to traditional wargames, “except that more attention was paid to the discussion that went on during the game (about the game) than the game itself.”
16. Setting Up a Wargames Campaign, 17.
17. See, for example, Dave Millward’s comment in Slingshot 37: “Basically the rules were very informal and relied on consultation ending in interpretation by the umpire. This was necessary, for we’d decided that a set of rules could not possibly cover all the eventualities so what was needed was a flexible set of principles and players and an umpire prepared to weigh up the chances in a particular case and pronounce judgment.”
18. How to Play War Games in Miniature, 88.
19. D&D, 1:4.
20. Chainmail, 6.
21. D&D, 3:36.
22. Beyond sporadic references to the existence of a “party,” the baseline D&D rules do not imply that players have any obligation to cooperate. Gygax would soon clarify that “players should begin together and for a time at least operate as a team if possible” (Europa 6–8). However, Gygax is aware that “Games with larger numbers of participants will also develop inter-player rivalries which soon make the game quite interesting by themselves” (Europa 4/5) Even if tensions never escalate naturally between the players, Gygax suggested that “at a certain point [the Dungeonmaster] will also introduce the factor of interplayer rivalry” (SF&F Journal 87). Arneson seemed to have favored interplayer conflict in that he wrote, “The best form of encounter would be one where the players themselves provided the opposition” (Dave Arneson to Tony Bath, October 15, 1974, private collection).
23. Courier 4 (1). Note that Vietmeyer brought these categories back in Courier 6 (1), around the time that D&D hit the market.
24. Table Top Talk 5, no. 4. Note that this Greensboro article would also be reprinted in Courier 3 (2) in 1971.
25. Advanced War Games, 160, 162.
26. Western Gunfight, 1.
27. Western Gunfight, 2nd ed., 4.
28. The battle report by Gygax in Panzerfaust 63 on the “Owlhoot Trio” certainly shows the influence of the Bristol descriptions. The published Boot Hill stresses that its rules are best exercised in an ongoing campaign “where past events were reflected as closely as possible in successive games.” But it interestingly downplays “rigid scenarios” in favor of “free-form play,” wherein you “set up a town, give a few background details, and allow the participants free-rein thereafter” (Boot Hill, 1).
29. Chainmail, 33.
30. War Game Digest 1 (4) and Slingshot 9.
31. Science-fiction fandom had its own traditions of participatory culture, like the sort discussed in Jenkins, “Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten.” In As If, Michael Saler covers similar phenomena, including the Baker Street Irregulars of Sherlock Holmes fandom and the collective authorship of the Lovecraft mythos by a school of writers. In “Narrative, Interactivity, Play, and Games,” Eric Zimmerman helpfully contrasts this sort of “meta-interactivity” around media properties with “explicit interactivity”: as he puts it, the “difference between a linear book and a choose-your-own-adventure book” (158).
32. Similar text would soon appear in Empire of the Petal Throne: “The objective is an interesting adventure, with enough danger for excitement (and also to punish the unwary and the foolhardy), but not simply to massacre the players” (104).
33. See Peterson, Playing at the World, 391–400.
34. See Lowood, “Putting a Stamp on Games,” for more on postal Diplomacy.
35. Jack Harness, Empire 21. Lee Gold discussed playing Revenge! in A&E 20, and in APA-L 516 she gave an overview of Dynasty.
36. See Costikyan’s overview of “Slobbovia” in Different Worlds 29.
37. Science-fiction fans even took up arms in search of a new way to interact with the storied past. The Society for Creative Anachronism, the medieval recreation group founded in California in 1966—with heavy early participation by Coventry veterans—adopted a feudal structure that influenced the medieval wargaming community behind D&D. Members took on a medieval persona and attended events in full costume to participate in combats and revelries suitable for their romantic reimagining of the middle ages. See Peterson, Playing at the World, 418–423.
38. Midgard 1. Note that Patterson based his ideas on the existing German board game and campaign Armageddon (1967), as described in Peterson, Playing at the World, 443–445.
39. CULT, August 20, 1972.
40. Kam-Pain, 13.
41. Supernova SF&F Gaming Info Sheet, supplement 1, June 1, 1974.
42. With the hindsight of 1980, Lewis Pulsipher would suspect that “it was inevitable, as games and F&SF become more popular, that some game like D&D would appear. German and British SF fans played postal individual RPGs (Magira or Armageddon, and Midgard I) years before D&D was published. . . . If Arneson hadn’t thought of it, someone else would have” (Different Worlds 9).
43. D&D, 1:3.
44. “The Giant’s Bag” appears in Great Plains Game Players Newsletter 7, and the “Expedition into the Black Reservoir” is in El Conquistador 1 (12).
45. Dave Arneson to Gary Gygax, December 12, 1972, private collection.
46. Compare Masters, “On the Vocabulary of Role-Playing,” which defines the “GM-as-Enemy Playing Style” as opposed to the “Co-operative Playing Style.”
47. With this precedent, some referees understood a die roll as merely advisory rather than authoritative, in the sense that “the referee uses the dice rolls to construct what makes sense in that situation” (Fine, Shared Fantasy, 103). This issue is discussed further in chapter 4, “The Role of the Referee.”
48. Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes (no page number). As Paul Mason helpfully explains in “In Search of the Self,” “’Monty Haul’ was a joke derived from a US TV gameshow host; in this style the referee was constantly trying to please players by distributing treasure and items within the game” (4).
1. D&D, 3:13.
2. APA-L, 511. Harness had played in Coventry and began a game anecdote with “Reminds me of when we Coventranians . . .”
3. Strategos, 105f.
4. According to Janet Murray, “agency is the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices” (Hamlet on the Holodeck, 126). In his take on Murray, Michael Mateas emphasizes that these actions “relate to the player’s intention”: “if . . . the player does have an effect on the world, but they are not the effects that the player intended . . . then there is no agency” (“Preliminary Poetics,” 21).
5. Metamorphosis Alpha, 24.
6. Monsters! Monsters!, 30.
7. Bunnies & Burrows, 56.
8. Strategos, 105f.
9. D&D, 3:6.
10. D&D, 2:33.
11. Space Patrol, 2.
12. Space Patrol, 2.
13. Sir Pellinore’s Game, 19.
14. Metamorphosis Alpha, 24.
15. What Price Glory, iv.
16. Sir Pellinore’s Game, 19.
17. D&D, 3:9.
18. Empire of the Petal Throne, 103.
19. One notable early system along these lines is the “Perrin Conventions” (1976), which provide generic resolution for physical actions based on a character’s Dexterity: multiply it by five, and if players roll under that amount with percentile dice, then they succeed in their attempt. Steve Perrin envisioned this as a catch-all for actions such as “changing weapons, turning and firing, opening a box and jumping back, closing a door quickly, etc.” A similar method generalized for other statistics would appear in Basic Role-Playing (1980).
20. D&D, 3:9.
21. D&D, 1:25.
22. Empire of the Petal Throne, 103.
23. Fine documents contemporary superstitions about dice and the role of cheating (Shared Fantasy, 90–106).
24. Monsters! Monsters!, 5.
25. High Fantasy, 43.
26. D&D, 1:4.
1. D&D, 1:6.
2. Peterson, Playing at the World, 286. The term role playing in isolation derived from still earlier therapeutic applications, as Lortz discussed in Different Worlds 4. Note as well the striking mention in the early live-action Tolkien-based Rules for the Live Ring Game (1973) of the “characters which those participating in the game will role-play” (3).
3. Europa 9. Note that Richard Berg, a primary reviewer at Strategy & Tactics, read and participated in Europa at the time and may have picked up the term role playing from Gygax.
4. “Role assumption game” was favored by Legacy and from there appeared in titles such as Gangster. In the 1980s, the more officious term rolegaming would occupy a similar niche.
5. See also Wild Hunt 14, where Doug Kaufman’s “Demon Lair” (1977) variant rules explicitly exclude nonphysical attributes from the scope of the system: “Things like intelligence and charisma are a function of the character who’s sitting down to play.” Villains & Vigilantes (1979) would solve this with the opposite approach: by assigning to the character the quantified abilities that the referee believes the player possesses, even after only the briefest acquaintanceship.
6. Bunnies & Burrows, 70.
7. D&D, 1:10.
8. Chivalry & Sorcery, 2.
9. Chivalry & Sorcery, 6.
10. Starships & Spacemen, 1.
11. D&D, 1:10.
12. Players also read into these characteristics other facets of character: Lee Gold, for example, noted in A&E 20 that “my female characters have higher Constitution than Strength, males the reverse. Thus inspection of characteristics rolled determines gender.”
13. Space Patrol, 2.
14. Traveller, 1:8.
15. Tradition of Victory, 2:2.
16. Players Handbook, 9.
17. Dungeon Masters Guide, 11.
18. Superhero ’44, 21–22.
19. Bushido, 1:8.
20. D&D, 1:7.
21. D&D, 1:34.
22. Greyhawk, 7–8.
23. Davis expanded on his alignment system in A&E 10, giving examples from his campaign.
24. The general consensus was that committing sexual violence rendered Lawful characters Chaotic. Lee Burwasser, in a teasing piece in A&E 14 that began by referencing droit de seigneur, offered a critique of associating lawfulness with moral probity: “With our extensive history of evil laws, how much sense does it make to automatically equate Law with Good? A law that disenfranchises, dispossesses, discriminates against n% of the population might increase law’n’order—for a while—but it certainly isn’t Good.”
25. Bifrost, 1:15.
26. Buccaneer, 2.
27. Chivalry & Sorcery, 6.
28. Arduin Grimoire, 1:13.
29. Fire the Arquebusiers! 1. At the heading of this piece, Costikyan prefixed his name with the title “Reverend.” A broader table of 50 characteristics of personal disposition, which includes everything from being “loyal” to “revengeful” to “homosexual” appears in Trollcrusher 2. For a broader look at the introduction of sexual elements to role-playing games, see Brown and Stenros, “Sexuality and the Erotic in Role-Play.”
30. Tunnels & Trolls, 15.
31. Eric Goldberg argued in “But . . . Is It Role-Playing?” that experience metrics “provide a raw measure of a character’s power relative to the world in which he adventures. This is analogous to a list of salaries in this world.” As Lizzie Stark sees them, progression systems “recapitulate the American rags-to-riches myth” (“We Hold these Rules to Be Self-Evident,” 171). In a similar vein, progression is called a “capitalist fantasy of perpetually swelling treasuries” in Peterson, Playing at the World (353).
32. Little Wars, 34.
33. D&D, 1:3.
34. D&D, 3:14. See also D&D, 3:19: the system for spell memorization denotes “the number of spells of each level that can be used (remembered during [any single adventure]).” And at 3:8 it states that Elves, who enjoy the latitude to shift between the Fighting-man and Magic-user class, may “freely switch class whenever they choose, from adventure to adventure, but not during the course of a single game.”
35. D&D, 1:18.
36. Empire of the Petal Throne, 27.
37. Tunnels & Trolls, 14.
38. Chivalry & Sorcery, 110.
39. Bushido, 1:64.
40. Bushido, 1:69.
41. Heroes, 11.
42. Somewhat confusingly, Bunnies & Burrows manages the “level” of its characteristics separately from the “innate value” rolled during character generation, so a rabbit with an innately rolled Strength of 15 still starts with Strength “level” 0 and raises that level through experience rolls, while the “innate value” remains constant.
43. Bunnies & Burrows, 44.
44. Bunnies & Burrows, 69.
45. Runequest, 46.
46. Buccaneer, 4.
47. See Zagal and Altizer, “Examining ‘RPG Elements,’” for a modern survey of character-progression systems, which includes examples of reverse progression.
48. En Garde, 8.
49. En Garde, 13.
50. Pocket Armenian 21–22. Scott Rosenberg amended the system slightly for publication in Cosmic Balance 3–4.
51. Wargame systems from Wells on had long incorporated the notion that forces get weaker rather than stronger after battle. Once upon a Time in the West (1978), a transitional game in the Western Gunfight tradition, even made regression of abilities a possible result of combat: most directly, a character might lose hearing ability by discharging firearms or explosives, but also penalties can result from failures of key “reaction test” rolls, such as situations in which a gunfighter panics and suffers a permanent penalty to courage.
52. Traveller, 1:5, 6.
53. Traveller, 1:6.
54. Runequest, 9.
55. Uuhraah!, 8, 17, 6–7.
56. Legacy, 105–106.
57. Legacy, 150, 74.
58. Legacy, 73.
59. Legacy, 152.
1. Monsters! Monsters!, 5.
2. The term immersion has since had something of a controversial tenure in the vocabulary of role-playing game theory; see White, Boss, and Harvianen, “Role-Playing Communities,” on some of the many meanings ascribed to it. Roos’s description seems compatible with the account in Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck, 98. For another roughly contemporary use, see the question posed by the sociologist Manuela Oleson to wargamers in 1975: “Do you ever become so immersed in wargaming that you neglect to be courteous and/or responsive to non-wargamers present?” (AHG 12 [4]).
3. Chainmail, 33.
4. D&D, 1:3.
5. Note that Dan Pierson provided a similar four-level classification of the sophistication of campaign worlds a year later in A&E 14.
6. D&D, 3:15.
7. Empire of the Petal Throne, 100.
8. Empire of the Petal Throne, 104.
9. Empire of the Petal Throne, 37.
10. Wild Hunt 1; this article was also later reprinted in A&E 11.
11. Bunnies & Burrows, 49.
12. E’a, 6.
13. Superhero ’44, 35.
14. Villains & Vigilantes, 38.
15. Villains & Vigilantes, 37–38, 3.
16. Flash Gordon, 2.
17. Flash Gordon, 2.
18. Flash Gordon, 2.
19. Bizar later castigated himself for his part in perpetrating Flash Gordon. He blamed much of the design on the onerous conditions imposed by the licensing agreement with the owner of the Flash Gordon intellectual property: “That was a project where we had no design freedom and were required, by contract, to force players to follow the adventures of Flash Gordon with little or no deviation” (Different Worlds 5). But an introductory note in the booklet written by Lin Carter tells a more interesting story: “I was dead set against Scott’s first idea of doing a book of wargame rules and held out for adventure-scenarios instead: eventually—as any fool can plainly see—he came around to my idea” (Flash Gordon, 1).
20. Tunnels & Trolls, 13.
21. Bunnies & Burrows, 23–24.
22. Compare Salen and Zimmerman, Rules of Play: “Meaningful play occurs when the relationships between actions and outcomes in a game are both discernible and integrated into the larger context of the game” (34).
23. Legacy, 125.
24. Legacy, 123.
25. Legacy, 126.
26. Dungeon Masters Guide, 80.
27. Dungeon Masters Guide, 80–81.
28. Merle Rasmussen to Allen Hammack, October 30, 1978, private collection.
29. Rasmussen to Hammack, October 30, 1978.
30. Allen Hammack to Merle Rasmussen, November 2, 1978, private collection.
31. Once upon a Time in the West (no page number).
32. The Return of: Once Upon a Time in the West, 24.
33. Moves 42. Dunnigan anticipated this factor in the design of Sniper! (1973), which includes optional “Supersoldier” rules that “simulate the legendary courage and skill of the immortal comic book and movie characters” in the hope of illustrating “the ludicrousness of ‘Hollywood’ combat (and to provide the Players with a few laughs).”
34. Commando: Gamesmaster and Role-Playing Rules of Play, 13.
35. Commando, 13.
36. Commando, 14.
37. Space Quest, 14.
38. En Garde, 7, 8. Compare Diplomacy (1959), “The rules do not bind a player to do anything he says” during the “diplomacy period which takes place before each more.” Instead, “deciding whom to trust as situations arise is part of the game.” Instead, after diplomacy “each player writes his ‘orders’ on a slip of paper, usually keeping them secret,” and, once revealed, those orders “must be followed” if they are legal (1, 3).
39. Dankendismal 1 augmented these rules for solo D&D play on the Outdoor Survival board.
40. Strategic Review 1 (1).
41. Philip M. Cohen, Empire 21. On PLATO and its early role-playing games, see Dear, Friendly Orange Glow, 286–305.
42. Buffalo Castle, 1.
43. For more on these text adventure games, see Montford, Twisty Little Passages, and the epilogue of Peterson, Playing at the World.
44. Superhero 2044 (1978).
45. Traveller, 1:5–6.
46. Commando, 18. Note as well that Costikyan is a rare holdover from this early period of theorizing about role-playing games who remained active in discussions once they spread beyond the confines of fandom; see, for example, Costikyan, “I Have No Words and I Must Design.”
47. Commando, 18.
48. Deathmaze, 2.
49. Commando, 19.
1. Mercenary, 35.
2. Metamorphosis Alpha, foreword (no page number).
3. Wild Hunt 13. This affirms the historical perspective given in Edwards, “A Hard Look at Dungeons and Dragons,” that “one cannot properly say that ‘D&D does this,’ or that a game ‘plays like D&D,’ without specifying exactly which D&D one means.”
4. Superhero ’44, 3.
5. Mythrules, iii.
6. E’a, 48.
7. Chivalry & Sorcery, 1.
8. Runequest, 5.
9. Tradition of Victory, 2:1.
10. Mortal Combat, 4.
11. See, for example, Arneson’s essay “My Life and RP” in Different Worlds 3, where he characterized his attitude toward rules during his Blackmoor campaign as “Rules? What rules?”, leading up to the point where (note the passive tense) “rules were actually written down” and Arneson’s remarks to the effect that “applying a fantasy setting to RPG was merely another outgrowth of an already established tradition (abet one without any real rules) in various non-fantasy settings.”
12. In Wyrm’s Footnotes 7. “Sartar High Council” was later reprinted in the Chaosium anthology Wyrms Footprints (1995).
1. For surveys of just how diverse this discussion has been, see Hitchens and Drachen, “The Many Faces of Role-Playing Games,” and Zagal and Deterding, “Definition of ‘Role-Playing Games.’”
2. Return of: Once upon a Time in the West, 3.
3. Return of, 3.
4. In the 1980s, Gamescience released a boxed set of the Bristol Western Gunfight rules as the “Old West Gunfight Role Playing Game,” inevitably.
5. Knights of the Round Table, 56.
6. In 1981, Fantasy Games Unlimited bought the rights to Elementary Watson from Phoenix Games, the successor to Little Soldier, along with Bushido and Aftermath. Although FGU produced new versions of the latter two, Elementary Watson never appeared under the company’s imprint. The company did, however, list it in advertisements as a forthcoming title with the description “an expanded version of this role-playing boardgame.”
7. Realm of Yolmi, 95.
8. In an essay called “‘Simulator’ as Lost Soul,” Pulsipher further railed against excesses of simulation, which he viewed no more favorably than Thornton.
9. Most notably, see Pulsipher’s contribution to Different Worlds 8 “Game Master Styles.” His first series of articles continued in White Dwarf 4 and 5, after which he wrote an introductory series on D&D beginning with White Dwarf 23; his piece in issue 24, “Dungeon Mastering Styles,” clearly retreads much of his earlier work. Finally, note Pulsipher’s articles in The Dragon beginning in issue 74 in the spring of 1983 with “The Vicarious Participator,” in which he showed a more measured approach to differences in role playing. Also see his piece on the “Survivalist” versus the “Glory Seeker” in Gameplay 7.
10. See Masters, “On the Vocabulary of Role-Playing,” for a later effort to capture key vocabulary terms, including campaign and scenario.
11. One amusing example can be found in Wargamer’s Newsletter 86 (1971), where a chess game is so dramatized.
12. Not until Ken Rolston’s articles “Adventure by Design” in Different Worlds 30 and 31 in 1984 would the discussion return to this level in the periodical.
13. Commando, 18.
14. Chivalry & Sorcery, 1.
15. Simbalist quotes from Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories.”
16. This point was important enough for Simbalist to restate it in various places. “I would like to repeat that all C&S systems are designed to be optional,” he wrote in Apprentice 3. “Players, in short, are encouraged to ‘meddle’ somewhat with the rules to produce the type of fantasy world they desire. When you buy a set of rules, after all, you purchase the right to use them as you wish.”
17. The similar principle that gamers today call “Rule Zero” admits of many permutations, so it is difficult to pin the origins of that term to any particular source—but the most likely culprit seems to be the four metarules beginning with “Rule Zero” advanced by Carl Henderson in “Request Comments on My RPG,” published in 1994.
18. Chivalry & Sorcery, 64.
19. For more on the resulting moral panic around D&D, see Laycock, Dangerous Games.
20. See Peterson, “First Female Gamers.”
21. For his part, Pulsipher drily replied in White Dwarf 6, “It’s a game, not a simulation, and you can’t practically prevent players from thinking mathematically if it will help them succeed.”
22. The Seligman system, which he often referred to as “Advanced Seligman & Sorcery,” was serialized across multiple installments of the Dungeoneer, beginning with “A New Magic System” in issue 7 (1978). His entire 14-page player handout for these rules is reproduced in Wild Hunt 40.
23. Peterson, “First Female Gamers.”
24. On the problem of gender inclusivity, see Trammell, “Misogyny and the Female Body in Dungeons & Dragons.”
25. A&E 63. A similar line of thinking runs through Michelle Nephew’s article “Playing with Identity,” which balks at the misogyny of fantasy literature and sees its shadow over “the misogyny that sometimes seems endemic to the hobby” (129).
26. The field notes in Fine, Shared Fantasy, 68–71, give corroborating examples of male attitudes toward female gamers in the 1970s.
27. A&E 51. See the second chapter of Fine, Shared Fantasy, for more demographic data from the period.
28. Wargamer’s Newsletter 97. A survey in Strategy & Tactics 28 (1971) put more than one-quarter of its readership in the age range 14–17 and another quarter between 18 and 21.
29. Although Jaako Stenros and Tanja Sihvonen’s later survey “Out of the Dungeons” correctly notes the absence of homosexuality in popular rulebooks of the era, it also notes that “source books and actual practice of play are two separate issues,” and in places such as Bigglestone’s article “Role-Playing: How to Do It” we see more progressive approaches to the issue.
30. See Bowman and Schrier, “Players and Their Characters in Role-Playing Games,” and other essays in the Role-Playing Games Studies anthology, for a more contemporary look at the membrane between player and character.
31. Welcome to Skull Tower, 99.
32. A&E 38. Simbalist also described how he handled nonplayer characters, who would ordinarily be played by the referee: “I use players to run NPCs a lot, and since my crew is largely composed of GMs, the method is effective. Most can be trusted to split their personae so completely that they can run a NPC while their own characters are present.”
33. Bushido, 1:4.
34. Monsters! Monsters!, 2.
35. Compare Bill Seligman’s article “Sex in Dungeons & Dragons” in Wild Hunt 24. Seligman disparaged the low quality of sexual content in games, mainly that encouraged by “the 16–22 year old GM who got into D&D somehow and is wondering why he spends his Saturday nights playing the dumb game instead of engaging in other activity.” Alluding to Costikyan’s article of the same title in 1975, with its description of “Sex Drive” characteristics, Seligman concluded that “to treat such things unseriously in a D&D campaign only leads to a cheapened universe.” Dave Hargrave would soon note in Abyss 16 that “young, male GMs . . . tend to shy away from all situations of a ‘sexual’ nature in their games,” evincing only a “snicker and ignore” response. Hargrave, however, found that female players “are a lot less shockable than their male counterparts” and indeed he lobbied for more sexuality in games: “If done without leering chauvinistic bullshit, which some people think passes for ‘being grown up,’ it is a valuable asset to any game or campaign.”
36. Christopher Lehrich would later argue in “Ritual Discourse in Role-Playing Games,” “I don’t mean that RPG play is like ritual at all; I mean that it is ritual.”
37. A Jungian understanding of role-playing games is the theme of Sarah Lynne Bowman’s more recent essay “Jungian Theory and Immersion in Role-Playing Games.”
38. Note as well DiTillio’s own bewildered rebuttal to Bachmann in The Dragon 43.
1. Games, September/October 1979.
2. Infinity, 28.
3. Welcome to Skull Tower, 74.
4. Commando, 18.
5. A&E 74. One form that Miller’s graph does not show is story-telling, which he says is “pervasive” and “a quality of the GM.” In a follow-up piece in A&E 78, along with an iteration of his diagram, Miller elaborated further on the story-telling quality, exclaiming bluntly that “every GM in the hobby world of FRP is a story-teller!” He argued in the vein of Lortz that “Game Masters can be thought of as Directors of a play, a movie, or a moving, expanding, colourful imaginary trip,” and advised that a GM devise “a theme” and “an outline of a story” as well as develop any “stage props” necessary for the story to unfold.
6. In “System Does Matter,” Ron Edwards seems to think along similar lines, especially when comparing the results of simple resolution systems against complex ones and noting the implications this has for acceptance of systems by players with different incentives and experiences—as well as in calling for designers to be cognizant of these matters.
7. A&E 72. Miller cited as examples of this games like Legacy and more recent titles such as the Morrow Project and the latest version of the Ysgarth rules.
8. Legacy, 151.
9. Freeman and editors of Consumer Guide, Complete Book of Wargames, 243.
10. Freeman, Complete Book, 248.
11. Freeman, Complete Book, 243.
12. Simian Conquest (no page number).
13. Freeman, Complete Book, 252.
14. In Search of the Unknown, 5.
15. In Search of the Unknown, 2.
16. Boot Hill (1979), 3.
17. Basic Role-Playing, 2, 7.
18. A&E 71. Note that in “On the Vocabulary of Role-Playing,” Phil Masters captures in its vocabulary list “Plamondon’s Test,” the principle that “if incidents in a game cannot be described without reference to the game’s mechanics, then those game mechanics are too intrusive” (67). The original test appeared in A&E 113. In A&E 124, Robert Plamondon offered his “second test,” that “if, when reading a campaign writeup, the game mechanics show up as otherwise irrational character actions or attitudes, the game mechanics are too intrusive.”
19. Dungeon Masters Guide, 110.
20. Paul Cockburn, Imagine 2.
21. “Children 10 to 14 years of age bought 46 per cent of D&D game sets last year, while the 15-to-17 age group picked up 26 per cent” (Discover, January 1981).
22. TSR Hobbies 1983 retailer catalog.
23. A&E 76. The shift to a critical perception of role-playing games as an art form recurs cyclically, like much else in this history. It seems to have finally stuck with the advent of Robin Laws’s article “The Hidden Art” in 1994, though Gygax, among others, would continue to reject it.
24. Fine, Shared Fantasy, 9–10, 14.
25. Nexus 1. See also A&E 50, where Paul Mosher wrote, “Ed Simbalist in recent issues has given us his views on FRP, different modes of play, the part of the Game Master, etc. But as yet I have not seen any publication on FRP which gives a set of guidelines for actually playing the role of a character.”
26. The impulse to sort games into “generations” would continue unabated; see, for example Porter, “Where We’ve Been.” But again, the markers proposed in that article for sorting these games are difficult to distinguish from system elements in play in the 1970s.
1. In “Definition of ‘Role-Playing Games,’” José Zagal and Sebastian Deterding cite the divisions now commonly recognized as role-playing game “forms”: computer, tabletop, live-action, and massively multiplayer online games. The last category had not yet come into being in the early 1980s. Also see Zagal’s “An Analysis of Early 1980s English Language Commercial TRPG Definitions” for examples of how designers in the 1980s defined role playing in their games.
2. For pointers on live-action role playing, see Harvainen et al., “Live Action Role-Playing Games.” For more on computer role-playing games, see Barton and Stacks, Dungeons & Desktops.
3. Kern, a staffer at Victory Games, received a design credit for 007 and wrote adventures to support it.
4. Champions, 48.
5. Adventurer’s Handbook, 120–125.
6. Even tabulating these models would be difficult. Mary K. Kuhner’s “Threefold Model” is given as the common ancestor of the modern “Threefold Model” (gamist, narrativist, and simulationist forms) subsequently elaborated by Ron Edwards in “GNS and Other Matters of Role-Playing Theory” and many later essays. See also Bartle, “Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades,” for indications of how similar typologies apply to digital-game players.
7. A&E 163. It is thus unsurprising that these terms made it into Masters’s essay “On the Vocabulary of Role-Playing,” though he does also note the Blacow forms.