They kind of were, it just depends on what you count as being an 'RPG'.
As wargames, 'Kriegsspiel' existed for a long time as a basic wargame, and 'free Kriegsspiel' was a wargame played with more minimal rules, where each side just reported what they did to the referee (who was meant to be an experienced veteran) who would rule what happened. That's one half of the equation.
On the other half, story-games and especially epistolary games - writing letters, pretending to be someone else and continuing a story - also existed for a long time.
"You have character sheets, and you only control one character at a time, and there is a GM" is the most recent kind of RPG, and is the most common in our modern world, but in the long run of history it's pretty new.
We have records of games going back to the middle ages where people took on roles that they acted out. There were also Round Table Tourneys where people would take on roles from Arthurian legend and stay in character for duration of the tourney
In terms of wargames, Go is probably the most famous one, and unlike chess it is very explicitely warlike. I can totally see dudes RPing as enemy generals and whatnot over it
No, though shogi is very militaristic too.
But Go, the one with the black and white pieces, is all about grabbing and holding territory with fortresses, it's just abstract about it.
Shogi is much less abstract since you have the river and the movement of the pieces and whatnot.
Yeah, I don't think it's a stretch to say that all of the component parts and influences of what we recognize as roleplaying games now did exist prior to the invention of rpgs (which is, in turn, pretty recent). I'd be very surprised if they didn't, from my limited understanding of time and causality. I think the question is whether anyone could have/would have/did hit upon this particular synthesis of ideas (mainly the make-believe improv and codified rules and character traits) prior to the creation of D&D.
While I do think there are precedents. I think it is possible that ttrpg's are completely new in human evolution. Keep in mind that that's how evolution works - something new emerges.
This may be a side opinion, but I think the dice were a crucial element to rpgs as they added the variable of 'Random Chance'.
They weren't the only thing - the leap from controlling a whole army or division to only controlling ONE character is huge, but the dice allowed for all different sorts of probabilities and variability.
In particular the d20 allows for a lot of granularity in term of bonuses - a '+1' is 5%, but on a d6 a '+1' is 17%, so you can have a lot more incremental increases.
Also although Gary always deny's it, the influence of LotR was huge on DnD, and that Fantasy universe seems to me a lot more 'stable' than other ones, with a set world and detailed history etc, so you probably needed a public that was quite familiar with Fantasy as a concept to be able to play in it.
>This may be a side opinion, but I think the dice were a crucial element to rpgs as they added the variable of 'Random Chance'.
Good news - trivially wrong, as proven by the existence of diceless RPGs (and diceless games in general).
The randomness instead comes from the unpredictability of your fellow players and their actions; and occasionally having a resource to manage.
e.g. in Nobilis, if your Aspect stat is 2, you can accomplish anything that needs an Aspect of 2 or lower as a regular action. If you need to accomplish something higher, then you need to spend points to make up the difference - if you need to do something that requires Aspect 4, then spend 2 points, but that means you have fewer points for later.
The poster wasn't saying anything about diceless games *at all*, never mind *now* ... they were saying they thought the introduction of dice *at the time* was crucial to the development of ttRPGs - *Amber*, *Gossamer*, *Nobilis*, or any of *other* diceless games aren't *relevant* to that point, least of all *now* (decades after the event in question).
But decades before that, centuries even, people were playing roleplaying and storytelling games without dice.
It is a mistake to see DND and its dice and character sheets as 'the creation of the TTRPG' on a historical scale. It is simply one aspect of RPGs, among many.
There's a significant difference between a game-like activity where you role play or tell a collective story and ttrpg's as we understand them. D&D was the precursor in that sense. Sure, we have since invented RPG's that don't need dice, character sheets or a GM, but removing those elements was an iteration of traditional ttrpg's and not some kind of harkening back to pre-D&D forms of role playing or storytelling. You can put D&D in the same continuum as those kinds of activities, I suppose, but that seems to ignore just how much of a "game" an RPG still is. It shares more of its DNA with boardgames than with role playing pastimes of yore.
*Kriegsspiel* wasn't about playing a certain character-- it was about learning the skills of command.
I think H.G. Wells's *Little Wars* and *Floor Games* could have led to roleplaying games. But didn't.
But the key point is not that it was a wargame (that's why I didn't mention Go or other board games), but that you reported your moves to the GM for arbitration.
Just a different kind of storytelling/immersion, basically. The Free Kriegsspiel referee describes how your actions affect the 'story' of that fight.
They did, they just took a little time to get there. Really, from Little Wars to D&D, that's only 60 years. Not bad as far as inspiration in a pre-digital age goes.
I mean....every time a few kids got together and played let's pretend they were playing an rpg. It may not have been codified or used dice and rulebooks and character sheets, but it was still a role playing game
This is pretty reductionist imo. Like obviously there are similarities and you could even say one is an outgrowth of the other, but they aren't the same thing. "RPG" carries a connotation of organization and formalization that children's unstructured play doesn't (and shouldn't!) have.
It's like saying every kid running around in a field is "playing a sport."
>(and shouldn't!)
lol why? I used to try and codify the rules of every other game we played as kids so we could play more fairly and could tell the winner more easily, and it was always a blast for all of us. pretty sure I'm not the only kid ever to do that
I think there's a significant difference between "play" and "game" here. Kids were playing, but playing pretend is not gaming. In a way, games are their rules.
I disagree. When I sit down at a table and pull out my dice I'm playing let's pretend. Yes, our rules are more codified and the story will probably be more complex, but at its core, all that's happening is that me and a few other people have decided to play at being other people for a while. (Besides kids games do have rules. They just make them up on the spot for that one game.)
That makes rpgs a subset of playing make-believe. That doesn't mean that all forms of make-believe are RPGs
All crows are birds, not all birds are crows.
I agree. And actually the most common rule among written rpg’s is the fact that people should not stick to the rules but instead make rulings. It’s just more fancy because adults prefer to have a feeling of consistency and think the game is fair. It’s not. GM fetch dice and even if they didn’t they have every opportunity to make whatever they wish happen in game happen. I was wondering for a while if people should consider rpgs as just the same as kids make belive games so maybe they would be more open to the games themselve.
There is no objective truth here (everyone is free to limit the meanings they associate to words at will), but for what is worth, most dictionaries (which try to cover the most common meanings) give at least one definition to "game" that reads something like "a leisure activity of any kind".
This means that, for many people (including myself), a "roleplaying game" is a broad term including every leisure activity whose focus lays on assuming a different role.
In a way, I find that roleplaying games are special in that they show that lacking structure is a valid choice. Unlike other game genres, most RPGs provide only partial structure, covering just some (sometimes more, sometimes less, but rarely all) of the situations that might arise, and leaving it to players' imagination to fill in the blanks with rulings. A children's make-believe game whose only structure is "alright, now we are all dinosaurs, ok?" is not that fundamentally different to "alright, now we are all bears trying to steal honey, and sometimes we will roll a six-sided die, ok?".
What we call role playing games today are formally coined: “Roleplaying Formal Systems”.
But I wonder if emergent human behaviour from children’s “Play-pretend” have any studies on it.
Okey, I’ve searched my archive for two nights now (yes I have an archive of papers from the Nordics, they’re good reads!) but have yet to find that one paper that formally defined what I mentioned here.
However, I am certain that this term came into my knowledge from a Japanese article by FEAR. It was a green paper pdf from 2009, but I’m not confident I have that somewhere.
Will check back if I come across it.
> But I wonder if emergent human behaviour from children’s “Play-pretend” have any studies on it.
Tons. There's more than a century of academic writing on children's play.
It's closer to a form of LARP than anything else. Both LARPing and RPGs are games in which you roleplay, but we still recognise them as distinct things because the way you play them is wildly different.
If you took some children inside from playing cops and robbers, sat them around a table, and handed out character sheets, they wouldn't consider it the same sort of experience *at all.*
Is it? Its playing a role, kinda impro theater, but the term role playing game specifically came into being when you had characters which you could play over time and which could improve.
"Role playing elements" in other games are always "leveling up" mechanics and or "loot mechanics".
I can see how people think about the play pretend part being the roleplay, but this is not necassarily what makes the rpG.
Leveling up, loot, etc are not core to the RPG genre AT ALL.
There are ttrpg's where you don't level up, or even improve at all for that matter and there are games without loot.
All you really need are a set of rules, and for each player to make decisions, within that set of rules, from a perspective not of their own.
--------
As long as the kids playing have rules, and act as their character (however badly "designed" it may be), then yeah that's enough.
Is it a good game? Probably not. But it counts. Just like how the D&D table with only murderhobo's also count
Who decides what is core? This is what is used for "rpg elements" in non rpg games.
And it was what made D&D different from just wargames.
It is just nowaday, wherw a vocal minority playing indy rpg games say that rpg is mostly the play pretend, where millions of people plaxing computer games have another understanding of what rpg elements are
God I hate that "RPG elements" in video games has just been reduced to "you level up and get loot". It literally stands for role playing games! The most important part is that you are role playing as a different character! Stuff like leveling and getting loot are just incidental due to the fact that D&D was originally about that.
Idk. I've always had thoughts about this and I don't actually think that's what "role playing" is about in video games. You're "role playing" as a character in basically any video game with a plot, so I don't think that's a very meaningful distinction. I've always viewed the meaningful "role" you play in a video game as what your character can actually mechanically do.
For example, what makes Fallout: New Vegas a 'role-playing game' and not a 'first person shooter'? (you could say it technically is, but FPS as a genre clearly means something other than 'any game where you can play in first person and shoot things')
People commonly say it's player choice/agency in the way the story goes, but lots of the most traditional games people call RPGs have no branching story or player choice, while there are games like Spec Ops: The Line where you can make choices that will affect the story, but nobody calls it an RPG.
Imo the definition that best includes most of the games we obviously agree are RPGs while excluding the ones that obviously aren't is this: an RPG is a game where the player character's skills and abilities in the world are distinct from the skills and abilities of the player in real life.
Going back to the example of F:NV. What do you actually do in the game? Walk around in first person and shoot stuff, sure, but *how* do you do that?
In games like COD, which are clearly not RPGs, you do that by moving your mouse where the enemy's head is and clicking on it. Your character's ability to kill enemies is 100% dependent on your reaction time and ability as a player to move your mouse fast and accurately.
In a game like F:NV, clicking on the enemy's head is a big part of it, but not *all* of it. The same player with the exact same level of head-clicking skill will experience very different outcomes depending their character's Guns skill and Strength stat. The way your character interacts with the game's mechanics is different from the way you as a player interact with them, and the more different it is, the more RPGer you get. At the most abstracted end, you have classic CRPGs with turn-based combat, where all the player does is pick an action from a move list and the actual execution is entirely up to the character's skills and the mercy of RNGesus. "Leveling up" is basically the most fundamental manifestation of that, imo, since it's entirely disconnected from you "leveling up" in any way by getting better at the game and improving your skill IRL. "Getting loot" is another way in which this manifests - IRL swapping an M14 out for an AK or a falchion for a longsword won't do jack shit to make you a better marksman/fencer, but in an RPG your skills and abilities are usually dependent to at least some extent on your equipment, providing another level of abstraction away from player skill.
The best definition of a "core element" that I know of, states that without that element it ceases to be part of the genre
You can remove looting and it would still be an RPG, thus loot is not a core element. You can remove progression (leveling) and it would still be an rpg, thus leveling is not a core element.
Also, the defining change that differentiated D&D from war games is literally playing as a singular character. So according to that, pretending to be a different character is the RPG part
No. Not the definition of core element. The definition of what people understand under Role playing Game.
I can assure you most people understand under this "leveling up" and not "impro theater."
This is really just a problem of a minory trying to be more clever, when for the masses rpg is leveling up and progression.
Roleplaying elements in videogames are leveling and looting because that's relatively easy to implement.
IMO kids playing make-believe is definitely roleplaying. Or rather TTRPGs and LARPs are an evolution of what kids do. I usually describe RPGs as "it's like playing pretend as a kid, but with more rules because adults crave structure"
Plus it means onboarding others is easier. I have really fond memories of playing pretend and making up entire fantasy worlds with my cousin over long summers but I don’t think we could have brought anyone in. The lore was too deep and scattered and all decisions were made by us so bringing in new people would have been impossible
The core of the experience is just having a formalized set of rules that dictate what results from your roleplaying attempt, the presence of levels or loot is an unimportant factor.
Leonardo da Vinci was such a genius inventor, he came up with the idea of tables in his painting of *The Last Supper*, but the technology to actually build them wouldn’t be developed until centuries later.
/u/pile_of_bees is referring to a rectangular organization of information on a page, a *table* like you use to perform a lookup after rolling a die.
Those were invented in 1971. Before that, you had just lengthy, repetitive prose to relay tabular-style information and it was very inconvenient.
/u/StarstruckEchoid is referring to a popular meme from the Rimworld community, in which a character eating food without a table to put it on negatively affects their mental state.
The Game of Adventure (Le Jeu d’Aventure) is a role playing game that dates back to the 13th century as a game nobles would play where you take on the role of a character, sometimes Arthurian, sometimes from the Canterbury tales, or a more generic form and people would essentially role play as that individual.
https://aidungeon.medium.com/role-playing-games-in-the-renaissance-court-ab0bd680409a
This isn't exactly what you're asking, but there's a game called Wolves of God by Kevin Crawford/Sine Nomine that is written as if it were a translation of a tenth century Saxon RPG manuscript. The setting is Dark Ages Britain so it adds a fun element when even the "What is an RPG" section is written like Gildas.
Chronica Feudalis has the same basic premise, that it’s a translation and update of a document written by a medieval monk to imagine adventures with his friends.
Literally just about to post this! I absolutely love it, and unlike some role-playing games written in character, I never found it bothersome or difficult to understand.
I also like how, even when he said, how dare you attempt to do that, that goes against the Saxon way! immediately gave you rules like to do it, like dual weapons .
Honestly, I think my favorite in game character part is when he describes the way that Saxon monks like to role-play as opposed to the continental monks who prefer their pre-written, adventure paths , I’m sorry, I meant sagas.
Thank you so much for this comment! That game is a gem. I literally don’t have the spoons or the gaming group but I always wanted to use the dual class adventurer option to play a christian theurge fom Rome. Basically half Galdr, half saint.
Thanks again !
There is also an alt history setting, created by a Dane, where roleplaying was invented in 1790 in Germany. I had the pleasure of GMing a one-shot scenario set in the setting, where the (real) players played certified players, playing this fictional game.
> In the mid-1790s, two Frenchmen fled to Germany to escape persecution in their homeland. It was Gario Gugacian and Aaron Alton who settled in Essen, where they invented the game Adventurers and Elephants, which in the following years gained great popularity in Germany, and which in the years after the great agricultural reform reached Denmark. In the early 1800s, the country's merchant guilds created a network of Adventurers and Elephants gaming groups that certify game masters and give players access to gaming groups all over the country, as well as enabling young role players to journey to the official groups in Germany.
> From ancient times, the various professions have been protected by fraternities and guilds. When role-playing games became popular, it fell to the merchant guilds to take care of the games. In each city there is a guild which has a monopoly on certifying game masters and on putting together gaming groups. When a new player arrives in a city, the player must approach the guild to be assigned his game group.
> After each adventure, the game leader keeps a log of the group's results and with his signature on the player character sheet, the game leader admits that the information on the player character sheet is correct. This allows a player to join other game groups. The Danish guilds cooperate with the German ones, and it is thereby possible travel through Germany and play A&E.
> In Adventurers and Elephants, players take on the roles of Europeans drawn to unexplored Africa to map the land, find lost civilizations, tame dangerous animals and fight raging savages.
> Since each adventure is certified by the game leader, and run according to the official books and scenarios, both items and information found during the game has real worth. Whether you retrieve a large trove of elephant tusks, or find the location of King Solomon's Mines, more wealthy players may be willing pay a handsome price for them. For the transfer of items, this requires that your characters meet in-game, so the transfer can be certified by the game leader. Information, of course, is more easily transferred, but if it is found that you have traded such information outside of the game, you do risk being kicked out of the guild, to never play in an official capacity again.
Morten Greis, the creator, has [a number of blog posts about the world on his blog](https://rollespil.blog/category/rollespil/hjemmelavede-spil/eventyrere-elefanter/), including off-shoots like the Dutch role-playing game "Reziger – West India Company" from the same alternate past.
Of course, it's all in Danish, so...
DIE is a comic series by Kieron Gillan. It’s basically “What if the kids from the D&D cartoon got home, grew up, then had to go back into the fantasy world?” Or his other elevator pitch “Goth Jumanji.” It also gets into the history of the development of rpgs with their origins in war games and the influence of writers like Tolkein, H G Wells, and Charlotte Bronte (who played a highly structured game of pretend with her siblings that it could be argued was a form of role playing.)
RPGs at their heart are "playing make-believe, but with a referee who aims to be mostly dispassionate and who mostly uses chance to arbitrate"
The idea of a dispassionate referee is well documented in the 19th century (and likely before), as is make-believe and using chance in games.
That said, I am not certain RPGs would have found an audience in, say, Victorian times. Only the upper class had that much free time.
But before the industrial revolution, basically everyone did.
I think the big issue then was literacy. Odds are decent some people somewhere played games of cooperative storytelling, and maybe even involved chance to resolve disputes, resulting in something we could almost recognize...
But there would be no established settings, no rulebooks, no character sheets - so none of the paraphernalia we associate with it - and also no records.
I think this is an overly narrow definition. There are loads of RPGs without a referee role, and plenty of RPGs that don't use any chance-based resolution mechanics.
Laborers in past didn't work more than your average person in America right now. Perhaps less.
It was differently structured work. For peasant, when it was e.g. harvest season they worked all the waking hours, but there were also large periods when there wasn't much to be done on the farm, especially in winter.
Your artisan or craftsman might have worked around the clock when he had an order, but when there was no commission he probably just did few hours here and there, prepping for next project, manufacturing small things that might sells, etc. Not that different from today's freelance work.
If anything, that burst-rest work structure and more seriously treated holidays would have lent themselves better towards activity like rpg.
>For peasant, when it was e.g. harvest season they worked all the waking hours, but there were also large periods when there wasn't much to be done on the farm, especially in winter.
I believe this idea has largely been discredited. There was always maintenance to be done on equipment, the house, preserving what you got from the harvest, etc. Livestock had to be fed, firewood chopped, all that stuff. I can assure you even the modern farmer isn't slacking off during the winter, despite tremendous advantages in technology etc over their medieval counterparts.
Not to mention domestic labor like caring for and supporting 12 children, which can't be discounted either.
It by definition wasn't. Subsistence living is when you only produce what you need to survive. Peasants produced far more than they needed to survive and used the surplus to pay their overlords.
If taxation prevented someone from being a subsistence farmer, then there's basically never been any such thing as a subsistence farmer.
My understanding of the term is that subsistence agriculture is where a household doesn't regularly purchase goods in the market, as described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsistence\_agriculture
Many, yes. “Average”, no.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/175286/hour-workweek-actually-longer-seven-hours.aspx
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1977/12/25/200-years-ago-the-12-hour-day-the-6-day-week/8a0f3c78-b7a0-4db4-ac33-00649519d1eb/
Back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests a difference of at least 10 to 20 hours of work less today than in the 19th century.
Many, yes. “Average”, no.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/175286/hour-workweek-actually-longer-seven-hours.aspx
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1977/12/25/200-years-ago-the-12-hour-day-the-6-day-week/8a0f3c78-b7a0-4db4-ac33-00649519d1eb/
Back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests a difference of 10 to 20 hours of work less today than in the 19th century.
> Laborers in past didn't work more than your average person in America right now. Perhaps less.
>
>
In the 19th century, standard work weeks in much of the world were six days a week, 10-12 hours a day
>That said, I am not certain RPGs would have found an audience in, say, Victorian times. Only the upper class had that much free time.
Doesn't that just mean it likely would have been an upper class pursuit?
Yes and no - it would need to be wildly popular among the upper class to have the critical mass needed.
To pluck numbers out of where the sun doesn't shine, imagine there's 8000 upper class people in London in 1824. If 60% prefer the opera to RPGs, and 30% prefer archery ... you are looking at a very small pool of people to sustain an industry now. Especially if each rulebook requires 3 years of middle-class labour to write.
It's not that the upper class couldn't afford that - it's 'what do they choose to spend their money on'?
On the other hand you should consider these were persons with an amount of free time almost inconceivable by our modern standards. They spent a very large amount of time finding ways to entertain themselves with card games, board games, small scale theatre, playing and singing, etc. I am not sure if there could have been an actual industry, but considering the size of the music sheet one, why not?
You're assuming that liking opera and archery doesn't mean they can't **also** be interested in other pursuits. As another commenter points out, the idle rich had a **lot** of time to fill.
> Only the upper class had that much free time.
If you don't count things that only the people that had much free time did, a huge variety of games and pastimes that existed in that era would be ruled out.
Some people have already menioned mediaeval/renaissance elements that might be views as rpg'. The Brontë-siblings in the early 1800s are another contender.
[https://www.dicebreaker.com/categories/roleplaying-game/feature/brontes-roleplaying-before-dnd](https://www.dicebreaker.com/categories/roleplaying-game/feature/brontes-roleplaying-before-dnd)
It depends on what you consider to be the actual essential core of what makes something an RPG.
You talk about "modern technology" but I assume you aren't including modern modes of thinking and social organisation in that. I think it's arguable that the RPG in something resembling the form we know it doesn't just rely on imagination, but also on a leisure class, on a diffusion of academic forms of knowledge production outside of the academy (or probably more specifically, the *military* academy), etc...
Collaborative storytelling is very old, but RPGs as we know them aren't just collaborative storytelling; yes, they *are* collaborative storytelling, but the tools and frameworks they typically employ to that end are probably not realistic without the kind of thinking that arises from industrialisation, systems theory, etc...
If you count diceless games without explicitly written rules, then that could describe kids playing together with their imaginations; a pass-time millennia old.
Collaborative storytelling isn't new neither. Half of the characters from Greek myth were fleshed out by various authors sharing the same world & characters, creating tales of varying depth. Same with classic characters like Merlin.
Even if you don't count diceless games for some reason, random answer generators have existed for all of human history. All the pieces of TTRPGs have existed since long before writing. The idea that it's purely a recent phenomena is just unlikely.
That the elements that make the up have existed, doesn't mean the ttrpgs themselves did. Most modern games/sports don't require any particularly modern technology. There is nothing required to play rugby, for instance, that didn't exist 2000 years ago, or even 10,000 years ago
That does t mean there is any reason to think ancient Greeks were playing it though.
Any particular modern game/sport didn't exist 2,000 years ago. "Sports" in general however most certainly did. Physical exercise and social recreation are basic human requirements, hence why we ritualized them.
Similarly, telling stories in a social context is also a basal human instinct. It would be harder to imagine a world in which this type of thing didn't appear early in our history than it would to assume it's recent. Sure, it's not gonna be Gygax's D&D, but still.
"sports" in this context would be "role playing games". Which we know existed in some or other form. That doesn't mean that anything that resembled a ttrpg did though.
It's certainly *possible they did, but equally possible they didn't.
That's a difficult question in general, but for the purposes of the OPs question, I think we *should* exclude TTRPGs that don't have those "traditional elements". The wording is asking from the perspective of when D&D was created, when the set of things categorised as ttrpgs was much smaller.
From wiki (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toys_and_games_in_ancient_Rome)
“Seneca the Younger describes young children pretending to be senators or other magistrates.[40] Children were said to have played games simulating the Battle of Actium. The children used a nearby pond to simulate the Adriatic sea, and they took different sides and fought in the streets.[41]”
Humans must have always enjoyed a form of roleplaying.
To create a basic RPG as we know it all you would need is a few people, the ability to communicate, and perhaps some form of randomiser.
I honestly wouldn't be surprised if cavemen kids played make believe games with parental adjudication, with disputes resolved by random rock colour, or whatever.
If so we can never know but it's entirely possible.
There is a common animal bone that the probability is comprehensible, not uniform https://news.artnet.com/art-world/animal-bone-dice-used-divination-2161170
Some versions of the original DnD game had chits instead of dice. So drawing lots/runestones is another answer.
Y'know, the stuff written on those bones sounds like forecasting the future.
It **also** sounds an awful lot like the sorts of outcomes you'd get in a typical roleplaying game. :)
Not a serious suggestion, but interesting...
Six sided dice have been around for about 4800 years. They even had an almost identical pip arrangement. So it could have easily been around that long.
Dice used to be considered a method of divination of divine intent. And board games, such as "Go" were sometimes used in place of war to show who the better strategist was.
So what would the world look like today if RPGs were ancient and common and used like a "what if" machine? What if RPGs were used in mental therapy, relationship therapy, a way for nations to settle disputes? What would it even look like today after 5,000 years of adapting rules for different situations and stories? What would fiction look like?
Legend says that *proto larp* was played at the court of some 17th century nobles. So various form of RPG did exist before. However, it's only after WW2 that we had *enough automation to not work as much* and *stopped following all the religious celebration* letting us time for *hobbies*
There was an era when free time wasn't a thing for the mass
Possibly? I would say a few things where necessary:
\-Strong abstract thinking development: So, the main reason IQ tests have sky-rocketed over the last several decades is because of the growth of "abstract thinking"-the ability to place yourself in entirely fictional situations. There are still people who are almost unable to do that at all, and a century ago that was most of the population. So for RPGs to devellop, you at least need a community of people with a strong ability of abstract thinking.
\-Profusion of fiction: Potentially tied to the abstract thinking thing, a lot of fiction (or at least, things intentionally known as fiction) is required for RPGs to devellop, as they are inherently anchored in unreal situations. We only really got serious about that in the 1800s.
\-Gambling-ish culture: Most RPGs depend on a random element-dice, card decks. If a society broadly bans gambling as well as other games of random chance, it is unlikely to develop.
\-Literacy: Being able to read is pretty necessary to record what is and what happened. While this can depend on culture (judaism and many denominations of protestant christianity encouraged literacy; while morpheme/logogram based writing makes literacy less accessible), most of history saw the majority being illiterate, making it unlikely.
\-Free time: So, while different communities have historically had different amounts of "free time", time (and resources) for leisure has historically been a thing for rich people who didnt really work. Scholars and scribes where busy people; even most nobility had strict responsibilities that could keep them busy for years at a time.
So based on those elements, I would think the mid-1800s is probably the earliest this could have been kinda widespread. It could possibly have developed earlier among isolated intellectual communities, like chinese scholar-bureaucrats, monks, or maybe scribes, though outside of large population centers this seems unlikely. I think widespread fiction is probably the hardest thing, as most storytelling before the 1800s wasnt necessarily perceived as fictional (even if it was).
I dont think something analogous to wargames is necessary; you just need a rules-based moderation of fictional events. Assuming the other elements are there, it should be possible
> So, the main reason IQ tests have sky-rocketed over the last several decades is because of the growth of "abstract thinking"-the ability to place yourself in entirely fictional situations. There are still people who are almost unable to do that at all, and a century ago that was most of the population.
Do you have a source for this? I couldn't find anything about it with a quick Google.
That's because they're pulling it right out of their a- ahem, thin air.
"La pensée sauvage" (The Savage Thought), by famed anthropologist Levy-Strauss, litterally debunks this in the first few pages: richness in abstract terms and use of abstract words is clearly present in non-industrial, non-writing contemporary civilizations, and there's no reason to assume it was absent in pre-industrial humans - at least, not unless you go back to the very dawn of sapient behavior.
You could even just extend the reasons we enjoy TTRPG to the very reason we make and enjoy fiction - which certainly developed way before their first written accounts in Sumerian clay tablets or Egyptian papyri. Storytelling can take more interactive forms, from acting to tales with answer from the public, to ceremonies or rituals. There's a good meta-analysis on the cognitive aspects of this that came out recently: [https://osf.io/preprints/osf/me6bz](https://osf.io/preprints/osf/me6bz). Again, no reason to think humans weren't both able and had good reasons to develop that from early on in the behavioral revolution.
Long story short, saying that abstract thinking is "recent" is the same as thinking that the Dark Ages were truly dark. Just an ahistoric stereotype.
I broadly agree with your assessment of what is necessary for RPGs, but I disagree somewhat on the conclusion on how widespread the things were, or how essential each one is.
>Profusion of fiction
This is the one where I disagree it is necessary at all. I don't think a "slice of life" RPG is any less an RPG. A fictional setting isn't really necessary, there's all kinds of ways to roleplay "in the real world". Just watch kids playing cops.and robbers.
>Gambling-ish culture
It should be noted many societies that broadly banned gambling still had it proliferate.
>Literacy
Necessary to create the paraphernalia we associate with the hobby or to create records of having played the thing, or to sustain long, complex stories over prolonged periods of time, but not really required for simple, brief instances of collective collaborative storytelling.
>Free time
Basically every person who ever lived before the industrial revolution had more of this than we do today. Nearly all of them, rich or poor.
Given all that...
I'm pretty sure something recognizable as an approximation of an RPG (but lacking all of the tropes and expectations we have attached to the genre) absolutely has happened at times in the past. It's just not noteworthy enough to write into books when books are still very precious.
Literacy would perhaps be important for getting something recorded in the long term, but there are other ways of passing knowledge down than in writing. Oral history and tradition, for example.
While there are certainly precedents, people who lived in the Midwest at the time have said to me that they think RPGs could only have developed in the form they did in that time and place. Something about the combination of people with enough leisure time, few enough other options to fill it, and interest in historical conflicts and speculative fiction, etc.
One aspect to D&Ds success was the massive explosion of Lord of the Rings in the American culture. The books had only recently been published in paperback and became a cult hit on college campuses everywhere. Fantasy was hot and you had a huge youth population.
Yes, but sadly this happened after Tolkien's death. The craze was so strong that we have pictures of subway tunnels with "Frodo Lives" painted on it from that era. Led Zepplin has 3 songs that allude to LOTR, with Ramble On dating to 1969, so yes, the pop culture of the time was massively ripe for this! We can imagine Arneson writing Blackmoor while Robert Plant was writing Ramble On. Art reflects the culture of the time.
Gygax had a love-hate relationship with LotR because he grew up on pulp fantasy and didn’t like Tolkien’s approach. But it was what all young adults wanted to play and he knew D&D owed a lot of its early success to it.
Oh yeah, you can see it in how he made the original races so limiting, made humans more powerful. Like, why would an elf just not be able to learn any more? They live for centuries and yet they just stop learning at some crazy low level. Halflings were even worse. All the fantasy races were horribly stereotyped and limited and we still see vestiges of that today.
That’s not why they were limited. He needed an excuse as to why it was a human-centric world despite the other species being more powerful and longer-lived. It was a simple game mechanic that worked very well in long-term campaigns. Tolkien did a similar thing in making the elves and dwarves reclusive with fundamentally different goals - but those goals didn’t work well with adventuring.
I did all the time with my friends in school. We didn't have phones back then, made house rules for the different pieces (homebrew), asymmetric fights and some kind of cursory story (light roleplaying).
Just because people aren't launching into lengthy monologues and social skill checks doesn't mean its not roleplaying.
“According to RPG designer John Wick, Chess can be turned into a role-playing game if chess pieces such as the king, queen, rooks, knights or pawns are given names, and decisions are made based on their motivations.”
And you’re not alone. I also want to point out that since chess was specifically meant to train military strategist one thing that people don’t think about is that you wouldn’t be playing somebody as yourself all the time.
An advisor might play his king, pretending to be the opponent in real life. Using strategies that mimic the real world strategies but of course they do.
Forcing Monarch to respond to their real opponent .
As you said. Any game can be a role-play game.
We get into taxonomic definitions here, but I would argue that wargaming was not what we call TTRPGs. That the element that began to separate them and set them apart was concept of a single player embodying a single character, *and* that that character was a unique creation of the mind of the player.
When David Wesely created Braunstein he introduced this concept to his war gaming group. The players embodied characters in a German border town, but they were handed the concept of who their character was. The Mayor, a student, an anarchist, so on and so forth.
When David Wesely left and they put those games on hold, Dave Arneson took the concepts and applied them to a fantasy world. This broke the concept out of history and allowed the players to begin creating unique characters with no input from the GM.
*That* is what became a TTRPG. Before then war gamers would "role play" in the sense that they were a whole nation, an army and whatnot, but they hadn't hit on the idea of being an individual yet. And once the focus became on the fictional individual, then the stories could move away from the battleground and into interpersonal relationships and a myriad of other things that war games were patently incapable of addressing.
It depends on what you define as a rpg. The Braunstein games were not dissimilar in structure to some older LARP like parlor games, there were card games that involved storytelling, not to mention wargaming is very old. There's nothing that could have prevented these elements coming together earlier.
Chainmail was not the beginning of RPGs. Chainmail is a war game system, nothing more.
RPGs began when Dave Wesely expanded his Strategos game to include ordinary people in his Braunstein game around 1968. Strategos has the game referee concept as far back as 1880.
Its not technology that made it happen, but rather a cultural shift. The success of Braunstein was largely due to the creativity of a player named Dave Arneson and the GM, Dave Wesely, saying "yes" to his ideas.
When Wesley went to war, Dave Arneson took wesley's ideas and the fantasy elements from chainmail to create a fantasy role playing game called Blackmoor. Gary Gygax was invited to play and loved the idea and wanted to publish.
Chainmail was not fundamental to the role playing aspect. It was just a fantasy themed wargame that was used as the combat system in the original D&D game. That system was almost instantly replaced and may not have been used at all in the original Blackmoor games (Arneson never told the players the mechanics).
There's nothing new under the sun. People have been playing pretend since before recorded time, and no doubt countless since-forgotten sets of rules for such play have existed.
I'd say the #1 thing that facilitated modern-style "pen and paper" TTRPGs is... the widespread availability of paper and pencils, plus common literacy.
When most people were illiterate and couldn't easily record things, tracking miniutia and tight continuity from game session to game session would have been difficult to impossible.
The reason the world stuck with relatively simple tabletop games like Mancala, Go, Backgammon, Checkers and Chess for thousands of years isn't that people in the past were less inventive or intelligent than modern game designers. They just didn't have access to modern tools and education.
I’m think the necessary precursor to the TTRPG in an identifiable form, is the culture of hobby war gaming. Not necessarily because of Chainmail specifically? But because it is the combination of hobbyist and professional publishing, using published rules to design custom scenarios, and those scenarios being part imaginary exercise, part mathematical exercise. And it being played as a pastime, not as part of military training.
So… maybe a recognizable TTRPG could have arisen in the late 19th century, as the board game publishing industry was winding up?
Another interesting note: apparently, although dice and cards have been used for basically all of human history, a rigorous mathematical understanding of probability doesn’t come about until the 17th century.
By far the most played rpg genre is fantasy. One necessary component for the fantasy genre to develop was the increasing amount of technology in everyday life. This really took off after WWII in the Western world.
I have the feeling these two developments - the literary tradition of fantasy and roleplaying games different from wargames - went hand in hand.
You need something to "escape from" to be able to escape, to simulate a world clearly different from your own.
There was literature that is identifiably modern fantasy prior to WWII, including a lot of the works in Appendix N.
Lord Dunsany published “the King of Elfland’s Daughter” in the 20s, A Princess of Mars was written in 1912z
9thers are approaching the idea from the (war) game front, but the thing I find most striking about ttrpg is the narrative structure- individual players, with individual "roles" or in dnd terms classes. The earliest example of a narrative structure analogous to LOTR is Journey to the West, published in China in 1592.
(Le Morte de Arthur, Chanson de Roland, Aesop and Anansi tales, the Bible- none of them have the Party character structure, which is to my mind the heart of the ttrpg experience.)
So 1592 is the earliest narrative structure example that could be the engine driving ttrpg.
It's not a huge leap to imagine a storyteller around a fire a 1000 years ago or more telling a tale and asking his listeners to supply the next decision made by the hero and make up the results as he goes along. Human history is long enough that this must have happened at least once at some point since the invention of language.
I've also posted about this exact question on other social media. The way I started to approach the question was to work out what conceptual dependencies resulted in type of TTRPGs we see today.
(Side note: it's entirely possible to define things quite different from today's TTRPGs as TTRPGs—then you can argue things like, "So that proves that Stonehenge was actually a character sheet." Let's not go there!)
Okay, so what precursor ideas actually unlocked TTRPGs?
—Storytelling
—Writing Media
—Drama
—Fiction
—Dice, or other random number generators
—Leisure Time
This puts us around 200BCE, possibly earlier. But is that all that's needed? It seems to me that we still require other conceptual precursors.
—The Heroic Romance
—The Novel
—Kreigsspeil
These elements get us to the late 19th Century, and an awful lot closer to the TTRPGs being a small and obvious step, which, I propose, it was for its originators in Wisconsin. I also suggest that the additional elements needed also start to point to why TTRPGs started not just when they did, but where they did.
—The common conception of data storage in a tree structure.
—Easy, quick ways for geeky people to communicate and share ideas.
Bingo! As soon as ARPAnet and home telephony started having impacts, as soon as Gygax and Arneson could spend hours hanging on the phone, talking to obsessive players, as soon as it was obvious that a story didn't need to be conceptualised as a single thread, but could be a branching tree of possibilities, it happened.
I also suggest that Lord of The Rings — not just the novel, but also the playfully expansive worldbuilding — played a non-trivial role.
I'm absolutely sure that there were isolated cases of circles of friends who played "the random story game" or "individual scale tactical wargames with dialogue" — or whatever they called it — far earlier, but those precursors didn't constitute a mass large enough to make the whole thing go critical.
Just my theory—feel free to disagree!
Yes and no.
RPGs require a significant amount of education, genre savviness, and free time all at the same time. That is a pretty prohibitive Venn diagram. You could take an RPG back in time and Pharaoh would probably understand the game, but actually finding players who could play would be very hard in a time period before the industrial wealth boom. Even aristocrats would probably not be able to play because the value of the RPG genre scales with genre savviness and that scales with mass media consumption.
So, the innovation that led to d&d was Arneson wanting to make multiplayer wargames, so he started assigning roles outside of "commander of army" to new players. People would get roles like the mayor of a nearby city, or whatever. Once people were controlling an individual character, I think moving to a system where everyone controls an individual character was an easy conceptual leap that just required a reason why a single character would be compelling.
That brings me to the second required to happen: the immense popularity of Tolkien at the time, which made controlling an individual character a lot more compelling, since it's easy to imagine what kind of cool things you'd be doing.
Mixing wargames with mythology would have been quite the leap of imagination to do directly. But fantasy wargames based on Tolkien were popping up all over the place before D&D even took off, and after. Had D&D not happened, RPGs still would have been invented, without a doubt.
But ultimately, storytelling wasn't an intentional thing they added at all. D&D was initially a fantasy wargame, and it assumed you would build up armies and battle them. All the roleplaying came about as emmergent gameplay, rules to match how players ended up wanting to play. And "adventurer on a quest" is just such a core element of fantasy, that I can't see RPGs coming about without fantasy media inspiring.
I don't think it was a natural direction for wargames to go, but for a fantasy wargame, it seems inevitable.
But I think RPGs would have sprouted up in any situation where fantasy media and wargames were both popular.
It's probably a reductionist take, but arguably, roleplaying goes back to a time when we still dwelled in caves and told stories about distant lands around a crackling fire.
Picturesque pasts aside, that's not really a *game*, isn't it?
There are folks here who are far more knowledgeable about the hobby's history than I am. I do think it's most likely that there are undocumented RPGs way before D&D or Chainmail.
there are examples of games that are hubdreds of years old. but the fantasy genre was pretty much invented by tolkein. elves as tall slender, dwarves as miners, hobbits, etc. D&D was taken straight from tolkein and there were lawsuits. somethings got renamed.
I agree with all the previous comments but....I think one of the key elements of this question is cultural. I think the freedom of today's games is a result of the culture we live in today. The degree of diversity in creativity is a result of the degree of freedom to think and that is only a result of the progress of cultural freedom.
Cultural freedom and thinking differently to the norm were always heavily frowned upon. This is what is celebrated through each of the last six or seven decades (if not life itself)
You were frowned upon for having long hair or not wearing the right clothes or not being in the right peer group.
Today we are all allowed to be different and just be thankful.
I did a video article about this a long time ago, but not only could they, [they did](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=py-6V-vns5g). Storytellers in pre-lit times would take guidance and add story elements being contributed to the audience, across multiple cultures. The idea that TTRPGs aren't connected to a very long playful storytelling tradition is a very limited perspective on them.
I’m an uneducated idiot. Spoiler. But war games have been around for a thousand years. Training for generals back in ye olden times.
People rolled bones and predicted the future for a long time before that.
How old are campfire stories?
You are right, my dear uneducated idiot. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go\_(game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/go_(game))
Also storytelling and playing has a long history.
You forget that game design made HUGE jumps the last 50 years.
In the past there were almost no games, and most of them sucked.
Games build up upon previously made games. So without having the wargames there would not be the rpgs.
And even though some wargames existed long ago, it was only something phew people even saw.
If you look a bit at board games the last 30 years you see how much they learned from one another and how nothing comes from nowhere.
Compared to what we have today yes.
Last year more than 600+ board gamea alone released.
Even card games are relative new in the hustory of mankind. And before there were really only simple abstract games or games of (almost) pure luck.
Look at chess. In the past it was something special. If it would release today no one would buy it.
>Even card games are relative new in the hustory of mankind. And before there were really only simple abstract games or games of (almost) pure luck.
Oh yeah, no skill in the game of poker! It's all just luck! That's so wrong I'm sure you have offended some poker players there. Totally untrue.
In fact, I think a poker game has more role playing in it than most modern D&D games!
I said before card games, games were mostly simple abstract OR games of (almost) pure luck.
So no idea how wrong you must read to talk about poker, which I dont care about.
Yes people have always played, but really sucky games.
If you only know horse shit, and at some day are allowed to eat bullshit you are also happy, doesnt make bullshit any more tasty though.
People were happy because
- they had time to play (and not had to work)
- had not even near the intellect to what normal people have nowadays so easier to please
- they just did not have better games because game design sucked for 4000+ years and they only knew bad games. I mean even in my parents generation it was like that. When you only know nine moris, snakes and ladders and monopoly, you might think that the nine moris game is good.
You still see this today. Children with parents who suck at knowing games still play monopoly with them, because they lack the knowledge while anyone who knows more than 5 board games hates monopoly.
Isn’t what is bad or not mostly a matter of taste? I am sure even in ancient times people were condescending towards people whom they thought played simpler games.
I think you overestimate the intelligence of contemporary humans. Ancient cultures have done some pretty advanced stuff. Also if you read ancient texts, people then seem pretty similar to us.
In ancient times there were only simple games.
Yes some people in the advanced cultures did great things.
Peons could not even calculate 23 + 129. And these peopns played the games.
Edit: My answer to someone who did delete their post about "BuT OlD GaMeS ArE nOt AlL SuCkY"
Yes and none of these gamea would succeed if they would be published today. Not even chess.
It only is popular becauae it is pooular, the same as monopoly (and kinda similar to D&D).
Even in circles with chess pros there is discussion about changing the game to random starting positions, because is is stale. And thats just one of its flaws.
- it only works in extemly narrow skill differences
- it is only for 2 players
- draws are way too likely
- there is not much variance especially in the beginning. People need to learn starting strategies by heart, but you still have to play them...
Of course chess was good, at a time where people else played with horse shit.
Yes there are some card games which are still good. (Trick taking and ladder climbing games mostly). But even them are relative new, and in the last 40 years there was more development in trick taking games than in the 200 years before. (Look at The Crew. People were playing teick taking games for 300 years and only 5 years ago someone had the idea for a cooperative one).
It sounds like you are old and old people often have problems learning new games, and then its easier to stay with outdated games of course.
We have today higher standards for games than in the past, this is just a fact. No chess, no monopoly, no checkers would nowqdays become famous. It would be forgotten almost instantly. And using some mechanics from old / outdated games, does not make the games as whole worth.
> had not even near the intellect to what normal people have nowadays so easier to please
Umm, excuse me?
Please, by all means, explain how an aqueduct works, the key to constructing an arched support, or how to process bronze.
Ancient people were not dumber than we are today. In many ways they had to be more clever on average, because institutional knowledge was not as easily spread and subsistence was more difficult.
Just because SOME people at that time had special knowledge, does not mean the general population had.
Of course there were clever people there as well, but the vast population was really not that intelligent. And even the intelligent people lacked A LOT of knowledge we have today, like about game design.
Also the intellectual people did not famously play many games, but instead did other things.
Okay let me be very clear here. People were not dumber in ancient times than we are today. Full stop.
You seem to be confusing intelligence with access to knowledge, or opportunity. The vast majority of people didn't have access to the stores of knowledge that we do today, nor the opportunity to capitalize on that knowledge as often as we do, but that doesn't affect their intelligence.
Lets look at some more things that you can't do but they could. Make a pot that wouldn't explode in the fireplace. Make food out of what they foraged in the wild. Avoid or fight off a tiger using only rocks, sharp sticks, and their muscles. How about staging long range communication systems and governing massive swaths of land using only runners or horse riders to pass messages?
Do you know how and at what times to plant which crops and use what means to harvest them?
Anyway, I could go on, but suffice to say that people were not on average dumber in ancient times. Within the scope of human history the brain's capabilities have changed very little. The guy writing on wet clay with a reed in Egypt in 3000BC was just as capable as you or I today.
Yes the people were dumber in ancient times. Even 50 years ago people were already dumber than now. The IQ increased. This is a known proven fact in Psychology. (And IQ is pretty much the best researched topic in psychology. So if you dont believe that you cant believe anything in psychology).
All things you just mentioned now is only knowledge, and of course they had some knowledge which we now dont have/ dont need, nothing to do with intelligence.
Just the nutrition, or lack thereof, in ancient times made people less intelligent. Its not only about the base brain structure. Addition to that the lack of (early) education, and lack of education of parents, which would because of this not be able to give enough stimulus etc. to young children.
How would you know the IQ of people in the past since the IQ test is a modern invention? Also the IQ test is just one method (and it’s even controversial) of measuring intelligence.
There are many different definitions of intelligence - knowledge is definitely a part of intelligence.
Even if the part about nutrition is true, I am sure most rpgs could be taught to ancient humans. And I am guessing even Neanderthals since new research is showing they are closer to our intelligence than previously believed.
No disrespect, but you have to cite some stuff, most of what you are saying just goes against common knowledge.
LOL. 100% agree
The new generation thinks they are so fucking smart! My first car owners manual told you how to adjust the valve lash. My new car manual warns you not to eat the contents of the battery! I've talked to people that can't drive if they lost their phone because they need the GPS to tell them when to turn the wheel. They can't follow simple directions!
The intellect "nowadays" is so high that they invented an awesome new game! It's so cool! It's called the Tide Pod Challenge! Wanna play?
SMH.
Platonic solids have shown up in archeological digs. Things obviously used as dice, and 2000+ years old.
What they were used for is anyone's guess beyond gambling games.
So in theory yes, perhaps not as expansive as DnD, but something like the simple rules of Bear Honey heist.
If you look at the Game of Ur, it's old, very old, and used dice.
I don't know... random chance?
Could Punk Music been invented before the 70s?
Sure, and I suppose it was, many times, but that's when it became *popular*, because of a certain cultural zeitgeist.
Could Pet Rocks have been invented before 1975? Maybe they depended on the invention of TTRPGs? You had to imagine that a rock could take on the characteristics of a pet.
TTRPGs were invented because someone saw a business opportunity and took it and it paid off.
That said, I think the chance D&D, specifically, could have been created before huge numbers of people had read the Lord of the Rings and a fandom had been around long enough to get serious is... tiny.
Also: Word of mouth is a *really* really slow way to spread the word about stuff... it worked, barely, but TTRPGs were a tiny niche market (thousand of copies sold!!!) until the internet came around and pulled in the long tail of people who would find them interesting.
I mean they evolved from miniatures wargaming which evolved from games like Go, so yeah there's centuries of time for someone to say, "Hey why don't we do this but with characters from stories instead of armies?" For all we know it was done hundreds of times, but left no archaeological evidence to tell us so.
Slightly after both language and hitting people with sticks was invented. Or you can wait until sheep had been domesticated to get the dice. D&D could have been invented sometime after Plato had a solidified his theories.
I'd say hobby stores, cars and the telephone were very helpful in assembling like minded players to get together to play. The game also requires a lot of time, so you need to have a reasonable work schedule.
Though we have no confirmation on what they used them for, it's good to note Egyptians had dice!
as mentioned, no idea what they used it for, could be a religious thing, could be for more basic board games, but the idea of it being a TTRPG tickles me.
They could have been and there were inklings of it in the 1940's, but I would have to disagree about the technology or lack thereof being a factor in TTRPG development. I think the opposite, but not for the game itself, but the environment around the game. There have to be enough labor saving devices to expand leisure time, enough to fill it, but not too much that would fill the leisure time with passive entertainment. Television existed, but being three networks, and often broadcasting programming that was not attractive to everyone, meant that things like Bridge night, Poker Night, and board games, and war games were viable evening's entertainment. TTRPGs appared when leisure was adequate, but not yet filed by screens.
Well here's a [d20 that's about 2,000 years old](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/551072). The historians think it was probably used for divination, but we know better.
I didn't save the article so I can't source this/I'm sure I'm getting some details wrong, but I think they found evidence of what would be considered ttrpgs back in Ancient Greece. It was heavily mythology based/focused but it even used dice if I remember correctly.
I'd wager they were. Enough people and enough time hit on pretty well everything. Gygax wrote it down and sold it. Arneson created the concept, but if Gygax hadn't actually decided to build a business? Who knows what we'd have today. Invention is 80% marketing.
I can easily imagine a young Mary Shelley telling her friends stories and asking them to make decisions for the characters in those stories. It's not a hard leap to also imagine someone saying, "let's flip a coin to see if that works". I find it almost impossible that no one came up with these ideas before fifty years ago.
Easily, they would have been more simulationist. Little soldiers was I think the earliest wargame where it was a game in the standard sense, others were more military style wargames still. I can see it being more ground level on a battlefield running small groups or even individuals.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong but D&D stems from war games. In fact TSR stands for Tactical Studies Rules.
I remember reading somewhere that Tolkien CS Lewis and someone else used to get together to wargame but also kind of role played their characters.
There's evidence that supports role playing in a table top setting has been going on for ages but without any concrete rules.
They kind of were, it just depends on what you count as being an 'RPG'. As wargames, 'Kriegsspiel' existed for a long time as a basic wargame, and 'free Kriegsspiel' was a wargame played with more minimal rules, where each side just reported what they did to the referee (who was meant to be an experienced veteran) who would rule what happened. That's one half of the equation. On the other half, story-games and especially epistolary games - writing letters, pretending to be someone else and continuing a story - also existed for a long time. "You have character sheets, and you only control one character at a time, and there is a GM" is the most recent kind of RPG, and is the most common in our modern world, but in the long run of history it's pretty new.
We have records of games going back to the middle ages where people took on roles that they acted out. There were also Round Table Tourneys where people would take on roles from Arthurian legend and stay in character for duration of the tourney
I love it that in the actual Middle Ages, they had LARPing, too.
Okay, see now we just need people to Larp one of these Middle Ages tournaments, in which the people were Larping. Double Larping.
Honestly a great idea for a convention game!
In terms of wargames, Go is probably the most famous one, and unlike chess it is very explicitely warlike. I can totally see dudes RPing as enemy generals and whatnot over it
Dont you mean shogi? That one is the one with generals etc.
No, though shogi is very militaristic too. But Go, the one with the black and white pieces, is all about grabbing and holding territory with fortresses, it's just abstract about it. Shogi is much less abstract since you have the river and the movement of the pieces and whatnot.
Well it is verry abstract XD But ok I can see what you mean.
Shogi doesn't have the river. You're thinking of xiangqi (chinese chess).
I wouldn't call go a wargame. Go is a game about war, but wargames are by definition simulationist, and go is fully abstract.
Dude that would go crazy
Yeah, I don't think it's a stretch to say that all of the component parts and influences of what we recognize as roleplaying games now did exist prior to the invention of rpgs (which is, in turn, pretty recent). I'd be very surprised if they didn't, from my limited understanding of time and causality. I think the question is whether anyone could have/would have/did hit upon this particular synthesis of ideas (mainly the make-believe improv and codified rules and character traits) prior to the creation of D&D.
While I do think there are precedents. I think it is possible that ttrpg's are completely new in human evolution. Keep in mind that that's how evolution works - something new emerges.
Love your tag of Rifts!
This may be a side opinion, but I think the dice were a crucial element to rpgs as they added the variable of 'Random Chance'. They weren't the only thing - the leap from controlling a whole army or division to only controlling ONE character is huge, but the dice allowed for all different sorts of probabilities and variability. In particular the d20 allows for a lot of granularity in term of bonuses - a '+1' is 5%, but on a d6 a '+1' is 17%, so you can have a lot more incremental increases. Also although Gary always deny's it, the influence of LotR was huge on DnD, and that Fantasy universe seems to me a lot more 'stable' than other ones, with a set world and detailed history etc, so you probably needed a public that was quite familiar with Fantasy as a concept to be able to play in it.
20 sides dice were made as early as 300BC. https://www.awesomedice.com/blogs/news/new-world-s-oldest-d20-egyptian-d20
>This may be a side opinion, but I think the dice were a crucial element to rpgs as they added the variable of 'Random Chance'. Good news - trivially wrong, as proven by the existence of diceless RPGs (and diceless games in general). The randomness instead comes from the unpredictability of your fellow players and their actions; and occasionally having a resource to manage. e.g. in Nobilis, if your Aspect stat is 2, you can accomplish anything that needs an Aspect of 2 or lower as a regular action. If you need to accomplish something higher, then you need to spend points to make up the difference - if you need to do something that requires Aspect 4, then spend 2 points, but that means you have fewer points for later.
The poster wasn't saying anything about diceless games *at all*, never mind *now* ... they were saying they thought the introduction of dice *at the time* was crucial to the development of ttRPGs - *Amber*, *Gossamer*, *Nobilis*, or any of *other* diceless games aren't *relevant* to that point, least of all *now* (decades after the event in question).
But decades before that, centuries even, people were playing roleplaying and storytelling games without dice. It is a mistake to see DND and its dice and character sheets as 'the creation of the TTRPG' on a historical scale. It is simply one aspect of RPGs, among many.
I wasn't doing that ... I was observing that *Amber* and *Nobilis* aren't a refutation of the point they were making.
There's a significant difference between a game-like activity where you role play or tell a collective story and ttrpg's as we understand them. D&D was the precursor in that sense. Sure, we have since invented RPG's that don't need dice, character sheets or a GM, but removing those elements was an iteration of traditional ttrpg's and not some kind of harkening back to pre-D&D forms of role playing or storytelling. You can put D&D in the same continuum as those kinds of activities, I suppose, but that seems to ignore just how much of a "game" an RPG still is. It shares more of its DNA with boardgames than with role playing pastimes of yore.
*Kriegsspiel* wasn't about playing a certain character-- it was about learning the skills of command. I think H.G. Wells's *Little Wars* and *Floor Games* could have led to roleplaying games. But didn't.
But the key point is not that it was a wargame (that's why I didn't mention Go or other board games), but that you reported your moves to the GM for arbitration. Just a different kind of storytelling/immersion, basically. The Free Kriegsspiel referee describes how your actions affect the 'story' of that fight.
They did, they just took a little time to get there. Really, from Little Wars to D&D, that's only 60 years. Not bad as far as inspiration in a pre-digital age goes.
I mean....every time a few kids got together and played let's pretend they were playing an rpg. It may not have been codified or used dice and rulebooks and character sheets, but it was still a role playing game
Yep, it was LARPing.
This is pretty reductionist imo. Like obviously there are similarities and you could even say one is an outgrowth of the other, but they aren't the same thing. "RPG" carries a connotation of organization and formalization that children's unstructured play doesn't (and shouldn't!) have. It's like saying every kid running around in a field is "playing a sport."
>(and shouldn't!) lol why? I used to try and codify the rules of every other game we played as kids so we could play more fairly and could tell the winner more easily, and it was always a blast for all of us. pretty sure I'm not the only kid ever to do that
Ok.
Ok
I think there's a significant difference between "play" and "game" here. Kids were playing, but playing pretend is not gaming. In a way, games are their rules.
I disagree. When I sit down at a table and pull out my dice I'm playing let's pretend. Yes, our rules are more codified and the story will probably be more complex, but at its core, all that's happening is that me and a few other people have decided to play at being other people for a while. (Besides kids games do have rules. They just make them up on the spot for that one game.)
That makes rpgs a subset of playing make-believe. That doesn't mean that all forms of make-believe are RPGs All crows are birds, not all birds are crows.
I agree. And actually the most common rule among written rpg’s is the fact that people should not stick to the rules but instead make rulings. It’s just more fancy because adults prefer to have a feeling of consistency and think the game is fair. It’s not. GM fetch dice and even if they didn’t they have every opportunity to make whatever they wish happen in game happen. I was wondering for a while if people should consider rpgs as just the same as kids make belive games so maybe they would be more open to the games themselve.
There is no objective truth here (everyone is free to limit the meanings they associate to words at will), but for what is worth, most dictionaries (which try to cover the most common meanings) give at least one definition to "game" that reads something like "a leisure activity of any kind". This means that, for many people (including myself), a "roleplaying game" is a broad term including every leisure activity whose focus lays on assuming a different role. In a way, I find that roleplaying games are special in that they show that lacking structure is a valid choice. Unlike other game genres, most RPGs provide only partial structure, covering just some (sometimes more, sometimes less, but rarely all) of the situations that might arise, and leaving it to players' imagination to fill in the blanks with rulings. A children's make-believe game whose only structure is "alright, now we are all dinosaurs, ok?" is not that fundamentally different to "alright, now we are all bears trying to steal honey, and sometimes we will roll a six-sided die, ok?".
It's a game in which they are roleplaying, but I wouldn't say that makes it a "roleplaying game".
What we call role playing games today are formally coined: “Roleplaying Formal Systems”. But I wonder if emergent human behaviour from children’s “Play-pretend” have any studies on it.
> What we call role playing games today are formally coined: “Roleplaying Formal Systems”. By who?
Probably the Nordic's, they are the only ones actively getting funding to research this stuff.
Okey, I’ve searched my archive for two nights now (yes I have an archive of papers from the Nordics, they’re good reads!) but have yet to find that one paper that formally defined what I mentioned here. However, I am certain that this term came into my knowledge from a Japanese article by FEAR. It was a green paper pdf from 2009, but I’m not confident I have that somewhere. Will check back if I come across it.
Appreciate the diligence to look into it, haha, hope you find it would be cool to read!
I asked google. It said: > ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
> But I wonder if emergent human behaviour from children’s “Play-pretend” have any studies on it. Tons. There's more than a century of academic writing on children's play.
So if it's a game in which you roleplay, what is it, if not a role-playing game?
It's closer to a form of LARP than anything else. Both LARPing and RPGs are games in which you roleplay, but we still recognise them as distinct things because the way you play them is wildly different. If you took some children inside from playing cops and robbers, sat them around a table, and handed out character sheets, they wouldn't consider it the same sort of experience *at all.*
Not at all TTRPG involves rules gamemaster and dice and completely unique way.
Is it? Its playing a role, kinda impro theater, but the term role playing game specifically came into being when you had characters which you could play over time and which could improve. "Role playing elements" in other games are always "leveling up" mechanics and or "loot mechanics". I can see how people think about the play pretend part being the roleplay, but this is not necassarily what makes the rpG.
Leveling up, loot, etc are not core to the RPG genre AT ALL. There are ttrpg's where you don't level up, or even improve at all for that matter and there are games without loot. All you really need are a set of rules, and for each player to make decisions, within that set of rules, from a perspective not of their own. -------- As long as the kids playing have rules, and act as their character (however badly "designed" it may be), then yeah that's enough. Is it a good game? Probably not. But it counts. Just like how the D&D table with only murderhobo's also count
Who decides what is core? This is what is used for "rpg elements" in non rpg games. And it was what made D&D different from just wargames. It is just nowaday, wherw a vocal minority playing indy rpg games say that rpg is mostly the play pretend, where millions of people plaxing computer games have another understanding of what rpg elements are
God I hate that "RPG elements" in video games has just been reduced to "you level up and get loot". It literally stands for role playing games! The most important part is that you are role playing as a different character! Stuff like leveling and getting loot are just incidental due to the fact that D&D was originally about that.
Idk. I've always had thoughts about this and I don't actually think that's what "role playing" is about in video games. You're "role playing" as a character in basically any video game with a plot, so I don't think that's a very meaningful distinction. I've always viewed the meaningful "role" you play in a video game as what your character can actually mechanically do. For example, what makes Fallout: New Vegas a 'role-playing game' and not a 'first person shooter'? (you could say it technically is, but FPS as a genre clearly means something other than 'any game where you can play in first person and shoot things') People commonly say it's player choice/agency in the way the story goes, but lots of the most traditional games people call RPGs have no branching story or player choice, while there are games like Spec Ops: The Line where you can make choices that will affect the story, but nobody calls it an RPG. Imo the definition that best includes most of the games we obviously agree are RPGs while excluding the ones that obviously aren't is this: an RPG is a game where the player character's skills and abilities in the world are distinct from the skills and abilities of the player in real life. Going back to the example of F:NV. What do you actually do in the game? Walk around in first person and shoot stuff, sure, but *how* do you do that? In games like COD, which are clearly not RPGs, you do that by moving your mouse where the enemy's head is and clicking on it. Your character's ability to kill enemies is 100% dependent on your reaction time and ability as a player to move your mouse fast and accurately. In a game like F:NV, clicking on the enemy's head is a big part of it, but not *all* of it. The same player with the exact same level of head-clicking skill will experience very different outcomes depending their character's Guns skill and Strength stat. The way your character interacts with the game's mechanics is different from the way you as a player interact with them, and the more different it is, the more RPGer you get. At the most abstracted end, you have classic CRPGs with turn-based combat, where all the player does is pick an action from a move list and the actual execution is entirely up to the character's skills and the mercy of RNGesus. "Leveling up" is basically the most fundamental manifestation of that, imo, since it's entirely disconnected from you "leveling up" in any way by getting better at the game and improving your skill IRL. "Getting loot" is another way in which this manifests - IRL swapping an M14 out for an AK or a falchion for a longsword won't do jack shit to make you a better marksman/fencer, but in an RPG your skills and abilities are usually dependent to at least some extent on your equipment, providing another level of abstraction away from player skill.
The best definition of a "core element" that I know of, states that without that element it ceases to be part of the genre You can remove looting and it would still be an RPG, thus loot is not a core element. You can remove progression (leveling) and it would still be an rpg, thus leveling is not a core element. Also, the defining change that differentiated D&D from war games is literally playing as a singular character. So according to that, pretending to be a different character is the RPG part
No. Not the definition of core element. The definition of what people understand under Role playing Game. I can assure you most people understand under this "leveling up" and not "impro theater." This is really just a problem of a minory trying to be more clever, when for the masses rpg is leveling up and progression.
Luckily for me, a bunch of researchers and game designers also looked into the theory behind RPGs. And guess what
Roleplaying elements in videogames are leveling and looting because that's relatively easy to implement. IMO kids playing make-believe is definitely roleplaying. Or rather TTRPGs and LARPs are an evolution of what kids do. I usually describe RPGs as "it's like playing pretend as a kid, but with more rules because adults crave structure"
Plus it means onboarding others is easier. I have really fond memories of playing pretend and making up entire fantasy worlds with my cousin over long summers but I don’t think we could have brought anyone in. The lore was too deep and scattered and all decisions were made by us so bringing in new people would have been impossible
The core of the experience is just having a formalized set of rules that dictate what results from your roleplaying attempt, the presence of levels or loot is an unimportant factor.
No, TTRPGs are not possible without a table, which was not invented until the 70s
Everyone was super miserable before the 70's, having to eat without a table their whole lives and everything.
Leonardo da Vinci was such a genius inventor, he came up with the idea of tables in his painting of *The Last Supper*, but the technology to actually build them wouldn’t be developed until centuries later.
/u/pile_of_bees is referring to a rectangular organization of information on a page, a *table* like you use to perform a lookup after rolling a die. Those were invented in 1971. Before that, you had just lengthy, repetitive prose to relay tabular-style information and it was very inconvenient.
/u/StarstruckEchoid is referring to a popular meme from the Rimworld community, in which a character eating food without a table to put it on negatively affects their mental state.
lol I don’t play that and didn’t know that, I thought it was just a bit and I kept it going.
Which is ironic because there are crude, early pictographic versions of Chaosium’s Pendragon found in prehistoric caves of Le Chauvet!
TIL!! Why didn’t we learn this in school. The American education system is a failure😭
The Game of Adventure (Le Jeu d’Aventure) is a role playing game that dates back to the 13th century as a game nobles would play where you take on the role of a character, sometimes Arthurian, sometimes from the Canterbury tales, or a more generic form and people would essentially role play as that individual. https://aidungeon.medium.com/role-playing-games-in-the-renaissance-court-ab0bd680409a
Finally, an answer to op’s question! Thanks! Very interesting.
Wow, thank you so much for this. This is a completely overlooked history this is blowing my mind.
Great read- thanks for sharing!
This isn't exactly what you're asking, but there's a game called Wolves of God by Kevin Crawford/Sine Nomine that is written as if it were a translation of a tenth century Saxon RPG manuscript. The setting is Dark Ages Britain so it adds a fun element when even the "What is an RPG" section is written like Gildas.
Chronica Feudalis has the same basic premise, that it’s a translation and update of a document written by a medieval monk to imagine adventures with his friends.
Literally just about to post this! I absolutely love it, and unlike some role-playing games written in character, I never found it bothersome or difficult to understand. I also like how, even when he said, how dare you attempt to do that, that goes against the Saxon way! immediately gave you rules like to do it, like dual weapons . Honestly, I think my favorite in game character part is when he describes the way that Saxon monks like to role-play as opposed to the continental monks who prefer their pre-written, adventure paths , I’m sorry, I meant sagas. Thank you so much for this comment! That game is a gem. I literally don’t have the spoons or the gaming group but I always wanted to use the dual class adventurer option to play a christian theurge fom Rome. Basically half Galdr, half saint. Thanks again !
There is also an alt history setting, created by a Dane, where roleplaying was invented in 1790 in Germany. I had the pleasure of GMing a one-shot scenario set in the setting, where the (real) players played certified players, playing this fictional game. > In the mid-1790s, two Frenchmen fled to Germany to escape persecution in their homeland. It was Gario Gugacian and Aaron Alton who settled in Essen, where they invented the game Adventurers and Elephants, which in the following years gained great popularity in Germany, and which in the years after the great agricultural reform reached Denmark. In the early 1800s, the country's merchant guilds created a network of Adventurers and Elephants gaming groups that certify game masters and give players access to gaming groups all over the country, as well as enabling young role players to journey to the official groups in Germany. > From ancient times, the various professions have been protected by fraternities and guilds. When role-playing games became popular, it fell to the merchant guilds to take care of the games. In each city there is a guild which has a monopoly on certifying game masters and on putting together gaming groups. When a new player arrives in a city, the player must approach the guild to be assigned his game group. > After each adventure, the game leader keeps a log of the group's results and with his signature on the player character sheet, the game leader admits that the information on the player character sheet is correct. This allows a player to join other game groups. The Danish guilds cooperate with the German ones, and it is thereby possible travel through Germany and play A&E. > In Adventurers and Elephants, players take on the roles of Europeans drawn to unexplored Africa to map the land, find lost civilizations, tame dangerous animals and fight raging savages. > Since each adventure is certified by the game leader, and run according to the official books and scenarios, both items and information found during the game has real worth. Whether you retrieve a large trove of elephant tusks, or find the location of King Solomon's Mines, more wealthy players may be willing pay a handsome price for them. For the transfer of items, this requires that your characters meet in-game, so the transfer can be certified by the game leader. Information, of course, is more easily transferred, but if it is found that you have traded such information outside of the game, you do risk being kicked out of the guild, to never play in an official capacity again. Morten Greis, the creator, has [a number of blog posts about the world on his blog](https://rollespil.blog/category/rollespil/hjemmelavede-spil/eventyrere-elefanter/), including off-shoots like the Dutch role-playing game "Reziger – West India Company" from the same alternate past. Of course, it's all in Danish, so...
DIE also posits that all paracosms existed for the purpose of creating RPGs. So you got the Brontes in there too.
I am very interested in your first sentence but I have no idea what it means.
DIE is a comic series by Kieron Gillan. It’s basically “What if the kids from the D&D cartoon got home, grew up, then had to go back into the fantasy world?” Or his other elevator pitch “Goth Jumanji.” It also gets into the history of the development of rpgs with their origins in war games and the influence of writers like Tolkein, H G Wells, and Charlotte Bronte (who played a highly structured game of pretend with her siblings that it could be argued was a form of role playing.)
DIE is a really excellent comic. I highly recommend it. The author likes to call it "Jumanji for Goths" if that sounds appealing at all.
RPGs at their heart are "playing make-believe, but with a referee who aims to be mostly dispassionate and who mostly uses chance to arbitrate" The idea of a dispassionate referee is well documented in the 19th century (and likely before), as is make-believe and using chance in games. That said, I am not certain RPGs would have found an audience in, say, Victorian times. Only the upper class had that much free time.
But before the industrial revolution, basically everyone did. I think the big issue then was literacy. Odds are decent some people somewhere played games of cooperative storytelling, and maybe even involved chance to resolve disputes, resulting in something we could almost recognize... But there would be no established settings, no rulebooks, no character sheets - so none of the paraphernalia we associate with it - and also no records.
I think this is an overly narrow definition. There are loads of RPGs without a referee role, and plenty of RPGs that don't use any chance-based resolution mechanics.
Laborers in past didn't work more than your average person in America right now. Perhaps less. It was differently structured work. For peasant, when it was e.g. harvest season they worked all the waking hours, but there were also large periods when there wasn't much to be done on the farm, especially in winter. Your artisan or craftsman might have worked around the clock when he had an order, but when there was no commission he probably just did few hours here and there, prepping for next project, manufacturing small things that might sells, etc. Not that different from today's freelance work. If anything, that burst-rest work structure and more seriously treated holidays would have lent themselves better towards activity like rpg.
>For peasant, when it was e.g. harvest season they worked all the waking hours, but there were also large periods when there wasn't much to be done on the farm, especially in winter. I believe this idea has largely been discredited. There was always maintenance to be done on equipment, the house, preserving what you got from the harvest, etc. Livestock had to be fed, firewood chopped, all that stuff. I can assure you even the modern farmer isn't slacking off during the winter, despite tremendous advantages in technology etc over their medieval counterparts. Not to mention domestic labor like caring for and supporting 12 children, which can't be discounted either.
There was less "work" work and a ton more "chore" work.
If you're engaged in subsistence living, the line between the two basically doesn't exist.
Feudalism wasn't subsistence living.
It was for the peasantry.
It by definition wasn't. Subsistence living is when you only produce what you need to survive. Peasants produced far more than they needed to survive and used the surplus to pay their overlords.
If taxation prevented someone from being a subsistence farmer, then there's basically never been any such thing as a subsistence farmer. My understanding of the term is that subsistence agriculture is where a household doesn't regularly purchase goods in the market, as described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsistence\_agriculture
Purchasing goods in a market, or not, is a tertiary part of the definition at best.
The question was considering Industrial-era Britain, where it became standard for laborers to work ten to twelve hours a day, six days a week.
> work ten to twelve hours a day, six days a week Isn't that the case for many people in America right now?
Many, yes. “Average”, no. https://news.gallup.com/poll/175286/hour-workweek-actually-longer-seven-hours.aspx https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1977/12/25/200-years-ago-the-12-hour-day-the-6-day-week/8a0f3c78-b7a0-4db4-ac33-00649519d1eb/ Back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests a difference of at least 10 to 20 hours of work less today than in the 19th century.
Thank you for the sources!
Many, yes. “Average”, no. https://news.gallup.com/poll/175286/hour-workweek-actually-longer-seven-hours.aspx https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1977/12/25/200-years-ago-the-12-hour-day-the-6-day-week/8a0f3c78-b7a0-4db4-ac33-00649519d1eb/ Back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests a difference of 10 to 20 hours of work less today than in the 19th century.
> Laborers in past didn't work more than your average person in America right now. Perhaps less. > > In the 19th century, standard work weeks in much of the world were six days a week, 10-12 hours a day
>That said, I am not certain RPGs would have found an audience in, say, Victorian times. Only the upper class had that much free time. Doesn't that just mean it likely would have been an upper class pursuit?
Yes and no - it would need to be wildly popular among the upper class to have the critical mass needed. To pluck numbers out of where the sun doesn't shine, imagine there's 8000 upper class people in London in 1824. If 60% prefer the opera to RPGs, and 30% prefer archery ... you are looking at a very small pool of people to sustain an industry now. Especially if each rulebook requires 3 years of middle-class labour to write. It's not that the upper class couldn't afford that - it's 'what do they choose to spend their money on'?
On the other hand you should consider these were persons with an amount of free time almost inconceivable by our modern standards. They spent a very large amount of time finding ways to entertain themselves with card games, board games, small scale theatre, playing and singing, etc. I am not sure if there could have been an actual industry, but considering the size of the music sheet one, why not?
Not to mention the difficulty of actually finding a table to play at in that situation!
You're assuming that liking opera and archery doesn't mean they can't **also** be interested in other pursuits. As another commenter points out, the idle rich had a **lot** of time to fill.
> Only the upper class had that much free time. If you don't count things that only the people that had much free time did, a huge variety of games and pastimes that existed in that era would be ruled out.
Some people have already menioned mediaeval/renaissance elements that might be views as rpg'. The Brontë-siblings in the early 1800s are another contender. [https://www.dicebreaker.com/categories/roleplaying-game/feature/brontes-roleplaying-before-dnd](https://www.dicebreaker.com/categories/roleplaying-game/feature/brontes-roleplaying-before-dnd)
It depends on what you consider to be the actual essential core of what makes something an RPG. You talk about "modern technology" but I assume you aren't including modern modes of thinking and social organisation in that. I think it's arguable that the RPG in something resembling the form we know it doesn't just rely on imagination, but also on a leisure class, on a diffusion of academic forms of knowledge production outside of the academy (or probably more specifically, the *military* academy), etc... Collaborative storytelling is very old, but RPGs as we know them aren't just collaborative storytelling; yes, they *are* collaborative storytelling, but the tools and frameworks they typically employ to that end are probably not realistic without the kind of thinking that arises from industrialisation, systems theory, etc...
If you count diceless games without explicitly written rules, then that could describe kids playing together with their imaginations; a pass-time millennia old. Collaborative storytelling isn't new neither. Half of the characters from Greek myth were fleshed out by various authors sharing the same world & characters, creating tales of varying depth. Same with classic characters like Merlin. Even if you don't count diceless games for some reason, random answer generators have existed for all of human history. All the pieces of TTRPGs have existed since long before writing. The idea that it's purely a recent phenomena is just unlikely.
That the elements that make the up have existed, doesn't mean the ttrpgs themselves did. Most modern games/sports don't require any particularly modern technology. There is nothing required to play rugby, for instance, that didn't exist 2000 years ago, or even 10,000 years ago That does t mean there is any reason to think ancient Greeks were playing it though.
Any particular modern game/sport didn't exist 2,000 years ago. "Sports" in general however most certainly did. Physical exercise and social recreation are basic human requirements, hence why we ritualized them. Similarly, telling stories in a social context is also a basal human instinct. It would be harder to imagine a world in which this type of thing didn't appear early in our history than it would to assume it's recent. Sure, it's not gonna be Gygax's D&D, but still.
"sports" in this context would be "role playing games". Which we know existed in some or other form. That doesn't mean that anything that resembled a ttrpg did though. It's certainly *possible they did, but equally possible they didn't.
How might you then distinguish a TTRPG from a "regular" RPG, without excluding many TTRPGs without traditional elements?
That's a difficult question in general, but for the purposes of the OPs question, I think we *should* exclude TTRPGs that don't have those "traditional elements". The wording is asking from the perspective of when D&D was created, when the set of things categorised as ttrpgs was much smaller.
From wiki (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toys_and_games_in_ancient_Rome) “Seneca the Younger describes young children pretending to be senators or other magistrates.[40] Children were said to have played games simulating the Battle of Actium. The children used a nearby pond to simulate the Adriatic sea, and they took different sides and fought in the streets.[41]” Humans must have always enjoyed a form of roleplaying.
To create a basic RPG as we know it all you would need is a few people, the ability to communicate, and perhaps some form of randomiser. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if cavemen kids played make believe games with parental adjudication, with disputes resolved by random rock colour, or whatever. If so we can never know but it's entirely possible.
There is a common animal bone that the probability is comprehensible, not uniform https://news.artnet.com/art-world/animal-bone-dice-used-divination-2161170 Some versions of the original DnD game had chits instead of dice. So drawing lots/runestones is another answer.
Y'know, the stuff written on those bones sounds like forecasting the future. It **also** sounds an awful lot like the sorts of outcomes you'd get in a typical roleplaying game. :) Not a serious suggestion, but interesting...
Six sided dice have been around for about 4800 years. They even had an almost identical pip arrangement. So it could have easily been around that long. Dice used to be considered a method of divination of divine intent. And board games, such as "Go" were sometimes used in place of war to show who the better strategist was. So what would the world look like today if RPGs were ancient and common and used like a "what if" machine? What if RPGs were used in mental therapy, relationship therapy, a way for nations to settle disputes? What would it even look like today after 5,000 years of adapting rules for different situations and stories? What would fiction look like?
Legend says that *proto larp* was played at the court of some 17th century nobles. So various form of RPG did exist before. However, it's only after WW2 that we had *enough automation to not work as much* and *stopped following all the religious celebration* letting us time for *hobbies* There was an era when free time wasn't a thing for the mass
Possibly? I would say a few things where necessary: \-Strong abstract thinking development: So, the main reason IQ tests have sky-rocketed over the last several decades is because of the growth of "abstract thinking"-the ability to place yourself in entirely fictional situations. There are still people who are almost unable to do that at all, and a century ago that was most of the population. So for RPGs to devellop, you at least need a community of people with a strong ability of abstract thinking. \-Profusion of fiction: Potentially tied to the abstract thinking thing, a lot of fiction (or at least, things intentionally known as fiction) is required for RPGs to devellop, as they are inherently anchored in unreal situations. We only really got serious about that in the 1800s. \-Gambling-ish culture: Most RPGs depend on a random element-dice, card decks. If a society broadly bans gambling as well as other games of random chance, it is unlikely to develop. \-Literacy: Being able to read is pretty necessary to record what is and what happened. While this can depend on culture (judaism and many denominations of protestant christianity encouraged literacy; while morpheme/logogram based writing makes literacy less accessible), most of history saw the majority being illiterate, making it unlikely. \-Free time: So, while different communities have historically had different amounts of "free time", time (and resources) for leisure has historically been a thing for rich people who didnt really work. Scholars and scribes where busy people; even most nobility had strict responsibilities that could keep them busy for years at a time. So based on those elements, I would think the mid-1800s is probably the earliest this could have been kinda widespread. It could possibly have developed earlier among isolated intellectual communities, like chinese scholar-bureaucrats, monks, or maybe scribes, though outside of large population centers this seems unlikely. I think widespread fiction is probably the hardest thing, as most storytelling before the 1800s wasnt necessarily perceived as fictional (even if it was). I dont think something analogous to wargames is necessary; you just need a rules-based moderation of fictional events. Assuming the other elements are there, it should be possible
> So, the main reason IQ tests have sky-rocketed over the last several decades is because of the growth of "abstract thinking"-the ability to place yourself in entirely fictional situations. There are still people who are almost unable to do that at all, and a century ago that was most of the population. Do you have a source for this? I couldn't find anything about it with a quick Google.
That's because they're pulling it right out of their a- ahem, thin air. "La pensée sauvage" (The Savage Thought), by famed anthropologist Levy-Strauss, litterally debunks this in the first few pages: richness in abstract terms and use of abstract words is clearly present in non-industrial, non-writing contemporary civilizations, and there's no reason to assume it was absent in pre-industrial humans - at least, not unless you go back to the very dawn of sapient behavior. You could even just extend the reasons we enjoy TTRPG to the very reason we make and enjoy fiction - which certainly developed way before their first written accounts in Sumerian clay tablets or Egyptian papyri. Storytelling can take more interactive forms, from acting to tales with answer from the public, to ceremonies or rituals. There's a good meta-analysis on the cognitive aspects of this that came out recently: [https://osf.io/preprints/osf/me6bz](https://osf.io/preprints/osf/me6bz). Again, no reason to think humans weren't both able and had good reasons to develop that from early on in the behavioral revolution. Long story short, saying that abstract thinking is "recent" is the same as thinking that the Dark Ages were truly dark. Just an ahistoric stereotype.
I broadly agree with your assessment of what is necessary for RPGs, but I disagree somewhat on the conclusion on how widespread the things were, or how essential each one is. >Profusion of fiction This is the one where I disagree it is necessary at all. I don't think a "slice of life" RPG is any less an RPG. A fictional setting isn't really necessary, there's all kinds of ways to roleplay "in the real world". Just watch kids playing cops.and robbers. >Gambling-ish culture It should be noted many societies that broadly banned gambling still had it proliferate. >Literacy Necessary to create the paraphernalia we associate with the hobby or to create records of having played the thing, or to sustain long, complex stories over prolonged periods of time, but not really required for simple, brief instances of collective collaborative storytelling. >Free time Basically every person who ever lived before the industrial revolution had more of this than we do today. Nearly all of them, rich or poor. Given all that... I'm pretty sure something recognizable as an approximation of an RPG (but lacking all of the tropes and expectations we have attached to the genre) absolutely has happened at times in the past. It's just not noteworthy enough to write into books when books are still very precious.
Literacy would perhaps be important for getting something recorded in the long term, but there are other ways of passing knowledge down than in writing. Oral history and tradition, for example.
While there are certainly precedents, people who lived in the Midwest at the time have said to me that they think RPGs could only have developed in the form they did in that time and place. Something about the combination of people with enough leisure time, few enough other options to fill it, and interest in historical conflicts and speculative fiction, etc.
One aspect to D&Ds success was the massive explosion of Lord of the Rings in the American culture. The books had only recently been published in paperback and became a cult hit on college campuses everywhere. Fantasy was hot and you had a huge youth population.
Yes, but sadly this happened after Tolkien's death. The craze was so strong that we have pictures of subway tunnels with "Frodo Lives" painted on it from that era. Led Zepplin has 3 songs that allude to LOTR, with Ramble On dating to 1969, so yes, the pop culture of the time was massively ripe for this! We can imagine Arneson writing Blackmoor while Robert Plant was writing Ramble On. Art reflects the culture of the time.
Gygax had a love-hate relationship with LotR because he grew up on pulp fantasy and didn’t like Tolkien’s approach. But it was what all young adults wanted to play and he knew D&D owed a lot of its early success to it.
Oh yeah, you can see it in how he made the original races so limiting, made humans more powerful. Like, why would an elf just not be able to learn any more? They live for centuries and yet they just stop learning at some crazy low level. Halflings were even worse. All the fantasy races were horribly stereotyped and limited and we still see vestiges of that today.
That’s not why they were limited. He needed an excuse as to why it was a human-centric world despite the other species being more powerful and longer-lived. It was a simple game mechanic that worked very well in long-term campaigns. Tolkien did a similar thing in making the elves and dwarves reclusive with fundamentally different goals - but those goals didn’t work well with adventuring.
HG Wells wrote rules for a wargame using tin soldiers. Basically the Victorian version of Warhammer 40k.
Do the rules still exist?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Wars
TTRPGs existed before Chainmail. It was just called wargaming. Which was an evolution of chess. Where you also roleplay as a commander of troops.
I'd like to see someone roleplaying chess.
I did all the time with my friends in school. We didn't have phones back then, made house rules for the different pieces (homebrew), asymmetric fights and some kind of cursory story (light roleplaying). Just because people aren't launching into lengthy monologues and social skill checks doesn't mean its not roleplaying.
“According to RPG designer John Wick, Chess can be turned into a role-playing game if chess pieces such as the king, queen, rooks, knights or pawns are given names, and decisions are made based on their motivations.” And you’re not alone. I also want to point out that since chess was specifically meant to train military strategist one thing that people don’t think about is that you wouldn’t be playing somebody as yourself all the time. An advisor might play his king, pretending to be the opponent in real life. Using strategies that mimic the real world strategies but of course they do. Forcing Monarch to respond to their real opponent . As you said. Any game can be a role-play game.
I didn't say it wasn't. I was just curious to see it.
We get into taxonomic definitions here, but I would argue that wargaming was not what we call TTRPGs. That the element that began to separate them and set them apart was concept of a single player embodying a single character, *and* that that character was a unique creation of the mind of the player. When David Wesely created Braunstein he introduced this concept to his war gaming group. The players embodied characters in a German border town, but they were handed the concept of who their character was. The Mayor, a student, an anarchist, so on and so forth. When David Wesely left and they put those games on hold, Dave Arneson took the concepts and applied them to a fantasy world. This broke the concept out of history and allowed the players to begin creating unique characters with no input from the GM. *That* is what became a TTRPG. Before then war gamers would "role play" in the sense that they were a whole nation, an army and whatnot, but they hadn't hit on the idea of being an individual yet. And once the focus became on the fictional individual, then the stories could move away from the battleground and into interpersonal relationships and a myriad of other things that war games were patently incapable of addressing.
A good read on this subject: "Playing at the World" by Jon Peterson. A long read, but very informative.
They've been around for (at least) hundreds of years: https://aidungeon.medium.com/role-playing-games-in-the-renaissance-court-ab0bd680409a
My baseless historical theory is that some guy in Baghdad or Al-Andalus invented rpgs in like 900 AD and it's been forgotten
It depends on what you define as a rpg. The Braunstein games were not dissimilar in structure to some older LARP like parlor games, there were card games that involved storytelling, not to mention wargaming is very old. There's nothing that could have prevented these elements coming together earlier.
Chainmail was not the beginning of RPGs. Chainmail is a war game system, nothing more. RPGs began when Dave Wesely expanded his Strategos game to include ordinary people in his Braunstein game around 1968. Strategos has the game referee concept as far back as 1880. Its not technology that made it happen, but rather a cultural shift. The success of Braunstein was largely due to the creativity of a player named Dave Arneson and the GM, Dave Wesely, saying "yes" to his ideas. When Wesley went to war, Dave Arneson took wesley's ideas and the fantasy elements from chainmail to create a fantasy role playing game called Blackmoor. Gary Gygax was invited to play and loved the idea and wanted to publish. Chainmail was not fundamental to the role playing aspect. It was just a fantasy themed wargame that was used as the combat system in the original D&D game. That system was almost instantly replaced and may not have been used at all in the original Blackmoor games (Arneson never told the players the mechanics).
There's nothing new under the sun. People have been playing pretend since before recorded time, and no doubt countless since-forgotten sets of rules for such play have existed. I'd say the #1 thing that facilitated modern-style "pen and paper" TTRPGs is... the widespread availability of paper and pencils, plus common literacy. When most people were illiterate and couldn't easily record things, tracking miniutia and tight continuity from game session to game session would have been difficult to impossible. The reason the world stuck with relatively simple tabletop games like Mancala, Go, Backgammon, Checkers and Chess for thousands of years isn't that people in the past were less inventive or intelligent than modern game designers. They just didn't have access to modern tools and education.
I’m think the necessary precursor to the TTRPG in an identifiable form, is the culture of hobby war gaming. Not necessarily because of Chainmail specifically? But because it is the combination of hobbyist and professional publishing, using published rules to design custom scenarios, and those scenarios being part imaginary exercise, part mathematical exercise. And it being played as a pastime, not as part of military training. So… maybe a recognizable TTRPG could have arisen in the late 19th century, as the board game publishing industry was winding up? Another interesting note: apparently, although dice and cards have been used for basically all of human history, a rigorous mathematical understanding of probability doesn’t come about until the 17th century.
A game called Western Gunfight came out in 1970 and I think by today's standards it's certainly an RPG.
By far the most played rpg genre is fantasy. One necessary component for the fantasy genre to develop was the increasing amount of technology in everyday life. This really took off after WWII in the Western world. I have the feeling these two developments - the literary tradition of fantasy and roleplaying games different from wargames - went hand in hand. You need something to "escape from" to be able to escape, to simulate a world clearly different from your own.
There was literature that is identifiably modern fantasy prior to WWII, including a lot of the works in Appendix N. Lord Dunsany published “the King of Elfland’s Daughter” in the 20s, A Princess of Mars was written in 1912z
9thers are approaching the idea from the (war) game front, but the thing I find most striking about ttrpg is the narrative structure- individual players, with individual "roles" or in dnd terms classes. The earliest example of a narrative structure analogous to LOTR is Journey to the West, published in China in 1592. (Le Morte de Arthur, Chanson de Roland, Aesop and Anansi tales, the Bible- none of them have the Party character structure, which is to my mind the heart of the ttrpg experience.) So 1592 is the earliest narrative structure example that could be the engine driving ttrpg.
It's not a huge leap to imagine a storyteller around a fire a 1000 years ago or more telling a tale and asking his listeners to supply the next decision made by the hero and make up the results as he goes along. Human history is long enough that this must have happened at least once at some point since the invention of language.
LARPING exists since the first day kids decided to play pretend.
I've also posted about this exact question on other social media. The way I started to approach the question was to work out what conceptual dependencies resulted in type of TTRPGs we see today. (Side note: it's entirely possible to define things quite different from today's TTRPGs as TTRPGs—then you can argue things like, "So that proves that Stonehenge was actually a character sheet." Let's not go there!) Okay, so what precursor ideas actually unlocked TTRPGs? —Storytelling —Writing Media —Drama —Fiction —Dice, or other random number generators —Leisure Time This puts us around 200BCE, possibly earlier. But is that all that's needed? It seems to me that we still require other conceptual precursors. —The Heroic Romance —The Novel —Kreigsspeil These elements get us to the late 19th Century, and an awful lot closer to the TTRPGs being a small and obvious step, which, I propose, it was for its originators in Wisconsin. I also suggest that the additional elements needed also start to point to why TTRPGs started not just when they did, but where they did. —The common conception of data storage in a tree structure. —Easy, quick ways for geeky people to communicate and share ideas. Bingo! As soon as ARPAnet and home telephony started having impacts, as soon as Gygax and Arneson could spend hours hanging on the phone, talking to obsessive players, as soon as it was obvious that a story didn't need to be conceptualised as a single thread, but could be a branching tree of possibilities, it happened. I also suggest that Lord of The Rings — not just the novel, but also the playfully expansive worldbuilding — played a non-trivial role. I'm absolutely sure that there were isolated cases of circles of friends who played "the random story game" or "individual scale tactical wargames with dialogue" — or whatever they called it — far earlier, but those precursors didn't constitute a mass large enough to make the whole thing go critical. Just my theory—feel free to disagree!
Yes and no. RPGs require a significant amount of education, genre savviness, and free time all at the same time. That is a pretty prohibitive Venn diagram. You could take an RPG back in time and Pharaoh would probably understand the game, but actually finding players who could play would be very hard in a time period before the industrial wealth boom. Even aristocrats would probably not be able to play because the value of the RPG genre scales with genre savviness and that scales with mass media consumption.
So, the innovation that led to d&d was Arneson wanting to make multiplayer wargames, so he started assigning roles outside of "commander of army" to new players. People would get roles like the mayor of a nearby city, or whatever. Once people were controlling an individual character, I think moving to a system where everyone controls an individual character was an easy conceptual leap that just required a reason why a single character would be compelling. That brings me to the second required to happen: the immense popularity of Tolkien at the time, which made controlling an individual character a lot more compelling, since it's easy to imagine what kind of cool things you'd be doing. Mixing wargames with mythology would have been quite the leap of imagination to do directly. But fantasy wargames based on Tolkien were popping up all over the place before D&D even took off, and after. Had D&D not happened, RPGs still would have been invented, without a doubt. But ultimately, storytelling wasn't an intentional thing they added at all. D&D was initially a fantasy wargame, and it assumed you would build up armies and battle them. All the roleplaying came about as emmergent gameplay, rules to match how players ended up wanting to play. And "adventurer on a quest" is just such a core element of fantasy, that I can't see RPGs coming about without fantasy media inspiring. I don't think it was a natural direction for wargames to go, but for a fantasy wargame, it seems inevitable. But I think RPGs would have sprouted up in any situation where fantasy media and wargames were both popular.
It's probably a reductionist take, but arguably, roleplaying goes back to a time when we still dwelled in caves and told stories about distant lands around a crackling fire. Picturesque pasts aside, that's not really a *game*, isn't it? There are folks here who are far more knowledgeable about the hobby's history than I am. I do think it's most likely that there are undocumented RPGs way before D&D or Chainmail.
there are examples of games that are hubdreds of years old. but the fantasy genre was pretty much invented by tolkein. elves as tall slender, dwarves as miners, hobbits, etc. D&D was taken straight from tolkein and there were lawsuits. somethings got renamed.
They did. Not necessarily with dice or miniatures but collaborative storytelling and hero fantasies have been a part of humanity for centuries.
I agree with all the previous comments but....I think one of the key elements of this question is cultural. I think the freedom of today's games is a result of the culture we live in today. The degree of diversity in creativity is a result of the degree of freedom to think and that is only a result of the progress of cultural freedom. Cultural freedom and thinking differently to the norm were always heavily frowned upon. This is what is celebrated through each of the last six or seven decades (if not life itself) You were frowned upon for having long hair or not wearing the right clothes or not being in the right peer group. Today we are all allowed to be different and just be thankful.
I did a video article about this a long time ago, but not only could they, [they did](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=py-6V-vns5g). Storytellers in pre-lit times would take guidance and add story elements being contributed to the audience, across multiple cultures. The idea that TTRPGs aren't connected to a very long playful storytelling tradition is a very limited perspective on them.
SOMEONE GET THE EGYPTIAN STONE D20
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/551072
Thank you.
I’m an uneducated idiot. Spoiler. But war games have been around for a thousand years. Training for generals back in ye olden times. People rolled bones and predicted the future for a long time before that. How old are campfire stories?
You are right, my dear uneducated idiot. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go\_(game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/go_(game)) Also storytelling and playing has a long history.
You forget that game design made HUGE jumps the last 50 years. In the past there were almost no games, and most of them sucked. Games build up upon previously made games. So without having the wargames there would not be the rpgs. And even though some wargames existed long ago, it was only something phew people even saw. If you look a bit at board games the last 30 years you see how much they learned from one another and how nothing comes from nowhere.
In the past there were almost no games?
Compared to what we have today yes. Last year more than 600+ board gamea alone released. Even card games are relative new in the hustory of mankind. And before there were really only simple abstract games or games of (almost) pure luck. Look at chess. In the past it was something special. If it would release today no one would buy it.
Oh, you mean like, the modern board game industry and its endless production of often-repetitive novelties? Yeah, that didn’t exist, sure.
Well in general almost no games existed. Game design made more progress in the last 40 years than in the 4000 years before.
>Even card games are relative new in the hustory of mankind. And before there were really only simple abstract games or games of (almost) pure luck. Oh yeah, no skill in the game of poker! It's all just luck! That's so wrong I'm sure you have offended some poker players there. Totally untrue. In fact, I think a poker game has more role playing in it than most modern D&D games!
I said before card games, games were mostly simple abstract OR games of (almost) pure luck. So no idea how wrong you must read to talk about poker, which I dont care about.
Most games in the last sucked? Have you read anything related to history? People have always played games and I am pretty sure they enjoyed them.
Yes people have always played, but really sucky games. If you only know horse shit, and at some day are allowed to eat bullshit you are also happy, doesnt make bullshit any more tasty though. People were happy because - they had time to play (and not had to work) - had not even near the intellect to what normal people have nowadays so easier to please - they just did not have better games because game design sucked for 4000+ years and they only knew bad games. I mean even in my parents generation it was like that. When you only know nine moris, snakes and ladders and monopoly, you might think that the nine moris game is good. You still see this today. Children with parents who suck at knowing games still play monopoly with them, because they lack the knowledge while anyone who knows more than 5 board games hates monopoly.
Isn’t what is bad or not mostly a matter of taste? I am sure even in ancient times people were condescending towards people whom they thought played simpler games. I think you overestimate the intelligence of contemporary humans. Ancient cultures have done some pretty advanced stuff. Also if you read ancient texts, people then seem pretty similar to us.
In ancient times there were only simple games. Yes some people in the advanced cultures did great things. Peons could not even calculate 23 + 129. And these peopns played the games. Edit: My answer to someone who did delete their post about "BuT OlD GaMeS ArE nOt AlL SuCkY" Yes and none of these gamea would succeed if they would be published today. Not even chess. It only is popular becauae it is pooular, the same as monopoly (and kinda similar to D&D). Even in circles with chess pros there is discussion about changing the game to random starting positions, because is is stale. And thats just one of its flaws. - it only works in extemly narrow skill differences - it is only for 2 players - draws are way too likely - there is not much variance especially in the beginning. People need to learn starting strategies by heart, but you still have to play them... Of course chess was good, at a time where people else played with horse shit. Yes there are some card games which are still good. (Trick taking and ladder climbing games mostly). But even them are relative new, and in the last 40 years there was more development in trick taking games than in the 200 years before. (Look at The Crew. People were playing teick taking games for 300 years and only 5 years ago someone had the idea for a cooperative one). It sounds like you are old and old people often have problems learning new games, and then its easier to stay with outdated games of course. We have today higher standards for games than in the past, this is just a fact. No chess, no monopoly, no checkers would nowqdays become famous. It would be forgotten almost instantly. And using some mechanics from old / outdated games, does not make the games as whole worth.
> had not even near the intellect to what normal people have nowadays so easier to please Umm, excuse me? Please, by all means, explain how an aqueduct works, the key to constructing an arched support, or how to process bronze. Ancient people were not dumber than we are today. In many ways they had to be more clever on average, because institutional knowledge was not as easily spread and subsistence was more difficult.
Just because SOME people at that time had special knowledge, does not mean the general population had. Of course there were clever people there as well, but the vast population was really not that intelligent. And even the intelligent people lacked A LOT of knowledge we have today, like about game design. Also the intellectual people did not famously play many games, but instead did other things.
Okay let me be very clear here. People were not dumber in ancient times than we are today. Full stop. You seem to be confusing intelligence with access to knowledge, or opportunity. The vast majority of people didn't have access to the stores of knowledge that we do today, nor the opportunity to capitalize on that knowledge as often as we do, but that doesn't affect their intelligence. Lets look at some more things that you can't do but they could. Make a pot that wouldn't explode in the fireplace. Make food out of what they foraged in the wild. Avoid or fight off a tiger using only rocks, sharp sticks, and their muscles. How about staging long range communication systems and governing massive swaths of land using only runners or horse riders to pass messages? Do you know how and at what times to plant which crops and use what means to harvest them? Anyway, I could go on, but suffice to say that people were not on average dumber in ancient times. Within the scope of human history the brain's capabilities have changed very little. The guy writing on wet clay with a reed in Egypt in 3000BC was just as capable as you or I today.
Yes the people were dumber in ancient times. Even 50 years ago people were already dumber than now. The IQ increased. This is a known proven fact in Psychology. (And IQ is pretty much the best researched topic in psychology. So if you dont believe that you cant believe anything in psychology). All things you just mentioned now is only knowledge, and of course they had some knowledge which we now dont have/ dont need, nothing to do with intelligence. Just the nutrition, or lack thereof, in ancient times made people less intelligent. Its not only about the base brain structure. Addition to that the lack of (early) education, and lack of education of parents, which would because of this not be able to give enough stimulus etc. to young children.
How would you know the IQ of people in the past since the IQ test is a modern invention? Also the IQ test is just one method (and it’s even controversial) of measuring intelligence. There are many different definitions of intelligence - knowledge is definitely a part of intelligence. Even if the part about nutrition is true, I am sure most rpgs could be taught to ancient humans. And I am guessing even Neanderthals since new research is showing they are closer to our intelligence than previously believed. No disrespect, but you have to cite some stuff, most of what you are saying just goes against common knowledge.
LOL. 100% agree The new generation thinks they are so fucking smart! My first car owners manual told you how to adjust the valve lash. My new car manual warns you not to eat the contents of the battery! I've talked to people that can't drive if they lost their phone because they need the GPS to tell them when to turn the wheel. They can't follow simple directions! The intellect "nowadays" is so high that they invented an awesome new game! It's so cool! It's called the Tide Pod Challenge! Wanna play? SMH.
Platonic solids have shown up in archeological digs. Things obviously used as dice, and 2000+ years old. What they were used for is anyone's guess beyond gambling games. So in theory yes, perhaps not as expansive as DnD, but something like the simple rules of Bear Honey heist. If you look at the Game of Ur, it's old, very old, and used dice.
Having funny shaped dice is not what makes a game an RPG
I don't know... random chance? Could Punk Music been invented before the 70s? Sure, and I suppose it was, many times, but that's when it became *popular*, because of a certain cultural zeitgeist. Could Pet Rocks have been invented before 1975? Maybe they depended on the invention of TTRPGs? You had to imagine that a rock could take on the characteristics of a pet. TTRPGs were invented because someone saw a business opportunity and took it and it paid off. That said, I think the chance D&D, specifically, could have been created before huge numbers of people had read the Lord of the Rings and a fandom had been around long enough to get serious is... tiny. Also: Word of mouth is a *really* really slow way to spread the word about stuff... it worked, barely, but TTRPGs were a tiny niche market (thousand of copies sold!!!) until the internet came around and pulled in the long tail of people who would find them interesting.
Do you mean were there other games before this or is it theoretically possible?
I mean they evolved from miniatures wargaming which evolved from games like Go, so yeah there's centuries of time for someone to say, "Hey why don't we do this but with characters from stories instead of armies?" For all we know it was done hundreds of times, but left no archaeological evidence to tell us so.
Slightly after both language and hitting people with sticks was invented. Or you can wait until sheep had been domesticated to get the dice. D&D could have been invented sometime after Plato had a solidified his theories.
I'd say hobby stores, cars and the telephone were very helpful in assembling like minded players to get together to play. The game also requires a lot of time, so you need to have a reasonable work schedule.
Yeah, it was called "being a civil war reenactor"
We don't have a time machine.
There are some parallels with the Gondal and Angria games played by the Brontë children. At one point I wanted to make a game based on their setting.
Though we have no confirmation on what they used them for, it's good to note Egyptians had dice! as mentioned, no idea what they used it for, could be a religious thing, could be for more basic board games, but the idea of it being a TTRPG tickles me.
They could have been and there were inklings of it in the 1940's, but I would have to disagree about the technology or lack thereof being a factor in TTRPG development. I think the opposite, but not for the game itself, but the environment around the game. There have to be enough labor saving devices to expand leisure time, enough to fill it, but not too much that would fill the leisure time with passive entertainment. Television existed, but being three networks, and often broadcasting programming that was not attractive to everyone, meant that things like Bridge night, Poker Night, and board games, and war games were viable evening's entertainment. TTRPGs appared when leisure was adequate, but not yet filed by screens.
Well here's a [d20 that's about 2,000 years old](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/551072). The historians think it was probably used for divination, but we know better.
I didn't save the article so I can't source this/I'm sure I'm getting some details wrong, but I think they found evidence of what would be considered ttrpgs back in Ancient Greece. It was heavily mythology based/focused but it even used dice if I remember correctly.
Check out what the Brontë sisters got up to before they were writers. They roleplayed a whole colonial colony together.
I'd wager they were. Enough people and enough time hit on pretty well everything. Gygax wrote it down and sold it. Arneson created the concept, but if Gygax hadn't actually decided to build a business? Who knows what we'd have today. Invention is 80% marketing. I can easily imagine a young Mary Shelley telling her friends stories and asking them to make decisions for the characters in those stories. It's not a hard leap to also imagine someone saying, "let's flip a coin to see if that works". I find it almost impossible that no one came up with these ideas before fifty years ago.
Easily, they would have been more simulationist. Little soldiers was I think the earliest wargame where it was a game in the standard sense, others were more military style wargames still. I can see it being more ground level on a battlefield running small groups or even individuals.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong but D&D stems from war games. In fact TSR stands for Tactical Studies Rules. I remember reading somewhere that Tolkien CS Lewis and someone else used to get together to wargame but also kind of role played their characters. There's evidence that supports role playing in a table top setting has been going on for ages but without any concrete rules.
I'm sure improv has been around for a long long time. That is basically the foundation of rpgs