I think a lot of the confusion comes from "role-playing" not really being a good description for "D&D and stuff like that" but it's so entrenched now that it's impossible to change.

RPing is great fun, but it doesn't really get to the core of what makes D&D be D&D and not a board game for me (being able to try to do anything you want instead of having the rules set forth a list of allowable actions) and as people have pointed out you can role-play in a gazillion games that aren't RPGs.

But because it's the name a lot of people focus on it as the end-all and be-all of the game and that anything that doesn't directly support it is illegitimate.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;789914e WoW that is designed to emulate table top RPGs.

Really?  I never would have thought of that.  How so?

I ask this honestly.  For me, they're entirely different, simply because in a TTRPG I can come up with an idea the game master/programmer never thought of, and try it.

But that's just me, as Cosgrove would say.

Quote from: dragoner;789971It's substitution, computer games have an easier buy in and ease of use than table top games.

Well, yeah.  Computer games including MMOs have the strengths of convenience and visual appeal, whereas TTRPGs have openness as their biggest strength.

Quote from: increment;790050You could act "in character" in many wargames, and this is part of what makes it so hard to draw a line in the sand where wargames stopped and role-playing began.

As I observed to you after the TRACTICS battle I played at GaryCon in 2013, "The line between 'What orders would my tank commander give based on Soviet tank doctrine for vehicles separated from their platoon leader in 1941' and 'What does my guy do' is an extremely porous one.

I could see the German tank platoon right on the other side of the damn woods, but my TANK COMMANDER inside the tank couldn't; and doctrine is "Support your platoon."

Quote from: increment;790158So sure, potentially someone else could have suggested that "role-playing game" applies to D&D and its ilk, it could have been a messier and more gradual drift. But looking across a very broad swath of zines of the time, all the key early uses - in Owl & Weasel, in the Strategic Review, in Metagaming ad copy for T&T and others - follow hard upon the uses in S&T. Bear in mind as well that S&T had twenty or thirty times the circulation of the largest such fan periodicals, back in 1975, so ideas appearing there reached vastly more people than virtually any other media source of the hobby at the time. The term went from pretty much total disuse in the games community (again, outside the fringes of Dippy fandom) in mid-1975 to being on the cover of Metamorphosis Alpha before the end of 1976. After that, there was just no stopping it.

A big part of it was the very real 'What the HELL do we call this kind of game?' aspect.  D&D was "medieval fantasy wargames campaigns," but that's a real friggin' mouthful.  And we knew you could have SF, or ancient, or other kind of games.  There was a lot of blathering and armwaving as people tried out various terms for "the set of all games that kind of are like D&D in ways we can't even really define."

People -- LOTS of people, all over the place -- REALLY need to realize there was a lot less "rigid academic work" and "involved logical thought" and a lot more "pulling stuff out of our asses at a moment's notice."

A large element of my book that I need to include more of is "demythologizing".  But that's really my whole point behind "we made up some shit we thought would be fun."  For instance, the "Half Elf" came about because my 16 year old self saw that an Elf in D&D could be either a Fighter or a Magic User, and I said "Hey, wouldn't it be neat if a Half Elf could be a Fighter and a Magic User AND a Cleric?"  The amount of thought that went into the "Half Elf" took less time than it took to read this paragraph.

Quote from: Vargold;790160Family resemblances? My Wittgenstein sense is tingling!

Wittgenstein was a beery swine who was just as sloshed as Schlegel!

Quote from: increment;790172philosophical pseudoproblems that generate a lot of Master's theses

HAR!!

Quote from: Bren;790175Perhaps you meant "critic" in the sense of a theater critic who reviews a film rather than in the sense of someone who dislikes and hence criticizes RPGs.

Yes; SOME of us actually try to differentiate "critic" from "asshole."

The transformation of "critic" and "criticism" into bad words is one of the greatest lingusitic losses of the English language.  "Constructive criticism" is a term that drives me fucking batshit insane; if it's not constructive it's not criticism, it's merely condemnation.

Quote from: Bren;790180Your desire to exclude people who were actually involved as a primary source seems artificial and a bit peculiar. It reminds me of the 19th century historians who preferred to use vase paintings and the writings of the ancients to determine how long a Macedonian sarissa was or could have been as opposed to the German school who had people actually drill with 16' and 21' poles to see if using such a large pike was possible. Judiciously used, direct evidence is a better source of knowledge than reading another book.

As somebody with an actual history degree I'm VERY dubious about such methods.   This method is how some English wargamer in the 1970s concluded that the stirrup didn't make any difference in combat, because he got on his horse without stirrups and rode around waving a stick over his head.

Quote from: Omega;790417"There were minis! Gygax tells you to use minis! D&D is ONLY about minis!"

"Arneson ALWAYS used minis!  Gygax NEVER used minis!"

THE UNIVERSE EXPLODES IN A QUANTUM ABSURDITY!!!

Quote from: Haffrung;790386The thing that gets on my tits about the whole "D&D's roots were a tabletop wargame" meme, usually spouted by 3E and 4E fans to defend their games, is that it fails to recognize that the thing which made D&D so different from anything before, and sparked the exponential growth in it as a game and pass-time, was the ways is which it was different from a wargame  or boardgame.

D&D's roots WERE a table top wargame.  And we played large parts of it that way.

And we also knew it was somehow MORE.  But we had a whole lot of trouble describing exactly in what way.  And once the term "Role Playing Game" appeared, people said "YEAH!  FUCKING YEAH!  THAT's what this game is!"

Quote from: TheNextDoctor;790232But the peculiar thing was that all the other pcs and the dm looked at me like I was a dumbass.  They couldn't comprehend why I would do such a thing.  I thought my character would take such an action, being a good cleric believing in a good god hanging out with a bunch of miscreants and violent party.  My motivation was that I (as the cleric) wanted them to be noble and good and such.  

That's what I got from D&D and agree with some points that Wick has made but I strongly disagree with some of his other points.

That has nothing to do with "game" and everything to do with "people."

Quote from: Old Geezer;790468That has nothing to do with "game" and everything to do with "people."

OG is right on the money with this.

Quote from: Old Geezer;790468That has nothing to do with "game" and everything to do with "people."

True, but the only time I've ever experienced that from people was while playing D&D.

And most of the PCs were the local World of Darkness guys and they never thought I was off my rocker when I did similar things while playing Vampire with them.

Plus, while D&D wasn't my first game I respect D&D as it is the granddaddy of them all and as I mentioned in another post I've always wanted someone to run Dark Sun where the PCs were slaves who were enforcers/police to a City Lord (think that's what they were called) but secretly undermine the City Lord's authority.  

Or any lengthy campaign involving Dark Sun or Planescapes but no one wanted to.  They were only willing to run an adventure at a time followed by another adventure followed by another but not in the campaign-sense beyond us using the same characters and while those adventures didn't always involve a dungeon but did include a plethora of monsters to destroy and cool loot awaiting the PCs at the end.  I didn't play those adventures with but I was sitting next to them in many of their sessions playing some ccg or something while they played at our local store.

But yeah, you're right it was the people.  When they wanted to run a campaign it was never D&D, it was World of Darkness, Shadowrun or other games.

Quote from: Old Geezer;790463As somebody with an actual history degree I'm VERY dubious about such methods.   This method is how some English wargamer in the 1970s concluded that the stirrup didn't make any difference in combat, because he got on his horse without stirrups and rode around waving a stick over his head.

I think these approaches can supplement other knowledge but they do have to be taken with a grain of salt (after all, your average historian isn't exactly built like your average warrior from the ages past). But there have been schools of history that take this kind of first hand experience of what they are studying seriously to help illuminate the subject. If you are going to study farming, it isn't a bad idea to get some direct experience trying to use techniques from the period. But you still need to rely on primary sources and you have to remember that re-enacting the past is very different from being there. I think there is a place for oral accounts as well but there is an entire discipline around that and you have to look for all kinds of pitfalls (like rehearsed narratives and the memory issue another poster brought up).

Old Geezer, what area of history did you focus on (just curious, as that was my degree as well).