I'll grant - probably more liberally than most - that a great many things can be part of role-playing, and many more can  be part of rpgs. When people insist that their notion of story-telling is of the  essence, though, I think they overstep.

I think that earliest role-playing game I've seen is Viet Valley where participants are given roles such as VC Tax Collector, Buddhist Monk etc.This one was 1969 (and 1970) and I think it was used to train MACV personnel on MAAG stuff. Here is how to play Viet Cong Propagandist:
You are the propagandist for the Viet Cong. You normally reside
in the VC Headquarters except when you are out visiting the villages.
Your team objective is to gain control of at least half of the
villages of the Ao Khe District. (See Win Criteria for an operational
measure of this.) To help achieve this goal, it is your responsibility
to carryon the battle for the hearts and minds. This may well be the
most important victory to be gained.
You have few resources at your disposal except your powers of
persuasion, poster supplies, and radio broadcasts over Control ,walkie-
talkies for 3 minutes each cycle. You have the capability and manpower
to help villagers rebuild the houses that have been burned. You can
also offer them a continuation of the land reform program that Has in
operation two years ago. When you wish to talk with a villager, you
may ask Control to send him outside the door, and he must come. You
are immune from arrest or assassination in this situation. If you
enter the village, you may be shot on sight, as you are known to the
GVN Regional Forces and the RD Teams. It would be safer to travel with
a security force. You may travel by either road or by trail, but on
the roads you risk arrest or assassination by the GVN forces.

Another of those early role-playing games was POLWAR simulation where you ran a district and counterinsurgency. Here is the most relevant instruction:
"Each player is supplied with a personal biography which defines his family
relations with other players in the game. This material is very important.
The most powerful obligations felt by Vietnamese are those of family and
kinship. No Vietnamese disregards these relationships when he acts or
commits his loyalty. You should make an extraordinary effort to think
in this fashion. "

There was also a commercial WW2 era infantry skirmish war game made in 1966 by Michael Korns "Modern War in Miniature" where you had two players and judge who would describe you what happened as you told her what you'd like to do. This is pretty much first role-playing game I've seen (unless you've seen Featherstone's books describing this earlier? Has anyone?). The money quote for his rules for simulating war is: "War gaming involves special kind of imagination. One must be able to set oneself in the position of the soldier on the field in order to become interested in the game and, at the same time, one must be able to separate reality from the make-believe in the same manner as the player who takes over the German troops involving himself in hard-fought skirmishes when in reality the thought of such a Reich would be revolting to him".

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

I do typically prescribe a healthy dose of Vitamin W to combat symptoms of excessive scientism. But yes, his account of the difficulty of defining games at all, as I alluded to earlier in the thread, should trickle down to our narrow scope. And it would be fair to say that I think furnishing a definition for "role-playing games" is a sort of pseudoproblem, very similar to philosophical pseudoproblems that generate a lot of Master's theses but evade a solution because the question posed is inherently flawed.

Quote from: everloss;790035Yup. I've been playing RPGs since the early 90s, and I knew nothing about minis until 3.5 came out and a miniatures boom occured at all the game and hobby stores. That statement does not include Warhammer 40K of which I was aware of and stared at minis in awe at the shop - I never really considered it to be an RPG. But I didn't know anyone who played any RPG, DnD or otherwise, with minis until the 2000s.

Hex crawls, dungeon maps, top down view of the combat, rules for flanking etc. All that stuff is pretty board gamy to me.

Something like this is very much like a boardgame and a combat simulator to me.

Quote from: increment;790056Sorry, I guess I assumed my sig would double for my cites.

Why in the world would you think that a link to your blog advertising your book would double as a citation of an original source?
 

QuoteMoves #23 is the earliest place I'm aware of ...

So the citation I was looking for that you hinted at in your reply would be the Strategy & Tactics Press magazine Moves, issue #23.

The quote doesn't use the term role-playing in a critical or derogatory way, merely as a way of distinguishing games where the player takes on the role of a person (frequently a single person) from games where they don't take on the role of a person. Perhaps 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.

Quote from: Nikita;790165I think that earliest role-playing game I've seen is Viet Valley where participants are given roles such as VC Tax Collector, Buddhist Monk etc.This one was 1969 (and 1970) and I think it was used to train MACV personnel on MAAG stuff.

As I've suggested earlier in this thread, there were a ton of games like this from the late 1950s forward. The Inter-Nation Simulation of 1959 (Guetzkow et al) is probably the most important and influential. They certainly knew role-playing (from Moreno), and recognized a role-playing element was present in their games. Thus, by 1964, we see references to political wargame exercises in the highest echelons on the American military explicitly called "role-playing games."  These are the first practices that anyone applied that exact label to, as far as I can tell. They were more like a Model UN than like D&D, though.

QuoteThere was also a commercial WW2 era infantry skirmish war game made in 1966 by Michael Korns "Modern War in Miniature" where you had two players and judge who would describe you what happened as you told her what you'd like to do. This is pretty much first role-playing game I've seen (unless you've seen Featherstone's books describing this earlier? Has anyone?).

Korns is an absoutely crucial work, since both the Twin Cities and Lake Geneva crowds knew it and leveraged it. Korns built on the idea of the game transpiring as a dialog between player and judge which he had read about in Sayre, who in turn got it from Verdy du Vernois. We should probably understand Korns and Totten as the key influences on Braunstein in the Twin Cities, and thus major contributes to D&D. But was Korns really a role-playing game? The line between wargames in this tradition and role-playing games is very hard to draw. You'll find though that Korns is heavy on tables of military statistics but light on rules - it's hard to read a game into his book, it's more like a sourcebook someone else might use to design a game.

Featherstone did not approve of the works in this tradition. But again, if what makes something a "role-playing game" in your book is just that it unfolds in a dialog between a player proposing actions and a referee describing results, you can find that in any number of nineteenth-century wargames long before Featherstone.

Quote from: increment;790158While I'm happy not to be contradicted by Mr. St. Andre, my method also is intentionally blind to what people recall today, especially when it comes to dates and sequences. Primary sources are much more reliable in my experience.

Your 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.

QuoteSo the citation I was looking for that you hinted at in your reply would be the Strategy & Tactics Press magazine Moves, issue #23.

The quote doesn't use the term role-playing in a critical or derogatory way, merely as a way of distinguishing games where the player takes on the role of a person (frequently a single person) from games where they don't take on the role of a person. Perhaps 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, the latter is the sense in which I use the term "critic," sorry if that was unclear. Another good example of linguistic drift, the way that "critic" now often means "someone who hates stuff" instead of "someone who judges whether stuff is good or bad." C.S. Lewis has a great book about cases like this, where usages of words slide into meaning "good" or "bad."

To your next post:

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.

I don't exclude them, not in the sense you mean - I conducted numerous interviews with eyewitnesses to the birth of role-playing games between, say, 2006 and 2010, including putting questions to folks like Gygax and Arneson. But bluntly, I found that dates and sequences of events are matters that are not clearly remembered thirty or forty years after the fact.

Not to pick on Major Wesely, but since I just mentioned Braunstein and Korns - in a series of (quite long) interviews with Wesely, he insisted that the first Braunstein had taken place before Korns came out: that the first Braunstein was in 1967, and Korns came out in 1968. In fact, Korns came out in 1966, and a zine that Major Wesely read (and contributed to) contained a prominent review of Korns that year. Contemporary documents from 1968 furthermore show that Wesely was just beginning his work on adapting Totten's Strategos then, yet Wesely insisted that he had his "Strategos N" rules for the first Braunstein. When after much digging in Twin Cities attics, he and I found an original copy of his "Strategos N," we discovered that Wesely had hand-written the date "1970" on the inside of the cover forty years ago. While what Wesely remembers doesn't change, we as people trying to piece the history together can (and should) revise our opinion about when events occurred.

I found innumerable similar confusions about dates and sequences in the personal recollections of others - worse still, different eyewitnesses supply different dates or sequences of events, so who do you trust then? Gygax, Arneson and Wesely all made separate and contradictory claims that they "invented" polyhedral dice for gaming, say - they can't all be right, but they can all be wrong. Unfortunately, when it comes to questions about a significant cultural phenomenon like D&D, there is a further problem that innovators sometimes present the history is a way that emphasizes their own role unduly. Unlike the case of the drills you mention, we cannot access the historical facts through conducting empirical tests today - the question of whether something happened in 1966 or 1968 can't be determined by any amount of drilling, say. We can however get far greater accuracy and certainty than memory from a judicious inspection of the right archives.

I guess that is part of the reason I don't feel the position that many of, if not a majority, of the principals at the inception of our hobby were aware of what roleplaying was considered to be back in the mid 70's to the early 80s is threatened.  For those that were not aware, it was a good term.  For those who were aware, it was a very appropriate term.  Especially, as mentioned, since many psychologists still feel that that similarity is valid enough to research.

It doesn't mean I'm completely right, I think this is going to turn out to be messy enough that I'm going to find a lot of conflicted middle.  But it is worthwhile.

Reading the articles made me think back to my first experience with D&D.

I was 20 years old at the time and while I started out with Palladium but the gamers at  the local store were into White Wolf stuff so I pretty much played World of Darkness (esp. Vampire) and a Shadowrun game was started by a guy which to this day was the best experience I've ever had as a PC.

A gentlemen came to our local shop, he was from the midwest and was here in the west coast for a couple of months due to work.

He was a D&D guy from the beginning of the game and I was really interested in playing.

He modified an old adventure and we played with several other players.  I recall playing a cleric.  

The important part that I recall was that there was this monster in the dungeon to which we could not defeat.  After 20 minutes or so I decided to pull a Gandalf in the Mines of Moria kind of thing and pretty much sacrificed myself so that the rest can continue on.

I ended up dying of course which sucked.  

But 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.  I felt the purpose of D&D is to complete the adventures alive and collect the loot a la a lot of computer rpgs.  My second experience a couple of years later when D&D 3e came out, with different DM and players, didn't fare much better.  When I was trying to come up with a name and background of my elven thief (iirc) the DM told me not to worry about that.

By the way, nobody survived the adventure.  Near the end (I assume) there was this corridor with drops of water or blood falling and everyone died as they walked through it and got hit by the drops.

That's funny, I had a very similar experience early on. Heh.

I played D&D (basic, I think?) as a kid/in early high school. By college I had abandoned D&D as nothing but hack&slash crap and moved on to GURPS and Call of Cthulhu and a few other games (Teenagers from Outer Space!)

Then I tried a 2e game... and boy fucking howdy. The ranger and paladin were murderous scumbags that the DM couldn't/wouldn't reign in.

I played a NG cleric of elephants or something (I had a lot of ivory doodads). Bunch of cultists, we're winning, so I call for them to surrender. They do. The paladin then cuts them down. WTF.

By the end of it I was just numb to the whole situation. Then the paladin had run ahead or something and we see him, addled from some mental influence, sitting in a pit of vipers. Uh oh.

Right. I hoist my loins and quickstep over to him, attempting rescue.

Roll roll roll roll roll.

Yep, bitten and died of poison. I don't remember if I actually managed to rescue him, I suspect not. Just an utter ignoble and pointless death in the middle of some grand adventure the other guys were making nothing more than tomb raiding.

Later the party had the chance to resurrect my character, whose spirit told them to fuck off. Better off in his heaven. Idiots.


So I liked D&D when I was very young, because it was my first RPG (though quickly intrigued/entranced by CoC), and then with 3e, because it seemed actually functional.

Yeah, I think most gamers go through the "I'm to SMART for that STUPID D&D phase," some just never come out of it.

As far as defining RPGs, Wick is obviously off base as calling the game that created RPGs not an RPG is just silly but I think focusing too much on roleplaying is a mistake: it isn't RPing that makes an RPG and RPG, it's how you interact with the world.

In other games there's a set list of things you can do and everything else is simply not allowed. In RPGs you can attempt to do absolutely anything you can image and then someone else tells you if you succeed or fail. And that's something you can really ONLY do in RPGs.

For example I played a bunch of D&D with my students and they name their character things like "Stupidpie" and "Fighter" and never ever roleplay or even know what roleplaying IS really but they still loved D&D and the ones who liked it best begged me for months and months to play it again, which a reaction I've never ever got from anything else. Why? It's because they got the fact that in this game they would attempt to do anything they could image. It didn't matter that "Stupidpie" had no personality (or hell, even a gender or ANYTHING) it mattered that he could kill ghouls by pushing a cow over a cliff at them or pour a bunch of oil on the floor, get goblins to slip in it and then light it on fire or that he could try to kill his friend after his friend took all of the loot and then roll a fumble and accidentally kill his pony.

For making an RPG be an RPG being able to roleplay as if your character were real isn't so important, it's interacting with the world your character (even if his name is "Fighter" and all there is to "Fighter" is he wants to get gold and not die) finds themselves in as if the world were real.

One you get kids to realize that questions like "can I use my sword more than one" don't make sense because you can just think about what makes sense in the real world and do anything that makes sense and I'll make sure the rules catch up then the eyes go wide and the wheels start turning. That's what makes RPGs great.

That's why I don't think chess is an RPG, not because you can't roleplay in it but because you can't order your pawns to start digging pit traps.

I like D&D, but 3e and it's foul progeny killed my interest in the game. At the time, I wasn't playing D&D, not players at the table where uninterested. 3e revitalized the group's interest, but it wrong to me. I thought I was going through D&D burn out myself, I couldn't enjoy myself even through I played and ran multiple campaigns.

Burnout was the probable best cause for my disinterest. I was wrong. I played 4e D&D, and while not my favourite game, it did have some echoes of fun. I went back to play older games, and found out I prefer the older stuff when ideas where paramount, not game balance or hard mechanics.

I've never looked back.

Quote from: Daztur;790326For example I played a bunch of D&D with my students and they name their character things like "Stupidpie" and "Fighter" and never ever roleplay or even know what roleplaying IS really but they still loved D&D and the ones who liked it best begged me for months and months to play it again, which a reaction I've never ever got from anything else. Why? It's because they got the fact that in this game they would attempt to do anything they could image. It didn't matter that "Stupidpie" had no personality (or hell, even a gender or ANYTHING) it mattered that he could kill ghouls by pushing a cow over a cliff at them or pour a bunch of oil on the floor, get goblins to slip in it and then light it on fire or that he could try to kill his friend after his friend took all of the loot and then roll a fumble and accidentally kill his pony.

This brings up the nature of Immersion.  Obviously, "StupidPie's" player isn't really Roleplaying a character, but he is interacting with the world, he's immersed in an alternate reality that isn't his.


There's an overlapping line between immersing yourself in a setting without getting into character (roleplaying yourself), and immersing yourself into a specific character within a setting.  Similarly, there's an overlapping line between immersing yourself into a specific character, and also immersing yourself as author/observer into the story of that character.

Immersing into Setting
Overlap
Immersing into Character
Overlap
Immersing into Story

All three of these are usually referred to as RolePlaying, at which time the knives usually get drawn.

It occurs to me to wonder if original sin mightn't have been naming things.

Seems like most of the fights humans get into come down to semantics.