When I was a kid my two favourite books were "Watership Down" and "The Lord of the Rings". In both I admired the sense of adventure, the landscapes and the great battles/action scenes. When I was 14 I bought TLotR board game by SPI. It had cards representing characters and monsters, rules for "heroes vs. random encounters" combat and a beautiful map. I played it a lot with two brothers who, at the time, were my best friends. I clearly remind, one day, myself saying "Wouldn't be wonderful for this game to have a free adventure mode with... mathematics used for fights and encounters?"

I was struggling to grasp a very unfocused idea. At the same time I was salivating every time I looked at the boxes in my FLGS. Money being tight, I started designing my games with paper and cardboard. I created a "Watership Down" prototipe inspired by SPI's LotR, with a map, cards for the various rabbits and even seasons and weather, but I was never able to produce a working game (much later I understood what it missed: objectives and scenarios).

I was more lucky with my two sports games: Soccer (a nice, beautiful game that was killed by Subbuteo) and "Decathlon with Dices" (the latter being my biggest success ever: we spent the Summer of the 1984 Olympics playing it). I also invented a purely deterministic spaceship combat game. If someone fired 8 points of lasers against a ship with 5 points of shields then that ship took 3 points of damage. It was very detailed, with fighters, nuclear missiles, point defences, and even fuel and refueling ships. I was implementing 3D movement in space when I discovered how no one wanted to play my space game. Pity, because it was becoming something.

Meanwhile I and my two friends were still fixated on the concept of "Fellowship". I had bought "Source of the Nile", about the exploration of Africa in the XIX Century. It was an exploration game with events, discoveries, relations and battles with native tribes, different "professions" for your explorer (Doctor, Journalist, Geologist...) and other wonderful stuff. We played cooperatively via some house rules, and, once again, I saw that there was something "beyond" the card system. What if, for example, a player could draw a card, describe a situation and ask: "What do you do?" But I also saw how it simply couldn't work in that ruleset's context.

Then "Magic Realm" dropped, and we believed that our dreams were fulfilled. We played that game to the death (yes, it could be done) but, paradoxically, it distracted me from my "there must be more" pursuit. What more could one ask for?

Back to Summer of 1984, and something so small and yet so close just happened. So close that even today I wonder what would have happened if...

Basically, Dragon's Lair was all the rage. There wasn't a cabinet at the seaside, but one of the first videogame magazines had published a guide, scene by scene, with vivid descriptions. So I invented this little game for my friends at the beach: I described a room (or a situation) from the game and then asked them what they wanted to do. If they survived they moved on. It was a purely narrative experience. I was the final arbiter: creative solutions were rewarded; if someone asked questions about a place and I missed the reference I made up the answer on the spot - then adding a note on the magazine's pages for further reference.

It was a hit. A lot of kids came to me, over the Summer, to play "Paper Dragon's Lair". Today you can see what I had reached. To me, however, it was a fun little game I was proud of but nothing more. I never grasped that "Paper Dragon's Lair" was exactly that way of playing which had eluded me for years.

That Fall of 1984 any possibility to "invent RPGs" was killed by a simple event: AD&D finally arrived in my FLGS. Books about fantasy adventuring?! Monsters described by mathematics?! I choose to buy the DMG first because "if this is for the guy running the game, for sure it will cover all of the basics!" To this day I defend my logic. Of course it was immediately obvious that what I bought was a sort of "Chapter Two", but I had found my game.

Ironically, I didn't buy the PH and the MM immediately. Wise people pointed me to D&D Red Box and "The Forbidden City" adventure module. On November, 1st 1984 my two friends rolled two characters each: a main 3rd level character and a 1st level "squire" - and our gaming habits changed forever. AD&D had to wait for two more years.

I went on to become a game designer (among other things I did in my life). Yet, I still wonder.

I had created systems to determine the outcome of events - from exploring to combat. I had been exposed to games which helped me to refine those concepts (like "terrain based" exploration results). I had grasped the "novel idea" of describing a situation and asking "What do you do?" But all those things were buried in different boxes in my mind. Had AD&D not dropped, would I have been able to put everything together and create this "new way of playing" by myself? I have no answers.

Well, what about you? Did you ever felt that "There must be another way of playing" before discovering RPGs? Did you actually created your first RPG before discovering the published ones? I feel that, somewhere, it may have happened.

Of course. All RPGs have roots in games of "let's pretend" played by children, from the simplest inklings to the more developed imaginary worlds, like those of the Bronte children. We even see this in the early history of RPGs, where MAR Barker and Ed Greenwood created extensive fantasy worlds before RPGs existed, and then converted them to D&D when it came out.

Whether any of them (or us) would have created the first real RPG is a more complex question, and may have required a background in gaming not just fantasy worlds -- look at ohw important kriegspeil and Risk and sandbox wargaming were to the developing of OD&D. But the ideas were in the air, and someone would have eventually come up with it.

No to the topic question. But my friends and I together almost invented boffer LARP in the mid 80s. We called it D&D in the woods and it more like the SCA or Dagohir in that we divided into teams and have at it against other. We tried having characters and adventure but couldn't figure out how to make leveling, and magic work. Or how to best organize the logistics of doing a adventure from the NPC side. A decade later I started playing NERO LARP and after the first few events I realize how close we came.

However the essential tricks to having a free form boffer LARP work like NERO were not intuitive. Basically a result of a man named Ford Ivey who figured it out in the late 80s running events in his game store's backlot in rural Massachusett. There were older LARPS but either they were like the SCA but with more fantasy roleplaying, or highly structured like the IFGS. Ford basically not only how to do in terms of mechanics, but also in terms of safety as well.

I used to use baseball cards to play a game that was similar to war, I would look at whatever stats were on the card to determine who would "win" in the imaginary conflict.

Yes, it was the unlicensed WWE RPG

Quote from: estar on January 03, 2022, 05:48:05 PM
No to the topic question. But my friends and I together almost invented boffer LARP in the mid 80s. We called it D&D in the woods and it more like the SCA or Dagohir in that we divided into teams and have at it against other. We tried having characters and adventure but couldn't figure out how to make leveling, and magic work. Or how to best organize the logistics of doing a adventure from the NPC side. A decade later I started playing NERO LARP and after the first few events I realize how close we came.

However the essential tricks to having a free form boffer LARP work like NERO were not intuitive. Basically a result of a man named Ford Ivey who figured it out in the late 80s running events in his game store's backlot in rural Massachusett. There were older LARPS but either they were like the SCA but with more fantasy roleplaying, or highly structured like the IFGS. Ford basically not only how to do in terms of mechanics, but also in terms of safety as well.

Treasure Trap started in the UK in 1982 (actually earlier than that - I went on one of their first weekend-long outdoor adventures before they acquired Peckforton Castle) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Trap

I used to add elements kind of like role-playing to my wargames with Timpo wild west sets and with my Airfix WW2 figures back in the 70's. When I first heard about D&D in 1975/6 (from a friend who had visited friends in the US and played a game with them), I created my own version of what I thought that game was like, based simply upon that description of the game. I ran it for a friend in school lunchtimes. I know it just used a dice I borrowed from my monopoly game and I drew a dungeon plan, populating it with wolves, snakes, giant rats and goblins. I think the character just had two stats - fighting and hit points (probably all they need, really!). Other than that I can't remember much about it. I do recall improving upon it when I encountered an advert somewhere describing D&D and also saw a photocopy of Owl & Weasel magazine. It wasn't long after before I played D&D proper so that early game fell by the wayside, obviously.