The answer here is supplied by none other than Gary friggin' Gygax. The 'heaven forfend!" makes me imagine him clutching a string of pearls, which amuses me to no end.Q: I realize the term "roleplaying" was not used right at first, but when it was used, what did the term ROLE signify? Today most people consider role to mean you invent a fictional persona complete with emotions and feelings and then somehow try to faithfully become that person. I suspect that it was not nearly so pretentious way back in the day, that role simply meant you had a job to do (I'm the cleric!) or perhaps the psychological sense of role-play (what would you do if you were in this situation?) Was there a pretentious thespian elite right from the beginning?
A: Heaven forefend!
Back in the day all the participants realized it was nothing more than a game for diversion and amusement, did not pretend to thespianism or consider play an "art form."
These days some do give themselves airs in order to try to elevate their hobby activity into something grander in the eyes of others, perhaps even to fool themselves.
I must say that you absolutely nailed the sense of what the term role-playing was meant to mean--a role in the game and role assumption in regards to problem solving.
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Beyond the original gamers and original design intentions, though, it didn't take very long for the arty/thespian/lit types to wander in to the hobby in numbers. There's clear evidence of them in some of the gaming mags and APAs of the mid-to-late 1970s, and of course by the mid-1980s Gygax's complaints about the trend were already well-known (culminating, more or less, in the semi-infamous 1985 Dragon magazine essay where he urged readers to return to a more balanced form of play and to stop placing undue attention on the thespian angles).
ReplyDeleteI figure most folks who read this blog remember most of this anyway; I'm just posting it in case someone reads Gygax's modern context and goes "a-ha! It's all Vampire's fault!" or some such. :) No indeed.
[...] And you know, I hadn't read that article in years, even though vague memories of it always stuck with me (I remember it annoyed Kenny, one of my DMs at the time).
ReplyDeleteReading back over it now, it strikes me just how much Gygax seems to be gritting his teeth in an attempt to treat the subject politely (a bit different from some of his more acerbic APA writings from earlier on). He still gets his digs in, but he keeps them subtle (going from but-of-course-it's-up-to-you back to reminding you that the focus on roleplay is "undue") :)
Now that you bring it up, I guess I should have included some comment about how I find the authorial intent behind D&D interesting, but that I don't feel burdened to play the game Gary's way. I like doing silly voices and accents too much to simply play a pawn with hit points.
ReplyDeleteThis middle paragraph though:
These days some do give themselves airs in order to try to elevate their hobby activity into something grander in the eyes of others, perhaps even to fool themselves.
That's ammunition for RPG Pundit if I ever saw it.
It is to the eternal benefit of the hobby that nobody much ever cared to play it Gary's way :) As I've said many times: RPGs weren't invented by Gygax & Arneson and RPGs weren't invented by designers that came before them or after them. RPGs were invented by D&D players who took D&D and played it wrong. That's where the hobby comes from, and ultimately that's where all the energy has always been.
ReplyDeleteMakes me wonder if GG and DA didn't intend for D&D to become an RPG, then why not just leave it as the original Chainmail rules and be done with it, rather than all the constant changing and up-dating, books, books, and more books, yada-yada-yada.
ReplyDeleteAny comments about that?
Or am I asking in the wrong forum?
D&D even in its original form was a dramatically different wargaming experience from Chainmail.
ReplyDeleteAfter that, they went with what the fans were grooving on. They never originally intended, for example, to support the game with dungeon modules. Arneson did one dungeon intended as an illustrative example ... everyone at TSR was blindsided by fan-requests for more premade dungeons, something that would eventually lead to a triple-digit library of adventure modules over the years.
It's also useful to remember that Gygax's authorial intentions (or his modern recollections of them) almost certainly weren't exactly the same as Arneson's. Chainmail had been Perren & Gygax ... Arneson entered the mix by bringing in dungeons, cooperative tactical play against foes in dungeons, individual PCs, etc ... It was Arneson's contributions to the gameplay that really laid the foundations for RPGing. Chainmail had one-mini-equals-one-man, and it had fantasy/magic rules, but Chainmail didn't have individual PCs or cooperative, exploratory play. Very different beast.
Arneson does get nearly enough credit little contributions like inventing the concept of the GM as we know it, and establishing the "PC party" as the default mode of play.
ReplyDeleteYah ... and even those elements that he and his group borrowed from unrelated designs were done in very cunning and creative fashion that took those elements where they'd never been before. Arneson, and Arneson's players, are the top of the pantheon as far as I'm concerned [though, of course, the multiple lawsuits between he and Gygax made it, historically speaking, a tie] :)
ReplyDeleteGygax tends to overshadow Arneson in much the same way that Christopher Columbus tends to overshadow the fact that North America was already sitting there, blocking his path to the East Indies :) And Gygax's authorial intentions, I place right beside Columbus' mercantile ones in their relative importance to how RPG games should be played/America should be explored ;)