From Metafilter comes a link to a really well-written blog that covers a lot of history relevant to old-school gaming: cardboard, paper and 5 1/4" floppy. Jimmy Maher's The Digital Antiquarian goes analog for a series on hex wargames and D&D that gives the best concise narratives of these hobbies' origins I've yet seen, and then traces their influence on computer games through the divergent paths of text adventures and computer RPGs. Early in my blog's history I noted a reverse influence - the more naturalistic problem-solving nature of text adventures coming in through the Old School movement and enlightening the number-crunching, cRPG-like ways of later D&D editions. So it's good to have all this history spelled out with great detail and insight. For example:' I submit that D&D was in practice not mostly played by groups of “artful thespians,” but by scruffy teenage boys and men perfectly happy to remain Jim and Bob as they pondered the best way to kill that group of trolls in the next room. And that experience of D&D a computer could, within inevitable limits, simulate pretty well.'
There's even an emulator version of Temple of Apshai, the pioneering computer RPG. Brave danger as a congeries of extended-set ASCII blocks!
Good stuff here.
I submit that D&D was in practice not mostly played by groups of “artful thespians,” but by scruffy teenage boys and men perfectly happy to remain Jim and Bob as they pondered the best way to kill that group of trolls in the next room. And that experience of D&D a computer could, within inevitable limits, simulate pretty well.
ReplyDeleteYes, I've often thought that. I've noticed that my games involve increasingly less and less thesping. We're a group of men, all in our 30s, and we enjoy solving puzzles, thinking out tactics for fights, and imagining spending wealth on cool kit. None of this needs to be "acted" for it to be fun, and in fact that would probably detract from the fun considerably.
Roguelike games and cross-pollenisation with D&D are another area to explore, as they seem like a divergent trend which maintained the purity of the original wargamish origins of D&D: basically, it doesn't matter what your character "feels" - he's your avatar and you're guiding him through obstacles, past monsters, and to the treasure.
@noisms: Right, or as I've put it, D&D is essentially an adventure game rather than a roleplaying game. Or rather, if roleplaying goes on, it is entirely for its own sake and does not plug in to the reward structure of the game. Especially if you leave out behavioral alignment restrictions.
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