Do you figure Colonel Mustard misses it closer?
If you’re asking if “Clue” is a narrative, it’s really not, except in the most technical sense. Is it that important for me to define words like “protagonist” and “narrative”? Because that sounds, again, exhausting, and makes the thread less interesting.
Granted, maybe you play Clue differently from me. But I’ve never played a game where people get into character and assign character traits to their game piece and make significant game decisions based on those character traits; nor have I been in a game of Clue or Monopoly where there was a traditional narrative structure with unity of theme, place, or time, with scenes, with protagonists and antagonists, and so on.
I suppose for the sake of argument (and I mean that phrase quite literally) you can stretch to consider the top hat a protagonist. But for roleplaying games, you don’t have to stretch.
A lot of roleplaying (and even more so in the early days) was just rolling dice in a dungeon crawl. “Getting into character” was window dressing, gamism was the dominant strain of play, everything was driven by rolls on tables. I view that as no different than a boardgame.
My H:ZD game didn’t end with the main questline.
Gary Gygax has said that people have been playing role playing games forever and that D&D was just “Cowboys & Indians” or “Cops & Robbers” with more rules to settle arguments. Given the number of diceless RPGs, stat-less RPGs or GM-less RPGs or other forms that don’t require five nerds in a basement rolling dice and arguing over how much damage their fourth level wizard should have taken, I don’t find the arguments made upthread very convincing. I’m much more impressed with video games as a new gaming form; the primary difference between that and Solitaire is the inclusion of the computer to dynamically react to your choices.
You really can’t argue that video games are just an evolution of solitaire, while RPGs are something new, when many video games are themselves role-playing games, or at least adaptations of role-playing games.
Even then, do we have any evidence of prior board games with persistent character growth (even just in terms of leveling up and getting loot) across multiple sessions and adventures? Hell, Risk Legacy spawned an entire new genre in 2011 when somebody realized a traditional board game could present a continuous narrative experience.
A funny line from the Wikipedia page for legacy games:
Game designer Rob Daviau claims to have come up with the idea at a work meeting after jokingly asking why the murderous characters in Clue are always invited back to dinner.
Sure. I don’t think anybody is really saying otherwise. It seems like some people are perhaps feeling like LHoD is trying to - on Gygax’s behalf - co-opt the creation of existing forms of play. His assertion is only that the innovation was the mix of existing forms of play and narration, not that he invented any single aspect of it.
All of which have iterated from the ur-RPG of D&D. Even the way you describe them (diceless, stat-less, GM-less) indicates that these forms are excepting themselves from the standard RPG structure.
Again: looking at how the participants engage with the entertainment. My activities re: Horizon Zero Dawn are much closer to my activities re: Solitaire than they are my activities when I’m playing a one-shot at a gaming convention.
I feel like some folks are here to have an interesting discussion, and other folks want to win the thread. I don’t really know how to engage with the latter group, so I’m gonna try to focus on the former.
I’d say that they are different from the most widely marketed RPG and the one best known as a commercial product and so it’s a distinction worth making. But people have been doing round-robin role playing without dice or character sheets far longer than they’ve been printing Monster Manuals. No one argues that those games aren’t RPGs now (well, I assume someone does…) so they were RPGs back then as well.
I’m a huge fan of these games–my favorite is Kingdom–and I play them at gaming conventions a lot. But I think you’re right, that they’re different from traditional RPGs in some key ways. GMless games like Fiasco and The Quiet Year still have that random element that separate them from other make-believe structures; but games like Kingdom and Microscope don’t, and they’re much closer to traditional activities like make-believe or coauthoring a novel. By returning more closely to older forms of interaction, they innovate in the TTRPG space.
I guess I’m just confused as to your core intent.
The assertion is this: D&D was an innovative blend of existing forms of play and narration.
Do you agree or disagree? “People were roleplaying without dice or GMs before 1974” isn’t mutually exclusive with the assertion.
I think there’s a fundamental disconnect in how we play video games. In playing something like H:ZD, I’m interacting with NPCs, I’m looking at the gorgeous scenery, I’m getting my adrenaline pumping fighting a Thunderjaw. None of that is like a card game.
If you play H:ZD purely to tick off the main quest and then you’re done, I can see it being like a card game. But that’s a playstyle, that’s not what the video game itself is.
No, what I was answering to was this (from the OP):
No, I don’t believe that they are. I believe that Roleplaying Games are something that predates D&D and, while they’ve developed since then, they’re not fundamentally new to the last fifty years. If we’re discussing significant innovations and developments, I believe that video gaming has RPGs beat by a country mile.
I disagree. In the original Baldur’s Gate, for example, there’s a scene with an angry drunk in a bar. You can talk to him, and if you say just the right things, he’ll calm down. Say the wrong things, or don’t say anything, and he’ll attack, and you can fight him. Or you can just leave, or never even enter that bar in the first place.
No matter how you deal with it, it’s an “easy encounter”, and even if you skip it entirely, it’ll have negligible impact on the main storyline (you might get like 20 XP for it, out of the tens of thousands you’ll eventually get). But a player playing a certain sort of character might still find a significant amount of satisfaction, in successfully achieving the peaceful resolution of the conflict. There’s nothing really comparable to that in Solitaire, because it really is roleplaying (albeit a very limited form of roleplaying, due to the limits of AI in the game).
I think it’s very obvious that 1970s Dungeons & Dragons was different than any previous forms of entertainment. Its particular combination of game elements was unique at that time.
Expanding from the original post. I don’t think any element is unique to D&D, but I think it’s the first game to have all of these.
Narrative: winning the game is completing the story in a satisfactory way. Other games might have narratives, but in D&D the narrative is the goal, which is rather unusual.
Cooperative: players are mostly aligned in their goals. One player succeeding does not necessarily prevent any other player from succeeding. This distinguishes D&D from most other games.
Protagonist: each player identifies with exactly one game piece. This distinguishes D&D from previous wargames.
Formal: Rules are codified. This distinguishes D&D from previous story-telling pastimes.
Asymmetric: Each player’s piece has unique rules. Similar to chess, but different from most other games.
Chance: Results are unpredictable within some bounds. Randomness is common in games; the novelty here is the application of randomness in so many ways.
Referee: There’s a neutral arbiter to manage the game. This is typical for wargames, but not so much other games.
Persistence: The game state is maintained across play sessions. To me, this is the biggest innovation and most likely to be unique. Card clubs will keep point totals across a season, but each session resets the game. Did any other games prior to D&D keep track of things in any similar way?
I don’t think it’s fair (or useful) to consider video games as a monolithic experience.
Some are absolutely like Solitaire (some of them are Solitaire!). They’re just big flowcharts requiring minimal cognitive input on my part, and I can play them while I listen to a book or have a conversation with somebody.
Some require much more focus and engage the same parts of my brain that engage when I’m performing complex, multi-layered tasks in the real world. They require thoughtful and/or split-second reactions to unpredictable stimuli, just like in real life (or in tabletop RPGs).
And what’s one for me isn’t necessarily one for you. I’ve played The Binding of Isaac so much that it’s an absolutely mindless activity for me, even though it’s a notoriously difficult game by most standards.
Excellent summation.
My kneejerk reaction is to disagree, but just because I don’t know of any roleplaying games prior to D&D (and I think Pleonast’s above post is an excellent roadmap for what it - pardon the pun - brought to the table) doesn’t mean they didn’t exist. Do you have any examples?
I don’t think you need to. I doubt anyone is hailing Windows Solitaire or Minesweeper as significant changes. I would point to the levels of immersiveness and dynamic AI response as things that move (some) video games much further from “Solitaire” than RPGs are removed from playing Cops & Robbers but with dice.
The basic fundamental of RPGs is the make-believe role playing. You can have RPGs without dice or without stats or without a GM or even without other players but you can’t have an RPG without the make believe. That element has been with us forever and goes beyond scampering kids to more adult campfire and parlor games of storytelling. Ironically, LHoD cites the return of these as an “innovation” in the TTRPG space but that strikes me as rather circular. While games like D&D have probably helped return them to some popularity from an era where evening entertainment was largely about television, those sorts of games don’t exist because of D&D. But if we’re going to call them RPGs – and I believe that they are – then we can’t call RPGs something “new”.
What’s “new” about D&D and its kin are the dice and books and character sheets. And I agree that those are an innovation. I don’t believe they are as much of an innovation as what’s going on in the video gaming space so, whether we’re judging on fundamentals or on innovations, I don’t see RPGs as a winner. Just my opinion for discussion. If someone wants to see RPGs as the newest thing to happen to game play, it doesn’t really rustle my feathers.
I think I get what you’re saying. But still, you’re interacting with an inanimate object (deck of cards/computer), and it’s presenting you with unexpected information (the two of clubs/the angry drunk), and you’re choosing how to respond (place it on the ace of clubs or on the three of hearts/fight him or sooth him), and the inanimate object gives you a new scenario depending on your choice, continuing the game.
It’s true that there’s a much more emotional/narrative element in BG than in solitaire, and certainly BG has a lot of elements in common with a novel, to the extent that CRPGs are a bit of a combination of a novel and solitaire. But the bones of how you interact are pretty similar.
Wait a minute, that’s not what I said. I said the absence of a randomizer was an innovation in that space, not the presence of make-believe. Rereading what I wrote, I can see how that could have been clearer.