The Varieties of Role-Playing Game Experience
In their interdisciplinary handbook describing the emerging field of role-playing game (RPG) studies, José P. Zagal and Sebastian Deterding begin by noting the universality of role-playing across the range of human experience: ‘We all role-play,’ Zagal and Deterding say, in many different ways throughout our lives: as toddlers and as adolescents, as adults at work and in our private lives, in indulging our imaginations, and in enacting our ordinary social roles. ‘It is little wonder,’ they add, ‘that games … have incorporated [role-playing] into their form: a snow globe version, safely packed, miniaturized, maybe a bit abstract, but strangely compelling’ (Deterding and Zagal 2018, p. 1). It seems to me that this universality makes it easy to assume that because we know what role-playing is from our own experience, we know what role-playing games must be, or that because we have a familiarity with one sort of role-playing game, we can generalize across all role-playing games. Possibly, however, this is begging the question.
The variety of possible RPG experience adds a layer of challenge to reaching consensus in role-playing game-related discussion, whether scholarly or otherwise. Participants in online conversations about RPGs resort to the motif of ‘talking past each other’ with some frequency.1 And the academic field of game studies—itself a multidisciplinary project focused on computer games, as befits its inception in the early twenty-first century out of earlier ‘cyberstudies’ (Aarseth 2006)—has only recently and fitfully begun to see tabletop RPGs (TRPGs) as anything more than the outmoded predecessors of the digital games in which they are really interested. Juul’s ‘classic game model’ positions tabletop RPGs as a ‘borderline case’ between things that are clearly games and things that are clearly not games, because despite having many game-like qualities, TRPGs lack fixed rules (Juul 2005, p. 44). To be fair, Juul’s intent is to problematize the classic game model by showing how the existence of different implementations of the same game across different media and platforms obscures the essence of any given game.
This chapter thus seeks to outline the discourse of role-playing games in the last quarter of the twentieth century as a set of conversations that sought to make sense of—and in making sense of, construct—what role-playing games were and what (and who) they were for. It is within the context of those conversations that the Forge—an online site for the discussion of tabletop RPG design, publication, and play in the first decade of the twenty-first century—has its significance, with consequences for the way that questions of art, play, authorship, and identity were layered within the discourse of TRPGs.
The Origins of Role-Playing Games
The emergence of fantasy role-playing games can be traced to the mid- to late twentieth-century confluence of (a) the wargaming hobby, (b) science fiction and fantasy fandom, and (c) the play-by-mail community of Diplomacy (Avalon Hill 1958), a game of international grand strategy (Peterson 2012). To the extent that there existed a coherent center at the origin of role-playing games, it lay, according to Peterson, in the open-world ethos that let players at least try to do anything in the game. Following the publication of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D; TSR 1974), however, ‘it took a couple of years for word-of-mouth to spread news of the game, and generate increasing sales and a body of players’ (Mason 2001, p. 1; see also Fine 1983, p. 15). The company estimated in 1979 that it would gross $2 million in annual sales, with 300,000 players in the USA and another 100,000 overseas.2
The earliest version of D&D relied so heavily upon the reader’s knowledge of the conventions of miniatures wargaming that it was held to be nearly unintelligible without that familiarity. This set of rules was ‘written with the assumption that the audience is already familiar with wargaming terms like referee and campaign’ (Mona 2007, p. 27), and they did not try to hide how incomplete they were in and of themselves (Laycock 2015, pp. 43–44). ‘As a result,’ one observer concluded, ‘the first few years of Dungeons & Dragons saw a multitude of interpretations of the game’ (Mason 2001, p. 2). In addition, D&D supplements like Greyhawk (TSR 1975) and articles in the company’s newsletter The Strategic Review (later Dragon magazine) ‘suggested that players add, remove, and personalize’ material for the game, and ‘made it okay for different groups to use different rules’ (Ewalt 2013, p. 95).
This ambiguity or even illegibility made the game seem incomprehensibly arcane to outside observers. One journalist could make neither heads nor tails of D&D: ‘At least on a first reading,’ he wrote, ‘it is only marginally less complicated than a Ptolemaic analysis of planetary motion.’3 Another sought to provide context in the wake of the mysterious disappearance and return of the reportedly brilliant but troubled young University of Michigan student James Dallas Egbert III, who was said to have played ‘an elaborated version of an intellectual game called “Dungeons & Dragons” … in the tunnels beneath the university.’ She anticipated her readers’ questions: ‘What is this game, which its players call D and D? Is it a harmless battle of wits and craftsmanship originated by J.R.R. Tolkien, the science-fiction and fantasy writer? Or is it a bizarre exercise involving the occult?’4
A considerably better-informed account at about the same time offers a description of D&D play apparently provided by a TSR spokesman. ‘Dungeons and Dragons has no board, no cards, no play money, no winners or losers, no spaces to move,’ the reporter told readers. He went on,
What it does have is rules that are only boundaries for the imagination of a game leader, the “dungeon master” or “D.M.” who creates an environment for play. In the D.M.’s imaginary castle, dungeon, or landscape, the players, who have created characters with various strengths and weaknesses by rolling six-sided dice, go adventuring equipped with weapons, food, and a specific amount of gold. Many game sessions later, the players will have learned about the environment, garnered wealth and magic items, and increased their characters’ “level of experience.”5
How to Play D&D
The proliferation of rules variations, play ideas, and other game options in modules, game magazines, and published supplements throughout the 1970s and 1980s created a fragmented textual landscape within which there was ample scope for local experimentation and a lot of contradictory guidance about how to play, especially given that as the game progresses, players usually attempt a wider and wider array of in-game activities. Though the initial setting for any given game would typically be a monster-haunted underground complex of one sort or another (generically called a dungeon), ‘at more advanced levels’ of play, one D&D player-turned-memoirist recalled, you might ‘engage in politics, marry, build cities, things you might have a chance of eventually doing in real life, were you not wasting every waking hour thinking about a game’ (Barrowcliffe 2007, p. 34).6
As all of this implies, local groups would develop idiosyncratic approaches to the game based on the individual preferences of players and the materials they had available, which may have included house rules and homebrew systems developed locally. As another writer put it when discussing his adolescent D&D games, ‘When we disagreed with the rule books, we made up fresh ones: tweaks, amendments, entire combat systems, even inventing new games’ (Gilsdorf 2009, p. 9). In some cases, distinctive local gaming scenes emerged, organized around the preferred variant in the area, including ones in Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area, and the Caltech campus in Los Angeles (Fine 1983, p. 32). The ‘California gaming’ scene in particular had a reputation for having developed a particularly eclectic approach to D&D (Appelcline 2014a, p. 317).
How to Play ‘Not D&D’
But as role-playing games increased in popularity and variety following the publication of D&D, its publisher was asserting a great deal of authority regarding what was truly Dungeons & Dragons and what wasn’t. For his part, Gary Gygax vehemently denigrated most fan-produced material as ‘detrimental to the campaign’ (Fine 1983, p. 256), and looked askance at Caltech’s ‘high-level variant’ Dungeons and Beavers (named after the Caltech mascot): ‘Okay, different strokes for different folks,’ he wrote, ‘but that is not D&D’ (Gygax 1981, p. 26; see also Mona 2007, p. 28). By the end of the 1980s, according to one observer, Gygax would display a ‘hissing aversion’ to ‘just about every development’ that varied from his ‘original conception of dungeon delving’ as the efficient slaughter of monsters and maximal acquisition of loot (Mason 2001, p. 8).
A number of games that were sufficiently distinct from Dungeons & Dragons to permit publication as separate games had already appeared by the end of the 1970s. Fine (1983, p. 6) mentions a number of them in passing and discusses in detail the three games in addition...