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Player Typologies, from Wargames to Role-Playing Games
One of the threads that The Elusive Shift follows is the development of typologies that sorted players, or sometimes game designs or playstyles, into categories that reflect what kind of experience...
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The Origins of Rule Zero
The idea that a gamemaster has the discretion to alter or discard published rules was not an invention of role-playing games: it derived from a wargaming tradition going back to the free Kriegsspiel...
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A History of Hero Points: Fame, Fortune and Fate
"Hero Points" was the name given by James Bond 007 (1983) to a quantified resource players could expend to alter the results of a particular system resolution. It built on an earlier innovation in the...
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Immersion and Role Playing in the 1970s
The idea that role playing involved a property called "immersion" occurred to the early adopters of the 1970s fairly early. The earliest explicit use I've found was that of Pieter Roos, as shown in...
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Does System Matter?
Dungeons & Dragons started out as a game with such an adaptable and open-ended set of rules that early adopters questioned whether any further published RPG systems were even necessary: DMs could...
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Western Gunfight (1970): the First RPG?
In 1970, a group of UK gamers located in Bristol published the first edition of their Western Gunfight rules, which recorded systems they had been running locally since the late 1960s. In the pages of...
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The Invention of the d4
When it comes to using Platonic solids as dice, the d4 is something of a special case. There are precedents that stretch back into ancient history for the use of the d6, d8, d12 and d20 as dice, as...
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A Date for Monsters! Monsters! Monsters! Galore
Everything leaves a trace. That's been my guiding principle researching the history of early wargames and role-playing games: any commercial product that survives, no matter how obscure, had to be...
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The Edmund Scientific Polyhedron Set (1966)
In cataloging the polyhedral dice available to early gamers, we shouldn't neglect a few products that weren't marketed as dice at all. In the 1960s, educational supply companies made models of the...
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The Sansu Set d10
Scouring through the polyhedral dice available to early gamers, you can sometimes stumble across a peculiar looking ten-sided die numbered 0 through 9. While these are obscure dice in America, they are...
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Game Wizards: My New Book
I have a new book coming out next month called Game Wizards. Unlike my previous books, which are histories of game design, this is an early history of Dungeons & Dragons as a product: of how it...
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Game Wizards: TSR Financials
Underpinning the business story of Game Wizards is the financial model shown here of TSR as a company, from the founding of TSR Hobbies in 1975 to the ouster of Gary Gygax at the end of 1985. Although...
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Game Wizards: TSR Staffing
The above model, drawn from the narrative of Game Wizards, shows roughly how many people TSR had on staff between 1976 and 1985. Obviously, staffing fluctuated over a given year, and these plotted...
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Game Wizards: D&D Development Timeline
While Game Wizardshas plenty to say about the big picture of TSR's corporate financials, it also pays a lot of attention to the early, scrappy days when D&D was more of a hobby than a business to...
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Units of Value and the Tactical Studies Rules Partnership
From September 1973 to September 1975, Tactical Studies Rules was a partnership of hobbyists, not a corporation. Under Wisconsin law at the time, partnerships apparently couldn't sell stock shares --...
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"Game Wizards" the Game
Game Wizardshas "turn results" at the end of the annual chapters to track the big picture, while casting the business of D&D as the sort of game that Gygax and others often made it out to be....
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Arneson's Hit Points for Characters
Game Wizardsis very decidedly not a book about who invented which system in D&D. But early drafts of the book did track one design choice in D&D that Dave Arneson perennially criticized: the...
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Game Wizards: The Evolution of TSR Contracts
This single piece of paper constitutes the entirety of the understanding between TSR and the authors of the 1975 Greyhawk supplement: most significantly, it covers a copyright assignment to TSR and an...
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Arneson v. Gygax: The Freeman Deposition
When Dave Arneson's lawsuit against TSR was nearing a trial date at the end of 1980, his legal team recruited an expert witness in the person of Jon Freeman. Freeman, who wrote for Games magazine and...
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The Deadly Illusion of GenCon 1978
As much attention as Game Wizardslavishes on conventions, there was more still before the manuscript was cut down to size. Convention tournaments in particular received more attention, and GenCon 1978...
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Alistair MacIntyre's 1974 Dungeon Designs
As another anniversary of the birth of Dungeons & Dragons passes, let's look back 48 years to the heady days of 1974, when the idea of dungeon adventuring had only just started to capture the...
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E'a, Chronicles of a Dying World
David M. Fitzgerald's E'a: Chronicles of a Dying World is one of the more obscure digest-sized unofficial supplements to early D&D, little known even in the community of its day. E'a did warrant a...
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Trivial Pursuit: Dungeons & Dragons Ultimate Edition
Of all the things that I never imagined I would end up working on, I was asked to help put together the Trivial Pursuit D&D edition, which has just been released. It is, well, Trivial Pursuit, but...
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D&D Turns 50, and Something Else Turns 200
2024 marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Dungeons & Dragons. Nailing down the exact release date of a product as informally produced as D&D is difficult: I've written about that...
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Jim Ward's Adventure in Gygax's Wonderland
Last weekend at GaryCon, many of us raised a glass to the memory of Jim Ward, who passed away just days before the convention. Ward was very helpful to me in my research, as he had been a longtime TSR...
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