Notes

• Erroneously referred to Tactical Studies Rules as Tactical Study Rules
• m119h/m199h has never actually been confirmed to exist – only speculated
• While Dave Arneson co-created D&D, it was Gary Gygax and Don Kaye who founded TSR

Description

RPG franchises like The Elder Scrolls and Final Fantasy didn’t just appear one day as the polished, AAA titles they are now. And to really understand how they came to be, we have to go back and see where they came from.

In this episode, we take a look at the RPG and it’s origins in Prussian wargaming, Dungeons & Dragons, and the creative use of college computers.

The First of Something

So a question I’ve been thinking a lot about recently, and it’s one of those questions that stays a bit longer than it needs to and just begs you for an answer, is, “where do you put the first of something?”

It’s a question that seems simple on the surface; we all know where to put something that already has a place – but what about something that doesn’t?

This question was, in a way, prompted by a recent playthrough of Death Stranding, which, if you’re not familiar, is a game in which Norman Reedus and a baby traverse a post apocalyptic and haunted landscape to deliver packages and restore the bonds, or strands, that connect individuals together.

In a twitter post from 2019, Hideo Kojima, the designer behind the game as well as a small indie franchise you may have heard about called Metal Gear Solid, wrote, quote:

DEATH STRANDING is not a stealth game. It is brand new action game with the concept of connection (strand). I call it Social Strand System, or simply Strand Game.

Unquote.

This type of tweet isn’t out of character for Kojima – a brief look through his twitter feed will show that to be the case.

But, this prompted many people, myself included, to ask the question, “What?”

Death Stranding is definitely a unique experience that approaches many gaming norms in a unique way, and it’s actually a personal favorite of mine, but does that really mean it deserves it’s own category? Is it really that different?

For a while, it seemed the answer was simply “well, no.” For most people, myself included, it fit right in to the action/adventure genre, even with it’s unconventional approach.

But then, in 2021, something interesting happened. Someone else started developing a “strand game.”

In an interview with Kotaku from September of 2021, Carolyn Petit spoke with game designer Xalavier Nelson Jr. of Strange Scaffold about his new game, called Witch Strandings – which is a not so subtle nod to its inspiration. In the interview, Xalavier listed three core principals that, to him, define the Strand genre. They were:

1. Nurturing
2. Transportation
3. Physicality

And it was after I read this interview that the question I posed at the beginning, “where do you put the first of something?” really started to burrow its way into my head.

In a very short period of time, all things considered, we essentially witnessed the birth of a new game genre – one that had an obvious heritage in the action/adventure genre, but one that also brought enough nuance and uniqueness to the table as to make it something different.

But Byron, what does that have to do with RPGs? You may be asking.

Well, it actually has a lot to do with it.

RPGs, as we know them now, weren’t plucked from the ether as the polished, mechanically sound games we’ve come to know and love. Even now, conventions are constantly evolving, and mechanics are constantly iterated on. Take a look at games like FFX and FFXV – 2 games from the same series, but vastly different in gameplay and style. But even with their differences, they share a few core elements that make them RPGs. And those elements came from somewhere – they were derived from something that came before, and as is the case with Death Stranding and the Strand genre, with enough nuance and uniqueness, those core elements became the basis for something new.

So what led to the creation of the RPG in the first place? And how do we determine what the first RPG actually was?

Where do you put the first of something? In this case, that something being the RPG.

But before we try to answer those questions, a small disclaimer.

One of the hardest parts of planning this episode, especially for someone like me who isn’t a historian by trade, or a writer for that matter, was figuring out how far back to go. There’s so much there, and each rabbit hole you go down leads to another, which leads to another, which leads to another, and before you know it you’re playing flamingo croquet with the Queen of Hearts. But I do mention that to emphasize that this episode is not meant to be a comprehensive history of every single individual, designer, game, or set of rules that ever existed, or even of everything that had some sort of influence over the RPG genre.

You could, for example, probably make some sort of connection between modern RPGs and board games like Chess, which has been around for nearly 1,500 years. Or even further back to games like Ur and Go if you really want to be that guy. But that’s way beyond the scope of this podcast, and even more so beyond the scope of my knowledge.

Instead, what I tried to do, was trace an easy to follow line, connecting the dots where they make the most sense and hopefully telling some sort of story that is interesting. Hard decisions, but necessary for the scope of the show, and for my own sanity. Which is why we begin our journey in 18th century Prussia at the advent of a new board game genre – the wargame.

The First Wargame

Johann Christian Ludwig Hellwig was an entomologist, and taught mathematics and natural science at a Prussian military academy in Brunswick. And in 1780, he published the rules for what could be considered the first non-abstract wargame, subtly titled “Attempt to build upon chess a tactical game which two or more persons might play.” He would later publish a second edition of the rules with the shorter title “Das Kriegsspiel”, simply, “The Wargame” in 1803. Hellwig’s proto-wargame is also sometimes called the Brunswick Wargame.

Hellwig’s wargame was mainly intended as a tool to teach his students military strategy, but he also envisioned it as a recreational game that people outside of the military sphere could also enjoy. In a letter dated September 26, 1801 Hellwig wrote, quote:

Wait a minute, I need to set the scene:

“You know that it was in the year 1780 that I published my first essay on the tactical game. That idea came to me first through a need which I experienced of rendering sensible, not to say palpable, a few principles and rules of the military art which my position as professor to the pages of the Duke of Brunswick required me to teach those young noblemen, destined some day for military service. Independently of this chief object my secondary one was to offer those who had no need of such resources an agreeable recreation by laying before them a game which, at first sight, presented different objects and operations, and which depended upon nothing but the rules and combinations made by the players.”

Unquote.

The game of Chess served as the core inspiration for Hellwig’s wargame, although it differed in some major ways. Where the chessboard was a simple checkered grid, the Brunswick Wargame utilized a grid that could represent multiple types of terrain, like mountains and rivers. The grid’s squares could be flipped to reveal different terrain, allowing for multiple terrain variations. Pieces also moved from abstract displays of individual troops to representations of entire military units with unique properties; you didn’t just have knights or rooks – you had grenadiers, and Calvary, and pontoon boats that all acted differently. Hellwig’s game broke from many of the traditions set by games like Chess and Go while still maintaining their simplicity and ease of play. It was innovative, and inspired multiple iterations over the next century and a half.

I think a common trap many of us fall into, myself included, is that we have a tendency to consider historical events through a modern lens. Ideas may seem commonplace now, when they’ve been around for decades, or centuries in this case. It doesn’t seem all that revolutionary for a board game to have something other than a generic grid. But at the time, this was novel, and new, and unique, and the impact it likely had on Hellwig’s contemporaries can’t be understated. Think about a time where you’ve experienced something new or novel, like the time you played your first video game, or saw Star Wars for the first time, or realized the little gas icon on your car’s dash indicates which side the tank is on – it would have felt something like that. Sure, to those of us who have played wargames like Warhammer, or video games like Total War, or even board games like Risk, the Brunswick Wargame can seem simple, and even a little crude. But before 1780, nothing like this existed. It was a completely new concept. And more than that, Hellwig’s wargame laid the first few bricks of what would later become the foundation for some of the most memorable gaming experiences in existence.

While Hellwig’s wargame undoubtedly blazed the trail for modern wargames, and by extension influenced some core elements of the role playing game, it’s admittedly difficult to draw a line directly from the Brunswick Wargame to something like Final Fantasy.

Over the next several decades, multiple new versions of the wargame would come into play, in a quite literal sense. And as I mentioned earlier, it’s not necessarily within the scope of this episode to cover each and every one. That being said, there’s one iteration that stands out in a few particularly significant ways, and it’s with this version of the wargame that we can start to connect the genre’s elements directly to tabletop role playing games – the direct precursors of their video game counterparts.

Kriegsspiel

In 1811, during lessons on perhaps the most interesting subject known to man, fortifications, with Prince William, (later King William I) and Prince Frederick (the heir presumptive to George III until his early death), the instructor recommended they study a new wargame, created by one Baron George Leopold von Reiswitz.

The game was simple in construct – a box of sand for the battlefield, that could be molded and sculpted to represent different terrain, with units represented by blocks of wood, much like modern politicians. But even with this unpretentious presentation, the two princes were intrigued and wanted to show the game to the Prussian monarch, King Frederick William III. Baron von Reiswitz was a bit reluctant to present what amounted to a giant sandbox to royalty, so he took some time to update the game’s components to something more suitable. A year later, in 1812, he presented the new version of the game to his majesty. This version had color coded terrain modeled in plaster, in relief, and units represented by porcelain cubes. His work was well received, and there’s definitely some sort of life lesson in there somewhere.

Throughout this time, Baron von Resiwitz’s son, Lt. Georg Heinrich Rudolf Johann von Reisswitz, continued to refine the rules, often collaborating with his fellow officers to ensure the rules allowed for, as much as possible, realistic battlefield strategies. In 1824, Reiswitz had the opportunity to present his refined version of the game to a group of Prussian military leaders. Prince Wilhelm was so impressed that he brought the game before the king and the General Chief of Staff, Lt. General Karl von Müffling (Moofling). Pleased with the warm reception of the game, Resiwitz officially published the rules, concisely titled “Instructions for the Representation of Tactical Maneuvers under the Guise of a Wargame”. Shortly after, he was summoned to a meeting with Lt. General Müffling to demonstrate his game. As soon as Reiswitz began unfolding his maps, reflective of real places and real terrain, Lt. General Müffling was sold. And after the session was over, Lt. General Müffling exclaimed, quote:

“Why, this is not a game, it is a veritable war school!”

Unquote

He later recommended the game be used as a training tool by the entire Prussian military. And for the next few decades, Reiswitz’s wargame, later simply called Kriegsspiel, became the standard bearer for wargaming throughout much of Europe.

Sadly, the fame and recognition brought to Reiswitz by the game also brought those who despised him for it. Many of his contemporaries, jealous of his success and reputation among elite Prussian circles, took it upon themselves to actively sabotage his career with defamatory accusations, ultimately resulting in his placement with the Third Brigade of Artillery at Torgau, a placement he saw as a disgrace. And on September 1st, 1827, Resiwitz took his own life. His father died soon after, and they were buried together in the same cemetery.

While his story ended on a somber note, his legacy lives on, and it’s due in no small part to his Kriegsspiel that we’re able to enjoy the RPG as we know it.

At this point, I do think it’s important to examine just why Resiwitz’s game was so well received, and how it revolutionized wargaming – finally moving the genre away from it’s roots in chess.

One of the most immediate elements that stood out was the move away from a grid. No longer were pieces confined to moving one square at a time – they could move in any direction, with variables applied to terrain, unit makeup, and vicinity to the leader. The maps moved from abstract representations of terrain to real life battlefields, thanks in part to the proliferation of the printing press. Even elements that I would have assumed were more modern inventions, like fog of war preventing units from being shown until it made logical sense, to rules that were specifically written to limit meta gaming, were present in Kriegsspiel. One of the most interesting tidbits I found when examining the rules was the fact that the game, initially designed for two opposing armies, used the colors red and blue to differentiate between the two – a trope that’s still present in many games today.

But, there were three changes that, to me, really stood out:

• The game used die rolls to calculate casualties and to resolve certain conflicts
• Players issued orders to determine actions instead of moving pieces instantly
• And finally, the game introduced an umpire to parse those orders, resolve any conflicts that arose from them, and to interpret the rules

In essence, with Resiwitz’s Kriegsspiel, he effectively launched the miniature wargaming genre and laid the mechanical foundation for the tabletop role playing game.

When I read the stories of people like Hellwig and Reiswitz and other histories in general, I’m often struck by the sheer absurdity of it all. And I mean that in a good way. Here we have, in the case of Reiswitz, a Prussian Lt who had a life, a normal life, that he lived around 200 years ago. He had his own goals, his own wants and needs. And he decided, with his father, to create a wargame, to help teach military strategy during a time and for a people that had just experienced one of the most tumultuous military campaigns in history. And to him, it was purely for that purpose – he was actually very much against the use of the word “game” to describe his work. Yet, eventually, Kriegsspiel would take on a life of it’s own, and, well, we know the result. It’s stories like that that make history worth learning.

Growing Pains

From the 1820s to the 1960s, the miniature wargaming hobby continued to grow and expand with new iterations, many introducing new elements to the genre. But there was one idea that began to take root throughout the 60s and 70s that had a major impact on the hobby, and one that would help define what exactly a role playing game was.

The concept of individualizing units as characters, with their own personalities, attributes, and stories that would emerge from playing over multiple scenarios would become more commonplace. Books like Jo Morschauser’s “How to Play Wargames in Miniature” from 1962, and Mike Carr’s flight combat game “Fight in the Skies” from 1968 emphasized playing as characters, and detailed ways to add personalities and backstories to your wargame units. This obviously led to questions surrounding how one was supposed to play a game when units had personalities of their own, and it was a question that caused some tension in the wargaming community.

At the same time, another important change was on the rise.

It’s worth pointing out, if you haven’t noticed already, that, up until this point, wargaming had largely been driven by a desire to mimic the battles of old. There were obviously some variations – some games allowed for fictional scenarios, but by and large most wargames assumed they took place in the real world, with real nations and real places. But in the late 50s, this began to change. Tony Bath would famously lead a wargame campaign set in the Hyborian Age, a fantasy setting based on the pulp fantasy works of Robert E. Howard – you may know it better as the home of Conan the Barbarian. And beginning in 1954, another seminal work would be released – one that would change the fantasy genre forever – J.R.R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

Soon after, fantasy worlds and ideas inspired by Tolkien, Howard, and others started to find themselves in the midst of wargame campaigns. Leonard Patt, a hobbyist wargamer and college student at the time, is credited as the first to implement a true fantasy setting into a wargame with a simple 2 page ruleset written for the New England Wargamers Association in 1970. But the first true fantasy wargaming system, and the one that would act as the transition point between wargames and role playing games, was Chainmail, published in 1971 by Guidon Games, written by Jeff Perrin and Gary Gygax. Chainmail originated from a series of rules written by Gygax and Perrin a few years earlier in a wargaming magazine, and, funnily enough, the fantasy aspect of Chainmail was an afterthought, and was relegated to a 14 page supplement at the end of the book.

This is another one of those points where it’s important, I think, to take a step back and try to put yourself in the shoes of the people who were there. As someone who’s read the Lord of the Rings on multiple occasions, and has seen the movies, played the games, and generally has more than a passing interest in Tolkien’s work, we even named our dog Arwen, it’s easy to forget that at some point not too long ago, The Lord of the Rings didn’t exist. If the three of you who are listening have even a passing interest in fantasy, you’ve undoubtedly come across something that’s been directly influenced by Tolkien. Elves, and orcs, and wizards, and bearded dwarves, and hobbit feet have been so ingrained in our culture that it seems like those things have always been there. And in the same way, the idea of gaming as a character is a trope that exists in nearly every video game genre at this point, whether it’s a RPG, a FPS, or a walking sim. And it’s the combination of these two ideas, along with the mechanical foundations laid by Resiwitz’s Kriegsspiel, that would culminate in the creation of the tabletop role playing game, and simultaneously, the computer role playing game.

Dungeons & Dragons

In 1974, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, through their new company Tactical Study Rules, Inc., published Dungeons & Dragons, a collection of three books – Men & Magic, Monsters & Treasure, and The Underworld & Wilderness. And history was made.

The D&D of 1974 is not the same D&D that we’re familiar with now. To modern eyes, the game would seem barebones – incomplete, even. There was a whole period of time where there was a big question as to what, exactly, D&D was. Was it a wargame? Or was it something else? The original, full title of the 1974 box set was Dungeons & Dragons Rules For Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable With Paper And Pencil And Miniature Figures – an obvious nod to its wargaming roots, as well as keeping tradition with the long titles that the genre was apparently fond of. And both Gygax and Arneson had extensive experience in the wargaming scene. In its early years, Gygax even marketed D&D as a wargame. And these were questions that rippled throughout the wargaming community at large.

It’s at this point that we can revisit the question I posed at the beginning of the episode – “where do you put the first of something?” Dungeons & Dragons was definitely different than what had come before, but was it different enough?

In addition to beautifully combining the elements of wargaming, high fantasy settings, and individual characters, Dungeons & Dragons also brought another innovation to the forefront – stat based character creation. In other words, characters were no longer nameless, faceless units. They were people, with motivations, personalities, backgrounds, and skills that made them unique. They delved the deepest dungeons, fought the most frightening monsters, and were rewarded with treasures untold, becoming stronger and more skilled as they progressed. Dungeons & Dragons wasn’t just a game about combat – it was a game about adventure. And with the intentionally flexible (and admittedly vague) rules, no two adventures ever had to be the same.

A new genre had been created – the role playing game. There was still, though, a crisis of identity surrounding what exactly a role playing game actually was. There were many players who had grown up with wargaming who were a bit reluctant to see Dungeons & Dragons as anything other than a game of combat, while others were enthralled with the opportunity to simply have an adventure as a rogue, or a wizard. Jon Peterson’s book The Elusive Shift: How Role-Playing Games Forged Their Identity explores that crisis in great detail, and is worth a read if you’re even remotely interested in the topic. Regardless, Dungeons & Dragons was indeed something new, and it directly inspired the creation of the first computer role playing games. And it’s here that we finally reach the culmination of everything that had come before.

The CRPG

One of the most interesting parts of studying history, to me anyway, is when you find seemingly unrelated things existing in the same period. Kind of like how Nintendo was founded just three years after the Statue of Liberty arrived in New York. And it’s even more interesting when you see those unrelated things come together. At the same time wargaming entered its period of contemplation over what, exactly, a wargame really was in the 60s, another important innovation was being established at The University of Illinois. Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations – PLATO for short, was a new distributed computer system developed in 1960 to help students learn and teachers teach. By the early 70s, PLATO had developed into a powerful, networked computer system, mostly relegated to use in academic institutions. But it also allowed particularly ingenious students the ability to flex their creative muscles.

In 1974, the same year Dungeons & Dragons released, the first known computer role playing game, mysteriously titled m119h (or m199h, depending on the source) was developed. Sadly, since PLATO was meant for serious academic use only, the file was deleted and lost to the void, and little is known of the game itself. But just a year later in 1975, another computer role playing game, simply titled The Dungeon, would be released on the PLATO system. The creator, Rusty Rutherford, sneakily named the file pedit5 to avoid deletion, and thankfully – it worked.

The Dungeon took direct inspiration from Dungeons & Dragons – you choose your profession from a small list of classes, roll stats for your character with the familiar attributes of Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, and Intelligence, that Dungeons & Dragons pioneered, and you explore a dungeon, fighting enemies, discovering secret passageways, and picking up loot on the way. Sure, the story elements were lacking; it was a straightforward dungeon crawl, with little in the way of narrative. Your goal was to make bank and leave. But the mechanics, and more importantly, the theme, was there.

The Dungeon was, unequivocally, a RPG.

Final Thoughts

In many ways, I think I bit off more than I could chew with this episode.

The history of the RPG is filled with detail, and contains so many great stories, that it’s nearly an impossible task to do it justice. There’s an extremely deep series of rabbit holes when it comes to both wargames and tabletop RPGs, and it was extremely difficult to parse what was and wasn’t relevant to the overarching story I’m trying to tell.

My goal from the get go was to distill what was there, as much as I could, in a way that made it easy to follow, and hopefully I’ve done that.

Thankfully, there are a ton of resources out there that do it better than I could, many of which I used extensively when researching this episode. You can find those sources in the show notes at subquestspod.com.

You can also follow the show on Twitter @subquests, and on Instagram @subquestspod.

Thanks for listening.

References

Anderson, Megan. “The Brunswick Wargame.” The Brunswick Wargame – Leiden Security and Global Affairs Blog, July 28, 2014. https://www.leidensecurityandglobalaffairs.nl/articles/the-brunswick-wargame.

Appelcline, Shannon. “Article the (Not-SO) Secret Origin of D&D.” The (Not-so) Secret Origin of D&D | Dungeons & Dragons, November 22, 2013. https://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/not-so-secret-origin-dd.

“Brief: Everything We Know about 1970s Mainframe Rpgs We Can No Longer Play.” The CRPG Addict, June 30, 2021. https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2021/06/brief-everything-we-know-about-1970s.html.

Cope, William, and Mary Kalantzis. “A Little History of e-Learning,” May 2021. https://doi.org/https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351400910_A_Little_History_of_e-Learning.

Heistand, H. “Foreign War Games.” Essay. In Selected Professional Papers Translated from European Military Publications, 233–289. Washington: Govt. Print. Off., 1898. https://archive.org/details/selectedprofess00divigoog/page/n244/mode/2up

“Johann Christian Ludwig Hellwig.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, July 5, 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Christian_Ludwig_Hellwig.

Kojima, Hideo. “Twitter Post.” Twitter. Twitter, May 30, 2019. https://twitter.com/HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN/status/1133981072524361728?ref_src=twsrc^tfw|twcamp^tweetembed|twterm^1133981072524361728|twgr^|twcon^s1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fkotaku.com%2Fembed%2Finset%2Fiframe%3Fid%3Dtwitter-1133981072524361728autosize%3D1.

Pepe, Felipe, and Craig Stern. “From Prussia with Love: The Origin of RPGs.” Essay. In The CRPG BOOK: A Guide to Computer Role-Playing Games, 28–29. Great Britain: Bitmap Books, 2021.

Peterson, Jon. “A Conversation with Len Patt.” Playing at the World, February 5, 2016. https://playingattheworld.blogspot.com/2016/02/a-conversation-with-len-patt.html.

Peterson, Jon. “A Precursor to the Chainmail Fantasy Supplement.” Playing at the World, January 20, 2016. https://playingattheworld.blogspot.com/2016/01/a-precursor-to-chainmail-fantasy.html.

Peterson, Jon. The Elusive Shift: How Role-Playing Games Forged Their Identity, 1-27. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2020.

Petit, Carolyn. “Look out Hideo Kojima, Someone Else Is Making a Strand Game.” Kotaku, September 13, 2021. https://kotaku.com/look-out-hideo-kojima-someone-else-is-making-a-strand-1847664001.

“Plato.” Illinois Distributed Museum. https://distributedmuseum.illinois.edu/exhibit/plato/.

Tresca, Michael J. The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2011.

Games Cited

Arneson, Dave and Gary Gygax. “Dungeons & Dragons Rules For Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable With Paper And Pencil And Miniature Figures.” Lake Geneva, WI: Tactical Studies Rules, 1974.

Carr, Mike. “Fight in the Skies.” War Game Inventors Guild. 1968.

Gygax, Gary and Jeff Perrin. “Chainmail rules for medieval miniatures.” Evansville, IN: Guidon Games. 1971.

Hellwig, Johann Christian Ludwig. “Das Kriegsspiel: ein Versuch die Wahrheit verschiedener Regeln der Kriegskunst in einem unterhaltenden Spiele anschaulich zu machen.” K. Reichard, 1803.

Kojima Productions. “Death Stranding.” 505 Games. Epic Games. 2020.

“m119h.” PLATO/PC. 1974.

Morschauser, Joseph. “How to Play Wargames in Miniature.” New York, NY: Walker, 1962.

Nelson, Jr., Xalavier. “Witch Strandings.” Strange Scaffold. PC. TBD.

Reisswitz, Georg Heinrich Rudolf Johann. “Anleitung zur Darstellung militairische Manöver mit dem Apparat des Kriegsspiel.” 1824.

Rutherford, Rusty. “The Dungeon.” PLATO/PC. 1975.

Supplements

Das Kreigsspiel – a scanned copy of Hellwig’s 1803 rules via Google Books.

Cyber1.org – a site dedicated to preserving the PLATO community.

Music and Sound

Bumpers

Pixel Lounge by Streambeats: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_KE88Au6Fc&list=OLAK5uy_nD5xnCbhoOOgu5SS0vqjYdp0sTTFCMAhQ

Wandering Light by Streambeats: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JTFoA1poQg&list=OLAK5uy_nD5xnCbhoOOgu5SS0vqjYdp0sTTFCMAhQ&index=8

Other

Patagonia by Scott Buckley – www.scottbuckley.com.au