Under Way

The dawn of a New Year (or, more technically, the late morning) is a time to step back, reflect, and set goals for the future. For me, a long time goal has been to learn and develop the discipline needed to treat writing as something more than a sideline or hobby. To that end, I'm going to make another attempt to do a post a day. Past attempts focused on comic books or a life journal; they stuttered and failed as I lost interest in both. This time out, I've decided to broaden my focus and write about the things that interest me on a day to day basis.

Over in his livejournal, James Maliszewski poses the interesting question "when did roleplaying games take the big plunge in transitioning between being rules that allowed you to tell your own stories in an imaginary world (of your own construction or others') to being rules that allowed you to tell other people's stories?"

Myself, I kind of look back and see the period around the release of TSR's Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2^nd edition as a marker point for the kind of gaming transition to which he's referring. For one thing, there was the forced move of the Forgotten Realms campaign setting to the 2^nd edition, including the release of a trilogy of railroaded adventures (Shadowdale, Tantras, and Waterdeep) that forced the PCs to follow along during the "major events" that changed the game world. I always found that move interesting, as it asserted TSR's control and dominance of the Forgotten Realms setting over that of the local Gamemaster.

I mark this as a transition point, because initially the Forgotten Realms were presented as a kind of sandbox setting for Gamemasters. The setting was massive; with broad areas left undefined and barely sketched in, it had much in common with the earlier Greyhawk Gazetteer. After the release of 2^nd edition, and the migration of the FR setting into that ruleset, I think it was made very explicit that as far as TSR was concerned, we were no longer playing in our sandbox, but rather sharing theirs.

This isn't to say there weren't earlier games that had elements of telling other people's stories – Runequest and Pendragon were both explicitly telling other peoples stories, for example. The comic book tie-in games for Marvel and DC were also clearly set in other people's worlds. But all these systems seemed to encourage the GM to take ownership of the setting and story, and to use the rules as a guideline to telling their own stories. Even DragonLance, despite the heavy tie in with the novels, seemed structured around the idea that the GM and players would fill in the gaps and make stuff up.

All of which brings us back to those three modules and the move to 2^nd Edition AD&D as a kind of marker point for the transition. It might just have been me, but I remember buying those modules (I was buying all the Forgotten Realms stuff at the time), reading them, and feeling like they had talked down to me. They didn't trust me to figure out how to bring my game up to date with their new rules, so had provided what I found to be a badly written and constructed set of modules to force things into their mold.

From that point on, I think the nature of RPGs shifted away from privileging our personal imagination and inventiveness, and instead began to rely on the imagination and inventiveness of those writing the source materials. I suspect this might have been because by 1989, the industry had filled up with a second generation of gamers – people who had grown up on the games of the 70s and could use them as source material for their own designs; but also with people who, as gamers, felt a desire to share their own campaigns and settings with all of us.

The trend continues, I think. It's gotten even stronger, as computer gaming has begun to influence tabletop design in an incestuous circle.