Is D&D Inevitable?

And the year's best RPG sale

This week on the channel I took a look through the Japanese version of the D&D Rules Cyclopedia, which was completely redesigned for a Japanese audience. Ever wonder what D&D would look like as a 1980s anime? Now you don’t have to.

• Humble Bundle has one of the best RPG deals I’ve ever seen: Runequest, Symbaroum, Vaesen, Masks, Basic Roleplaying, Savage Worlds, The Witcher, Dragonbane, Nights Black Agents, Call of Cthulhu, WFRP, Apocalypse World, Cyberpunk Red, and TONS more RPGs all for $40.

• Want to try your hand at writing a short DnD adventure? The Appendix N Jam is going on right now! Judges are Jorphdan, Lex Mandrake, Diogo Nogueira, Tony Vasinda, Nova aka Idle Cartulary, and Sam Mameli aka Skullboy

---

Is D&D Inevitable?

I was recently on Ben Riggs’ podcast (episode coming soon) and an interesting topic came up: what would RPGs look like if D&D hadn’t been the first one? What if Vampire larps had taken over in the 1970s, or Traveler, or PbtA games?

What’s interesting to me about this is that strictly speaking D&D wasn’t the first RPG, Braunstein was, and just being first didn’t guarantee its success. For those who don’t know, Braunstein was a sort of larp run by David Wesely in 1969. It was the first game to have each player controlling a different character with a unique motivation, and it gave them completely free reign to try whatever they wanted. I got to play it with him at Gary Con a little while back.

And it wasn’t a one off thing either. Wesely ran the game multiple times, and after he joined the military other gamers in his area kept up the tradition. There was a Western version of it called Brownstone and of course Dave Arneson began the first fantasy version with Blackmoor.

Despite how revolutionary the game structure was, it never became more than a curiosity. Even though it was the first RPG by modern definitions, that wasn’t enough to turn it into a global phenomenon that would launch a whole industry and change gaming forever.

In my view, D&D became a powerhouse not because of the year it released because it took the Braunsteinian elements of roleplay and “tactical infinity” and wedded them to two other elements, one from Gygax and one from Arneson. My hunch is that these two elements primed DnD for mass popularity, and that if DnD hadn’t combined them, whichever RPG thought to do it first would have become the industry leader.

Let me explain.