Rise of the TTRPGs

You’ve heard of tabletop Role Playing Games and if you were born here on the planet Earth, you’ve heard of Dungeons and Dragons.

Everyone - and I mean everyone - has heard of Dungeons and Dragons. Whether you’re newer to the world, or you come from a time when the fabled 1970s walked the earth, it almost feels as though the tabletop phenomena has always been.

D&D <Dungeons and Dragons> is easily one of the most overused tabletop role playing games referenced when talking about tabletop role playing games.

There’s a good reason for that. 

It is the first massmarketed, and wildly successful tabletop RPG <Roleplaying Game> to sell was Dungeons and Dragons. This brainchild of Gary Gygax (Co-founder of the International Wargaming Federation alongside Bill Spear and Scott Duncan; IFW est. 1967 - 1973) and Dave Arneson, with art by Dave Arneson, Keenan Powell, Greg Bell, C. Corey, T. Keogh, and David C. Sutherland III. 

The original Dungeons and Dragons was designed under the assumption that players were familiar with its predecessor, Chainmail (by Gary Gygax and Jeff Perrin). 

Chainmail, the predecessor to Dungeons and Dragons, was a miniatures battle game reliant on the 20:1 scale figures and mass combat rules originally perfected by Tony Bath (founder of the Society of Ancients). 

These rules were based on the Lake Geneva medieval system (see Panzerfaust #64 and Domesday Book #5). In Chainmail, each figure represent twenty footmen (and six subsequent classes: light foot, heavy foot, armored foot, light horse, medium horse, and heavy horse). Battle is simulated by rolling six sided dice, and depending on the class fighting, the amount of dice you roll.

To date, Chainmail is still a part of legacy gaming through Dungeons and Dragons.

It was an evolutionary inevitability, the departure from traditional wargaming on a macro scale to stepping into the role of an individual character.

The inspiration born from Dungeons and Dragons gave birth to new genres of tabletop role playing games.

Following the 1974 release of Dungeons and Dragons, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson discovered Muhammad Abd-al-Rahman (M.A.R.) Barker’s self published work, Empire of the Petal Throne. Through TSR (Tactical Studies Rules: 1973 - 1997), Gygax and Arneson acquired and published and released M.A.R. Barker’s game in 1975 as a stand-alone game system, rather than an expansion of Dungeons and Dragons.
Empire of the Petal Throne published through TSR in 1975; it published again in 1987 as a reprint of its 1975 edition and published again in 2005 as the Guardians of the Order edition. 

Meanwhile, the 1973-1995 publisher, Game Designer’s Workshop published Marc Miller’s Traveller. Traveller enjoyed multiple publications between 1977 and 2016. Its publishers included GDW, Imperium Games, Steve Jackson Games and Mongoose Publishing. 

Traveller was the first science fiction tabletop Roleplaying game of its era, a generic space opera that allowed players to assume the roles of space explorers in the spirit of Star Trek (est. 1966 - present). 

The 1980s was a popular era for tabletop roleplaying games, with entertainment competition stemming largely from cinema, video game arcades, home entertainment, the Atari 2600 (released in September 11, 1977) and Calicovision (released in August of 1982).

Unlike the limited capacity for video games of the late 1970s into the 1980s (which were still plenty entertaining for their time, just in a very limited capacity), tabletop RPGs held the interests and imaginations of hobbyists and gamers alike.

Hysteria was on the horizon, though. The 1980s was about to become a dark time for Tabletop RPGs. In the next work, I'll discuss Satanic Panic! Occult hysteria and RPGs in the 1980s.