Hot answers tagged history-of-gaming
61
With ingenuity, a ten foot pole can be used for a nearly infinite number of tasks. A huge part of D&D back in the day was its exploration aspect, mainly in dungeons. There were no "skill checks" so plausible innovation was the primary game mechanic for those scenes. You had to use your mind and whatever gear or other things you could leverage to find ...
43
History
D&D started as a series of little booklets, now called "original D&D" (OD&D). These booklets were basically barely-edited versions of the house rules of Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson.
In 1977, TSR hired J. Eric Holmes to develop a Basic D&D game. This was a dark blue, boxed set containing D&D in a single book, plus a module (B1 ...
40
That's interesting, as being a non-native English speaker I always assumed it was one of the accepted meanings. So as every time I realize one of these things, let's check the wiktionary:
Verb
soak (third-person singular simple present soaks, present
participle soaking, simple past and past participle soaked)
(transitive)
4- To allow ...
39
In 'Different Worlds #3' (June / July 1979), Dave Arneson describes his adding experience points (and a few other ideas) to the Chainmail rules after he and Dave Wesley started playing a medieval version of Braunstein's games.
It was certainly not in Chainmail and it was in the original OD&D booklets from 1974. So this makes perfect sense to me.
It's ...
39
My first encounter with a D&D sorcerer class was 3E. The 3E PHB says on p51:
Sorcerers create magic the way a poet creates poems, with inborn talent honed by practice. They have no books, no mentors, no theories -- just raw power that they direct at will.
In religious studies, "charisma" sometimes refers to the inner personal power in an ...
38
The ultimate and most ancient point system for "quantizing success through a numerical method" is, of course, money. Or perhaps predating even that, number of cattle, sheep, size of land controlled, etc. And war and trade were very early human activities to optimize that quantized success.
History aside, LordVreeg's answer above looks the most promising ...
37
Many of the items on this list have been done in games I've been involved in...
Using to carry the quarry back to camp. Even, no, especially when it's an uncooperative princess.
replacing the pike's haft after the swordsman with the sweihander whacked the head off of it.
pole-vaulting over certain obstacles and traps
pushing the inept climbers from below ...
34
E. Gary Gygax notes in several places that the class limits and level limits were both game balance and to force the game to be humanocentric.
I'll let EGG speak for himself (Dragon #29, Sept. 1979, p. 12):
The character races in the AD&D system were selected with care. They give variety of approach, but any player selecting a non-human (part- or ...
32
Gygax felt that the 'work' side of the whole affair counted far more, but Arneson felt that his 'spark of life' was of paramount importance. The debate continues after their passing; Gygax's fans claim he was cheated, and Arneson's fans claim he was neglected by both history and Gygax.
To understand these conflicting points of view, review the early ...
31
Before original D&D was published, but after its invention and they'd started playing it, the story I've heard is that a Dave Wesley found these odd dice in an educational supplies catalogue and thought they might be good for the game. Gary Gygax had a love of statistics and probability, and that probably had a lot to do with his quick adoption of the ...
30
Going back in The Strategic Review, issue 2 (Summer 1975), I see an XP table for the Ranger class, which shows that experience points were in play in the original White Box.
My copy of Chainmail is boxed up in storage, and it's a later edition anyways, so I couldn't tell you whether or not it had a point progression system for levelling up individuals or ...
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1991.
"Soaking damage" first became common after Vampire: The Masquerade used the terms "soak roll" and "soak dice" in regard to the dice pool used to reduce incoming damage. As an opposed roll, the dice would "soak up" the incoming damage, and the character would take what was left.
27
In general in play they were ignored or just treated as an abstract language with no further comment.
As to where they came from, here's an answer from Gary Gygax on Dragonsfoot!
As D&D was being quantified and qualified by the publication of the supplemental rules booklets. I decided that Thieves' cant should not be the only secret language. Thus ...
25
In this reply, I will attempt to address, solely at first, the "Boy Scout merit badge" subset of your newly edited question: "Did D&D inherit this concept from anywhere? Can plausible arguments be made to, for example, Boy Scout Merit Badges (where, from my hazy understanding, certain sets of merit badges are needed for advancement)". (EDIT: A LONG edit ...
24
According to a regular in Gygax and Arneson's early Blackmoor and Greyhawk games, the cleric was largely draw from the priests in 70s vampire movies, with the prohibition against edged weapons inspired by legends and fantasy fiction:
Ahem. I was there.
In CHAINMAIL there were wizards that functioned as artillery.
Then there was Dave Arneson's ...
23
Tolkien's Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, and the Simarillion lead directly to Perren and Gygax's minis battles fantasy supplement Dwarves in Chainmail (see Chainmail 3rd Ed, p28, and the later designer's notes article). Also, Gygax and Arneson made much use of this in the games which would ater become D&D.
Tolkien claimed inspiration from the Norse and ...
23
Since Gary Gygax was the original "designer" let's look at what inspired his version and hence D&D's version of the Paladin.
This is from a Collection of "Sources for D&D" that was compiled by Aardy R. DeVarque, who draws his source directly from the original 1st edition Dungeon Masters Guide.
Paladin Class
Based largely on the character of ...
19
The progression went like this
Chainmail was a set of rules for
wargaming with miniatures.
People wanted to fight the battles
they read about in Lord of the
Rings, Conan, and other fantasy
novels of the time. So the Fantasy
Supplement was added.
Dave Arneson was inspired by David
Wesley Braunstein game to create his
own version. He used the Man to Man
and ...
19
History
According to Ben Robbins, David Weseley ran a Napoleonic wargame called Braunstein in 1967:
Major David Wesely took his usual wargaming group and tried something a little different. Instead of having them command armies he set down the two opposing leaders in a Prussian town before the battle, their troops nearby but not on stage. To give the ...
19
The D&D Cleric, apart from its Blackmoor origins as a vampire hunter (as noted here), is a mish-mash that has grown into a trope of its own.
The D&D cleric as a trope, encompasses:
undead hunter
healer
second rate combattant
priest of a pantheon (or faction within a pantheon)
non-direct-damage spellcaster
no edged weapons
The Cleric was one of ...
18
I hate to say it but I don't think it was for a game. I think it might have been for something called "College", where you get credits for tasks & defeating courses. "The idea of quantizing success through a numerical method" applies to a lot of things, really. I swear no snark intended...Using Experience Points for a Fictional Avatar could totally have ...
18
The expression "I wouldn't touch that with a 10 foot pole!" has been around for who knows how long. I believe (don't have my books on me) that the 10 foot pole was included in the ADnD adventuring gear list as a tongue-in-cheek reference to this.
The pole quickly became useful in many ways. Personally, my companions and I have used it for:
Measuring depth ...
17
There have been a number of historical articles written about it (the best one in my opinion is Paul La Farge's Destroy All Monsters—but there are lots of others) But I really think the issues were money, who got credit for what, and the fact that these guys were not located in the same area—distance leads to difficulty in communication, and Gygax was trying ...
17
Indirectly, yes. Gary Gygax tells us that "the mind flayer I made up out of whole cloth using my imagination, but inspired by the cover of Brian Lumley's novel in paperback edition, The Burrowers Beneath." Said novel was firmly rooted in the Cthulhu mythos; in fact, Lovecraft's character Robert Harrison Blake wrote a short story titled "The Burrower ...
17
There's an interesting item in the Wikipedia article Sources and influences on the development of Dungeons & Dragons about Clerics. Quoting from an old Dragon Magazine article it states:
The cleric is largely inspired by folklore of the medieval cleric of
Templar.[13] Like the Templars described in White's The Once and
Future King, clerics in ...
17
No, this isn't novel (although that does not mean that it isn't clever design in Numenera).
There are two separate things married in that mechanic as you've described it. Both have been done before, and I can think of at least one game that has married them in the same way before.
First there is the concept of a pull mechanic. Most GM-initiated events are ...
16
In such cases, it's often best to let the original author speak for themselves. Fortunately, Doug Schwegman does so at the start of his article where he introduces them to D&D.
. . . I believe it is a logical addition to the D & D scene and the one I have composed is a hodgepodge of at least three different kinds, the norse ‘skald’, the celtic ...
16
The term definitely predates D&D - the term "twenty dollar gold piece" has been in use for the $20 Double Eagle and $10 Eagle coins of the late 19th century, and also the $5 gold coin, as well.
"Gold Piece" In Print
The term is used in the Lebanon Daily News, 1 Nov 1965, of Lebanon, Pennsylvania, bottom, in an advert for old coins under the left column ...
15
If you check wiktionary, you'll see that it comes from the French, and it has both implications of 'old soldier' and of 'grumbling curmudgeon'.
EDIT As for the actual origin, this thread has a link to this page where an explanation is given:
The term 'grognard,' as applied to
veteran wargamers, was first coined
back in the early 1970's by John
...
15
Because they are silly and ridiculous in a game setting where players generally try to take the fictional world seriously. It was part of an unfortunate trend at the time to put things that were generally considered "silly" into otherwise coherent milieus - the greater outrage was a year earlier when WG7 Castle Greyhawk turned out to be a huge megamodule ...
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