What Made Original D&D Great

THE BIG PICTURE.

My prediction is that paper-and-pencil RPG's will have a hard time surviving in the future against the dazzling variety and complexity of personal computer games available and being developed. In general, it is the same kind of person who participates in these activities, and as computing power becomes greater, and the games more comprehensive (many RPG's have been translated partly or in whole to computer games), most of these people will be able to pick their own games at their own times, rather than join a group playing one game. From a certain sociable standpoint, this is a little sad.

In one sense the timing of D&D's arrival was most fortunate, in the early 1970's, just before the arrival of universally accessible powerful computing machines. Both in the sense of the games available and time spent on the machines themselves (programming and hardware) the kind of intelligent individuals are, to a great extent, devoted to computers nowadays. I doubt if, in current times, with the preponderance of computers and "electronification" (digitization) of every sort of information, anything like RPG's could arise, in the sense of the communal sit-around-a-table telling stories to each other activity that it is and was. As a control measure, it would be interesting to have statistics tracking the sales figures for boardgames sales in the past few decades, to see if they have fallen with the rise of computer gaming.

In this writer's opinion, if this is the way in which RPG's fail and disappear, I submit that this newest and youngest genre of literature/drama will in fact constitute the first kind of literature actually killed off by the computer culture. EGG's writings were the first that I got my hands on and read avidly and researched, as a young reader, more so than actual fantasy or SF novels. If RPG's disappear over the hill as a publishing medium, it will be the test case, I think, that possibly in the future media such as magazines, newspapers, and even books might in fact evaporate into the atmosphere of the information superhighway.

Also, one will be hard pressed to ever again see the combination like EGG and the D&D core game system. No one has ever written RPG adventures with such flourish as EGG, and in addition his hand at writing cosmologies of depth and intrigue was unparalleled. I still think that the core "class-template" based D&D rules has a certain iron strength at its heart, and, of course, TSR still owns the property rights to all of EGG's earliest, most energetic and fundamental creations, now ten years after his departure from that company. (Meanwhile, almost every other game system that TSR ever offered forth in the intervening years has died off.) After all is said and done, I would like to think that this late 20th century activity echoing the earliest types of poets, artists, and academics sitting around a campfire telling stories to each other, and taking dramatic roles to play, would continue on into the future, but I have my doubts. At any rate, the industry has left its springtime explosion of growth behind, and is well into its mature and perhaps jaded years. As we watched the D&D game first develop and generate the RPG economic sphere, so too we now watch it to see if, in stumbling and faltering, it heralds the end of the role-playing game as it has been known for a quarter century now.

NEXT