Mary Shelley Invented RPGs

Posted On July 23, 2024

Thanks in large part to the bros actively re-inventing and reshaping RPGs through experimentation, session reports, analysis, and (sometimes heated) discussion, the hobby has cycled back to the age old question of, “Who invented role playing games?”

Other lesser factors contribute, of course. The upper midwest Boomer Crew is aging out and so has found renewed incentive to make one last push to secure their legacy. Their motivation derives in part from the blue haired fatties and other dysgenic communist freaks making their usual rounds of iconoclasism by tearing down of the grognard idols for being Normal Men.

The conventional debate pits partisans of Arneson and Gygax as the two sole contenders, with the compromise position being that Arneson did the sketchy original discovery and Gygax followed up with the marketable streamlining and explanations for a wider audience. As with most conventional debates, the choices from which you are allowed to pick are constrained from the outset, and few men look any deeper at the issue.  They simply choose sides, draw up arguments, and start shouting at each other.

This is not universally true, of course.  Good and proud nationalist Brits sit in the cheap seats waving the banner of Tony Bath and shouting sing-song chants extolling the virtues of Hyboria! (Though I be Yank by birth, when pressed by the dullards to choose, sit uneasily among these men.)  David Wesley’s invention of the Braunstein style of games earns a few loyalists.  There are even partizans for Ken St. Andre as father of the hobby, but more on that in a moment.

Rare are those men blessed with the insight to pause and ask, “Wait, what do you mean by ‘RPG'”?  No one ever wants to define the term, because however you define it, your teams loses to the unnamed hordes of gamers who played as imaginary personas that preceded the Boomers and their parents. Any sufficiently advanced definition ends the discussion in one of two ways:

1. It is either so constrained as to allow for the existence of only one RPG through history. “Who invented the intellectual property of D&D,” for Gygax-bros. “Who told people to assume one persona and argue in character for that persona’s goals,” for the Twin City crew.

2. It is either so broad as to encompass games played for millennia, but we ignore the precedents because *jazz hands*! You just know that a few of the Prussian colonels assigned to play as the French in a pre-1900 running of von Reiswitz’ Kreigspiel used bad Parisian accents and made odd tactical decisions to defend bordellos. That’s just how people’s brains work.  Those guys just didn’t sperg out about it.

You see the same thing in literary circles. The same blue-haired fatties and communist, but I repeat myself, are so desperate for a female w that they’ll make the absurd claim Mary Shelley invented science fiction. But they use a fungible definition that mutates the moment  you point out titles that predate Frankenstein. “That doesn’t count”, they bleat, “because now we’re using a different definition.”  They aren’t fooling anyone but themselves. We all know it doesn’t count only because it ruins their case.

The same thing occurs when it comes to who invented RPGs. People refuse to define their terms specifically so they can muddy the waters and cloud out their champions’ forebears. It’s tedious, and we should be glad that at least one blogger is willing to state his definition boldly and stick to it even if the result is that Ken St. Andre invented RPGs.

You might fault his definition of ‘role-playing game’, but if you do, you are forced to talk about what makes an RPG rather than who gets credit. And that is a far more honest and worthwhile and productive discussion.  When you think about games in that way, you lose interest in endless rehashes and reskins if the same old game play and same old supplements.  That’s the kind of discussion and analysis that leads to a total re-invention of the hobby.

Oh.