Tunnels & Trolls is the First Rpg

It’s true.

If you love rpgs, then the man to whom you owe everything isn’t Dave Arneson, it isn’t Gary Gygax, and it isn’t David Wesely. It’s Ken St. Andre.

Stay with me on this. We have an iron-clad case here!

In the first place, Braunstein is not an rpg. Yes, it has a referee that is similar to what you find in rpgs. It has players playing roles like they would in an rpg. Nevertheless, it is a fundamentally different type of game from rpgs. Braunstein is explicitly competitive where rpgs tend to be cooperative. In rpg’s, the referee is much more of a mastermind and often described as being sort of a “god”. In Braunstein, the players are liable to run out of control when away from the referee– and the referee himself may not have a clear idea of what all is really going on. This is a fundamentally different type of game!

What about Blackmoor, then? Take a look at The First Fantasy Campaign and you don’t get a description of how to set up and run an rpg campaign. You get a bunch of random notes on how he set up an incredibly large multi-year Chainmail campaign. Though this campaign was initially billed as being a type of Braunstein, it is clearly such a departure from David Wesely’s game that it rapidly turned into something else.

Original Dungeons & Dragons would be the game which most people that aren’t eggheads would describe as being the first rpg. However, sit down and attempt to play the game that is actually described by the rules and you will get a game that is quite unlike anything people playing rpgs are doing. The 1:1 time rule contained within its pages turns the game into a sort of continuous, ongoing Braunstein. It also allows the referee to coordinate the activities of multiple independent parties, characters, and factions under a fog of war. When played in this manner it becomes necessary to actually use all of the wargame elements from the game that roleplayers typically omit from their campaigns. From this vantage point D&D becomes precisely what is written on the cover of its rules volumes: Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Playable with Pencil and Paper and Miniature Figures.

That subtitle is not what anyone into rpgs thinks of when they attempt to define rpgs. That subtitle isn’t the result of someone reaching for words to describe the concept of rpgs before the term even existed yet. It’s a very clear indication that D&D is a unique sort of game that is unlike anything people imagine it to be.

D&D is not a role-playing game. It is a framework for creating a type of continuing campaign that is much more in line with the things you see written up in Arneson’s First Fantasy Campaign than anything really that came after. So, what is a roleplaying game? Rpgs are derivative of Original Dungeons & Dragons. But they did not evolve from it. Rpgs are what people created when they wanted to play D&D but could only understand fragments of its rules. The only way they could play it was if they created their own game out of just the parts that they could understand.

This new type of game tended to eject the 1:1 time rule of OD&D. It shifted from being a sprawling wargame campaign to focusing almost entirely on the exploits of a single party. Dungeon exploration became the primary focus in this initial phase of rpgs with nearly every other gameplay mode being relegated to handwaving and ad hoc rulings. So many needful rules got thrown out that a very early paraphrase of the idea of “rulings not rules” quickly emerged as a means of holding this new amateurish type of non-game together– typified by the phrase be reasonable. All of the premises and assumptions games like Rifts and GURPS and the B/X branch of D&D can be traced back to this point.

The first person to get aggravated that he could not understand D&D, create a variant rule set that detailed how to play the type of game that people today think of as being an rpg, and then publish it and get it into the hands of people that wanted in on this burgeoning hobby is Ken St. Andre. And the game he did it with was Tunnels & Trolls.

Everyone that loves rpgs owes him a tremendous debt. Even as late as 1979 Gary Gygax was still convinced that the thing hobby gaming needed most was a set of instructions that would recreate the awesome scope of the old Blackmoor campaign. He completely failed to anticipate that the derivative non-games of the people that had no idea what he was pointing people toward would ultimately overwhelm his own efforts and even retroactively define what people understood OD&D and AD&D to even be.

If you love rpgs, then truly… you owe Ken St. Andre a tremendous debt. And not just Ken, either really. But everyone that lacked the ability to read and follow the instructions of this odd little group of eccentrics that hailed from the Midwest.

Thank you, Ken!

And thank you to everyone who just didn’t get it!