RPG
We are G.I.R.L.S.

What is RPG?
• Role-Playing Game
• a game in which players take on the roles of imaginary
characters, usually in a setting created by a referee, and
thereby vicariously experience the imagined adventures of
these characters (Oxford English Dictionary)
• a game in which players assume the roles of fictional
characters and collaboratively create stories. Players determine
the actions of their characters based on their characterization,
and the actions succeed or fail according to a system of rules
and guidelines. Within the rules, players can improvise freely;
their choices shape the direction and outcome of the games.
(Encyclopædia Britannica)

HISTORY
From Tabletop Games to Computer Role
Playing Games

War games (19th Century)
• Sumer - idea of simulating battles without the
personal hazards
• Prussia – contemporary war games originated
• Kriegspiel – a game that introduced the ideas of
arranging markers on a "sand table", and using a
dice to determine any random elements in the
battle

War games
• H.G. Wells – grandfather of war games
- published a set of amateur wargaming rules in a book
entitled Little Wars (“wargamers’ bible”)
- first to suggest that miniature figures be collected to
represent respective forces, to add flavour, and a
sense of involvement, to the game
• Charles Roberts – released the first
commercially available “board” war game

Wargames (60’s)
• peak of popularity of wargaming (no longer a
game, it was already an industry)
• 1996 - Lord of the Rings was released in full
-
No longer did players want to recreate the battle of
Gettysburg, but the battle of Helm’s Deep. The Napoleonic
Wars were discarded in favour of the War of the Ring, goblins
and orcs replaced foot soldiers and calvalry. People wanted to
know just how much damage a Balrog could do, and what the
range was on a lightning bolt spell.

War games
• Chainmail - a wargame that gave an accurate
model of most aspects of medieval warfare
created by Gygax and Perren
- Arneson and Gygax combined their ideas which
resulted to the first true role-playing game ever
- Immediate predecessor of Dungeons and Dragons

Dungeons and Dragons (1974)
• Dungeons and Dragons – first commercially
available role-playing game
- popularised many of the RPG conventions that are
still being used today, such as character classes and
abilities, races, experience and hit points (EXP and
HP), levelling up, and turn-based combat.
- set in a fantasy world populated by elves, dwarves,
and dragons.

Dungeons and Dragons
• “It was about characters, choices, and stories; it was about
experiencing fantastical adventures through a brand-new kind
of collaborative, improvisational storytelling. Players became at
the same time script-writers and actors of their own roles;
whereas a reader of a book or a viewer of a movie always
remained a passive observer, a player at a D&D game was
constantly called upon to make choices that propelled the
action. Compared to the role-playing dimension of D&D, the
stats and battles were only minor aspects.” (Alex Kierkegaard)

Tunnels and Trolls (1975)
• According to legend, Ken St Andre, writer of Tunnels and Trolls
(or T&T), actually came up with his idea of a role-playing game
independently of Gygax and Arneson. He had even chosen a
name similar to that of D&D, and was horrified to find, when he
began to try and sell his game, that he had been resoundingly
beaten to the punch.
• Second-generation product of D&D
• Characters have six similar stats, plus a similar choice of
classes and the settings and adventure formats are
practically identical

Tunnels and Trolls
Tunnels and Trolls
• Simple rules
• Six-sided dice rolls handle
almost everything
• Had sense of humor
Dungeons and Dragons
• Complicated rules
• Seven multi-sided dice
• Serious
• T&T was the first major competition of D&D
• However it was always considered “Number Two”

Chivalry and Sorcery (1976)
• Created by Ed Simbalist and Wilf Backhaus
• Most complicated RPG ever designed
• Rules and style are designed to recreate France in
the late 12th century
• Tried to do too much (race, age, sex, height, frame,
alignment, horoscope, mental health, social class,
birth order, family status and your father's occupation)
with many calculated statistics and vague skill system
all just for character creation

Chivalry and Sorcery
• Too realistic (Clerics had to
preach sermons, knights had to
spend hours of play trying get
enough money just to buy their
swords, and playing a magic
user required so much time and
effort to collect ingredients,
study spells and perform the
rituals, that there was no time
left to go adventuring.)

Empire of the Petal Throne (1975)
• designed by M. A. R. Barker
- a game where the system and setting work together
to produce a world that not only felt alive, but felt like
you were living in it. (religious and political)
- Players were Tsemels (warrior-cardinals) leading a
holy war against their heretical neighbours
• Did not became popular because it was too
complex and powerful for gamers to handle

1970s
• StarFaring (St Andre, 1976) – first SF RPG
• Metamorphosis Alpha from TSR (1977)
• Starships & Spacemen (Fantasy Games
Unlimited, 1978)

Traveller by Mark Miller
• Briliiantly designed and presented new ideas
- skill system was the best the industry had yet
produced and became a model for many years to
come
- rejected a class or occupation system - characters
simply rolled to see what skills they had learnt during
their life in the military
- the rules allowed not just for the creation of countries,
or planets, but whole solar systems

Traveller
• its release occurred at approximately the same
time as the release of Star Wars
- flexible and straightforward rules and its open ended
setting
- first pick for the role-playing fans
- Huge market success

RuneQuest (1978)
• Greg Stafford began designing
Glorantha, the world in which
RuneQuest is set, as the
background for a board game
called White Bear and Red
Moon (1966)
• Steve Perrin, Ray Turney and
others decided to create a roleplaying game set in Glorantha

RuneQuest
• Second game to use skills
• Invented the idea of the critical success/failure, and
introduced the possibility of skill improvement through
training rather than experience (e.g.: in order for mages
to increase their power, they had to earn favour and
privelige in their particular rune cult - usually by running
errands or going on quests.)
• intertwined a frighteningly realistic world with an
excitingly realistic system

The Dark Age

1979
• James Dallas Egbert III ran away from college, with the intention
of killing himseld
- He left a confused note that mentioned the steam tunnels
under the university, and the game Dungeons and Dragons, of
which James was an avid and obsessive player
- Through irresponsible journalism, and a confusion by the
authorities, it was publicised that D&D was responsible for
Dallas' disappearance
- First “D&D suicide”
- Egbert was facing extreme pressure as a child prodigy (he
was 16), was an alleged drug addict, and was highly mentally
unstable.

• With reports that the steam tunnels were the site
of "live" D&D games, the story rapidly grew out of
hand until it caught the media and D&D became a
dangerous, cult-like obsession that was a "threat
to your children"

1982
• Irving “Bink” Pulling took his
own life with the loaded pistol
his mother kept in the house
- suffered from chronic
depression, isolation and mental
instability
- His mother blamed his death on
D&D and used it as a scapegoat

BADD (1984)
• Pat Pulling accused a teacher at Irving’s school of
killing her son, by placing a "curse" on him during
the course of playing D&D
- She filed a case to the court about the matter but was
immediately dismissed
- Formed the society Bothered About Dungeons and
Dragons (BADD) and began a war of propaganda
against role-playing games

BADD
• Pulling involved BADD in the trial of Darren
Molitor
- was being tried for the murder of a young girl which
allegedly occurred while he was acting out a
Halloween joke
- convinced the defence to argue on Molitor's lack of
culpability due to the influence of D&D which was
dismissed irrelevant
- BADD was also able to convince Molitor of the
game's control over his actions

BADD
• BADD also campaigned to the Consumer
Product and Safety Commision to have
warning labels placed on RPGs
- Rejected
- Acquired a private investigation license
and attracted the support of psychologist
Dr Thomas Radecki
- Wrote “The Devil’s Web,” a fictional work
about a teenager being lured into the
occult through role-playing

BADD (1987-1990)
• After BADD petitioned the Safety Commision,
the Game Manufacturing Association
(GAMA) carried out their own studies
- also commissioned Michael Stackpole to investigate
BADD and Pulling which exposed the spurious and
manipulative methods used by BADD that led to the
discrediting of the propaganda

The effects of BADD
• Many schools banned RPGs, churches
condemned them and shops stopped carrying
them
• Gaming stores were often forced to close and
more than one small company went bankrupt
• BADDs propoganda was able to convince
thousands - possibly even millions - that roleplaying was dangerous and evil.

TSR
• Made the transformation into merchandising
better
• Released the Advanced system for D&D
• Invested the Role-Playing Games Association
(RPGA) to help unite gamers across the US

The Dragonlance Chronicles
• the first fantasy series to feature on the New York
Times' Best Seller list
• turned TSR into a major paperback publisher
and made Larry Elmore a household name.

AD&D (1989)
• richest, most popular and most
powerful game in the world
• TSR always ran itself as a
corporation, treating their games as
merchandisable product.
- also used their money and power to
take gaming to new levels of fame and
fortune, and thus are responsible for
bringing RPGs to more people than all
the other games put together.

1980
• superhero comics enjoyed a powerful upturn in
popularity and presence, culminating in the big
movie cross-overs towards the end of the decade
which led to the industry of superhero games

Champions (1982)
• Developed by Hero Games
• encouraged imaginative character creation,
so that players could carve out their own,
unique superhero instead of using popular
heroes which were licensed to Marvel and
DC
• provided a well designed and fairly
universal system which stressed the
players using their own imaginations.
• first game to showcase an entirely pointsbased character creation system

GURPS
• Made by Steve Jackson
• Originally Great Unnamed Role-Playing System
but was changed to Generic Universal RolePlaying System under Steve Jackson Games.
• Universal (allowed gamers the luxury of always
having a system, no matter what game they want
to play)

West End Games (WEG)
• most prolific producers of licensed games
• Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones, and Star Wars
(best licensed game ever created)
• Star Wars used a simple D6-based system, which
had originated from Ghostbusters, and eventually
evolved into the award-winning generic system
known as "D6"

Palladium Games
• TMNT, Robotech, Palladium Fantasy, and eroes
Unlimited.
• created a generic “world” which could be used
with any setting by the combination of many
dimensions

Call of Cthulhu (1981)
• comes from a series of deeply horrifying short stories
written by H.P. Lovecraft at the beginning of this century
- Centers around the Old Ones, ancient and god-like
aliens who exist just beyond the scientific world of postVictorian New England
- Sandy Peterson, staff of Chaosium, decided to turn
Cthulhu into a game
- CoC's rules balance the needs of both game and story in a
way that has arguably never been beaten.

Aftermath (1981)
• Fantasy games Unlimited
• presented for once a more realistically
bleak post-apocalyptic world, and
reinforced it with equally brutal rules
- Players were still pretty powerful and the
games were very combat-oriented, but
here you were battling for food, or
shelter, or just to stay alive. The rules
made the players have to fight every step
of the way, with equipment, allies and
safe ground all very scarce

Bushido
• gave an enthralling and realistic view of
roleplaying in Feudal Japan
• historic setting was reinforced throughout,
from mechanics, to NPCs, to adventure
archetypes, with extensive use of
Japanese names encouraging the feel of
things
• tweaked the experience system, such that
it required players to act in ways suitable of
their class and standing in the Nippon
society

Toon (1984)
• West End Games
• set in the universe (and mindset) of Warner
Brothers-type cartoons, complete with falling
anvils
• one of the first free-form, rules-light games,
another revolutionary step.

Paranoia
• Dan Gelber and Eric Goldberg
• death is meaningless because each player has several
clones of herself in case one is damaged
• PCs are special agents of the Big Brother-esque
Computer, chosen to undertake the most dangerous task
of rooting out traitors
• plays this frightening world for laughs, hamming up the
dark patches to produce a game as funny as Toon, but
also more subtle and with a dash of political satire.
• only game that is based solely on the PCs working
against each other

Other games
• Ars Magica (Lion Rampant, 1985)
• Warhammer Fantasy RolePlay
• Amber (based on the novels by Roger Zelazny)
and Everway – uses cards instead of dice
• TORG (West End Games, 1990) - used both
cards and dice in its universal system

Gaming Workshop
• John Peake, Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson
• Jackson and Livingstone published the very first
Fighting Fantasy Game Book entitled The
Warlock of Firetop Mountain, an ingenious
attempt to write a solo roleplaying experience in a
novel form
• released the boardgame Talisman

Ultima Series
• Ultima 1 was released in black and white in 1980,
and was followed by seven sequels, each game
making use of the cutting edge technology at its
time
• One of the most popular computer RPGs

Strategic Simulations
Incorporated (SSI)
• Dragonlance Series
• setting was torn straight from the pages of TSR's
phenomenally successful Dragonlance series
• gameplay was a close model of an AD&D game
• Pools of Radiance
• you roll your characters' attributes, chose a class and a name,
bought equipment, and then went adventuring, gaining
experience and levels with each victory
• improved on Heroes of the Lance, being even more
entertaining and bringing roleplaying to the computer at an
unprecedented level.

MUD
• Multi-User Dungeon
• simultaneous online roleplaying
• internet-chat environment adds an important social
element to the adventure game
• Roy Turbshaw and Richard Bartle
• With the growth of the internet, MUDs have
proliferated to the point of omnipresence. Some
are free, some very expensive, some use
graphics, some text, and they run the gamut of all
genres, settings and styles

Mobile games (1989)
• Mobile gaming were introduced earlier but
became more popular through the introduction of
the Gameboy in 1989
• Later models were introduced such as the
Gameboy SP and Gameboy Advance.
• Some of the famous games played on a
Gameboy were Pokemon, Final Fantasy 1 and 2,
and Snake(the one were you get to play as
“Snake’ not as an animal snake).

1990s
• William Gibson revolutionised science fiction with
Neuromancer
• GURPS CyperPunk
• onfiscated in a Secret Service raid on the GURPS
office, because it was thought to be "a handbook for
computer crime“
• Steampunk
• shifts the same dark themes to a world of Victorian
Europe

Vampire: The Masquerade (1991)
• Mark Rein-Hagen
• Captured the unearthly horror of Cthulhu, the
gritty, paranoid, dark edge of cyberpunk, plus it
featured super-powered unearthly heroes which
were still the popular trend and tapped directly
into the Gothic subculture

Collectible Card Game
• Magic: The Gathering
• Richard Garfield
• first Collectible Card Game
• CCGs proved more resilient, but they too have
dropped in popularity
• RPG industry suffered a serious decline in sales

• Wizards of the Coast announced in 1996 that they
were dropping their entire RPG line to concentrate
purely on selling CCGs
• TSR, the biggest, oldest and most venerated
company of them all, went into bankruptcy
• West End Games, another giant, soon went the
same way, and so was the nature of the times
• old standards like Steve Jackson Games, Chaosium,
White Wolf and WotC/TSR continue to produce their
high quality lines

1994 - 2001
• In 1994 the Play Station 1, a new gaming console
was introduced wherein again RPG games
takeover
• Later on 2001 the XBOX was invented.
• RPG games on this platform were now more high
in graphics

2005-The PSP
• A new kind of mobile gaming was introduced by
SONY with the PSP(Play Station Portable). The
games here were like the ones on Play Station,
but now made portable.

Present Time
• Nowadays RPG games can now be played on
virtually anything. It can be played on an Ipad/phone/pod, Android tablets and etc.
• However RPG games are now rich in science.
Some games are either more realistic or more on
imagination or fantasy and impossibilities.

Notable Games

Final Fantasy (Square Enix)

World of Warcraft (Blizzard
Entertainment)

Diablo (Blizzard Entertainment)

Dungeons and Dragons (Tactical Studies
Rules, Inc. & Wizards of the Coast)

The Elder Scrolls (Bethesda
Game Studios)

Pokemon (Nintendo)

Difference with other genres:
• Adventure – Unlike adventure games, RPG’s
don’t usually involve puzzle solving and exploring
a big world instead, its main focus is physical
challenge and combat is its primary activity.
• Strategy – Players of strategy games are often
forced to use their decision-making skills in
determining the outcome of the game. These
kinds of games usually require critical thinking to
win the game.

• Shooter - The main goal of these kinds of games
is to test the speed of the player and his/her
reaction time to things unlike RPG’s wherein you
are not that required to be fast and accurate while
playing. A common thing used in these games
are ammunition (ammo’s) and long range
weapons like guns or other weapons which
require precise aiming to be effective. Its main
point is to shoot, kill and stay alive.

• Action – Unlike RPG’s, the main point of action
game is to control a character throughout a level
and fight his way to the end avoiding some
obstacles, picking up items on the way, killing
guards or enemies and usually fighting a hard
enemy or boss at the end of the level. It’s not like
RPG’s wherein you have a party with their
different roles and fight your way to the end
chapters after chapters.

• Sports – Obviously, RPG’s are different from
sports. Sports are just a virtual reality of the
different sports out there so even if you don’t
know how to play a certain sport, in these kinds of
games, you will learn how easily and without
even spending hundreds or thousands of money.

Issues/Controversies

Super Columbine Massacre RPG!
• Based on the 1999 shooting in
Colorado where 13 people died
and 21 were injured
• plays the role of the shooters who
plant bombs throughout the
Columbine High School
• was initially accepted, then later
rejected from the Guerilla
Gamemaker Competition at the
2007 Slamdance Film Festival

Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
• ESRB (Entertainment
Software Ratings Board )
rated T with target audience
13+
• but due to a mod that made
characters nude, ESRB
changed the rating to M

RapeLay
• role of a man who stalks, molests, and then
forces himself upon three women in explicit,
graphic detail.
• Released in Japan in 2006 and sold as hentai
aka X Rated game meant for adults only
• became controversial in 2009 when found
available on amazon
• called for tightening the regulations for v.game
sales

Sources
• http://insomnia.ac/commentary/on_roleplaying_games/
• http://ptgptb.org/0002/history2.html
• http://www.denofgeek.com/games/12107/ahistory-of-rpgs
• http://www.armchairarcade.com/neo/node/1081