Baseline

Before RPGs, games had two basic forms. There were free-form make-believe games of small children and there were rules-based games of adults. As children were learning adult games they’d often create brief hybrids of these two, robbing the bank in monopoly¹¹ For example, Bill Waterson’s Calvin and Hobbes strip from 24 January 1988 shows role play being incorrectly applied to the rule-based game of Monopoly as a commentary on childhood.
or having a chess king abdicate the throne and appoint a pawn as the new king for example, but those were quickly put down as immature breaking of rules.

Before RPGs, role play had four basic forms. There were the aforementioned free-form make-believe games of small children; scripted or ad lib performances designed to entertain; secretive alter egos designed to deceive; and practice scenarios designed to educate and prepare.

Referee

Military training has long included mock combat, which naturally extended to mock troop movements and strategies to train generals. But unlike mock combat, where touching someone with a wooden sword could be taken as a natural proxy for defeating them, mock troop movements lacked an obvious way to say who had won.

In the 1810s and 1820s, Georg Leopold von Reisswitz and his son Georg Heinrich Rudolf Johann von Reisswitz published a set of rules for running these war games that had several components that became mainstays of RPGs 150 years later:

• Rules for many kinds of action, including rules that were posed as statistics about the real world instead of as allowable actions in the game.
• Permission to try anything, even things not covered by the rules, with a referee to decide the outcomes of novel actions.
• Units that could take several losses before ceasing to operate, a concept that later became known as hit points.

There’s much to say about the subsequent history of the war gaming that the Reisswitzes invented, but that’s not a genre of game that I personally find particularly compelling so I’ll instead simply note that it was known as Kriegsspiel²² German for wargame, was developed by both the Prussian army and by hobbiests in the region though the 19th century, and entered the United States several times in the 1870s and 1880s, most notably though Charles A. L. Totten’s 1880 book Strategos³³ Strategos had two subtitles: on the cover it was subtitled the American Game of War and on the title page it was instead subtitled a series of American Games of War base upon military principles and designed for the assistance of both beginners and advances students in prosecuting the whole study of Tactics, Grand Tactics, Strategy, Military History, and the various Operations of War.

Role Play

In the late 1960s a group of college students played Kriegsspiel frequently. Sometimes they would joke around about the backstory and personality of their army’s general. That humor turned into an important game element in 1969 when David Wesely decided to run a special scenario set in his fictional Napoleonic town of Braunstein where instead of controlling armies each player controlled a significant character in the town: the mayor, the banker, and so on.

Because the Kriegsspiel play space had large overhead maps with small tactical-movement tokens and combat between units that was stated and then resolved, player actions in Braunstein were mostly described, not maneuvered with game pieces or acted out. The outcomes of those actions were resolved by Wesely the referee, except when the players were talking in-character directly to one another in social interactions. This interaction was greatly enjoyed by the players and became one of the anchors of RPGs: role play.

Role play in RPGs generally involves each player controlling one game character, speaking in character like an actor would but describing or narrating what the character does instead of acting it out.

Continuing Story

Early Braunstein-style games were played like most games are: when play ended so did the story, with the next game resetting. But then Duane Jenkins, one of Wesely’s friends, ran a series of Braunstein-style game set in a wild west town he called Brownstone where the results of the previous game continued into the next, with characters and the town evolving in response to past games.

This idea was not entirely new to the players; sometimes Kriegsspiel play would re-enact many-battle campaigns from historical wars over many play sessions. But that kind of play was not the most common for this group of friends and found new life in the Braunstein games where it felt not like remaking history but rather like making a new life and personality.

Most RPGs are oriented around continuing-story games, with each meeting of the players being called a session⁴⁴ Session comes from the Latin word for sit and means what a court does in one sitting, applied to RPGs with very little modification in meaning. and a series of continuing-story sessions being called a campaign.⁵⁵ Campaign is from the French word for open country, used as a military term for what an army does while in a single region, and later by extension in a single season or as part of a single enterprise. RPG campaigns are rarely limited to a single field, region, or enterprise.

Cooperative versus Referee

The original Braunstein game and those that followed continued the traditional set-up of war games (and indeed most games to that point): players played against one another, striving to win. In Braunstein this meant that each character had their own objectives. Because of the role play that arose it was not uncommon for play to diverge from a straightforward progression towards those objectives, but fundamentally the games remained player versus player.

David Arneson, another of Wesely and Jenkins’ friends, introduced a Braunstein-style game set in his fantasy-medieval Blackmoor Castle and its surroundings where all the players were on the same side, opposing monsters and other challenges that were entirely controlled by the referee. Cooperative stories like this were common in books and other media, but in game-like domains previous cooperation had been largely limited to team-versus-team or to puzzles instead of games. With the structure of referees and role play, Blackmoor could keep its essential game elements while having all players on the same side by having the referee do more than simply adjudicate outcomes. Because the role now went beyond just refereeing, it gained several new names over time, most notably Game Master (GM) and Narrator.

Rules for Shared Fantasy

Arneson’s Blackmoor games caught on and started to turn into a campaign, but ran into a new problem. Blackmoor was set in a fantasy world, with beings from fable, magic, and other elements for which there was neither lived experience to create a shared intuition nor statistical tables compiled by military historians to appeal to in refereeing outcomes. This led to disagreements between players about what should be possible, so they needed a set of rules to create a shared definition of how the fantasy worked.

Gary Gygax had recently published a fantasy appendix to a set of medieval war game rules called Chainmail. Gygax played much simpler war games than the others mentioned thus far and was unaware of any of the advances of Kriegsspiel or Braunstein or Brownstone or Blackmoor, but he had wargame-like rules for how trolls fared in battle and so on. Arneson was aware of those rules and applied them to Blackmoor to help build a shared understanding of the fantasy world within the game.

Rules for defining shared fantasy have become a mainstay of RPGs. There are RPGs that take place in a setting close enough to reality that there’s no shared fantasy to define, but that’s the exception not the rule in RPGs today.

Slowly Escalating Power

Arneson thought the games his group of friends had designed and were now playing as Blackmoor were worth publishing, and he knew of only one person who had published fantasy wargame rules: Gary Gygax. So he contacted Gygax to get Blackmoor published. But Gygax had no experience even with refereed wargames, let alone role play, continuing stories, and cooperative games and Arneson’s letters and calls made no sense to him, so Arneson traveled to Gygax’s house and ran a Blackmoor game for him. Gygax was hooked, and worked with Arneson to write up the rules for this game.

While codifying the rules of Wesely, Jenkins, and Arneson’s creation on Reisswitz’s foundation, Gygax introduced one more common element of RPGs: rules-backed character growth, so that the longer a campaign runs the more powerful the characters in it become. Arguably a natural result of trying to write rules for campaign-style play, this new rule element became iconic enough that some early computerized role-playing games kept only that one element of RPGs and still felt they deserved the RPG title.

Most RPGs include some form of this power increase mechanic. Gygax used a set of defined power levels where characters rise from one specified set of powers to the next. That design has many alternatives, with two of the most common being shopping list of powers, with prices and power-shopping currency awarded during play; and skill trees, where the cool powers are hidden behind a dependency graph of preliminary powers; but most RPGs that support continuing story campaigns also have a defined power increase mechanism.

Summary

I’ve identified seven elements shared by most RPGs: the essential role-play; the mainstays of referees, cooperation, campaigns, and rule-defined fantasy; and the common tools of hit points and power increases.