orcs, wizards, sword n board, medieval setting, these were the starting points and the stable of the rpg genre. However, considering D&D was mostly brought forth by a couple of white dudes with a biased toward european influences, I wonder if the genre has not went beyond its usual stables due to both comfortability and lack of creativity. For instance, the Japanese took the formula of D&D derivatives like waizardy and have followed this formula ever since. A strategic battle centric system with a party likely set in a european like setting. And if not european, it houses the same stables of sword and magic classes, but in a different time. Instance, using a sword despite guns being largely superior. Or games like xenosaga and xenogears.
My question mainly is: can this system go any differently? Is it even possible? Or we stuck to the concepts of classes, sword and magic, objective decision systems? D20, rifts, and many other rp games exist, but they also stem from one place. Basically, if D&D was never made, how different would history be? And would something entirely different would have come instead?
>>47169715
D&D was largely based of wargames and stuf that already existed. Someone would of done something similar sooner or later.
>>47170276
Makes me curious what that something would have been. If it would have even been the same circle of traits.
I agree with >>47170276, but depending on what they do the changes would have quite an effect on video games and subsequent tabletop games. I'm more of a vidya guy, so if someone were to even do a different magic system as opposed to the standard "spells per day" the balance of said games and similar titles in vidya. And let's say that things weren't based off European fantasy, then something more prominent would take it's place obviously.
The thing is really that if someone did a different D&D thing, then everything afterwards would be impacted since there was nothing quite like it, and early computer rpgs were based off of D&D as we see it today.
>>47169715
>if D&D was never made
Then Tolkien obviously never wrote. Something like D&D was inevitable after the success of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
Your question has too many hypotheticals too far back in time. It would take pages to explore just a few of the possibilities.
>>47170357
Without tolkien then. What would have replaced it? Greek literature?
>>47170374
It wouldn't have diverted significantly.
It started as a eurocentric war game. It would probably just be based closer to actual history or folklore than the the Tolkien inspired interpretation.
>>47170357
>Then Tolkien obviously never wrote. Something like D&D was inevitable after the success of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
D&D wasn't really based on LotR or the Hobbit. Tolkien was one source of inspiration among many, but D&D was primarily supposed to model swords & sorcery fiction like Howard and Vance. If D&D didn't exist, and someone made an RPG based on LotR without the S&S stuff, it would probably look quite different.
>>47170597
>orcs are now africans
>elves are now asians
>goblins are now south asia indians
>dwarves are jews
>>47170612
>elves are now asians
>>47171164
my bad. elves are aryan whites
>>47169715
>Making the laws of physics his bitch
You can see quite clearly from the follow through of the wizards right arm that he just threw this book.
The "lucky girl" is even raising her arm to try and block it.
>>47173360
Can someone tell me whether it was not uncommon for a wizard to be physically fit?
>>47173360
>not clubbing potential mates into unconsciousness with your musty, heavy tome
>>47170374
Then it would've defaulted back to Tolkiens influences, Norse mythos and the Arthurian cycle (including elves).
>>47173754
did anyone even care about arthurian cycle till tolkien?
>>47169715
>the stable of the rpg genre
It's "staple".
>>47173763
Yes.
Who would have guessed that preindustrial fantasy, whose content is almost exclusively produced and consumed by those descended from europeans, would use preindustrial europe as a default template?
>>47173840
Exactly!
>>47173848
I'm saying it's a perfectly natural and expected phenomena.
And as far as your "objective decision system" comment goes, you can go fuck yourself. It's not a game if there are no rules. If you don't like one set of rules you can make your own, or choose from the infinitely many alternatives that already exist.
>d&d was mainly inspired by Tolkien
when will this bullshit fucking meme finally die?
>>47174290
Just take it as a way to separate the wheat from the chaff.
I mean, technically you've either have to have read 1e or original, or just know stuff about Gygax. Otherwise it's hard to expect newbs to know that it's just concessions he made for fan/player requests.
>>47170374
Yes
http://mazesandminotaurs.free.fr/revised.html
>>47174950
I read fantasy outside of tolkien is the main way I recognize that d&d is an s&s setting. A person doesn't even necessarily need to be familiar with 1e. I've played osr games but I've never sat down and read the 1e phb or dmg desu.
>>47169715
Thematically, stuff like Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Conan, or Elric could have been even higher in that initial fantasy mix. Or if it had taken a few years more for the concept to get off the ground, maybe Star Wars and its derivatives would have been the starting point.
Mechanically, I doubt that you would have seen anything much less prosaic than what we got. It took a couple of decades for less literal mechanical systems to start showing up in pen-and-paper stuff, and I'm not sure that the first tables would have been able to wrap their heads around something like Fiasco, even if they had the media vocabulary to theoretically play it.
Wasn't there an indie RPG from a few years ago that ran with the idea of what the first RPG would have looked like if it hadn't been D&D? IIRC, it had a late-70s setting, with lots of 'In Search Of' supernatural stuff going on, like UFOs, but I could be drastically misremembering.
>>47175499
Well, if we look at the popular movies of that time
>godfather
>star wars (highly probable of a tabletop system)
>rocky
>close encounters of the third kind
>alien
>apocalypse now
>superman
>smokey and the bandit
>jaws
It would have been either influenced by sci fi or some kind of modern twist on a 70s/ 80s themes like you said.
