What if... TRPGs were created before 1971 ?

[updated March 1st, 2020]

Tabletop role-playing games allow us to explore counterfactual thinking, ie. asking ourselves « what if… » and simulating the consequences of a modified fact in the past.

Olivier Caïra asked the question « why was it not invented during the Antiquity or during the Renaissance, but instead in the middle of the 1970, during the boom of the audiovisual leisures. » (Caïra, 2007, p.143-144).

His hypothesis (Caïra, 2007), with the one of McKay he cites (McKay, 2001) , recently Cook (Cook, 2020) and mine (Me), are that a culture needs :

• to be deeply embedded with common cultural references shared in a community (Caïra, 2007)
• to accept to play with these references (Caïra, 2007; McKay, 2001) :
• by absorbing them, accepting them, recycling them, putting a distance with them (ie. being active and not passive) (Caïra, 2007; McKay, 2001)
• by serializing them (McKay, 2001)

• to support a pleasant and entertaining sociability among equal peers (Me)
• to value individual choices as decisive element of life successes (Cook, 2020)

So « Let’s Have a Dream » (purely counterfactual)

Year -379, at the bottom of the Aeropagus, some old philosophers who knew Socrates are replaying the events that led to his poisoning. They are using a free-form system solely based on rhetorics to honor their master. After 37 simulations (all ended by a TPK, a total philosopher kill), they finally agree that if Socrates has not been that stubborn, he would be 90 years old by now.

Year 803, in the gardens of Isfahan, law school students are playing One More Night where they continue the 1001 Nights of Scheherazade with rules derived from Tavla boardgame.

Year 1236, in the Lérins Abbey, four monks are passing their recreation time to chivalry search for the Holy Grail. The abbot is not officially informed but he is listening them from the next room because he was a fan of Chretien de Troyes in his youth too. He would like to interrupt them to tell them they are all wrong on Perceval.

Year 1612, in a tea house of Nanjing, bookstore owners are gathering to play Further to the West because they want to keep going on the hexcrawl adventures of the Monkey King and his party. They are often arguing on the use of I Ching as randomizer: is it narrativism or simulationism ?

Year 1826, in Bavaria, at a romantics authors meeting. They were collecting folk tales from all over Germany countryside. They are now collaborating together to build a collective roman à tiroirs massively multi-authors.

Year 1883, in London, young insurance traders are meeting at Gryffin Club to solve new cases of Sherlock Holmes with statistical and actuarial tables. Their Crime Master is inventing mysteries much more complex than the ones in the magazines but they don’t give up. They come back home late, it's much more interesting than the family parlour games.

Year 1925, on the Leman Lake shores, some dissenting jungian psyhoanalysts are attending a congress about « Character archetypes and fertility of the verb since the Annunciation of Marie ». The mouth-to-ear practical workshops are warming everybody so much, that as emotional safety device, they all decide to jump naked in the lake.

Year 1963, in a Dublin primary school, students are sharing their side view dungeons. Every night each of them is designing their own giant subterran mazes. The playground supervisor almost confiscated all of their work because they were fighting about the designing rules, some are ullysean wanderers, while others are orphean pathfinders.

« In real life » (purely factual)

May 22, 1971: Dave Arneson threw an invitation to his wargaming friends to play at his place an heroic fantasy game based on the principles of Braunstein.

(source: Three Line Studio blog, Kuntz, 2017)

__________________________
Caïra, Olivier. Jeux de rôle: les forges de la fiction. Société. Paris: CNRS, 2007.
Mackay, Daniel. The Fantasy Role-Playing Game: A New Performing Art. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001.

^{Cook, Eli. “Rearing Children of the Market in the ‘You’ Decade: Choose Your Own Adventure Books and the Ascent of Free Choice in 1980s America.” Journal of American Studies, 2020, 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875819001476. Available at Academia.}

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