The Evolution of RPGs: The Reisswitzian Kriegsspiel
Here we have largely caught up with the start of my original "On the Origin of RPGs, Part 1" post. The Prussian baron, Georg Leopold von Reisswitz, cites all three of the previous wargame designs as direct sources of the ideas that would feature in his own game – but he saw that those games all faced the same inescapable criticism: real war is not played on a grid where only a single formation can exist in any mile-by-mile square space. Apart from the invention of the "vertrauter", which I describe in that older post, solving the grid problem was von Reisswitz's key innovation: he used game pieces that were proportionally scaled to the real-world size of their respective formations, on a map of modeled terrain – at first a sand table, and later manufactured from plaster-cast terrain pieces. Units could move in any direction, with their relative speeds tracked by physically measuring proportional distances on the model terrain. Later, when his son Georg Heinrich Rudolph Johann von Reisswitz took up further developing the game, he chose to replace the model terrain with a much cheaper alternative, perhaps inspired by Venturini: highly-accurate, real-world topographical maps had only recently become available, but were much easier to duplicate and distribute than plaster tabletop terrain.
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The Landlord's Game was invented in 1902 by Georgist activist Elizabeth "Lizzie" Magie, in an effort to educate the public about how the seemingly-obtuse Georgist land-tax would cure the problems of capitalism. Magie, despite having no noteworthy background in gaming, turned out to be a game design prodigy. She single-handedly innovated multiple long-standing design elements and created the single most influential commercial board game of all time.
The Landlord’s Game appears, at first, to be structured like a simple race game in the vein of Pachisi or Goose, but one of Magie's most influential innovations was the idea of a looping circuit: Upon reaching the end of the track, players simply start a new lap. Victory is decided on the basis of the play-money that is lost and gained as the players land on the various spaces. The original rules prescribe five laps, but the game can be shortened or lengthened to taste.
Race games are already tedious, so repeatedly looping the track might have been downright Sisyphean – except that Magie's board is highly dynamic. Another influential element of her design was a space where players draw a random event card from a deck, such that the space’s effect is always unique. But almost all of the track spaces in The Landlord's Game are subject to some change: players can buy a "title deed" for most spaces that then forces any subsequent players who land there to pay "rent" to the owner.
Players earn a modest "wage" for each lap they complete – but not enough to keep pace with the escalating taxes, fees, and rents. When you can't pay, you start losing turns locked in the "Poor House", which can see you functionally eliminated from the game. To win, you must charge more rent than your opponents, so that they end up in poverty instead. As the rulebook notes, this system (modelled after real-life capitalism) will eventually drive all but one player to ruin.
But players can vote at any time to adopt the Georgist "Single Tax" policy, which means that rents are paid to a new “Public Treasury” instead of to the owners of title deeds. At the same time, all of the spaces that charge taxes or fees become free of charge (either immediately or gradually as the public treasury grows). Portions of the public treasury are used to increase the players’ wages, and whenever a player would otherwise be sent to the “Poor House”, they instead move to the nearest public sector workplace (where they earn additional wages).
The overall effect of the Single Tax mode is that poverty is eliminated, and it is no longer possible to brutally extort one’s opponents. The game shifts into a much friendlier – and tighter – race to see who can make the most wealth, rather than who can cause the most harm. Unfortunately, the Single Tax mode has not survived into the modern era: as if to prove the inherent cruelty of real-life capitalism, the Parker Brothers company first refused to publish The Landlord's Game, and then later stole the design. They stripped Magie of her inventor's credit, erased all traces of Georgism from the game, and published it under the now much-more-widely known brand Monopoly.
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Perhaps the most surprising fact I have learned over the course of this project is that Gary Gygax was widely considered "the rules guy" among the wargaming clubs of Minnesota and Wisconsin around 1970. In this (one and only) sense, he was quite progressive: pushing for miniatures wargames to exit their folk/oral tradition and join the modern world of recording and publishing. So when Gygax read Blackmoor's "battle reports" in one of the wargaming zines, he asked Dave Arneson to visit him and demonstrate the game – whereupon he immediately suggested they collaborate to create the manuscript that would eventually become Dungeons & Dragons. But I found this story surprising because, in reading through the original 1974 version of D&D, I can find no trace of this supposed "rules guy". Just like the Chainmail rules before them, OD&D's rules are written with a miniatures wargamer audience in mind – which is to say, they assume that the reader is used to designing a new system, from scratch, every time they decide to play a new scenario. OD&D is completely unusable unless the reader is prepared to personally contribute an enormous amount of potentially game-breaking design choices. So to compare OD&D to, say, any of Avalon Hill's board games is like comparing a set of guitar strings to a music album. Even with regards to what is actually provided in OD&D, the quality is abysmal. The core concept of the game is so poorly explained that it would be hard for a complete neophyte to tell how any of the material is meant to be used, and that material is frequently unintelligible due to the ambiguities and obtuse phrasing. It is little wonder that such an amateurish-looking effort was rejected by Guidon Games, Avalon Hill, and indeed every other publisher Gygax sought out. Instead, with the help of Don Kaye, he co-founded Tactical Studies Rules so as to publish D&D independently. The final iteration of the rules (now referred to as the "white box" version) was rushed to production, without Dave Arneson's approval, in order to have it ready for GenCon – the humble first step in Gygax's years-long effort to cut Arneson out altogether.
And that, my friends, is the ignoble story of how the first commercially-published role-playing game came to be.
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To truly understand the origins of RPGs, one must know that a Feudal economy will inevitably collapse if the ruling lords ever stop acquiring new arable land. Since there is only finite land available on Earth, the lords are therefore forced into territorial wars, which exposes another fundamental flaw with that system: that although the legal right to command a fief's military forces is hereditary, the ability to command those forces with any semblance of competence is not.
By the end of the 1700's, the standard practice among the kingdoms of central Europe was to send the medieval nepo-babies off to military college to hopefully learn a smattering of elemental strategy before they reached a battlefield. It was under these conditions that the first ever "combat simulator" board game was invented, as a way to trick the kids into learning principles of warfare while having fun. Dismissed by experienced officers for being too abstract, the game inspired a deluge of successors before one of them was recognized by the Prussian military for being a genuinely realistic game worthy of inclusion in their academy curriculum.
A noteworthy feature of this last kriegsspiel (wargame) was the idea of a "vertrauter" (confidant) who could simulate the fog of war. Players on both sides (i.e., military students) would secretly issue their orders to the vertrauter (i.e., the students' instructor, a seasoned veteran). The vertrauter would then take measurements, roll dice, refer to statistical tables, and consult various other rules in order update the game state on the players' behalf. Finally, the vertrauter would deliver a battle report to the players, containing only whatever intelligence would be known to their (simulated) front-line staff.
The game was generally considered a great tool for both training and planning, but many of the academy instructors found mastering the rules to be a huge pain in the ass – a problem that was exacerbated by the ensuing 50 years of rules updates and feature creep. Eventually, the Prussian brass concocted a solution: if the ultimate measure of a wargame's realism is to see whether or not its rules agree with the expectations of a seasoned officer, then why not just have the rules say "whatever the seasoned officer expects to happen is what happens"?
This "free" wargame (in contrast to the "rigid" former one) enjoyed a dramatic increase in both popularity and perceived realism among the officers. Incidentally, the concept of "cognitive bias" would not be invented for another 100 years. Nevertheless, the Prussian victory over France in 1871 had the entire world looking to copy Prussian military doctrine, and so the kriegsspiel was exported around the globe.
The American localization, dubbed Strategos, tried to bridge the gap between "rigid" and "free" by including the byzantine rulebook of the former, but also granting the so-called "referee" license to deviate from the rulebook where their expertise with both warfare and game design deemed it necessary. Despite the endorsement of the USA Department of War (and perhaps because its author was one of the only living humans possessing the unusual combination of skills required run it), Strategos seems to have languished in obscurity.
That is, until 1967, when it was rediscovered by a recreational wargamer named David Wesely.
All right, folks, this is where shit gets real. Following the emergence of pure strategy games, every culture starts to devise their own unique stuff. There's no easy way to trace the origins or inspirations for each of them, so all we know is that Chaturanga ("The Four Arms") is from Ancient India, it was invented some time before 500 CE, and it's a pure strategy game in the same vein as Petteia but with a twist: there are four different kinds of pieces (named the infantry, cavalry, chariotry, and elephantry, after the contemporary branches of the Gupta military) and each one has different movement rules. Coordinating the movement of the disparate pieces at once results in incredible strategic depth, and so this game explodes in popularity over the next 1,000 years. In Persia, who imported it first, it was named Shatranj. In China, it is adapted into Xiangqi. The Germans name it Schach. The French name it Échecs, and their British subjects name it Chess.
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Careers is an unassuming 1955 board game that was seemingly designed as a direct reaction to the single-minded pursuit of wealth in Monopoly. Its designer, seeking to better reflect life's diverse pageantry, asks players to pursue happiness, fame, and wealth. It is also the only commercial board game with the distinction of having directly contributed to the advent of RPGs.
At the start of a game of Careers, players must secretly commit to earning an arbitrary combination of happiness points, fame points, and wealth points (with a sum of 60 in total). It's this idea – of players operating from secret agendas that are, potentially, totally unrelated to the goals of their opponents – that was bouncing around the mind of David Wesely as he was experimenting with Strategos' philosophy that, in a robust refereed simulation, "anything can be attempted".
In 1969, this admixture led to Wesely's magnum opus: Braunstein, the first formal game in human history that clearly qualifies as a Role-Playing Game in the modern sense. At first blush, Braunstein seemed a perfectly traditional kriegsspiel about a fictional Prussian city coming under French attack during the Napoleonic Wars. A "Prussian General" player would face off against a "French General" player, with Wesely acting as the vertrauter – just as I described it in Part 1.
But the twist, inspired by Careers, was this: several more players would participate in a range of non-military roles, like the town mayor and the chancellor of the local university. These players, too, would receive a secret briefing which would include secret victory conditions tailored to the nature of their role. Just like the generals, these players would privately inform Wesely of their intentions, and would thereafter receive private reports from him, briefing them on the evolving consequences of everyone's actions. It was an extremely novel, exciting concept that had Wesely's gaming circle chomping at the bit.
The result was a catastrophe.
So much buzz had built up around Wesely's Wild Ride that, on the night of the game, more than twice as many players showed up as the number of roles he had prepared, forcing him to improvise several new roles (and their victory conditions). After getting underway, the game almost immediately devolved into a quagmire of chaotic political maneuverings. Many of the orders he received from the players went completely outside the scope of what he had expected or prepared for. He frequently had no idea how the events that needed to unfold could possibly be simulated, and so he found himself inventing sloppy rulings on the spot. When Wesely was finally forced to call the game late that night, neither General had ever gotten around to issuing orders to their troops. None of it was what Wesely had wanted.
His players, by contrast, uniformly loved the experience.
Over the next few years, Braunstein became a term not just for that original scenario, but for a new genre of games created by Wesely and other members of his gaming circle, featuring dramatically charged scenarios in a range of settings. Perhaps the most famous of these, now, is Blackmoor – a "Braunstein" that was set in a medieval fantasy world.
My conjecture is this: everywhere in the world that develops a stratified, sedentary society also, sooner or later, develops tabletop games, starting with games like Mehen (most of which have not survived). But Mehen-style race games are frankly pretty boring, so inevitably, the culture will graduate from that to what we now call a "tables" game, which is a subgenre of race game where there's a lot more strategy involved: you have more ways to use any single dice roll, and the optimal move in any situation is not always obvious. The oldest examples are the game of Twenty Squares, which comes from Mesopotamia, and Senet from Egypt, both of which date back perhaps as far back as roughly 2600 to 3000 BCE, but there are tons of examples from virtually every corner of the globe. Despite the remarkable similarities of these games, there's no evidence linking them to a common ancestry, meaning that they were all invented independently. Tables games are like pottery and metallurgy – they're just something that humans tend to do, eventually, when left to our own devices.
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The oldest identifiable tabletop game in human history is Mehen, "The Coiled One", which was found in ancient Egypt and dates back to roughly 3000 BCE.
The exact rules of Mehen are lost to the ages, but we know that it was a game of chance in which players move pawns along a track according to the results of a throw of stick-dice. We now refer to this sort of thing as a "race" game, and while Mehen is a very simple race game, it's not the simplest race game imaginable. Players must manage multiple pawns, a special "lion" piece that moves last but can reset opponent's pawns, and quirky rules regarding certain dice results. It seems to imply that Mehen is, perhaps, an evolution of an even older game in which the board is nothing more than a way of tracking the score from the dice throws.
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