Pity the game store clerk who must puzzle over shelf placement every time a new shipment of games comes in. Pity the gaming magazine editors and page layout teams, who must figure out the appropriate genre label to assign the review one of the writers has just handed them. Pity the gamers, those of us, myself included, who have brought home a box loudly proclaiming itself "RPG!" only to load it up on the computer and find it was nothing of the sort. Pity us all . . . no more?
No more, I say. I intend to clear up this identity crisis that has gone on far too long and has misled gamers, reviewers, marketers, and everyone else who tried to safely categorize the RPG. To do this, we must return to the roots, to the etymology, to the very foundations and origins of the term.
The playing of roles has been a human pastime for as long as our species has existed. Before the discovery of fire, there was imagination, and so, too, was there entertainment in the form of storytelling. From the forms of the animal spirits in Native American culture, to the exaggerated mannerisms of Kabuki, to the formal structure of the chorus in Greek tragedies, acting has been formalized across human society for centuries. (Mythologist and scholar Joseph Campbell might add that the same archetypes are present and shared across our diverse populations as well, but that is a discussion for another article. )
The publication of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in the 1950s, and their paperback publication in the 1960s, was a catalyst that revolutionized the landscape. To quote Babylon 5, "it was the year everything changed." His works have justifiably become the benchmark to which all other fantasy writings are compared. And like many great ideas, his work inspired others, including Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax, two young men in the U.S. who had been involved with strategy and tabletop war gaming. After the 1974 publication of the first three Dungeons and Dragons books by Tactical Studies Rules, better known as TSR, a new genre with new terms was born: the role-playing game, or RPG.
The first editions of Dungeons and Dragons were almost direct ports of Tolkien's world of Middle Earth. They even included hobbits, until a lawsuit by Tolkien's estates forced TSR to change the name to "halflings." But although high fantasy like AD&D's Forgotten Realms remained a significant section of the RPG library, other genres and concepts rapidly took their places on the shelf as well, including settings in science fiction, horror, and alternate dimensions like Planescape that seemed to be a bit of everything at once. Many other rules systems emerged, such as GURPS and the D6 system.
Later, the progeny of strategic wargaming tried improvisational acting -- new dice-free systems known as LARPs, or Live Action Role-playing, gained popularity and have become featured events at cons across the country. These became a separate category from typical RPGs, whose dice and calculations remain the bread and butter of the majority of the pen and paper community.
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