Lineage of RPGs

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So, sipping my morning coffee I read through this blog post. It’s an interesting read. I like probability work. I like thinking about different methods of throwing dice and tinkering with the odds.

However, in the second part, the article shifts a bit into talking about game lineages. Put a date on your work, citing influences, etc. The author goes back trying to piece together a lineage up to the first cases of the resolution system he explored in the first part of the article.

I’m not against any of that. I do think about the chains of influence between games of different generations. So many games had an impact on me and influence how I design.

However, I’d be wary to systematically tying games together in a lineage just because they share certain qualities or features and are adjacent in time. Certain design elements are incredibly complex in possible variations, and the coincidence of two designers coming up with the exact same expression is quite unlikely. But task resolution? It’s like the first thing I did when I encountered a dice pool game (Vampire the Masquerade) many years back. I listed all the different ways I could tinker with it: add dices, change the threshold for success, reroll certain dice, exploding dices, etc. There’s not an infinity of variations and coincidences will happen.

I’m not saying that any of the games mentioned by the author are not related, or that they didn’t influence each other. But I think stating that because game A used this resolution design and game B did something similar a few years behind, thus game B must have been influenced by game A, is not a good approach.

I don’t have a clear call for this thread, I’m mostly curious what everyone’s reaction to the topic is.

In all cases, the blog post is interesting and worth a read!

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I think the blog’s author makes a lot of assumptions of where designers got their influences from. I also don’t think it’s feasible that every RPG system designer becomes a historian, knowing when mechanics were first used and how that flowed downstream until it reached their game.

I think it’s quite enough for an RPG designer to list their mechanical touchstones in their work, and if a reader is curious enough about further ancestors, they can take it upon themselves to dig deeper. I think if you like a game you should check out any games listed as its inspirations anyways.

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Thanks for reading my post! You both have comments about the addendum.

@SamB, Coincidences in design happen all the time. Often, though, designers do state their influences, which seems like a courteous thing to do.
As for dice pools, I originally had a short paragraph about the splash Vampire: The Masquerade made when it first came out in 1991, but it was getting off track of the point I was making, so I took it out. I was focusing more on games now forgotten, whereas Vampire is still pretty famous. But I can tell you (in case you were not playing back then) that everybody paying attention to RPG design in 1991 recognized that the d10 dice pool in Vampire was a variation on the d6 dice pools of Shadowrun, and that that was playing with what West End Games did for Star Wars and Ghostbusters. It’s sort of like the way Kelsey Dionne doesn’t need to cite Dungeon Crawl Classics for us to see the impact of the latter on her ShadowDark. Some things like this are obvious when you are involved at the time.

@erk, I’m curious to know which connections you think I’m assuming unwarrantedly. Most of them are documented or obvious.
For the record, I did not say “every RPG system designer must become a historian.” Wouldn’t that be a weird thing to insist on? What I was talking about was what you just wrote, reflecting on “knowing when mechanics were first used and how that flowed downstream until it reached” other games. That’s not a high bar.

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Going back further, the One Braincell rules clearly owe much to the Over the Edge game (Jonathan Tweet and Robin Laws, 1992)

It’s hard to codify RPG history but this was the assumption of inherited mechanics that I responded to in my initial statement. I never mentioned that it was unwarranted, as you reference earlier in the blog drawing the history of these games is hard to do.

Perhaps I misread your opening line in the 'Game Lineage section

Game designers should be giving credit where credit is due and also keeping the history of our games alive.

Does that not posit that game designers should take the role of historians? I’m confused what you meant by “keeping the history of our games alive” here, if not to have the designer become historian.

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The Over the Edge rules (1992) give each PC not numerical traits but descriptors: a primary trait, two secondary traits, and a flaw. You roll two dice for most things, 3 if you have a trait in that area, and 4 if it’s your primary trait. This was the first RPG to make your main stats nonnumerical descriptors (and it was a small revolution at the time).

One Braincell rules (2000) give each character a primary ability, two secondary abilities, and a weakness, as well as a goal and a secret. Instead of having dice you add up, it counts successes on 5s and 6s. (I’ve just learned from someone who sent a copy of One Braincell to me that the resolution is a bit messier than that, but that’s basically it.)

To me, it’s pretty clear that One Braincell owes a lot to Over the Edge. The main difference is that in OtE, you add up your dice against a target set arbitrarily by the GM. In 1BC, it’s a “classic dice pool.”

About historians, this may seem like splitting hairs, but I thought you were saying that I insisted that every game designer has to be a historian. I meant more casually what I said: “keeping the history of our games alive,” like it’s good to know this stuff. (In real life I am a historian, professionally, so that may be why I misunderstood you. I absolutely don’t think game designers need to be actual historians.)

The whole addendum about Game Lineage was so that nobody would get the mistaken idea that I invented this d5/6 method. I just named it, and I thought it would be a good idea to discuss its roots since I wasn’t claiming I’d made anything new.

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This. I’ve seen far too many instances of the same basic mechanic popping up in unrelated circumstances where those involved had no clue the others existed to think that one necessarily influenced the other. If you’re going to claim such influence, you’ll have to provide hard evidence that the later designer actually knew of the earlier use AND that there wasn’t a different source of influence for that same mechanic.

The idea that it’d be nice for designers to note what works they know influenced them is laudable. I’m certainly interested in that sort of information, as it may point me to systems I’d never encountered. The details matter far more than the general mechanism, too, and it’s in comparing the details from different designs that provide a better understanding of it.

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I agree! It often sends me in a rabbithole and I discover new products. As you said, it’s also just a courteous thing to do.

I think that’s where we digress. I think it’s entirely fine to look at two products with similar design decisions and say “man, it must have influenced it. I’m sure it did”. But unless the author specifically mentions the book as an influence, then it’s all conjuncture and we can only guess. I felt that the wording in blog kind of stated factually that it was an influence.

Unfortunately, I haven’t read or played these two games, so maybe if I did it’d become obvious and hard to say that they’re not related. But you did spend a good amount of time talking about resolution system (d6 pools, etc) trying to trace some lineage. My issue is that some designs are so specific that it can hardly be a coincidence.

Like, for example, the Genesys dices and system is so specific that it’d be hard to convince me to that you came up with a system really close to it while not being influenced by it.

However, sometime like using 2D6 with some modifiers, or having a dice pool where you add dices, or change the threshold for success, or try to get a number of success, or just one success. This is all stuff that’s way too elementary. You can’t just say “this game used 2D6, and a few years alter this game also did, surely it comes from there”. When I was younger and started designing games professionally, one of the first thing I did whenever I was handed a new medium or accessory (dice or cards or tarot) was to just write down or play with all the possible permutations to see the design space I had available.

I firmly remember being 14, playing D&D 3E and us using something like Advantage or Disadvantage as a house rule to alleviate some of the complexity or 3rd edition.

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The 2D6 with mods was used in Traveller, and with that being a seminal system from the Long Ago, it’d be easy to say any other system using 2D6 derived from that. However, 2D6 was used in other games prior to RPGs, so tracing the influence of any one game that used 2D6 rolls is challenging, at the least.

I, too, was exposed to advantage/disadvantage before it was enshrined in D&D (and I never picked up 3e to even know it was there until it popped up in discussion). Same with kits, which one player brought with him from his previous OD&D games when he moved into town, long before they appeared in 2e. There have been numerous things that have appeared in landmark systems that are said to have been influential that I encounterd prior. Untangling the influences for it all is nigh on impossible.

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I didn’t comment on 2d6 system lineage because that’s literally ancient, like Backgammon and other ancient games.

It is possible to do historical research on games and to sort many of these things out, though. It takes time and effort (or just interest) to scour old game publications and magazines and interviews, etc., and from that, it is possible to ascertain the history of much of this. Nobody will know all the house rules, but from printed matter alone, one can go very far. For example, RuneQuest (1e, 1978) seems to be the earliest published game with starting gear kits.

It doesn’t bother me that we can’t know everything about every table’s peculiarities. Many of the rules lineages are quite clear. Some people commenting here seem to doubt that a history of games is possible, but in fact game history is way easier than what most professional historians do.

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I’m not doubting that history is possible. I’m saying that you can’t just take for granted the influence of one product on another unless you get some sources. When you describe “scouring old games, magazines and interviews” this is exactly the type of work that’s required. If you do have these sources, I’d be welcome to see the lineage you’re drawing. As I said, I find that topic interesting.

And saying “I think this game might be the first one to do this” is perfect fine. It’s an hypothesis and time might confirm it. But I felt that in the article you picked a resolution system, and took for granted that any other system using something very similar must have been influenced by it. I’m mainly talking about the examples you gave in the blog. And once again, you might have sources, but all I saw was speculation.

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I’m often very wary of ascribing firsts to published games, and also wary of assuming that a designer has necessarily encountered a specific mechanism, even it exists prior to them, and even if it exists in a “big” game.

We can certainly use such statements, like “Empire of the Petal Throne was the first published example of critical hits” (if we ignore their inclusion in wargames), but its a much larger stretch to say that critical hits did not exist in ttrpgs prior to this, and that the next games to include critical hits were necessarily influenced by EPT.

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That doesn’t mean that the very next system to offer starting gear kits was influenced by RQ. You originally stated that designers should all be listing their influences and now you see to be arguing that they should research all systems that use the same mechanics, without regard to whether there was any influence.

I can understand wanting to see what actually inspired or influenced a given system’s design. I don’t understand why you would think it important to research the history of any given mechanical approach if earlier designs weren’t even know to the designer.

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The extended lineage reads more as a “huh this is cool” than an attempt at definitive categorization, so the concerns in the OP feel a little unwarranted to me. I can say that bibliographies are some of the best ways to make sure a work gets remembers in ttrpg-land, (look at “Appendix N” becoming shorthand for a specific set of fantasy works, or the closely related network of credited influences that birthed PBTA and FITD), so I generally approve of encouraging writers to note their prominent influences.

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Thanks to everybody for thinking about this in response to my blog and the discussion. I confess I’m a little surprised at the tone of some of the reactions in this discussion. You’re discussing what I wrote as an addendum to a blog post about the lineage of the dice method I was discussing in that post. I thought it would be wrong to seem to take credit, through silence, for what I was naming and discussing. I pointed to all the background that I knew about. The blog post was not a research article (the kind of thing I write for work). As @Stepnix just wrote, it was more of “huh this is cool.” I didn’t think anybody would expect me to be citing “hard evidence” (as pladohsghost puts it) to make some casual observations about the near and long backgrounds to d5/6 and d6 dice pools. Citing my own sources is not speculation; it’s giving credit. Folks here are right, though, that by giving credit to a lineage of games, I am talking about game designers reacting to earlier published designs. That’s why I was mostly careful to put things as I did.

Folks here are talking about “influence,” but that’s not how I think about it much, partly because of the gaps in documentation. I did use the word “influence” once, giving credit to the almost utterly forgotten One Braincell RPG. That’s because it is the game that Matausch explicitly cited as the source of his d5/6 method, which spawned a few dozen minimald6 games. I wrote all this in the blog post. I also even specified when Tiny Dungeon did not cite One Braincell–which seems to be what folks here wanted me to do.

That said, I’m more optimistic about the history of game mechanics. In the early days of the games that are now called TTRPGs, there were not thousands of them. There were only a few, and then there were merely dozens. It was pretty common for any gamer who was not a D&D-only gamer (those existed then as now) to know most of the stuff in most of the games that were out there, especially if they were interested in designing games themselves. (I know @JustinH remembers those days, too.)

You’ll notice that in my blog post about starting kits, I listed some games with starting packages in roughly chronological order. I didn’t say much about influence; I said just that RuneQuest was influential in this area. That’s the lineage I was talking about: a series of games with variations of the same idea. You can draw your own conclusions about whether a game was directly influential or not, and I didn’t insist on it. Then again, if you don’t think RuneQuest was influential… okay. At that point, I am not sure what to say. But if anybody can show an older example of starting kits; that would be cool! A number of my blog posts feature corrections by commentators and I have always embraced those and given credit to those who point them out.

I can’t prove that game designers in the 80s were aware of what the other major games in the same market then were doing, because they don’t say so directly. Likewise, I can’t prove that Steve Jackson was “influenced” by D&D when he made GURPS stats like “Strength” and “Intelligence” with a score of 10 as “average” and 3D6/roll-under, either. It seems that by the skeptical approach I’m encountering here, I should assume by default, wthout “hard evidence,” that GURPS is just coincidentally similar to D&D in these respects, an uncanny parallel. That’s a pretty high standard that my blog post will never reach, and neither will professional game historians.

You don’t need to understand my interest in game history. It’s okay! I do think it’s strange, though, for anybody to assume that game designers were (or are) not aware of the other major games in their own niche market, whose products and even whose designers they were seeing at regular conventions. As a matter of method, I should request “hard evidence” that they didn’t know the small field of publications in which they were working, competing for the same market. If that is the nature of the skepticism, it’s something I’m happy to agree to disagree about, and we can leave it at that.

Speaking for myself, there is a limit to which I can accept radical skepticism about these connections. For example, I cited the Ghostbusters RPG as a landmark in the development of d6 dice pools and dice pools generally. And maybe you thought, “How can he be so sure of its influence?” Well, it was written by Sandy Peterson, Lynn Willis, and Greg Stafford (i.e. designers famous in the field then and now), published by WEG (a major game company at the time), and it got the H.G. Wells award for Best Roleplaying Rules of 1986. Can I give documentary evidence proving that the authors of Shadowrun and the people working at FASA knew about the Ghostbusters RPG, when they published Shadowrun in 1989? No, I can’t document that. But I think it’s strange to doubt it. In any case, I don’t intend in my casual blog to make a perfectly-documented argument for every antecedent to every game, citing design notes, interviews with the designers, etc. As I said before, we don’t need Kelsey Dionne to tell us that DCC played a role in her conception of ShadowDark’s magic rules. People who are following these things can see it. If that doesn’t meet a reader’s standards, let the reader do better. That would be great.

JustinH is right to be wary of declaring “firsts” when so many developments are not documented. Total agreement here. I also think, though, is that the limitations of documentation should not lead us to think there’s nothing to see. We can see innovations and they are a legitimate topic for discussion. Normally, we are talking about firsts in publication. This is how it works in research and with inventions: if it’s not documented, it’s very hard to establish that someone else has discovered something first. There is a field of the history of science, and such historians deal with this problem all the time. That doesn’t mean the history of science is futile. Same goes for trivial stuff like the history of game mechanics.

Ultimately, my claims in that blog post were not profound. I was citing my sources and talking about a lineage of games with similar procedures. Some of the dots I connected, some I left unconnected but pointed to the dots anyway. Seems like it prompted profound skepticism, which is an interesting side-effect.

I am willing to bet that every gamer reading this already assumes influences of different games on each other, but they can’t document all those influences in the way this discussion seems to demand. It might be more interesting to discuss those, instead of my blog entry addendum, if you have suggestions of that kind. Can we detect influences without an explicit statement or attribution? My sense is that several people here so far think not.

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Yes, I know who the designers of RQ are. Yes, I know it was a major release by a major company. And, no, that doesn’t automatically equate to influence of other systems coming along thereafter.

Look, RQ was on the market for years before I got a good look at it and played it. I know that sort of experience – not engaging with a popular game for years – isn’t unique, nor even unusual. Any assumptions that a game that goes unengaged is influential on somebody’s work is untenable; if one is to make that claim without a way to substantiate it, yes, I’m going to be skeptical.

The blog post was bemoaning – intended or not – the lack of attribution of influence, which is what raises the skepticism. I’m all for acknowledgement of influences (if the designer can remember them all, yet hesitant to automatically assume any specific influence without evidence. I’m leery of arguing that Game X influenced Game Y directly without evidence that it actually happened; there have been too many instances of separate development of bits and pieces of game systems for a blanket assumption of that sort.

I certainly ain’t mad at ya. I’m just pointing out it’s more likely those dots aren’t connected.

(And I’d pay money to have a record of all of the designs I’ve been influenced by. I can ID the major sources. After reading hundreds of sources and playing with dozens, though, they get lost in the halls of memory.)

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Yeah, this is not the tone and direction I was looking for. My bad. I enjoyed your whole post, but the addendum is what brought me to want to discuss with others.

No, it depends on what we’re talking about. I do agree that the implementation of certain design ideas is so specific that it would be really surprising to see it pop again in the same way by a different designer. The example you give is not a bad one. I don’t think that having strength as an ability in multiple games is that uncanny. But having similar maths and all really does suggest a certain influence.

But the example you had explored in your blogpost, which was the dice method, was nowhere specific enough that another designer couldn’t come up with it on his own in a matter of hours.

Yeah! And to be clear my goal with this thread was not to attack anyone. It made me react in a way where I thought “that’s not nearly enough for me to connect dots in my head” and I was curious how others viewed lineages, influence in games, etc. That’s the part I’m more interested in discussing.

I certainly do! But unless I know for sure there is an influence, it’s kind of something that rarely pops in a conversation. But you blogged about it, for many people to see and now we’re having a conversation!

I’d honestly be curious how professional historians connect influences in other art forms.

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It all depends on the period and the kind of science or art. Not easy to explain a profession in which people get PhDs in discussion note online. In the end, discovering connections comes down to documentation, but what counts as documentation varies by topic and period and region. Take the history of mathematics, which, beyond arithmetic, evolved early on mostly in application to astronomy. When sets of astronomical figures expressing the apparent motion of heavenly bodies in terms of degrees show up in one set of sources, and then the exact same figures, in the exact same units of measurement, which could not be hit upon coincidentally with the generally poor-quality or “blurry” measurements of astronomical instruments in premodern times, show up in some relatively distant place at a later time, the chances are about 100% that these numerical parameters were transmitted indirectly by sources and intermediaries that are now lost or not yet found. I don’t know if that makes sense, given my brief explanation, but basically when complex numbers line up exactly, you can be pretty sure there are connections. (An outdated but highly readable take on this kind of thing is Otto Neugebauer’s book The Exact Sciences in Antiquity.)

The same applies to game method lineages. As people in this discussion have pointed out, it’s likely that game-players in different places and times are going to come up with the same relatively finite number of things to do with 2d6, making 2d6 methods less meaningful as a marker of lineage (though not meaningless when most others are using 3d6 or 1d20 or 1d100). On the other hand, if you have a specific template, such as one in which each player is supposed to come up with one primary descriptive trait, two secondary descriptive traits, and one disadvantage, not measured with numbers but ranked as primary and secondary, converted to numbers of d6s just so… at that point, the chances are extremely good that the second one to appear was copying the first one, especially when the later one is just six years after the other one in a niche hobby where game designers scrutinize each others’ work. So that’s how we can see One Braincell riffing on Over the Edge, among other reasons.

In the skepticism expressed in the discussion so far, I didn’t see any specific examples of skepticism raised. I just saw a general skepticism. But I was asking if people had specific examples.

So I’ll give an example. In my blog post addendum, I threw out there that Tunnels & Trolls was at the root of Fighting Fantasy, which was behind Troika!. Maybe to some that seemed like a reach, but it’s easy to connect the dots. First of all, Troika! is obviously just the Advanced Fighting Fantasy rules cut and pasted and then tweaked a bit. The author, Dan Sell, doesn’t say so directly, so how can I be sure? He makes it perfectly clear indirectly in his intro to Troika! (in 2018, a date I had to look up because they didn’t even bother to put a date in the initial publication of that game):

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I.e., he likes the Fighting Fantasy rules rather than D&D for his British brand of “old-school revival.”

As for Advanced Fighting Fantasy, probably a lot of people know that those rules were designed for solo gamebooks at first. But Ian Livingstone, one of the authors of the first Fighting Fantasy gamebook, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, published in 1982, and of the whole FF system, was already writing in 1980 (White Dwarf 21) that spell points (used in FF and Troika!) made a better method than Vancian magic. (More here.) He cites RuneQuest there in White Dwarf magazine as one example of such a system.

But Tunnels & Trolls, along with D&D, was cited as one of the two inspirations of RuneQuest, from its first edition, through mention of its author, Ken St. Andre. This is the dedication of RuneQuest in 1978, three years after T&T and four after D&D. There were not a lot of role-playing games to take ideas from back then…

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Tunnels & Trolls was the first published role-playing game to use spell points, derived from T&T by one route or another by most other magic systems outside of D&D. Any game designer in 1980 who read RuneQuest would know to look at T&T, which may be an obscure game now but was quite popular in the UK in that period.

You can also see the influence of T&T on FF with its Luck point system, not to mention the way it handles combat as a contest instead of alternating to-hit rolls.

Those interested in spell points may know that the Warlock variant of D&D rules, published in August of '75, just a few months after T&T, represented the CalTech variants of D&D developed within a year of D&D’s publication in '74, and they used “spell points” by that name. I can’t prove it, but I think it’s quite clear that Ken St. Andre in Arizona was introduced to D&D through a visitor for the LA area. The parallels between how Ken St. Andre describes his game in T&T1e and how we know players played D&D in the LA area are too great to be coincidental, such as the adoption of the name Dungeon Master before TSR did (TSR took “Dungeon Master” from California gamers). My point is that Ken St. Andre was probably not the inventor of spell points. It was one of the earliest schisms in fantasy rules design, less than a year before D&D was mass produced. These lineages are visible and documented.

So, basically, I was not making up the stuff I said out of thin air. That’s just one example. It just wasn’t the main point of my post. Often there are lines for every single dot. Not every line will be found in sources, but we can be pretty confident about a lot of them. And I don’t feel the need to recapitulate and cite all my sources every time I assert a connection. :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

If others have questions about lineages you suspect or doubt, I’d be interested to hear your examples. This stuff can be fun.

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