Een stukje geschiedenis - hoe het allemaal begon

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Wijlen Fandath Ryne
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Lid geworden op: donderdag 14 oktober 2004, 18:23

Een stukje geschiedenis - hoe het allemaal begon

Bericht door Wijlen Fandath Ryne »

Fantasy role playing grew out of wargaming with miniature figures. These are battles fought with little armies of toy soldiers on a table top. Each figure represents ten, or twenty, or more men. The gamers move the armies according to elaborate movement rules (obviously cavalry or tanks move faster than infantry) across a map-like terrain, and resolve rifle fire or clash of swords by die rolls of varying complexity. For anyone who laid out toy soldier battles on the living room rug as a child, the tiny armies of inch-high, hand painted lead figures marching across the table have an inevitable fascination. Usually a battle is a set piece, perhaps a replay of an actual historic engagement, perhaps an imaginary confrontation between Napoleon and the Prussians or the British.
An integral part of the hobby of wargaming with miniature figures is the collecting and painting of each of the tiny soldiers. The miniature armies naturally divide into periods of time: Ancient (Greece and Rome), Medieval (armored knights), Napoleonic (including the American Revolution and Civil War) and Modern (WWII). WWI tends to be neglected, although one can find enthusiasts for any period imaginable.
The rules for miniatures stress historical realism and involve extensive historical research. How fast can a battery of French cannon reload? Should they be allowed to fire more than once each turn? If a British "square" fires a musket volley, what's the probable number of casualties among the charging Turks?
Several companies published sets of rules, attempting to cover these, and all other, eventualities, using dice to simulate the chance factors over which the table top generals have no control. War Games Research, in England, produces the most authoritative and widely used rules for these games.
In the 1960's and 70's another phenomenon occurred which was to change the face of wargaming forever. J.R.R. Tolkien's wonderful book The Lord of the Ringswas published in paperback, and was discovered by an immense audience of young people. This epic adult fairy tale, without doubt the greatest work of fiction produced in this century, inflamed the imagination of an entire generation. The story, as most of my readers know, involves the clash of great armies of men, elves, dwarves, goblins and magical creatures.
The prelude to the epic, a children's classic, The Hobbit, is the tale of a quest to steal a dragon's hoard of gold. It wasn't long before wargamers were introducing armies of orcs and dwarves into their medieval battle plans. Eventually, War Games Research added a set of rules for dragon fire and magical swords to the back of their book of medieval rules.
In Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, a small group of wargamers, headed by Gary Gygax, published a rule book for medieval battles calledChainmail.This was essentially a set of instructions for miniature armies, castles, sieges and campaigns, but it contained a large amount of fantasy material, magic spells, giants, trolls, dragons and what have you. The game was reasonably popular.
What happened next is conjecture on my part. Unfortunately, as so often in an enterprise that becomes financially successful, the principals are now engaged in litigation over the priority of discovery.
Anyway, about this time, Dave Arneson, a wargamer in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, introduced the players in his area to a dungeon under Blackmoor castle. Each player ran one character, and each character had a set of abilities indicated by die rolls. The combat and magic spells were run using the Chainmail rules, which the gamers were already used to.
The game was a great success. Arneson got together with Gygax, who then began a dungeon campaign called Greyhawk.
More and more midwestern gamers heard about the game and asked for instructions and rules. The two gamers offered their creation to a few of the established game companies, and were turned down. At the time it probably looked like, and was, an unlikely mishmash of wildly imaginative fantasy and rules for an improbable miniatures battle. The inventors were making up new spells, new monsters and new magical artifacts at a tremendous rate. As there seemed to be a demand for the game, they decided to risk the investment and have Gygax's little company, called TSR (Tactical Studies Rules) publish the books. The initial publication was a set of three pamphlets, in a box, and mostly mailed out to customers from Gygax's basement. In about a year the first printing had sold out and Dungeons and Dragons was on its way.
At first advertising was by word of mouth. D & D games appeared at science fiction conventions and then at college and high school campuses. Young people who had never heard of war gaming or seen a miniature army were captivated by the creative fantasy element. Within a few years of its publication in 1974, the game was selling by the thousands.
"Like Topsy," Gygax observes, "it just grew." Actually that is how the game and the first rule books were created - they just grew in the fertile imaginations of Gygax, Arneson and their collaborators. The three Dungeons and Dragons books, for those who were playing in an ongoing game, were ideal tools. For the myriads of new players springing up in every high school and college in the country, they were often confusing. "Combat," the authors say offhandedly, "is conducted as in Chainmail." Long lists of magical spells were given, but no instructions to the neophyte magic users on how to use them. Few, if any, of the new players guessed that spells could be used only once in each expedition, and beleaguered Dungeon Masters made up their own systems for handling these ambiguities.
At Lake Geneva, TSR Hobbies, as the company now called itself, began issuing additions and supplements to the original game. Arneson wrote a supplementary booklet called Blackmoor, and Gygax did one called Greyhawk. TSR began publishing a newsletter, The Dragon Rumbles, which grew into The Dragon, a full-sized monthly magazine, devoted to fantasy gaming and wargaming. At Caltech in Pasadena, students Cowan, Clark, Shih, Smith, Dahl and Peterson put together a set of rules with what they felt to be an improved combat and magic system: Warlock. I used their combat table when I first began playing D & D, because I could not understand the one in the original books. In Arizona, Ken St. Andre created a role playing game called Tunnels and Trolls, again with different rules for magic and combat. These games were published; other rule sets appeared in the amateur magazines. In fact, within a few years of its appearance, D & D had generated many more pages of commentary and revision than were contained in the original three little rule books.

Uit: Fantasy Role Playing Games van J. Eric Holmes (1981)
"Fulminictus...Fulminictus....gauw! Geef me het toverboek!" riep de magier, alert als immer

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Karma
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Lid geworden op: zondag 11 september 2005, 23:45

Bericht door Karma »

en dan nog een kort achtergrond van Oog des Meesters (mijn eerste rollenspel):

Door he tsucces van Dungeons&dragons wilde men dit spel vertalen naar het Duits (1985 ned versie). Echter D&D vroeg zo'n hoog bedrag om het daar uit te geven, dat mensen een eigen fantasy rollenspel bedacht hebben Het werd Das Schwarze Auge.
Net zoals D&D gebasseerd op Lord of the Rings, maar niet de achtergrond van miniaturen. De eerste versies werden alleen met pen, papier en natuurlijk dobbelstenen gespeeld.
Het spel sloeg snel aan in Duitsland en werd vertaald naar het Nederlands.
Na een serie boeken en speldozen - Basisspel", de "Instrumenten van de Meester" (een uitbreiding met kartonnen speelfiguren) en acht scenario's - werd het vertalen echter gestopt (waarschijnlijk te kleine markt, of teveel concurentie met D&D), er was nog sprake van vertaling van uitgebreidde magieregels, maar die is er nooit gekomen. In het Duits zijn er echter wel een hele reeks van uitbreidingen en avonturen gekomen en is het nog steeds razend populair
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