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Early Sherlock Holmes era. The tech required for OD&D (i.e. none) existed in 1880 and there was zero competition. No radio, no TV, no internet. People were desperate for books and entertainment. Reading about Victorian London, every night the upper classes visited each other's houses because there was nothing fucking else to do. D&D would have been 10x more popular than it eventually became.

So why didn't it? They had fairy stories, they held seances, belief in the occult was far more widespread, they knew about basic war gaming/kriegspiel. HG Wells was perfectly positioned as the greatest scifi/fantasy author and avid wargamer to be Gygax Writ Large.

So why didn't it happen? Was Arneson's innovation really a moment of Einsteinian inspiration, and without him rpg's still wouldn't exist today? Because all the ingredients were there for 100 years and no one else did it.
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I don't know, but bookmarking for interesting premise
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>>94264954
>Because all the ingredients were there
Not all of them - stories taking place in outright fantasy worlds, like Middle-earth or the Hyborian Age, weren't really a thing yet.
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>>94264963
>Not all of them - stories taking place in outright fantasy worlds, like Middle-earth or the Hyborian Age, weren't really a thing yet.
It would've taken a slightly form, something like playing Greek or Roman heroes in the ancient mythical "real" world. Victorians were obsessed with Rome. Or playing as Lancelot in King Arthur's court. The key innovations of D&D weren't about requiring a medieval fantasy world. If D&D had been invented a few years later, it might well have been scifi-based to capture Star Wars' 1976 popularity.
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>>94264954
>there was nothing fucking else to do
do people really think like this
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>>94265058
>>there was nothing fucking else to do
>do people really think like this
If those things were more interesting, makes sense people would continue preferring to do them when new things are invented, right? And yet they don't. Take a few minutes to think about it if you need to.
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>>94265058
You don't have social media, you work 12 hours a day, you're likely illiterate and dying of pollution related complications.
Getting drunk and fighting one another is about all most people were able to do, and Church where you got to listen to music and hear exciting tales from a distant land long ago is your biggest out.
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>>94264954
Imagine how much more "racism" and "sexism" modern D&D would have had to "weed out" too.
What it would/could have been is essentially worthless, given that its modern day treatment wouldn't change whatsoever.
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>>94264954
I was going to make a comment about literacy in America in the era, but looking it up, literacy in the 1880s was higher than it is now. That's fucking grim.
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>>94265166
>don't use racial slurs
>don't make Europeans the only humans and heroes by default
>"this is worthless! My creativity is stimmied"
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>>94265249
>I was going to make a comment about literacy in America in the era, but looking it up, literacy in the 1880s was higher than it is now. That's fucking grim.
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>>94265252
Well I killed it on the spelling, demolished the Reading, I did pretty well on the arithmetic without a calculator, plunged off a bridge with the grammar, did well enough on the geography, flunked hard on physiology, skipped Civil Government because fuck that, and only got half the history questions.
I will say that while most of these hold up the history section is bullshit because the questions are memorization and not understanding.
I'm an engineering undergrad working on a double major in history.
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>>94265312
*presumably demolished the reading (I read a lot of things from the period for fun)
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Well fantasy roleplay was born from fantasy wargaming, which was born from fantasy novels, but more specifically ones with an emphasis on states and warfare like LOTR. sure all the pieces were theoretically there, but so was the electric motor. Roleplaying games using dice have existed for centuries, but the problem i see is we didnt have the cultural context to make it or have it be viable.
>dungeons and dragons? Its a game about that snake thing snt george killed? Is it trying to climb the tower, or is it stuck at top and trying to get down?
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>>94265166
>Imagine how much more "racism" and "sexism" modern D&D would have had to "weed out" too.

The title says it all
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>>94265796
>Wells was a Tomboy appreceator
Beyond based
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>>94265855
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>>94264954
>No radio, no TV, no internet.
Limited communication options and no mass popular culture. Role-playing games, with an emphasis on the game part, developed through exchanging ideas between the US Midwest and the West Coast, then other regions later.
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>>94264954
The creation of D&D was fueled by the wargaming convention scene, which was powered at least in part by the cultural void of post-industrial capitalism.
To put it differently, people 150 years ago didn't need so much pretense to visit each other and eat snacks and make smalltalk. It would have seemed like a lot of homework for little payoff because the payoff is mostly social.
Conversely, as people in the west continue to get lonelier, TTRPGs are continuing to grow more popular and more divorced from their wargaming roots.
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>>94265250
>don't use racial slurs
Linguistic drift means that any word used for a below average group eventually becomes seen as a slur. For example: "retardation" -> "mental handicap" -> "mentally disabled" -> "mentally differently abled" -> "neurodivergent" etc. It doesn't matter what you call something, you can't brand your way out of being a retard.
>don't make Europeans the only humans and heroes by default
European country, European creators, European customers.
Go to Africa, support an African creator who is creating things for Africans if you want something else. Everything else is just White Man's Burden (Corporate Edition).
>"this is worthless!
Yes.
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>>94266838
Your tears fill my heart with warmth.
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>>94265796
>>94265881
>you will never play a wargame with H.G. Wells
Why do I even bother continuing to live?
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>>94265796
>for that more intelligent sort of girls who likes boys' games and books
The hilarious thing is that acknowledging that some little girls like boys' games and that they are no lesser because of that was probably a very progressive take from his part.
Not to mention it's quite lucid
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People have been playing role playing games for centuries. These include things like mock trials and weighted board games, and during the Victorian era they fell under the umbrella of "parlour games."

One popular one involved players being given a character such as a firefighter, a pregnant woman, and a blind man, and they each had to argue as to which of them should get the single vial of antidote to a poison they all just drank.

These games were very popular with women, and often included props and costumes, and were played as the name suggests in parlours.
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>>94264954
>Einsteinian inspiration
its Archimedean inspiration, as in the Eureka moment or Newtonian inspiration (Isaac Newton's apple tree)
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>>94264954
>Imagine how popular D&D would have been if it were invented in the 1880's
less popular, it would be have stabilized into something very specific, very "squared" in a way.
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>>94264954
>without him rpg's still wouldn't exist
tabletop rpgs are fun but are not a Tesla-Tier invention or understanding of the cosmos or some sort of Beethoven piece of work.

They would have been 'invented' in the forms we have them today sooner or later. A bit later by some people and that would be it.
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>>94264954
it would have 1 thread in tg, like chess
>>94195092
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>>94265131
>you're likely illiterate
By the 1880s? Fuck no
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>>94267439
This anon is correct and can be excused for taking a break from working on their art.
Wasn't as popular with men or boys yet because there was still significant stigma against being a booknerd all the time in the upper classes and the middle class wasn't literate and comfortable enough for the children to fuck about like that yet.
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Unironically fascinating thread.
throwing my hat into the ring, improv social parlor games such as >>94267439 mentions were a definite factor, but I do think the "pulpification" of mysterious fiction was a necessity. Strange worlds were either novel concepts relegated to conceptual literature (the night land, vril: the power of the coming race, verne novels) and few and far between, relegated to the realm of childrens books (such as alice in wonderland) or closer to the beating heart of mythology. Mythological and Archetypal analysis almost certainly played a role in the revival of literary interest on that last factor, which may have played a role in the fantastical nature of d&d, but I think the pulp novel and the democratization of fantasy to working classes via cheap, easy to read magazines and books would have provided the literary basis for something like d&d to exist far more than say, seances and mythology did.
Gygax and Arnerson, from what I understand, both came from working/middle class households, yet had constant access to pulp novels and reading of that nature. Everyone did. "Weird Tales" and the like, and comic books were huge.
The working classes for the first time were getting a taste of fantasy, and were loving it. Now suddenly men of different backgrounds- amateur artists, wargamers etc now had a common connecting factor in the mystical and magical, and could combine their skills (helped by the burgeoning ability for rapid communication in postindustrial capitalist societies as anon notes >>94266692 here)

Sure on some level, the upper classes had the composite materials to *maybe* make D&D, but they had no motivation or need too. they had other entertainments, better shit to do. but a bunch of working class midwest nerds who suddenly realize that their soldiery marching across battlefields could be like the barbarians and dragons of their 50 cent novels? thats when it happens
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>>94268627
to tl;dr my massive blog post:
Victorian times (in my opinion) had perhaps the composite materials to make d&d with their occult and strange literature, but it wasn't saturated in society like the pulps would do to American society, nor did the upper classes would have had motivation to do this sort of thing. but post-industrial working stiffs, bored, surrounded by the 50c strange tales of their youth and looking to spice up a wargame? that was a perfect storm.
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>>94268634
>>94268627
thinking about this more instead of doing my assignments, but I think pulp fiction also changed how we viewed monsters, baddies, and enemies of all types.
The fantastical fiction of the victorian age (take for example, the poem Jabberwocky by Lewis Caroll) and for a lot of mythological/folk tale history, the slaying of a monster was a momentous event. Dragons tormented towns for centuries, trolls ate babies in the night, witches took children with abandon. Opposition to these forces required either a mythical hero or someone with great luck and blessing.
The pulps changed this, I reckon. The National Guard BTFO's Innsmouth. Conan cuts dudes down like he doesn't give a fuck. Suddenly, the beast is vulnerable- not exactly able to be stomped by any old type, but divinely blessed/lucky warriors and the children of gods arent the only people capable of killing them. Guns, particularly in the "strange fiction" that takes place in contemporary years, equalize the field. If there aren't guns, still beasts can be slaughtered and magical foes can be defeated with a little less difficulty then it may have needed in folk tales or greco-roman myths.
This background is why we have the dungeons full of enemies to kill, because pulp fiction allowed figures like Arnerson, Gygax and co to go "huh, you can just kill these things, and take all of their loot."
There was certainly plenty of danger. but still. and keep in mind this is all my unsourced babbling- I have a background in literature, but I don't exactly have 5 books open up in front of me rn to provide legitimacy to these claims. It's mainly from my perceptions of "weird fiction" that I've read from the 19th century compared to that of the 20th.
The angel-things of Vril were essentially unkillable by man, as were many of the titanic inhabitants of the night land for example.
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>>94268634
To add to this, post WW2 boom gave more middle class people more free time, income and capacity. If you look at the Tony Bath's Wargaming Campaigns as a growth of the UK Wargaming scene, the Hyboria(sp) and slingshot stuff you see the setup for od&d and the blackmoor stuff.
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>>94268814
absolutely. The gigantic increase in wealth, free time, and big houses given to pretty much any old joe cause of the GI bill alongside plentiful college education (which lots of WW2 vets decided they wanted to use on literature studies) were a massive factor.
Suddenly more people than ever had a parlor room to play a big dice rolling game with lots of terrain on, and a lot more free time after work to research the color schemes of Cromwell's cavalry.
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>>94268790
Your take on killing the things and taking their loot is a bit off. There was some killing, some running the fuck away, some clever avoidance, etc.
Conan is sneaky and smart as much as he's a murder machine. Same for farfad and the grey mouser, cudgle, etc. foremost of appendix N.
There's a bunch of reading material if you want to get into the weeds with how D&D started.
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>>94268834
>For most of
Although it could be argued the typo also works.
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>>94268790
this is all good stuff anon i would like to add that i believe the closing of the american frontier created a latent demand for exploration and adventure that had up until that point been an important part of our culture. this could be argued to have extended into the space race / atomic age as well. into the 70's and 80's however that sort of civilizational energy has had nowhere to go, add on top of that the increased emotional, social distance between people ie. endemic loneliness nationwide and you have a much more malleable clay for people to want to play make-believe in far off fantasy worlds
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>>94268834
Admittedly, like I said I'm doing a lot of conjecture and unsourced babbling, and I'm not as well-read as I like on the pulps. There were obvious setups for the rogues in stuff like the Grey Mouser novels.
Hell, Elric was a miserable, weak, cunning bastard, and I'm almost certain he had a massive influence.
I've wanted to read the book "Appendix N" that looks into the literary influence of D&D for sometime now but just been caught up with too much other nonsense.
>>94268856
The atomization right at the end of the Vietnam War was a palpable, societally damaging thing. There's a reason the 70s had such an explosion in politically oriented violence, lone shooters etc, and I think that endemic national loneliness had a part in it. Looking at the inverse, the 1880s Victorians had the exploration they wanted in droves. Sure the world was smaller, but the arctic had yet to be fully explored, and the interior of Africa was still awaiting survey and settlement. By the 70s, no such luck. Everest had been ascended, and the arctic had research stations.
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>>94264954
Kriegsspiel is as much RPG as wargame, its just you are always playing a commander.
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>>94265166
If TTRPGs came out earlier they likely would be aligned more towards women's interests. Roleplay parlor games were rather popular at times but tended to be closer to free form VTM LARP than modern D&D as the use of dice by women was considered unseemly and associated too closely with gambling.
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>>94269003
Kreigsspiel was quasiroleplay but intended as training exercises for actual officers.
FKR is a different indi game thing with vauge inspiration from Kreigsspiel but not much actual direct connection.
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>>94268886
I think the beginnings of pulp were already quite heavily present in the public eye, circa queen Vic's reign. You had Doyle writing dino Island shit in The Lost World, sensationalized tales of highwaymen like Dick Turpin, and even "The Mummy's Curse!" making headlines after the Tutankhamun excavators started (supposedly) dying under mysterious circumstances.

The thing is: a lot of this was /real/. Dick Turpin actually escape the bow street runners in a counties-long chase. There were still countless unexplored islands that could feasibly hide a lost world. You wanted to rob tombs of an ancient pharaoh? You could. Most people didn't, but as the option was there, the need for pretense was absent. I'd wager that the death of the age of exploration left a hole in the hearts of westerners, leaving fantasy as the recourse.
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>>94264954
... you again?
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>>94267853
He was talking about russia
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>>94267439
>>These games were very popular with women, and often included props and costumes, and were played as the name suggests in parlours.
Imagine being a London aristocrat and you want to retire to the smoking room with the boys ASAP rather than listen to the women's inane babble for another moment, so you toss a parlor game into their midst. "Darling, I believe this game allows you scandalously take the role of either a harlot or a trollop or a nun." The women fall on it like a pack of hyenas and you're blessedly free to go while Jeeves the Aged Butler allows himself an almost imperceptible smile.
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>>94265855
>>94266938
>Wells was also an anticolonial communist that only stopped denouncing zionism after the holocaust and died before the Nakba
Wait, this sounds like the sort of guy people bitch about.
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>>94264954
This is fifth time thread on this subject came up since September started. Did I miss some shitty meme, a retard twitter drama or a stupid youtube video? Or you're just trying to force a stupid meme on us, OP?
Either way, it's not working, and your assumption by default is flawed, assuming a whole lot of things that never were true.
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>>94274344
>This is fifth time thread on this subject came up since September started. Did I miss some shitty meme, a retard twitter drama or a stupid youtube video?
You sound angry and mentally ill. Are you the guy who only wants to talk about your nonbinary furry PC yet refuses to do it on Reddit where you belong?
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>>94264954
>Was Arneson's innovation really a moment of Einsteinian inspiration
No, he needed David Wesley.
who in turn needed strategos.
which needed kriegsspiel.
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>>94265252
Some of the arithmetic I missed, since I don't know feet/miles (metric here) or what a cord of wood is. Missed one or two geography, and some of the history was nope (sketch for example).
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>>94274254
>Wells was also an anticolonial communist that only stopped denouncing zionism after the holocaust
But zionism got way worse after the holocaust. Why would anyone denounce zionism before the holocaust?
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>>94275472
well among the jews,
some thought it was improper/outright heretical to create their land before the coming of the messiah (I think, im not mr. jew expert), and orthodox jews reallly hated them. Assimilated, secular, or otherwise post-enlightenment jews believed that jews should fully integrate and be given equal rights in the nations they inhabited.
among the non jews:
a stance against any sort of colonial occupation
anti-semitic viewpoints, some decrying zionism as a "jewish trick"
Arabs obviously werent pleased with the whole deal even pre-1948.
Communists, jewish and non jews alike decried it as borgeouis (im not spelling that properly) nationalism.
average smoe probably thought that "those joos ought to go somewhere else sure"
>>94274344
i think its an interesting and thought provoking discussion. get the dildo out of your ass.
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>>94267439
Well those are games for girls and note the cool ones where you kill ogres, orcs and dragons and
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>>94268790
1880 d&d certainty would've had a different flavor and it's interesting to imagine how. Certainly no direct Tolkien influence, probably faeries instead of elves. Maybe more emphasis on fighting Dante's depiction of devils, no generic clerics but a direct implementation of Christianity. You make an interesting point about fighting a single baddie rather than slaughtering a dungeon full of them - that is actually how LotFP suggests to play, though it fails in that it doesn't change the B/X rules enough to support such play.
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>>94276246
>i think its an interesting and thought provoking discussion
It was semi-interesting the first time. Now it's the exact same posts repeated for the 5th time
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>>94279814
well I didn't see it the last 5 times.
>>94278876
Admittedly I think it may have shifted equally to using wits as much as blades, like >>94268834 mentions. Dedicated rules suggestions on outwitting a monster with lots of play examples, or perhaps not so much a single-minded focus on mathematics based rules but rather giving the players theatrical carte blanche to try and roleplay out such a solution. Kind of what we consider a puzzle in a RPG now, but much more open ended maybe?
In any event this could be the interesting basis for an OSR/ B/X game that comes from an "alternate history" wherein Wells perhaps invented a primordial roleplaying game.
Man I wish i had the freetime to do that, you could use royalty free art perfectly.
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>>94264954
I think its just as curious with that Little Wars example why wargaming didn't take off that much when it had literally been invented. I know it would be expensive but I mean among people who would have had the money

Someone raised a good point that completely fabricated worlds purely designed for entertainment weren't as big a thing yet, so the conceptual leap to playing a band of adventurers in one wasn't as natural. Lord of the Rings was the 50s and it wasn't "like dnd". Dnd style worlds took a while to evolve out of Tolkien from people liking specific things in it and not caring about other aspects, and ultimately boiling it down to just those crowd pleasing elements. Conan the Barbarian was earlier, but still not till the 1930s.
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>>94280372
this is something I can say a little confidently on wrt fictional worlds: a lot of them were concepts built on questions, rather than entertainment. Caroll, a talented mathematician and logician sought to create a world without logic in Alice and Wonderland. Flatland was a social allegory, as was Erewhon, Utopia(400 years prior to most of these books but you see the point) was a fictional society meant as an allegory, the time machine discussed class differences, The Coming Race was Bulwer's exploration of the occult, and so on. a few notable exceptions I can think of come later on like House on The Borderlands and The Night Land more than likely being sheer entertainment rather than an allegory or exploration.
What I'm getting at is that fictional spaces or worlds were less often meant to stand on their own and to be explored like the forbidden planets and jungles as pulps, but more taken as lessons, allegories, moral tales, etc.
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>>94275472
>Why would anyone denounce zionism before the holocaust?
Because it was always a blatant settler colonial project about removing the indigenous population. Just like what happened in the USA or Australia.
It's also antisemitic because it's an ideology that says all people of this one faith aren't actually from their homelands, they're an other that needs to leave.
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>>94280372
>>I think its just as curious with that Little Wars example why wargaming didn't take off that much when it had literally been invented. I know it would be expensive but I mean among people who would have had the money
Imagine showing HG Wells "ok Mr. Big Imagination Mr. Big SciFi, explain to me how your Little Wars will be transformed into this 125 years from now."
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>>94282904
The fuck is that girl supposed to be, a failed prompt?
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>>94282925
>The fuck is that girl supposed to be, a failed prompt?
not sure what you mean but I looked again and check out her proportions. They're obscured by the freakshit birdman in front of her, but her legs look 2x too long compared to her torso. You can clearly see her feet.

I now suspect this IS AI art and we could probably cause a shitstorm among the Modern Audience by tossing this like raw meat into one of the subreddits.

"Folks, I LOVE the new Ravenloft art direction and inclusivity but I'm deeply afraid the Boymoder warlock is AI art. I've been shaking and sobbing for an hour and only just now have pulled myself together!"
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>>94282947
The overreaction to AI art is pretty funny.
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>>94280372
>I know it would be expensive but I mean among people who would have had the money
They were using it for military officer training. It was called Kriegsspiel, iirc it was around in the 1820s. There were various simpler games of it made after that for civilians, I think ther was one specifically just called Kreigsspiel right around when Little Wars came out.
The post WW2 socioeconomic boom, increased literacy and leisure time among the middle class made it as well as many other forms of entertainment, more wide spread.
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>>94282947
>>94282925
Everyone's hands are borked. You can see they tried to salvage it but had to make everyone doing jazz hands shadow puppets to get anywhere near passable.
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>>94268627
I think it's also worth noting that, for the US, WW2 also served as something of a literacy accelerator. The government thought it worthwhile to help troop morale by providing them with ample amounts of free light reading, mostly pulpy shlock the men could read to keep their minds off dying. After the war ended the US saw an explosion of popularity for pulppy "gentlemen's magazines" as returning soldiers continued their reading habits. This gave an excellent jumping off points for hundreds of pulp, fantasy and scifi writers and also formed a big part of the media diet that the eventual creators of D&D consumed as kids.
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>>94264954
People role played at the time. There’s even a tale about the parties that Lord Byron used to host and how they all pretended to be the characters from the novels they wrote. The game aspect of RPGs came from wargaming, and those were just starting to become a thing. Had wargaming become a thing 50 years earlier, I’m pretty sure w we would had seen RPGs in the 19th century.
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>>94275472
That was the position the Soviet Union held. They supported the creation of Israel between 1945-1948 as reparation for the holocaust but quickly changed their tone after they saw what was happening to the palestinians. Their support didn’t even make it through 1948, despite the israeli government being socialist.
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Peak White Male Recreation.
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>>94282947
Oh wow I honestly hadn't seen the raven guy and thought she was some kind of bizarre centaur lol

>"Folks, I LOVE the new Ravenloft art direction and inclusivity but I'm deeply afraid the Boymoder warlock is AI art. I've been shaking and sobbing for an hour and only just now have pulled myself together!"
lmao
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>>94285362
additionally, GI bill got a ton of them into college where, surprise surprise, after spending a fair bit of time reading at the front, they decided to get into literature.
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>>94285400
What does D&D even need from its wargaming roots?
Modern times proves that the wargaming aspect isn't even remotely necessary.
The only thing that really comes to mind is the concept of hit points.
Everything else can be generally abstracted is "assign an arbitrary quantity representing relative ability for an action or activity, and use that number alongside a random number generator to determine whether a given attempt is successful".
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>>94264954
If people in the *19*80s thought D&D was satanic what would people in the 1880s think?
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>>94287747
Publically pretend not to know about it and that polite people like themselves have no interest in such nonsense.
Private clubs with invites, special guests, esoteric and libertine crossover and pilaged mummy parts for nattty 20 energy.
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>>94288282
>pilaged mummy parts for nattty 20 energy
lol
>your regular group stops playing for a year because the DM goes on an expedition to Africa
>he comes back missing an eye but has dice made out of mummy bones and a DM screen made out of old tablets
>a few months later he swears that every adventure ending with a TPK is just bad luck on our part, and that there's no such thing as the mummy's curse
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>>94287561
>Modern times proves that the wargaming aspect isn't even remotely necessary.
Modern times only prove modern times were a mistake.
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>>94287561
Some of us like the combination of individual scale conflict and adventure mixed with and in the back drop of lager scale military conflict also decided by player actions?
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>>94288282
>pilaged mummy parts for nattty 20 energy
These would be eaten akin to those gummy consumables/meta currency some tables do.

>"Thedore, your Fairy contramaestre perfomance has been of the upmost quality, i bequest you an Emperor's will."
>Takes out a mummy's finger from an ivory box
>"You may consume it to impose the will of a lord in this here table for an aproppiate action
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>>94267231
It doesnt say that the author thinks any more or less of girls because of it, just that a higher iq sort of girl likes boys games and books.

The only thing it acknowledges is that the average girl isnt the sort with the intelligence to like boys games and books, rather than the auther thinking ill or not about it.
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>>94264954
How popular where specialty publicantions in the 1880s? I know that more general topic publicantions like magazines and readers digests were a thing, Where stuff like short stories where published, but where specialty interest publications as lucrative?

Because I think that was a big part of TSR and other early RPG's cash base. the publishing of modules, news letters, and additional content.
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>>94293627
>How popular where specialty publicantions in the 1880s? I know that more general topic publicantions like magazines and readers digests were a thing, Where stuff like short stories where published, but where specialty interest publications as lucrative?
>
>Because I think that was a big part of TSR and other early RPG's cash base. the publishing of modules, news letters, and additional content.
This is part of why 1880 D&D would have been so popular. There'd be a huge appetite and demand for good modules, rules lawyering, etc. They'd argue over the same things we argue over today with the exception they can be argued for free online, whereas HGW Inc. would be able to print $ with a monthly or bimonthly or whatever pamphlet. In the Sherlock Holmes stories, a respected amateur scientist or archaeologist would always be introduced with mention of some self-published "pamphlet" (i.e. a short paperback).
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>>94264954
In order for D&D to get invented someone had to misinterpret the rule in 1880s Strategos that "anything can be attempted" eventually resulting in Braunstein.

People in the 1880s would have correctly read it as meaning "any strategy or move normally part of playing this miniatures war game" i.e. the point of the passage was that Referees shouldn't backseat drive players making non-meta bad moves, as long as they're actually legal.

The idea someone would read that and go "well if ANY strategy is allowed then I'm forming an alliance with Bob, I'm infiltrating Jim's ranks with a spy, see propagandistic leaflets in the nearby villages to gain their aid, and finally I'm going to move my troops here to cut off Frank's supply lines" in the middle of what is basically Napoleonic 40K was completely outside of the author's intent, and simultaneously both a supremely rules lawyer take and a little brother mom forced you to include playing playground Calvinball at the otherwise serious game table take.

So like, yes, all the ideas were possible, but the kind of player responsible basically didn't exist yet.
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>>94293627
Victorians were ardent hobbyists. Stuff like this, still in the compendium format. Has model making, gardening, Chess in the back etc. The idea I think is that the household subscribes to it.
https://www.worldradiohistory.com/UK/Hobbies/00/Hobbies-1906-10-13-S-OCR.pdf
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>>94265252
Recordings of people from Appalachia in the states from this time sound very intelligent (although they misspeak every now and again), today they sound like the hickest of hicks.

(Holy shit, 1000 seconds?!)
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File: 1912 Exam.png (6.48 MB, 1560x1891)
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>>94264954

>Playing DnD with your gentleman bros who all have a solid grasp of history, geography, physics, math, and ancient languages.
>No brainrot from smartphones, SSRIs, and fluoride
>No phone calls interrupting the game
>Staying home is boring so there's no flaking

Sounds heavenly.

>>94265252

I saw one college entrance exam where you had a blank map of the 13 colonies and had to mark the locations of the major Revolutionary War battles. We've definitely been purposefully dumbed down.
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>>94275472
Franz Kafka was an anti Zionist who died before the holocaust. There's tons of reasons. It's a colonial project in a former british colony, it uses theocratic or etnostate arguments, you don't want to leave your home nor think everything will be solved if you just give up and move to the desert etc
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>>94268814
Best posts on tg rn, 10/10
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>>94264963
As evidenced: Neither Middle Earth nor Hyborian age are purely fantasy worlds: Both are set on Ancient earth. It's only later works that actually separated "mythic history" into its own world.
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I think the main risk to adding dice to imagination games in the Victorian era might be people condemning it as gambling and potentially causing a moral panic.
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>>94314789
That was mostly the 70s though you'd probably have to put up with stoners.

The real benefit of D&D being invented early would have been the lack of Satanic Panic. Though judging by Wizard of Oz the fantasy settings would have been WEIRD.
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>>94335477
This is why Castle Falkenstein used the Cyberpunk 2020 system but with playing cards. Dice were for poor people.
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>>94335726
>judging by Wizard of Oz
And Alice.
...Oh wait, one of the first adventures was inspired by Alice. I guess not much would change there.
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>>94265058
There were still lots of games which could be interesting and could eat up the time, e.g., billiards, backgammon, chess, go, a slew of card games, etc.

Or you could simply read a fuck load, write letters to friends, etc.
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>>94264963
its the least important ingredient tbqh, the most important thing its the rules and the system
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>>94280736
>the j cries out as he strikes you
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>>94264954
>(i.e. none)
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What if 40k had dropped in 1880? They had wargames after all.
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>>94350549
You know, I could imagine something like Rogue Trader being written in the 19th century, but it would probably take a radically different direction without WWI and WWII o draw from.
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>>94350387
What tales does the last anon describe at the end? I can recognize king arthur but wtf is people turning into trees?
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>>94314789
>brainrot
>muh fluoride
The irony



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