Dungeons & Dragons: The Pen and Paper Video Game

Gamasutra is running a three-page piece that not only pays tribute to the late Gary Gygax but also examines how the tabletop version of Dungeons & Dragons is played and how it has influenced even non-RPG video games over the years.

In providing these rules and model of the world, D&D offered a powerful framework for running the first interactive simulations of reality, one in which both the everyday and the extraordinary were possible. For the first time in gaming, you could walk around a world, talk to people, explore towns and cities — and, yes, dungeons.

More importantly, you could be a hero in that world, going on adventures to rescue those people, save those towns, fight dragons. Though crude by today’s digital standards, the simulation was robust and extensible, modeling the fantastic — elves, dragons, magic — as well as the mundane.

The simulations ran on the best computers around: human brains. Armed with common sense knowledge, intuition, and imagination, a person need only hear the word “forest” or “castle” in order to picture one. (This worked out well, since building a convincing digital forest in 1974 was impossible.)

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Pen-and-paper Dungeons & Dragons was in some key ways a progenitor of the contemporary video game, and had a massive impact that goes far beyond the RPG genre. First, by allowing gamers to run the first robust interactive simulations, D&D was one of the first products that let gamers act within a virtual world.

By using that simulation to bind game elements and story elements together, D&D was also a pioneering game that did more than just gameplay, it told a story and offered players fantastic adventures. And with its class system and open player freedom, it even influenced fighting games, team-based FPSes, and open world games.