Wargaming: The Forebear of Roleplaying
The origins of roleplaying games as we know them today go back to the practice of wargaming: simulations for military strategists to assess tactics and their ability to command without the actual costs of armed conflict. Chess, of course, can be understood as a highly abstract wargame simulating the battle of two evenly matched forces over even terrain. The Chinese, Indian, Persian and Italian precursors to modern western chess have genealogies that may date as far back as 200BC, and there have been many efforts to adapt the rules of chess to reflect the growing complexities of warfare. In 1780, the Master of the Pages for the Duke of Brunswick developed a sprawling chess variant that involved 1666 squares of varying terrain with pieces representing artillery, infantry and cavalry units. Henry Michael Temple developed a variant of chess in 1899 named Kriegspiel, literally, “war play.�
However, the Napoleonic wars spurred the development of a different kind of wargame for officer training and strategic planning, also referred to as Kriegspiel. The Prussian army adopted Lieutenant von Reisswitz’s 1:8000 scale wargame as a standard training tool in 1824, assembling elaborate books of rules for determining the results of a variety of different military decisions over a range of terrains and circumstances . Although General von Verdy du Vernois replaced the books with qualitative consultations in 1870, he kept many of Reisswitz’s fundamentals. The order of play codified the processes of decision-making for a two-map format (one for each opposing strategist) and emphasized the role of the umpire, usually a senior military officer. Effective knowledge about the movement and capabilities of different units was the key to winning a game of Kriegspiel. Finally, even though probabilities were weighted using mathematical tables or judgments of the umpire, the game relied on dice to determine the consequences of combat.
Wargaming became mainstream recreation in the early 1900s in England and Europe, increasingly associated with die-casting technologies of the day, allowing military units to be represented by detailed miniatures. H.G. Wells published Little Wars in 1913, an attempt at developing a “vivid and inspiring Kriegspiel, in which the element of the umpire would be reduced to a minimum.� This challenge was met by rigid yet simple rule sets that allowed young players to strategize within a limited range of choices. Little Wars also encouraged players “to set up a few obstacles on the floor, volumes of the British Encyclopedia and so forth, to make a Country,� an evocative and accessible description of a game in which children turned their playroom floors into battlegrounds, placed toy soldiers and knocked them down with the aid of spring breechloader guns. Wells’ own writings hint at the popularity of wargaming among his adult contemporaries, indicating that wargaming was not a merely a youth pastime in the early twentieth century.
In the 1950s, recreational wargames began to adopt less expensive and less expansive requirements by borrowing principles from board game formats that made the Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley household names in the preceding decades. Pioneering companies such as Avalon Hill and Simulations Publications, Inc. led the way in “tabletop wargaming� but were quickly joined by other competitors in the late 50s and the 60s. As a side effect, this established distribution channels that would facilitate the rapid popularization of roleplaying games in the 70s.
