The "Golden Age" of RPGs--Science Fiction Games

I know it's been a while since I've blogged about my research topic, or anything else really. Rather than waste time with excuses, I'll just jump right into the information.

I left off last time describing and discussing some of the RPG games that were created to challenge Dungeons & Dragons in the commercial arena. Now it's time to look at how well RPGs caught on and where the genre went next.

By the late 1970s, RPGs were established as a new and creative type of game that could be played over and over in different scenarios with different characters playing. According to Astinus's "The History of Role-Playing Part III", role-playing was a genre of gaming "...around which could be built literature, and convention, even a whole sub-culture. It had the potential to be very big, but at that time, it still had some way to go before it got there".

Fantasy RPGs such as D&D, Tunnels & Trolls, and Chivalry & Sorcery were making money and gaining popularity. Science fiction literature and subcutlure was the new craze in the U.S. so naturally it followed that sci-fi RPGs would be created next. StarFaring, by St. Andre press (the publishers of Tunnels and Trolls)was one of the first science fiction RPGs out in 1976. The game had a very small run, as well as the obscure Metamorphosis Alpha from TSR (D&D's publisher) and a few other games.

The most successful of early science fiction RPGs was Traveller by Mark Miller from Game Designers Workshop in 1977. The game was ground-breaking because it presented new ideas and was well designed. Up until that point, sci-fi RPGs had focused on the skill system, which is highly important, but had neglected to flesh out the design of the game. Besides creating a good skill system that was influential to other games later down the road, Miller also rejected a class or occupation requirement for player characters. Players only had to roll dice to find out what skills their character learned during their life.

The setting of the game was boundless. The rules of the game allowed for the creations of solar systems, planets, and countires. The books provided simple and easy to follow tables for generation of a random planet with factors such as size, temperature, government system, and religion. There were also tips for creating richly detailed cities and worlds. Miller provided his own game setting of a powerful yet decentralized empire instead of stealing from popular sci-fi movies and TV shows of the time. If players didn't like Miller's setting, they could easily change it. Part of the appeal of Traveller was the game's incredible flexibility.

Another of the major reasons that Traveller became so successful was that it was released close to the same time as the Star Wars movie. Now Star Wars fans could act out the adventures they had seen at the movie theater with their friends and "be" their favorite Star Wars character.

That wraps it up for now with science fiction games. In the next research post I'll be discussing the role-playing subculture.