Sorry Mr Gygax, D&D Would Have Happened Anyway

A provocative title for a blog, but the unstated conclusion of Jon Peterson's Playing At The World Vol. 2: Three Pillars of Role-Playing Games (2025, MIT Press). 

It's big. It's weighty. It's not cheap. It's the meisterwerk of scholarship into the origins of tabletop roleplaying.

I reviewed Vol.1: The Invention of Dungeons & Dragons pretty much exactly a year ago (and you can read that review here). Vol. 2 arrived this Spring with twice the page count and a price tag to match (i.e. still cheap as chips compared to buying a new boardgame).

It's a more challenging read, not just because of its length, but because it's not really written to be read sequentially, in a start-on-page-1-and-just-keep-going sort of way - although that's what I did, despite Peterson's repeated appeals to readers to skip bits that don't appeal to them.

In this, it contrasts with Vol. 1, which was a guided tour, year by year, of how D&D arose out of Midwestern wargaming and Diplomacy groups, cross-pollinated with more avant-garde West Coast early adopters, and how that led to fierce debates about who owned this new recreational form and how it was to be defined. That book almost demanded to be read sequentially. Jump in to Chapter 16 (GenCon 1974 and its Aftermath) and you'll be asking, 'What does IFW stand for? Where is Avalon Hill? Who or what is Lowrys Guidon?' Back you must go to earlier chapters to find out.

A timeline of D&D's inception, taken from Peterson's The Game Wizards (2021)

The Medieval Fantasy Genre

Vol. 2 comes at things more theoretically.  There are three roughly-equal parts to the book. The first covers the Medieval Fantasy Genre: where did this emerge from? how did it distinguish itself from science fiction? what texts were the biggest influences? where specifically do D&D tropes like underground dungeons, pointy-eared elves, character classes, and alignment come from? As a literature graduate, this is the section that I found easy reading and inspirational: lots of novels to add to my bucket list!

For people who like arguing with strangers online, Peterson addresses both sides of the contention that D&D plagiarises - or repudiates - Tolkien.

It amazed me how many bedrock D&D tropes you think must be medieval in fact date from Poul Anderson's 1961 'portal fantasy' Three Hearts And Three Lions.

The Rules of the Game

The second section, and the largest, covers the Rules of the Game. Peterson is thinking of things like Hit Points, saving throws, levels of experience and experience points, ability scores. Before he can delve into that he first takes us on a deep dive into the origins of wargaming in Prussian Kriegsspel games and the manufacture of toy soldiers. These chapters are particularly dense and, although Peterson essays to keep bringing everything back to D&D, there are longueurs. But then again, I'm no wargamer, so perhaps this section was always going to sag for me.

I was intrigued by the early techniques for generating probability spreads just using six-sided dice, back before the advent of polyhedral dice in the 1960s and '70s. Interesting too was the division between simulationists who wished to use wargames as a way of training military officers, and gamers proprement-dit, who used wargames to stimulate the imagination or as a prompt for creativity. I was fascinated to read of a convalescent Robert Louis Stevenson using toy soldiers to fight battles and writing the results up as war journalism reporting from fictional conflicts - imaginative immersion that is a clear step towards RPGs. 

Dice like these used to be really difficult to get hold of!

Playing Roles

The final, and shortest, section covers the concept of Playing Roles. Peterson gives the childhood game of 'Let's Pretend' the obligatory nod, then dives into an analysis of some real childhood pretend-worlds that persisted into adulthood, notably those of the Bronte siblings and C.S. Lewis and his brother. This leads to a discussion of the world of 'Coventry' created by Paul Stanbery and imagined to exist on a gigantic space ark in the far future. Coventry attained performative reality in the 1960s as members of Los Angeles SF fandom adopted roles within it and attended events, in character and costume. 

From here we progress into the Society for Creative Anachronism pioneering Renaissance Fayres and 'shared world' experiences like Tony Bath's Conan-inspired Hyboria campaign and the Play By Mail game Midgard, all of which merged wargaming, diplomacy, and immersion in a fictive role within an imagined setting. Perhaps because of my current work in Psychology, I found this the most intellectually gripping section of the book.

One of my (very few) criticisms of Vol.1 was that Peterson prefers granular close analysis to placing events within the context of broader cultural change. Here he redresses that, looking at the impact of the atom bomb and the Cold War on the ethics and ostensible purpose of wargaming. the influence of globalisation and European travel on previously isolated wargaming subcultures, and the disillusionment with modernity that underlies much wargaming and RPGs after the Second World War - a trend that Peterson links to the popularity of 'Portal Fantasies' in literature, in which an ordinary person can live an extraordinary life when they inadvertently enter a fantastic new world. Peterson explores the tensions between imagining yourself operating in a fantastic world, and imagining yourself as native to a fantastic world, and wishing to have that experience in a recurring form, rather than just while reading a book or watching a movie.

Edgar Rice Burroughs (yes, the Tarzan guy) popularised 'Portal Fantasies' with stories of John Carter, an ordinary schmo on Earth, but on Barsoom (Mars) he battles monsters and romances half-naked princesses.

Who Invented RPGs?

Instead of debating angels dancing on pins, 21st century fandom still convulses over whether the credit for D&D should go to Gary Gygax or Dave Arneson. Peterson's argument might be summarised as 'Both, but really Neither.'

The picture that emerges from Peterson's marshalling of sources and statements is of immersive, character-driven, campaign-style roleplaying developing on a number of fronts at the end of the 1960s and through the early 1970s. Out on the West Coast, they were dressing up as knights-of-olde or attending diplomatic banquets as rules of Coventry. Over in the UK, Tony Bath was getting wargamers to imagine themselves as rulers and generals of Robert E Howard's fantasy world of Hyboria. Out of Germany came a Play By Mail Game called Armageddon, which was repurposed in Britain as Midgard, then launched (rather more effectively) in the USA as Midgard II and its spin-offs. Even ordinary board gamers and Diplomacy players were naming their favourite miniatures or board game tokens, treating them as real people, and skewing the game away from playing-to-win towards 'What Would My Character Do?'

On this telling, popular culture was hungry for a fantasy roleplaying product, but no one had yet put the component parts together in a way that could launch into the mainstream. Miniature wargaming and Creative Anachronism required research, craftsmanship, and expense. Pay By Mail games were slow. 'Shared Worlds' like Coventry were too open ended, prone to schism, and lacked focus.

You would have expected D&D to emerge from a Play By Mail game like this, rather than from Gygax and Arneson's playing around with miniature figurines.

What Gygax and Arneson delivered was the essential experience of fantasy roleplaying, adapted to the tabletop, and imagined in a setting (the 'dungeon') that allowed for moment-by-moment immersion and characterisation.

But if they hadn't done it, who would? Maybe Hartley Patterson or Will Haven (of Midgard), or Lewis Pulsipher or Hal Broome who developed the concept, or Tom Drake (of Midgard II), or Scott Rich (of Midgard Ltd), or someone else from the SfCA. All these people were striving towards the same end, chasing the same elusive experience, trying to find away to instantiate fantasy worlds in real-life exchanges.

This doesn't make D&D inevitable, like Thanos: but reveals it to be a cultural product whose time had very much arrived.

Should It Be On Your Shelf?

As a work of scholarship into the history of RPGs, Peterson is unsurpassed and this book will be a resource for decades. 

As a work of popular history, it's a bit harder to assess. There will certainly be something in it for everyone, whether to delve into the literary sources that inspired Clerics or how 19th century mathematicians developed percentile outcomes from d6 rolls, or how the RAND Corporation used Diplomacy to wargame nuclear brinksmanship in the 1950s: it's in there and more.

But it's a lot of book to buy just to access one part of it - and with an academic price tag too. It's a well deserved price tag, because there's a lifetime of scholarship here, but face it, you could buy an entire RPG in hardback in a fancy slipcase for that money.

Here are two alternatives, if you are on a budget:

The Elusive Shift (2022) is also by Peterson, with the subtitle 'How Role-Playing Games Forged Their Identity.' It focuses on the concept and practice of roleplaying, its antecedents, and the ways D&D built on and then developed this sort of creative immersion - or rather, perhaps, the way it didn't, but the fan culture around D&D did so, far more enthusiastically than the game's creators.

Peterson's other book is The Game Wizards (2021), subtitled 'The Epic Battle For Dungeons & Dragons.' It traces the conception and marketing of D&D, from 1974-1985, culminating in Gary Gygax being ousted from his company TSR and losing control over D&D. (If that's too much of a cliffhanger for you, Benn Riggs's Slaying The Dragon follows the tribulations of D&D and TSR through the 1990s).

Both of these books are products of the same scholarship that created Playing At The World: essentially, they offer Peterson a platform to piece together events and draw historical conclusions from data that goes beyond his remit in writing his straightforward-yet-labyrinthine history of RPGs.

I recommend them all. I just wish Peterson would stop trying to make 'Role-Playing' with a hyphen happen. It's not going to happen.