Their maneuvers and the results of their battles were calculated via a complex mathematical formula, with scale distances marked off with tape measures. Pratt’s game involved dozens of tiny wooden ships – built to a scale of about one inch to 50 feet – spread over the living room floor of his apartment. In 1940 Fletcher Pratt’s Naval War Game was first published. While Wells’ rules were self-admittedly simple, he did discuss in the second book, Little Wars, the notion of expanding the system into a more rigorous rules set. HG Wells wrote two rulebooks in 19, respectively, that attempted to codify similar rules for infantry encounters into simple rules, and which championed restoring the principle of random outcomes as the ultimate authority. In the same period, the first non-military wargames club was started in Oxford, England Naval enthusiast Fred T Jane came up with and published a set of rules for simulating naval encounters with model ships, around 1898 (these were reprinted in 2008), and the 1905-06 edition of Jane’s Fighting Ships included a revised edition of “The Naval War Game”. The Prussian victory over the Second French Empire in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 is sometimes credited, at least in part, to the benefits of this tactical training.ĭuring the 19th century, increasingly realistic and detailed tactical simulations became a standard element of military officer training, coupled with real-life simulations and training scenarios involving all ranks.
Somewhere between 18, the Prussian General Staff took that concept and developed the tactical Wargame, Staff officers would move metal pieces around on a game table, use dice rolls to emulate chance events and outcomes, and with a referee who would score the results and adjudicate the rules of the simulation, frequently overruling the roll of the dice. Hellwig, the Master Of Pages to the Duke Of Brunswick in 1780, took inspiration from Chess to create a battle emulation game. The great grandaddy of all these ways of describing the same thing is Chess, created as Chatarunga in ancient India as a simulation of Indian Warfare with pieces representing the different types of units. Military Sims / Miniatures Combat / “Wargaming” That changed in the late 18th or early 19th century. Most of the early dice games were gambling in orientation. The oldest known d20 is from Ptolmaic Egypt, part of a larger historical dice collection held by New York’s Metropolitan Museum Of Art, and the Ancient Egyptian game of Senet was played with dice. Without each, the RPG as we know it would not exist.Īnd that, I think, is the right place to start.ĭice as a concept extend back into prehistory the oldest known dice of any type were excavated as part of a backgammon-like game set at the Burnt City, an archaeological site in south-eastern Iran, estimated to be from between 2800-2500 BCE. I should have said, “incredibly long article”!ĭ&D has four conceptual parents.
* Actually, it was always going to be a really long article. This is going to be a really long article * unless I control my enthusiasms really tightly, so expect me to be a little more succinct than usual. Click on the image to view full-sized in a new tab. This image combines two wonderful pieces of public-domain art that is vividly suggestive of the worlds that can be created by a good GM with D&D, and hence the appeal of the game, regardless of which flavor you prefer.
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