RPGs Cant stand alone

Here's my view: No role-playing game can exist (for any meaningful length of time) without providing its audience with a series of short-cuts (a secret passage if you will) into an underlying literary or mythological source.

Fantasy literature is very popular. It has increased in popularity steadily since the 1920's. So has its volume. There may be many reasons for its appeal. There certainly are many theories. But that is a topic for another day. For present purposes accept what I say: "People like reading fantasy and find it very absorbing."

A role-playing game, in any form, combines (in proportions which vary from game to game) two elements: An avenue of intimate access to the mythological source (more intimate than would be the case simply reading a novel), and a game that allows friends to have fun around a table and measure whether they are doing well or badly at the game.

When Gygax and Arneson started conceptualising D&D they were already gamers in the second sense as were many others who contributed to the earliest rpgs. Their genius was conceving the channels between game and fantasy literature and providing a mechanism that captured some of the more popular elements of the fantasy mythology and bringing them into living rooms all over the world. When they began playing the game and word started to spread, what fanned the flames was the love that the potential audience had for the fantasy genre. I believe that if G&A had been hard sci-fi fans or detective novel fanboys, we would have no RPGs and I would not be writing this. Sure, certain popular culture phenomena have a wide enough appeal to sustain a game for a time, like Star Wars or Coen Brothers films, but for how long?

Now for the next step in my tortured logic. For so long as the mythological base remains popular the success of a specific role-playing game will be determined by its ability to give its players a level of access to that mythology which is as unfettered as possible. When role-playing games start to ignore the mythological layer on which they teeter and to see themselves as the mythology itself, they begin to die.

I will try and be less theoretical and apply this to examples in the next post.