Retrospective: En Garde!

That roleplaying games grew out of miniatures wargaming is well-known, a fact that's quite obvious to anyone who's read the little brown books of OD&D. What's less well-known is that that connection to wargaming wasn't immediately displaced once people started to wrap their heads around the idea of roleplaying. Many RPG designs from the 1970s still show a clear connection to miniatures wargaming, such as Boot Hill. Another such game is GDW's En Garde!

First published in 1975, which makes it a close contemporary of OD&D, En Garde! is an unusual game. Subtitled "Being in the Main a Game of the Life and Times of a Gentleman Adventurer and his Several Companions," it's basically a man-to-man combat simulation of dueling in 17th century Paris but with roleplaying-oriented options for things outside of dueling, such as carousing at the social club, wooing potential mistresses, and going off to war with the military. Dueling is the most complex mechanic in the game, though, and the game's combat system is actually quite cleverly done. Each player chooses a weapon and a series of twelve maneuvers. These pre-plotted moves are then revealed and cross-referenced on a table that adjudicates their relative effectiveness. It's simple, certainly, but it allows for the use of tactics, as players can get a sense of which attacks or defenses work best against others. There were also rules for aborting certain moves in response to those of one's opponent, so dueling was not wholly "mechanized."

At its heart, though, En Garde! is a game of social climbing. Acquiring status in the form of social influence, wealth, and position is the main motivation for character action. Every activity in the game is thus geared toward that end, providing increases or decreases to one's status, depending on one's success or failure. Each activity is the subject of a table and simple mechanic and you can definitely see the beginnings of Traveller in these rules. Military service, for example, involved choosing between safe (or cowardly) assignments to ensure survival and dangerous ones that could reap huge status rewards if your character survived. These rules are simple too, but, like dueling, players must make cost-benefit analyses of their character's actions and, thanks to the use of random tables, even the most conservative choices won't necessarily end well.

Compared even to OD&D, En Garde! is much more of a wargame than what we'd consider an RPG today. That is, its "game-y" aspects weigh heavily upon it and, while I know it's quite possible to squeeze a lot of life out of its rules, it would also be quite possible to treat it all as little more than a game of chance. Perhaps unsurprisingly, En Garde! was well suited to play by mail games, acquiring a kind of afterlife once GDW ceased producing it in 1983. The game also proved very popular at conventions, particularly in the UK. Indeed, the game lives on today through a British company that produces a new edition of it, which can be purchased here. I'm surprised I haven't seen more online examples of En Garde! as I think it'd work well in that context. Heck, I imagine it'd be fairly easy to produce a simple app that ran the game on a website and it'd probably be a lot of fun.