"You're a Player of Role-Playing Games"

Following up on yesterday's post about the "Appendix N" of Temple of Apshai, let's look at the paragraphs that follow, because, in many ways, they're even more interesting. After asking the reader whether he was familiar with any of stories, books, and characters cited, the game's introduction then declares:

If any or all of your answers are "yes," you're a player of role-playing games – or you ought to be. (If your answers are all "no," you have either stepped through the looking glass by mistake, or fate knows your destiny better than you.)

As I said, interesting. In particular, I think it's notable that the writer (Jon Freeman) saw an almost necessary connection between being familiar with fantasy literature and being a player of RPGs – as if you can't be one without also being the other. He continues:

Role-playing games (RPGs) allows you to step outside a world grown too prosaic for magic and monsters, doomed cities and damsels in distress ... and enter instead a universe in which only quick wit, the strength of your sword arm, and a strangely carved talisman around your neck may be the only things separating you from the pharaoh's treasure – or the mandibles of a giant mantis.

The standard (non-computer) role-playing game is not, in its commercial incarnation, much more than a rulebook – a set of guidelines a person uses to create a world colored by myth and legend, populated by brawny heroes, skilled swordsmen, skulking thieves, cunning wizards, hardy Amazons, and comely wenches, and filled with treasures, spell-forged blades, flying carpets, rings of power, loathsome beasts, dark towers, and cities that stood in the Thousand Nights and a Night if not The Outline of History. 

Freeman writes very evocatively, doesn't he? Old school RPG fans will also, no doubt, approve of his description of a rulebook as "a set of guidelines." 

Role-playing games are not so much "played" as they are experienced. Instead of manipulating an army of chessman about an abstract but visible board, or following a single piece around and around a well-defined track, collecting $200 every time you pass GO, in RPGs you venture into an essentially unknown world with a single piece – your alter ego for the game, a character at home in a world of demons and darkness, dragons and dwarves. You see with the eyes of your character a scene described by the "author" of the adventure – and no more. 

Again, evocative stuff. Reading this, you can really tell that Freeman is passionate about the then-new hobby of roleplaying games.

There is no board in view, no chance squares to inspect; the imaginary landscape exists only in the notebooks of the world's creator (commonly called a referee or dunjonmaster) and, gradually, in the imaginations of your fellow players. As you set off in quest of fame and fortune with with those other player/characters, you are both a character in and a reader of an epic you are helping to create. Your character does whatever you wish him to do, subject to his human (or near-human) capabilities and the vagaries of chance. Fight, flee, or parley; take the high road or low; the choice is yours. You may climb a mountain or go around it, but since at the top may be a rock, a roc's egg, or a roc, you can find challenge and conflict without fighting with your fellow players, who are usually (in several senses) in the same boat.

This is very good stuff and, if I may, very much in keeping with the philosophy of gaming that's been championed in the Old School scene over the last fifteen years or so. 

Role-playing games can (and often do) become, both for you and your character, a way of life. Your character does not stop existing at the end of a game session; normally, you use the same character again and again until he dies for a final time and cannot be brought back to life by even the sorcerous means typically available. In the meantime, he will have grown richer on the treasure he (you) has accumulated from adventure ro adventure, may have purchased new and better equipment, won magic weapons to help him fight better or protective devices to keep him safe. As he gains experience from his adventures, he grows in power, strength, and skill – although the mechanics and terminology of this process vary greatly from one set of rules to another.  

The remainder of Freeman's introduction pertains mostly to the ways that Temple of Apshai alleviates some of the burden typically placed on the shoulders of players and referee alike, which is understandable, as part of his purpose is to demonstrate the value of computer RPGs over "standard" ones. Even so, what he says about roleplaying games – in 1979, please recall – still holds interest more than four decades later, especially to those of who prefer the "old ways." Indeed, I think it's all the more interesting when ones considers where this introduction appeared and who its intended audience was.