Negative Space: gaming history
- The deep history of roleplaying
- Rob MacDougall talks about roleplaying before roleplaying.
- Dungeon 112 (July 2004)
- Dungeon 112 is a special issue of Dungeon Magazine devoted to old-style TSR goodness!
- Experience and Advancement in Role-Playing Games
- Kill monsters. Take their stuff. How has character advancement in role-playing games changed over the years? Starting with original D&D and on up through a handful of modern games, I’ll be surveying methods of experience and character advancement over the years.
- Experience in Generic Role-playing Games
- After D&D, it seemed as though anyone could write up game rules and publish them—and many did. From Tunnels & Trolls through GURPS, how did these games deal with experience and character advancement?
- Experience in thematic role-playing games
- Thematic games combine a love of rules with a love of setting. In these metagames, the rules are the setting, and the setting is the rules. Further, acknowledging the rules makes it easier to remove them. Such games are usually acutely aware that character advancement is a reward encouraging the actions that incur the reward and which move the game towards a specific conclusion.
- Experience in world-based role-playing games
- In the eighties and through the nineties, people started writing games where the world was more important than the rules. In theory, this should make for a different kind of character advancement as well.
- Gary Gygax’s game
- Links around the net to people talking about Gygax.
- Order of the Astronomers
- Follow the adventures of Sam Stevens, Gralen Noslen, Will Stratford, and Charlotte Kordé as they delve into the abandoned castle of the Order of the Astronomers. Start here if you’re new to the game or to role-playing games in general.
- Poisoning the Magic Well: RPG Distribution
- Ron Edwards writes a short history of RPG distribution that’s fairly accurate to my recollection.
- Rewards and improvement in Dungeons & Dragons
- Kill monsters. Take their stuff. How has character improvement in D&D changed over the years? This article in the RPG experience series looks at changes in experience point acquisition from early D&D through later versions of the game and later games by the authors.
