Role Playing Games - A Brief History … …

The Role-Playing Game , or RPG as it is commonly called by the players , first appeared in its current format during the middle 1970`s when Dungeons & Dragons was released by a small American company called TSR .			Its roots go back a lot farther however and has its base in popular make-believe games such as Cowboys & Indians or Cops & Robbers where groups of people (usually younger children) act out a role of being a gunslinger / tomahawk wielding Native American / desperate gangster/ etc. These games were great for kids ( Bang ! You`re dead ! ….No I`m not - Missed Me ! Did not ! Did too ! ) but often ended in sulking and/or fighting when one wouldn`t play dead or be arrested . Now a lot of lads (& lasses too) enjoyed this type of play and several got together and decided to write some rules systems to workout whether you were dead or not .			These designers were fans of tabletop wargaming and had already written a game using magic and fantastic creatures such as Dragons and the like which had been pulled to pieces by a lot of traditional wargamers who liked just the historical (Civil War , WW2 ,etc) settings . They decided that rather than armies of Magic Users and holy warriors it would be fun to just play one character in this fantasy world like Tolkien`s Bilbo Baggins or Howard`s Conan the Barbarian - So they wrote it. That finally became Dungeons & Dragons . It was published at their own expense & that was the beginning of RPG`s as we know it.
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