Realization: Pablo Cantudo and Jesús Nicolás / Edition: Ramiro Angulo
A role-playing game is one in which the participants adopt the role of a character but without referring exclusively to appearance, skills or equipment, but to the entire character, with personality and moral compass included . It is the maturation (or professionalization, if you prefer) of those games of fathers and mothers, pirates, knights and princesses or Indians and cowboys that almost all of us enjoy in childhood but taken to a new level and applied to a universe with rules and patterns. . There may be some discrepancy but there will be many who place the origin of these games as we understand them today in 1974, when Gary Gygax created Dungeons and Dragons .
Ernest Gary Gygax was born in Chicago on July 27, 1938 . A fan of board games and fantasy and science fiction stories since he was a child, in 1971 he published the game Chainmail together with Jeff Perren, a medieval wargame that provided one of the first manuals for this type of games with miniatures . In 1973 he founded the company Tactical Studies Rules with his childhood friend Donald Kaye and the following year he experienced what would be a turning point in his career: the launch of Dungeons and Dragons , the first commercialized role-playing game and the that defined this genre for years .
Designed by David Anerson and Gygax himself , the game used resources and elements from Chainmail, but focused on the elements of the role to the detriment of the purely strategic ones of wargames . In Dungeons and Dragons a player assumes the role of game director ( Dungeon Master ), responsible for guiding the rest of the characters through the adventure and setting them the objectives to meet and challenges to face . The rest of the players will embody different characters with different races, roles, abilities and properties that they will have to combine in order to finish the game victorious. Although the Dungeon Master is the one who sets the pace of the game, the actions depend on the results obtained in the dice rolls (between 4 and 20 faces) and that determine, among other things, the probability of success or failure. of actions.
One of the great attractions of role-playing games, be it D&D or any other, is the freedom of action that they grant the player while respecting the rules and mechanics. Both players and the Dungeon Master can improvise their actions and use their imagination and creativity to change the course of the game, making each game a different experience. The most daring will even set out to create their own story arcs or modify the rules so that the game is 100% personalized .
What began as a new entertainment format has grown over the years to become a benchmark of popular culture that lasts today. For its part, Dragons and Dungeons has countless books, game manuals, editions, television series and even movies. On the other hand, role-playing games have become one of the most popular genres both in board games and, especially since the 90s, in the world of video games (RPG) where it has such important titles as Baldur’s Gate (1998), or the Final Fantasy and The Elder Scrolls sagas.
Muy Interesante thanks Generación X and Héctor González for their participation in this interview.
