A blog post on my thoughts on why ttrpg's came out of wargames, and why the role-play built into wargames only has limited appeal.

https://vanishingtower.blogspot.com/2022/06/wargamers-roleplayed-first.html

I agree! I started out with pnp rpgs first before doing tabletop wargames, but I definitely feel like there was a story told through the actions and dice rolls of my characters in the latter. In a way, I think wargames defined a more meta perspective of role-playing, where by it was less acting and more your brain concreting the abstract, and thus in that sense, there were times when wargames felt more alive than rpgs.

The wargame side blended with the roleplay for me.

Red box, yeah, I was into that... but FASA Trek, Star Frontiers, Gangbusters, Battletech/Mechwarrior. A lot of that is a tactical map with roleplay elements. (FASA Trek. I mean, you have to put this in context of Wrath of Khan, IMO, a contemporaneous piece of media. I cared more about the tactical starship map than the rest of the FASA Trek.)

I think wargaming sold me on roleplaying. Battletech was a big thing for me. PanzerBlitz & Panzer Leader were also absolutely huge.

I played wargames before discovering RPGs, but when with my friends we started gravitating towards "Magic Realm" and similar games the writing was on the wall.

I didn't even know that RPGs existed, BTW. When AD&D 1E arrived in Italy (in English) I found "what I was looking for even if I didn't know about it". A side effect was that grades in English jumped overnight. My guess is that, to this day, my English teacher is still trying to understand how I cheated 

I come from a wargaming background.  I really know little of RPGs.

I stumbled across D&D when I started attending a local wargames club as a teenager. I got thrown in the deep end by being persuaded to run a game as DM before I even read any rules or played at all. The idea of RPG's was known to me, I'd seen others playing. Worse, I got roped into running more and more D&D sessions rather than wargaming which I was more interested in back then. This led directly toward the first RPG phase in life, the second as a result of meeting people at another gaming club many years after.

I was playing Avalon Hill wargames way before I ever played any rpgs. It's probably also a reason why I'm more interested in low-magic settings, with lots of conflict, castle building, etc.

Same here to an extent, thought with my D&D campaigns high level was something the players did not easily achieve and it came with caveats - high power means you can't be anonymous any more. Regional leaders, military leaders, religious leaders, national leaders, demigods, ultimately the gods themselves sit up and take notice when the power reaches their attention. They might want service or to hinder. I never gave players a free ride simply because they had access to higher level magic. That said, my campaigns were more worldly in many ways than some I came across. You should have seen one group get upset because they were caught in woodland under the ownership of a noble who assumed they were poachers because the players hadn't asked permission or announced themselves (this was based on one of Ine's Laws from the 8th century whereby anyone off the beaten track who did not occaisionally shout or blow horns was assumed to be up to no good and could be legally punished, and on one other occaision, the players could not understand why the law courts weren't going to let a cleric cast 'Truth' and inform the court the players weren't lying.

I might be swinging back in a way, currently reading Five Parsecs from Home which is part skirmish game and part solo RPG campaign game.

Quote from: zircher on July 07, 2022, 01:06:37 PM
I might be swinging back in a way, currently reading Five Parsecs from Home which is part skirmish game and part solo RPG campaign game.

Is it any good? Can it also be played cooperatively/competatively?

It looks good.  Easy enough to split the squad and play co-op.  It's not really designed for head to head, but another player could 'play the bot', if they wanted to.