Part
I: “Can you afford to know”?
In
the aftershocks of the OD&D ‘big bang’, a wave of new games emerged that
surely find much of their DNA in the LBBs (et al). Indeed, from TSR alone, the Olduvai Gorge of
RPGs, games such as Gamma World, Boot Hill and Top Secret followed the path
blazed by the ‘original’. Of course,
acknowledging similarities also prompts us to consider differences.
I
suggest that as early as Top Secret’s 1980 publication not only had TSR produced
a new system but also proposed, consciously or otherwise, a differing style of
play. While acknowledging a profound debt to D&D (see Top Secret, Forward,
p.4), author Merle Rasmussen readily pointed out there was something different about his game claiming that
players embarked on “exciting missions” that, when “interconnected” in a series
was “called a campaign” (Top Secret, p.4) Clearly, Rasmussen was up to
something.
I propose that Top Secret and its support materials
constitute one example of the ways in
which some first wave games (OS games?) evolved from the ‘building block’ of
OD&D, to offer not just an alternate systems but styles as well. By considering two specific themes: level
appropriateness and the ‘story-line’ as a style of play, this article looks to
acknowledge and celebrate the range, innovation and diversity of the first wave
gaming.
A
Game to Fit the Characters
Cryptic hints that something was different notwithstanding,
Top Secret represented only a first tentative evolutionary step. In fact, the rulebook contained almost no
insight on how to ‘run’ a campaign (Top Secret, 1980, pp. 4, 48) at all. The only possible hint was that Rasmussen
(and TSR) compared Top Secret action “to the excitement of the spy thrillers at
the movies or on TV” (Top Secret, Forward). In the
broadest sense, Top Secret characters (and players?) were part of a larger
quest (story-line?) to “rid the world of…offensive characters, to set right the
wrongs, to bring honor to the organization, and to improve yourself” (Top
Secret, p.3). Perhaps, such notions
suggest a meta-plot in the sandbox?
If,
however vague and tentative, Top Secret imagined the possibility of
‘serialization’, characters needed, at times, to be protected from
players. Of course, this does not
suggest Top Secret was neither deadly nor unforgiving. As we shall see, it was both. Yet from the outset, Rasmussen appeared sensitive
to a need for lack of level appropriateness
as a survival mechanism. For example, the
rulebook makes two claims: “Since new
characters are, by game mechanics, relatively weak and inexperienced, the Admin
should plan to present smaller risks and correspondingly smaller rewards at the
beginning of the campaign, and increase the risks and rewards as the player
characters become more powerful and experienced” (Top Secret, 1980, p.4) and “risk
must be carefully balanced with reward, and the situations designed must not be
so deadly that no one will want to play the game!” (Top Secret, p. 4). For Rasmussen, clearly some form of
appropriateness was required, not only to make the game playable but also fun
enough to play at all. Yet, the rulebook offered no concrete advice on how to
create, manage or run a game of Top Secret (p. 39 notwithstanding), let alone how
to make it ‘appropriate’ or even ‘fun’.
To find out how to do such a thing, would-be Admins needed to look
elsewhere. The evolutionary path then,
while beginning in the primordial soup of the rulebook, quickly ‘jumped’ to the
next link, support materials. Indeed, by
examining Top Secret’s “Administrator Files” (‘modules’), we begin to see some
of the ways in which TSR gaming developed.
Next...Part II: Your mission, should you choose to accept it…
