I’ve been flipping through old issues of Dragon magazine for a few days, from issue 1 up to around issue 30 so far, and I’ve noticed a few interesting things. First, the primary article material in the magazine is weighted towards D&D, I’d say about 60%-70% of the articles

However, there is a large variety of other games represented, both in primary articles and in reviews, in primary articles Traveller, Wizard, EPT, Metamorphosis Alpha, Boot Hill, Stellar Conquest, Dungeon, Ogre, War of the Ring, I was frankly shocked at the number of games

Dragon also reviewed games, usually about 4-5 per issue, and it gives you a sense of just how many TTRPGs there were floating around in the late 1970’s. Many of these I had never heard of, as I assume they died off over time, there was a lot of variety in gaming, even BITD.

There was a lot of concern about magic, and specifically magic-users, dominating the game. This reminded me that a lot of early gamers were still having hangovers from wargaming, where tactical dominance was a concern. So many articles either justified the power of the…

… magic-user, or tried to “nerf” it. There was a Leomund’s Tiny Hut article that nerfed a ton of magic-user spells. What was interesting about that is it is clear that game design was a conversation at that point, between designers, on the pages of Dragon, pretty cool.

Another thing that emerges pretty clearly is that there was a ton of interest in non-European settings, within the first 30 issues there were articles on Persian, Japanese, near Eastern (Sumerian, Babylonian), Christian (angels), Aboriginal (Australian ) and Polynesian gods

There were also articles on weapons and armor from non-European cultures, there was apparently a lot of interest in things like Japanese weapons and Japanese Feudal culture. Playes were clearly hungry for non-European content as early as the late 1970’s

And of course, articles on monsters, spells, magic items and traps, subclasses (ninjas, samurai, witches, alchemists…), subsystems (psionics,morale,etc.), minis, alignment, levelling, random encounters, encounter design, weather, spell minutiae, fantasy fiction…

… fictional inspiration (e.g. Tolkien in D&D yea or nay), combat systems (jousting, unarmed combat, etc.), variant magic rules (e.g. magic-user specialization), game “flavor”, poison, fleshing out NPCs, spell choice for NPCs, “reskinning” monsters, historical inspiration…

What should be apparent here is that gamers have been discussing similar issues for decades, not that there isn’t anything new under the sun, there certainly is, but it would be a mistake to think that many of the current discussions around D&D are “new”, they are not.

For example, there was an article suggesting players must spend their loot to gain the XP. I’ve seen this idea floated a few times as “new”.

It's at least 40 years old.

And , the article about it is titled “Orgies Inc”, because that was one of the things you could spend on…

None of this discounts current discourse, and of course today's players will bring different perspectives to these issues, but it is a reminder that ignoring the history of TTRPGs is a mistake, it robs you of context and content and makes the industry look far more staid...

... and ossified than it actually was. Even BITD TTRPGs were varied and evolving, they weren't fixed, and gamers were looking for variations on the theme from day 1, wanting "more" for D&D, and more THAN D&D, is not new, and the hobby has always been vibrant