Western Gunfight (1970): the First RPG?

 

In 1970, a group of UK gamers located in Bristol published the first edition of their Western Gunfight rules, which recorded systems they had been running locally since the late 1960s. In the pages of their own obscure Bristol Wargames Society Journal, and in the widely-read Wargamer's Newsletter, they began to position these games not as traditional conflict simulations, but instead as ways of telling Old West stories involving continuous characters, like the villainous "El Manolito" enjoying the spoils of his success in this 1970 rendering above. When they shifted their focus to these characters and stories, had they crossed the threshold into what we should call "role playing"?

The Western Gunfight Wargame Rules furnish a striking example of the emergent properties that can appear in a man-to-man scale wargame campaign when it is staged in a setting familiar from genre stories. The Bristol gamers quickly recognized that their approach had become different from the norm, and began documenting their perspectives on embodying characters. Their sessions were run by an umpire, and as the account of El Manolito from Journal #8 shows, could have ten or more players controlling the "goodies" and "baddies" in their sessions.

Their gunfighters were individuated by level of experience (novice, average, or professional) and various quantified abilities like specific weapon proficiency and nerves. Although man-to-man scale "skirmish wargames" remained a niche within the small miniature wargaming market in 1970, the Bristol Old West rules found an eager audience. Lead designer Steve Curtis informed Don Featherstone of Wargamer's Newsletter that demand for the rules was high enough to justify an expanded spiral-bound edition in the fall of 1971. 

The Bristol group would soon expand on their ideas in their Colonial Period spin-off in 1972 (incorporating combat resolution with their early d20), which gives a sense of how they viewed player agency and its relationship to the rules:

Largely thanks to Featherstone, word of their antics got out to America. For example, Gary Gygax read the five-page writeup of the "Incident at Peseto Grande" in the January 1973 Wargamer's Newsletter with interest, which surely prefigured his own group's experiments in the Old West setting. But it is moreover timely because it showed that Gygax had been exposed to the Bristol group's thinking in the era that Dungeons & Dragons was taking shape.

Throughout 1973, as D&D gradually made its way onto paper, the Bristol gamers continued to talk about the potential they discovered in "having characters with lives of their own who find themselves in situations and then behave in character rather than simply acting in their own best interests." 

They stressed how each campaign session was built around "cooking up interesting situations involving one, some, or all, of our stock characters in Pima County, New Mexico. The situation might follow from a previous game, e.g. after an incident at Thornbury Way Station... one of the Hole in the Fence gang, Slade, was wounded and arrested by Sheriff Seth Harker. Long Haired Steve [Curtis] and the boys have decided to spring him! Alternatively, the game could revolve around an entirely new factor, e.g. fresh Apache raids from out of the Guadalupe Mountains."

As Curtis himself would put it, "Who wins doesn't really come into it." All this ultimately led the Bristol gamers to ask, in the title of one of their articles, "But is it really wargaming?" They hoped it was -- they considered themselves wargamers and hoped to sell to other wargamers. But the fact that they had to pose the question, that they were sufficiently aware that some would hesitate to classify their activities as wargames, was perhaps the earliest published inkling of the dawn of a new genre. It furthermore starkly illustrates that the shift toward character and story driven games was not unique to the Twin Cities and Lake Geneva -- it was instead a broader movement.

Once RPGs became a thing, many previous "miniature wargaming" titles were rebranded as RPGs, including some Old West games. The most famous is of course Boot Hill, a 1975 TSR pamphlet which would be redone as a boxed RPG in 1979. But that was far from the only one: the British Once Upon a Time in the West rules, published as a wargame in 1978, were hastily amended with a supplement called The Return of that presented the rules as role playing "cause that's what they are," as the game's publisher insisted.

And inevitably, when Lou Zocchi reissued a boxed set of the Western Gunfight rules in the early 1980s, the cover would call it the "Old West Gunfight Role Playing Game." Rebranding earlier miniature wargames as RPGs was often merely a commercial ploy, though we'd be hard pressed to find an earlier ruleset reissued as one. Moreover, given how the Bristol gamers recommended using the Western Gunfight rules, would deeming it an RPG really be so different from how a certain set of "rules for fantastic medieval wargame campaigns" itself came to be understood in retrospect as a role-playing game? This comes down to questions about the distinction between rules and play that make it difficult to definitively classify RPGs even in the present, like whether role playing was an emergent or intended property of D&D. The shift from these wargames to role playing was, as they say, an elusive one.

We might well wonder what Steve Curtis thought of the rise of role-playing games, and whether his Western Gunfight would have qualified as one, but he did not live to see those days. Curtis had muscular dystrophy, spending much of his life in a wheelchair, and died on August 18, 1975, at the age of 28.

[And if you'd like to hear me doing this live, this was the focus of a talk I gave at RopeCon in 2019.]