Was there ever a Dungeons and Dragons type game ever before modern DND in the 70's?

by TKInstinct

By that I mean fantasy roleplay that were based in groups, used dice or some other type of equipment? Anything remotely like that?

Valkine

Not really. D&D is pretty unique in what it does, that's a big part of why it's so influential. However, D&D didn't come from nowhere and it had clear influences that shaped its development. Two of the most prominent ones, and the closest in terms of what you're asking, were the board game Diplomacy and the Kriegspiele.

We'll start with the latter first, since it influenced both D&D and Diplomacy. Kriegspiele is literally just German for wargame, but in this context it refers to a specific type of military wargame first established by the Prussians as an officer training tool. These would usually be 'played' in military colleges where an instructor would put cadets in leadership positions, give them an approximate map of their engagement, and ask them what they would do. They would then deliver their orders and the officer would determine their likelihood of success, returning to them for further actions once success or failure (and their consequences) was determined. There were two dominant schools for how to determine success. One dictated that statistical tables should be used to determine the most likely outcome, possibly with the inclusion of dice or another random element to represent 'luck'. The other school felt that the instructor should simply determine the outcome, either by determining the most likely result based upon their own experience and judgement or by picking one that could present a valuable learning opportunity for the cadets.

Diplomacy, first published in 1959, owes some of its design features to the influence of these kriegspiele but is also uniquely its own beast. I don't know if you've ever played the game, but in brief up to 7 players take control of the great powers of Europe c.1914 and play out the Great War but with no luck, no dice roles. It's pure negotiation with victory in battle only being possible by outnumbering your foe. It's a really impressive piece of game design, and if I'm being honest I think it's also hell to actually play. Diplomacy was a huge hit and fan variants quickly appeared across America. Many of these players adapted the games mechanics to different settings (WWII or Medieval, for example) including some fictional (Lord of the Rings is the obvious one here) as well as homebrew settings. Some of these campaigns were simply direct adaptations of the game but others encouraged people to role play their nations - developing personalities and sometimes inventing new rules for country management and governance.

These Diplomacy games influenced the Braunstein games of Dave Wesely. Wesely was more of a traditional miniatures wargamer (Napoleonics in particular) but he liked the idea of introducing more multiplayer options to a traditionally two player experience. He started assigning players non-military roles, such as the mayor of the town near the battle or that of a banker. He then began to incorporate the ideas from the Diplomacy community to expand these roles into a more campaign like structure, with players role's persisting between individual battles. These games (generally called 'Braunsteins' by the community, Braunstein being the fictional German town that was the setting of Wesely's campaigns) were a direct influence on Dave Arneson's Blackmoor campaign, which incorporated Gary Gygax's medieval miniature's rules system Chainmail to develop rules for characters to explore dungeons, go on adventures, and basically do all the stuff you'd recognise in D&D. To a certain extent you could say that Blackmoor is basically D&D before D&D, but Blackmoor only dates from the early 1970s and is literally the direct predecessor to D&D, so it's not exactly a separate entity.

A big part of what D&D did was bring together a huge range of disparate elements in both game design (especially within the wargaming community of the time) and popular aspects of the contemporary fantasy literature scene into a brand new combination of ideas that really was revolutionary.

If you're really interested in this subject I cannot recommend Jon Peterson's Playing at the World enough. It's a fascinating exploration of all the different influences and real world factors that made D&D first edition possible. It's also like 600 pages long, so probably only worth it if you're really invested. Peterson also runs a blog, though, with more digestible pieces of insight into D&D and its development which is also worth checking out. I am particularly fond of this short article on why D&D uses the armour system it does.