Destroy All Monsters: A Journey into the Caverns of Dungeons and Dragons (2006)

Anyway, that's the advantage of both DnD and CS. They're do new you can still often meet and talk with the founders of the entire discipline, or at least one step removed.

There's a book called "Playing at the World" that goes into the details of all this, but my takeaway was that Gygax was more of a rules guy, and Arneson was the story teller.

Also a great read if you want to know a lot about the corporate side of the whole situation...

And then they usually do a very bad job of most or all of the things you mentioned, and it doesn't matter because playing Let's Pretend is just inherently fun.

Remember, of course, that they only have to have all that world knowledge to a degree that permits suspension of disbelief. Often the GM is more committed to learning how society works than most of the players, so the bar may be pretty low.

And with respect to the acting skill, remember that one or two crazy set-piece speeches are usually desired, but aside from that, most people are more interested in telling the story about their character that they want to tell, so in many play groups, the savvy GM just puts most of the acting burden back onto the players, who like it better that way anyway (though groups vary widely in this regard).

And with respect to improvising constantly... some GMs are good at this, but most are not, and so most play-groups have spoken or unspoken rules that they'll be good and behave in moderately predictable ways, to narrow down the chaos that is created.

Again, the main thing that makes it work is that sitting around the campfi^H^H^H^H^H^Hgaming table, telling brag stories, is inherently fun, and it's even more fun if there's suspense, and outcomes you've chosen to care about, riding on the roll of a die.

Most npcs don't need to be fleshed out at all, since they're only there to drive setting/plot. If players interact with non-important npcs too much, you just think of a character from some other story/movie and steal their behavior/attitude. And in fact original dnd would have basically omitted them altogether (and roleplaying in general) since it was focused on the gameplay and dungeon crawling aspects themselves.

You need to tune things to the various player's tastes to a degree, but for the most part the players do half the work for you, and many components of the world no one cares about, and doesn't require expansion. You're just tying everything together, and maintaining sanity in the world.

Once you realise that pedantry isn't part of the gameplay it gets a lot easier. It merely has to be good enough for those sitting at the table - who themselves are also invested in their suspension of disbelief.

> effort worthy of a major novel or movie

That's the thing, RPGs do not exist in a vaccum, nor are they trying to portray a particular historical era realistically - they are based on fantasy novels. That means you don't have to ..

> understand what a medieval blacksmith understands

... you merely have to make up what the minor character of a blacksmith in a Jack Vance novel might say. If you want to do some common tasks there is probably a table for armour repair or weaponsmithing costs in AD&D 2nd edition somewhere.

There's usually a bit of tension between railroading the players into set-pieces versus dropping hints and relying on them to cooperate, but that can be all part of the fun.

> consistent

Consistency issues can usually be fixed with wizards.

(edit: the whole issue is addressed by Shakespeare at the start of Henry V, "can this cockpit hold The vasty fields of France" etc)

[0] http://slyflourish.com/lazydm/

To see a masterclass of it check out Critical Roll on geek and sundry (D&D played by a bunch of professional voice a actors).

The largest "best prepared" path I'm aware of is the Dark Obelisk Berrincorte system, which is about one linear foot on the bookshelf, seriously many thousands of pages. Something more normal size would be the Pathfinder adventure paths where you get dozens of pages of prep for GM and players, and a couple pages per hour of path.

You have to realize that historically DnD came from lord of the rings fans sitting around debating how many dwarven archers it would take to kill a balrog or what are the odds if a wizard had to fight it out with forest elves? These are not people intimidated by mere thousands of pages of fantasy fiction. I admit I've occasionally bought paths to read because I like the creativity.

That's the super high level answer. The super low level answer is RPG fan sites and subreddits and usenet are full of epic battles between the GM and the players when the players insist on running a campaign off the rails. To be a good player there has to be at least some surrender to the GM to play along. An annoyed GM can, at the cost of ridiculousness, push the players along the correct path, so if they insist on goofing off in town instead of exploring the scary cave, "a sinkhole opens up in the floor of the pub, underneath your feet, and you fall into the cave the sheriff had assigned to you to explore ..."

Well written, well prepared paths have a lot of problem solving, and the players big job is discerning when the purpose of a problem is to be creative vs it was imposed by the GM to keep on the path. For example, if there's a cliff are we supposed to risk our necks freeclimbing, or are we supposed to look around for rope or hidden steps, or use our limited magic resources to fly up there, or does the cliff exist because the GM "knows" we can't get up there and its just part of the scenery to keep us on the prepared path?

As a compare and contrast generally most players are used to computer RPGs which have zero character development and consider "bring me 9 wolf pelts" to be superior character development and writing style, at least for the genre. Thanks to computer RPGs, the bar is extraordinarily low, so its not hard to impress your players. There's more than a little meta similarity between real life human GMs and role playing class of "bard", so much as a bard wouldn't back down in-game, a GM is unlikely to back down and will put in a best effort.

Smoke and mirrors. Improvisation. You define a lot less than you describe, both in terms of entities and details for each entity. And while consistency is an issue, TTRPGs are an ephemeral enough medium that people aren't going to analyze it the way they will a book or film. And there are lots of ways to rationalize apparent inconsistencies; working the rationalization into the background of later adventures so it is revealed as if it were a campaign secret that was foreshadowed by the seeming contradiction is a thin that happens.

The hardest part is often recognizing how much you don't need.

More generally, most early video games, and thus the elder genres, were based on board games and sports (y'know, existing games).

DnD -> roguelike isn't particularly notable in that sense; though the fact that the influence was from DnD v1, v1.5, and not the later editions (like [cw]rpgs) is somewhat interesting, as it depicts a significant shift in the aspect of rpgs people were interested in (shifting from exploration and combat to actually roleplaying)