A Game built around Math, paper, and your imagination inspired the development of other games.

I've been a long time player of D&D type games, and I personally think they should be done in school. They helped me in school early on learning Math, giving me a solid foundation to build on. Story writing being the DM of such a game gets developed quite well if you're sucessfull anyway.

But the most important part is it spurs your imagination into high gear. Something that alot of people, old and young, are lacking more and more. Its nerdy as hell, but its fun to pretend to be that strong warrior loping the head of an orc off.

What D&D still rules at is emergent gameplay- IE, setting the gigantic boss villain on fire by collapsing the house on her, etc. Rather than focusing on simple "dice mechanics," game devs should be putting their money towards physics engines and other things that will let players PLAY with the world.

What's funny is a lot of devs get it backwards trying to emulate the simplicity of D&D: D&D uses simple mechanics because players have to do all the work themselves. Computers are happy to calculate THAC0 a hundred times a minute if it makes for better gameplay.

In fact, from just the club I co-founded at SFU, The GoT, I think half of us went on to become game designers.

Many of us were computer scientists, so making the jump into video games was pretty easy back then.

at the darkness?

Even more important to MMORPGs and other comparable games: experience points and levels. Apotheosis as a numbers game.

CoD absolutely had HPs. Just because they added some temporary damage as well doesn't mean it's suddenly a new concept. If I recall correctly, when you got hit you took some permanent damage and some temporary damage that slowly returned. Temporary damage wouldn't kill you, but if you got hit again while your temporary damage had you below zero you would die.

It even had a bar that clearly represented a hidden numerical value (Hit points) and you died when it was empty (zero).

Not sure if this link will work, but here is a screenshot (off GameSpot) showing the hit points in action:

http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/2003/pc/callo fduty/1029/call_screen006.jpg [com.com]

And people say Halo isn't innovative... as far as I know, this type of health system was invented in Halo 2. IMO it's infinitely superior to hit points.

Every single edition of D&D has exploded to "75" books that you "need" if you want to have real ultimate power. But at the same time it has always been playable (and still is) with just a few core books

What if TSR had patented "hit points?" Or, "the idea that one hit doesn't kill the player"?

Ah, and what if Jack Vance [wikipedia.org] had patented the idea that wizards can memorize a certain number of spells, and then forget each spell immediately after it is cast?

The Player's Handbook is the only "required" book. The DM's Guide and Monster Manual make things easier but are not strictly necessary - you can run a perfectly good game without them.

Unearthed Arcana, on the other hand, actually made it harder to run a perfectly good game...

(It was still neat to read, though.)

As a teenager, playing D&D did not help with my social interaction skills, but it DID, however, help me develop creativity (figuring out how to open the chest without the goblins hearing), wittiness (the dark elf waves his sword at you as he taunts you...how do you respond?), and math skills (1d8+1 S, 2d8+3 M-L, you do max damage, how much is that?). There's so much benefit that can come from these tabletop RPG's that many people simply don't "get". I lived in the "Bible Belt" and in a small community as well, so anyone caught playing these games was instinctively branded a devil worshipper. ...which of course is just stupid, because everyone knows you can't worship the devil in D&D. Maybe Ba'al or some other chaotic evil entity, but certainly not the devil. pfft...

We have classes because it is easier to balance 12 classes with a finite set of skills for each class than it is to balance every possible combination of 100 different skills. The less time you spend balancing the more time you can spend creating content for those things to be balanced against, and content is king.