Historian Jon Peterson traces the direct lineage from 19th-century Prussian military Kriegsspiel through Diplomacy mail-play to Gary Gygax’s tabletop RPG designs.
Key Takeaways
The article is a historical piece by Jon Peterson, author of the definitive RPG history book “Playing at the World.”
The throughline runs from Prussian military staff using board-based war games for operational planning to commercial parlor games to basement D&D.
Diplomacy, a negotiation-heavy board game playable by mail, was a key intermediate step: Gygax was inspired by a Diplomacy variant that added roleplay and character acting.
The Prussian model treated simulation as a serious decision-support tool, not entertainment – a design philosophy that persisted into later wargame design.
Hacker News Comment Review
Modern militaries still run formal command post exercises (CPX): real command staff, simulated troops, 1:1 real-time over five 24-hour days, with umpires tracking outcomes – the objective is to find who and what breaks, not to practice tactics.
Commenters with firsthand Diplomacy experience confirm the mail-play format (ref collects moves, posts results with included barbs) and note Gygax’s specific inspiration was a Diplomacy variant that layered acting onto the board game.
The wargame-to-RPG pipeline has serious modern descendants: Combat Mission is cited as a tactical sim actively used by militaries; SPI’s 1970s catalog established a commercial paper wargame lineage running parallel to the RPG branch.
Notable Comments
@Animats: CPX exercises use the same people and gear as real command posts; umpires run computers in the back – “the objective is not so much to learn tactics as to see who and what breaks.”
@a34729t: Combat Mission (Matrix/BFC) is a concrete example of the military-sim lineage reaching commercial and professional use today.
