#RPGaDay2024 for 6 August: RPG that is easy to use

Today's prompt: RPG that is easy to use

Arguably the simplest roleplaying game I played was Metagaming's Melee and Wizard, the skirmish rules that would form the basis for - or were derived from? - The Fantasy Trip. Now, many gamers consider Melee and Wizard to be exclusively skirmish rules, but I'm inclined to believe that if the rules allow me to roleplay a character in an imaginary world, that's sufficient. Dawn Patrol and En Garde! are unquestionably roleplaying games given my personal conception of roleplaying, and based on what we actually did with the two 'microgames,' there's no reason I can see for excluding them.

I picked up both Melee and Wizard in 1978 or 1979, and indeed we used them primarily for arena battles at first, but as (some of) our characters survived more than two or three battles, they began to take on a life of their own, so we grew curious about the world around the arena and their lives beyond its walls. Whereas AD&D was our game for exploring dark dungeons and howling wildernesses, Melee and Wizard lent themselves to a sort of urban fantasy setting centered on the fighting pit - first there was a tavern where our gladiators drank and wenched and gambled and brawled between matches, then a neighborhood grew around that and a city around that.

The whole thing very quickly developed a Sanctuary feel - remember, Thieves World was published in 1978, contemporaneously with Wizard - leavened with a bit of Lankhmar, in particular a Thieves Guild that would offer bribes to fighters to throw battles, a dangerous proposition as survival couldn't be guaranteed for characters attempting to yield or feign serious injury.

In any case, this lasted about a year or so, and by then I'd largely moved on from fantasy adventure gaming for Traveller, Boot Hill, and Top Secret. The whole experience would strongly influence a 1e AD&D character I created years later, a high Dexterity fighter who I modeled on one of my old Melee gladiators.

What stands out in retrospect was how the barebone rules didn't prevent us from making stuff up on the fly as we needed it for our adventures away from the arena, and then would find their way back into the fighting pit - scaling walls, leaping, taunting, cajoling. With three stats and no skills, we still managed to have what would arguably be my first real experience with swashbuckling adventure outside of the Yaquinto boardgame. Fond memories indeed.