The Stanford System of Role-Playing Games (1976-77)

In the autumn of 1976, when Dungeons & Dragons was just two years old, four or five "of the most active" DMs at Stanford University near Palo Alto, California, wanted to create a unified campaign world for the exciting new kind of game we call fantasy role-playing. Each DM would develop a part of a shared world setting so that players would be able to take their characters from one DM’s game to the others’.

This meant that they had to agree on rules.

In those days, there were as many interpretations of the original D&D rules of 1974 and styles of play as there were player groups. The original D&D booklets were famously unclear, so players had to make up for that by developing their own rules where the ones in the books were obscure. Often, early gamemasters simply called Gary Gygax on the phone long-distance to ask for explanations, but as often as not, they went their own way with the rules. Eventually, Gygax would claim that their games were inferior and disown them, but that didn’t stop the new hobby from sprouting in different directions all at once.

This is to say that there was no single original play style common to D&D players, no One True Way for modern retro role-players today to emulate. People can play all kinds of ways today and know that they are right in line with what other gamers did from the beginning: creative variation.

The Stanford DMs of this time found common ground in their shared collective dissatisfaction with the original D&D. We learn about this in the zine Phantasmagoria #1 (Fall 1977), by Stanford graduate student and DM Barry Eynon. He tells us that he has been "a wargamer from way back" who had been introduced to D&D through the Ryth Campaign (also here and here) of John Van De Graaf and Len Scensny in the Detroit area in 1975. When Eynon got to Stanford for graduate school in '76, he met many other DMs there. Evidently, the hobby had been spreading fast.

In his zine, Eynon sketched out the system that the DMs there had developed since they met there the year before, which they called the Stanford System, distinguishing it from the “traditional Gygaxian sets of rules.” From the limited sketch he gave, it’s clear that the Stanford System was an early and influential milestone in the development of role-playing game mechanics that suited the tastes of many of those who were dissatisfied with D&D. It specifically started with things that bothered them about D&D and it consisted of so many fixes that it amounted to a new rule set.

They agreed that “one could produce a better game by starting over with slightly different assumptions and models, i.e. a game which had more elements which correspond to an ‘intuitive’ idea of how things would really be.”

For one, they did not like it that nobody in original D&D got tired. You could march and fight without break and there was no rule to indicate that it affected you badly.

They also didn’t like that “Carrying looted valuables out of holes in the ground teaches you how to throw spells and wield a broadsword.” That is, they didn’t like the idea that experience came from gold, a common complaint to this day.

They didn’t like that “As you get better with your craft, you can stand to be run through more times before you die.” In other words, they didn’t like the idea of hit dice and hit points per level, another problem still at issue today.

They didn’t like that a fighter who had never picked up a bow could, at sixth level, know how to shoot it with high expertise the minute one came into his hands. To have a uniform block of class-based skills made little sense to them.

They didn’t like that a mage got access to just about any new spell upon rising in level.

They fixed some of these things.

They developed a versatile endurance point system, one of their core revisions. As far as I know, this is the first such system in role-playing games. From the description available, endurance points were spent not only for exhaustion, but could be spent to parry and block blows. Hit points, by contrast, do not seem to have gone up much. “The damage which one can take before dying stays fairly constant with level [in the Stanford System], with advancement only counting toward the number of endurance points one has in a given day. Better fighters get better at blocking blows, and so tend to stay alive longer.”

They developed a “split experience” system, where experience accrues to subset abilities. This is simply a primitive skill system. A fighter could gain experience with the broadsword, if he used the broadsword consistently, but not with the bow if he did not use a bow.

The “split experience” system applied to mages, too. “Mages progress individually in 5 categories of Magic: Bewilder, Control Energy, Protection, Move&Reshape, Detect&Enhance.”

A general bin of experience counted towards higher endurance points.

Treasure could be spent on training or better equipment but did not confer experience. Note, readers, that there were plenty of players who refused to give XP for GP in 1977, before Holmes Basic D&D was published. Rejecting XP for GP is as “old-school” as giving XP for GP.

The Stanford DMs developed nine ability scores from the original six. They split Dexterity into Agility and Dexterity (a distinction that was not unheard of in early role-playing games, but may have started here at Stanford). They split Charisma into Persuasiveness and Leadership. They added the Size statistic, a feature that made its way into later Bay-Area role-playing games published by Chaosium, but it seems to have started in the Stanford System. (Then again, Size appears in the Complete Warlock D&D variant of June '78; it may have been included already in the original Warlock rules at CalTech, which first appeared in August 1975. I can't tell whether Size began at CalTech or Stanford.)

The nine ability scores were linked to each other in a complex pattern of clusters that limited their variation, so that, for example, Strength, Constitution, and Size could not diverge enormously.

The Stanford System clearly caught on around the Bay Area. Steve Perrin must have known about it as he co-developed Runequest for Chaosium, a Bay-Area company. When RuneQuest came out in 1978, it showed a heavy debt, of course, to Dungeons & Dragons (1974) as well as to Tunnels & Trolls (1975), and in its setting clearly drew a modicum of inspiration from Empire of the Petal Throne (1975). But in the Size characteristic and in other respects, the Stanford System is in the background. I am guessing that in the Stanford System, as in both Tunnels & Trolls and the original RuneQuest, hit points were based on Constitution. In RuneQuest, high or low Size and Strength modify hit points. I have a feeling this is another debt to the Stanford System. Another feature of Chaosium’s games that can trace its roots to the Stanford System is the idea of “split experience.” At Greg Stafford’s insistence, Chaosium’s RPGs did away with experience points, but characters develop specific and individualized skills through use, as in the Stanford System.

If we had a more complete description of what the Stanford System entailed, we could say more. For now, this entry sheds a little light on the major phenomenon in role-playing games in their original reception: radical rewriting of the rules to suit the varying tastes of local playing groups, creating local cultures that were known by the names of the cities and universities where they grew. As time passed, their successful innovations would find their way into print in still new versions of games that competed with D&D.

If you play any Chaosium role-playing game, such as Call of Cthulhu, chances are that you are playing with elements derived from the Stanford System. Even the list of skills on your D&D 5e character sheet shares some of the same genetic code, differentiating the abilities of characters of the same class.

California was the site of several successful innovations in D&D. To the Warlock variant of CalTech, the Perrin Conventions, and the Arduin books, we should now add the Stanford System. But does anybody out there have the whole Stanford system on paper? Barry Eynon wrote in 1977 that it was kept on a computer file for easy modification, but was it ever printed, and did any printed copy survive? Or did everybody at Stanford switch to RuneQuest and all the other new games that would soon be published, forgetting the Stanford System? If you are reading this and you know where to find a copy, let me know.