A Western in Fantasy Dress

D&D can be understood as a Western in fantasy dress. The reasons for this are not complicated. D&D grew largely out of the American pulp fantasy tradition, and that tradition largely had its historical origins in stories about cowboys and Indians. This is present in the game's very DNA. D&D PCs roam around a landscape full of danger and carry out feats of derring-do in return for glory. And this is, essentially, what every cowboy in every Western does. Sometimes the feats of derring-do are unquestionably good (like The Lone Ranger or Shane). Sometimes they are morally ambivalent or even morally undesirable (like in High Plains Drifter or A Fistful of Dollars). And both of these are present in the different branches of D&D play, with mainstream games often resembling something like Rio Bravo, High Noon, or The Naked Spur, and more OSR-oriented games often resembling something more like The Wild Bunch or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

The genius of D&D, however, is that it (entirely, I am sure, unconsciously) recognises that Westerns have both limited shelf-lives and limited scope. Ultimately, the Western is not that interesting as a long-term proposition. Westerns work best as short stories, or as films (which are the visual equivalents of short stories). They are a chunk of concentrated action and adventure with a definite beginning, middle and end. They are not the stuff of, say, a multi-volume series of epic novels each of 1000 pages in length.

This is the reason, I think, why we don't really see many Western RPGs in general. There are only so many innocent Indian tribes to vanquish, robber barons to dispossess, stagecoaches to protect, banks to rob, and outlaws to apprehend, before things get stale. Those things are fine as one-offs. But they aren't the stuff of campaigns.

The genius of D&D lies in the fact that, just as English layers a great deal of French (and loanwords from other languages) on an underlying Germanic chassis, it submerges its Western skeleton in fantasy tropes - and thereby brings in almost limitless variety. And this variety comes in at two levels. On the one hand there is just so much more to do (you can vanquish hostile tribes, dispossess robber barons, protect stagecoaches, rob banks, and apprehend outlaws, but you can also fight dragons, defeat vampire lords, delve beneath the ocean to fight sahuagin, summon vile and ancient demigods, and so on). And on the other hand there is much more scope to improve. A cowbody is always a cowboy. But a D&D PC can go from being an ineffectual, green-around-the-gills schlubb to being in effect a demigod in his own right.

I don't think that Gygax and Arneson explicitly saw this (maybe they did), but they certainly unconsciously intuited it. Western bones + Tolkien meat = a delicious feast. 

Two corollaries arise from this.

1. The Western structure also works for other genres - certainly science fiction. In principle, any type of meat can be put on the Western bones so long as the underlying skeleton is left intact.

2. It is I think also true that fantasy dress can enliven any underlying structure. Mystery RPGs on their own are quite dull and hard to make work. But the structure of the mystery may be vastly improved by making it a mystery in a fantasy setting, with all the variety that entails. There may be other examples.