Sandy Petersen Invents Role-Playing

The Investigator
I am not sure when we started calling it role-paying, but among my friends the term didn't really apply until we discovered Call of Cthulhu and became investigators. Up until that point we played heroes, magicians, priests and thieves in pen and paper wargames where we each controlled one or more individuals with specific talents. It was a natural extension of skirmish wargaming with miniatures where each figure represented a single individual and we had our own guy or playing piece. The object in these games was to kill or capture the other player's guy(s).
Early on playing White Box we had learned to ask "Who, What, When, Where, and How?" in our back and forth dialogue with the referee; mostly in an attempt to outsmart the "dungeon" and grab its treasure while avoiding the loss of our playing pieces or characters. My gaming friends were all wargamers excited about the new game coming out of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. We were history buffs and science-fiction, fantasy fans much like the creators of the new game. It was fresh and fun and we were obsessed with climbing the experience ladder of success, each trying to get a more powerful character so we could reasonably descend to even deeper and unexplored levels underground.
Talking in character? Not so much. Asking ourselves what would our character do, think, feel, say? Not so much. We generally played ourselves, even if our character sported a distinct name borrowed from a popular source, such as "Conan", Ragnar, Harald Hardradda", "Lancelot", "Roland" or "Corwyn". Then Chaosium published Call of Cthulhu in an attractive box with quality booklets and maps. We were already enamored with Chaosium as a company because of their previous game products including Thieves World and the RuneQuest line. We purchased our copies at Gencon and had the enormous benefit of having the game explained to us by the folks at the Chaosium booth so we had some idea of how to play as soon as we opened our copies. Being a bunch of history buffs we rather enjoyed the idea of playing a game where we could make some use of our knowledge of the American 1920s.
Armed with a new game and some ideas from the Chaosium staff regarding role-playing we set about investigating ghosts and ghouls, cults and hauntings. We learned to think like role-players, to imagine a person separate from ourselves, often very different from us in age, education, values, and goals. We asked questions in a different voice, literally and figuratively. The 1980s was a transition time for our gaming group as we looked for and found new game experiences including new systems like Call of Cthulhu and we adjusted our style of play to include more actual role-playing. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson introduced us to a new hobby. Sandy Petersen taught us how to play a role.