Melee (1977), by Steve Jackson, was the first Fantasy Trip publication, published by Metagaming as Microgame 3. The little booklet contains rules, a sheet of tokens and a folded up hex map. Its so wee! Just four inches by seven. All the art is by Liz Danforth – after years of associating her work so strongly with MERP, I am suddenly awash with her work for other games, and it takes on a very different, satisfyingly violent character here.

Melee is a very simple system for man-to-man (or man-to-monster) combat. It would be premature to call it an RPG in 1977, honestly – it is really a lean and mean tactics game. It is still in the spirit of Dungeons & Dragons, though, and in 1980, the “advanced” revision of the rules would be a legit RPG.  

Which is not to say it didn’t blaze any trails – it certainly did! The big first is Melee’s place as the first game with a point buy system for character creation. It is rudimentary here – 24 points to spend between Strength and Dexterity – but Steve Jackson would take this concept and use it as the foundation of GURPS (and it would even eventually find its way into D&D as an alternative for character creation).

A bit more interesting to my eye is the approach to game actions. They’re called Options, and you get to do one when it is your turn, but they are defined as “a set of actions.” So you have stuff like “ready a weapon” and “shift and attack.” Broadly, none of that is terribly surprising, but I find the way it is organized to be very philosophically reminiscent of playbooks for Apocalypse World and other Powered by the Apocalypse games. Again, rudimentary, but still a potentially intriguing bit of game design DNA.