One thing that blows my mind is how tabletop RPGs appeared roughly at the same time as computers and modern video games but it's pure coincidence
Why didn't tabletop RPGs appear sooner? All you need, in theory, is a randomizer and some paper and writing utensils.
@craigmaloney great response!
@craigmaloney @cwebber Wait, wargames way predate WWII, though. H. G. Wells was a gamer, he made and played Little Wars.
IIRC, Gygax originally planned D&D as a duel between the players and the DM but people kept treating it as story-telling.
It might be that RPGs are a unique fluke that wouldn't exist without him and TSR.
@cwebber Also it looks like there was a version of "Werewolf / Killer being played in the 1920s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_role-playing_games#Early_role-playing
But for the most part it seems LARPs pre-date RPGs.
@cwebber https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15784870-playing-at-the-world will probably answer this question in whatever level of detail you want. (I only took in the first hundred pages or so of detail)
@joeyh @cwebber
It does. (In excruciating detail.)
The basic answer is:
Tabletop wargaming existed for a hundred or two hundred years before it was first successfully commercialized in the 1950s. This commercialization lowered the emphasis on complex and expensive figurines in favor of standardized mass-produced cardboard landscapes & markers.
The use of cardboard created a wargame community that hadn't existed before when it was too expensive.
@joeyh @cwebber
Dungeons & Dragons came out of the modding scene in this wargaming community, essentially -- as an offshoot of the already-marginal 'ancient battle wargaming' community.
The wargaming community was firmly on one side of the Two Cultures & didn't like the idea of fantasy or science fiction being mixed into their "historical re-creations", so D&D (with its emphasis on individual figures rather than whole squads) was marketed as its own thing.
@joeyh @cwebber
Since the tabletop wargaming community was heavily focused on reproductions of WWI and WWII, and depended upon fan newsletter style community building pioneered in the teens and 20s (wherein a community of amateurs would communicate via paid classified ads in the back of a semi-professional magazine), I suspect the community couldn't have been scaled up much earlier.
@cwebber but who knows with certainty what the ancient Greeks were really doing with those astragals... 😜
@cwebber But RPG rulesets date back to HG Wells at the latest in English, and about a hundred years earlier in Austria (as career military training).
And the miniatures were normal in the 1910s instead of niche as in the 1970s. Collections of lead soldiers used to be a synecdoche for boyhood. Painted to match particular armies, marched and invested on dustheap and counterpane, particular miniatures represented the child or a hero.
@cwebber My guess is its all because of WWII. Lord of the Rings was influenced by Tolkien crossing his love of mythology with the traumas of WWII and LotR is what transformed earlier wargames into RPGs. WWII also funded the early research into computer hardware and mathematical theory.
@cwebber Because wargames were scratching the itch of the era. Understand that we were also coming out of WWII and both wargames and computers were going through a transformational period.