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.
@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
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.
@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.