Dungeons and Dragons never invented

Any proto characters in Squad Leader were no where near as developed as in RPG games. Rather, they were mostly shells and included to give a little more life / detail to a board war game. But..... I wonder if Gygax and company hit on the small scale, 'modular' and proto character concepts in AH's Squad Leader game and then ran with them?

In short, did RPG games evolve from Squad Leader?
D&D has a pretty clear history of evolving from medieval miniature wargames, through a process of gradually giving individual minis more skills and personality, and adding in a fantasy element. I'd hesitate to call the small scale board wargames as proto-RPGs...
 
Much as Ed Greenwood was writing the earliest stories of the Forgotten Realms long before D&D, Barker was sketching out the Empire of the Petal Throne before he encountered Arneson and Gygax. Barker was a wargamer, big into ancients, and Tekumél was his setting as much for minis wargaming as it was for novels, sourcebooks, and roleplaying.

Empire of the Petal Throne was published by TSR too. The (first) system undeniably owes a lot to D&D; but players who played with him said he actually didn’t use much of the rules at the table in his own house campaigns, and less of the later-published rules that came after.

There are several miniature rule sets for EPT, have them and would love to eventually play them at some point...
 
What lit the fuse for this, was the release of a paperback edition of the LOTR books in the mid '60s that got people thinking about fantasy.

Miniature wargaming was expensive if you went into metal(then Lead), but luckily Airfix had a wide range of figures, for ancients to WWII, expanded by the Italian Atlantic company in the early '70s
These were small, 1/76 scale figures, that were close enough to use with the Airfix brand.

Britians company made traditional larger toy soldiers, but not in the range of Airfix. GHQ made WWII and modern 1/285 figures.
Tiny! Detailed!
Expensive!

What also hit in 1975 was Ral Partha miniatures showing new, highly detailed 25mm lead alloy figures, for wargames, with fantasy figures the nexd year. in '75 Grenadier also did Ancients thru the Old West in lead, not quite as nice as the Ral Parthas, but still great looking, compared to what Superior Miniatures had been doing.
by 1977, you had Citadel doing figures, mostly fantasy, as the D&D Juggernaut got rolling everyone started doing a fantasy line
 
Well there goes my formative years. I cut my teeth on my 25th lvl dwarven fighter....using 2nd edition rules....Ironwood. probably would have gotten more into geekdom programming commodore 64 games for home use on my tape drive.
 
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