Earlier role-playing games?

I asked this question a few years ago. Roleplaying is an interesting phenomenon--it's not acting because it's not scripted. It's not storytelling because all the players are participants. In OTL, roleplaying evolved from miniature wargaming--people put personalities on their figures. But then you needed a GameMaster to run everyone else. That's a concept which came from refereed wargames.

The original roleplaying games were clunky things which betrayed their wargame provenance. There are still plenty of roleplayers who play as if their game is a tabletop version of WoW. They're just interested in the system rather than the story. I don't think that kind of roleplaying can evolve without wargaming first.

Other players, however, are much more interested in the story side of RPGs, and the system isn't very important. I think *that* sort of roleplaying game could have evolved from two places. One is the theater. Perhaps some school of improv hits upon the idea of having a "Stage Manager" who sets the scene arbitrarily. Mix that up with some fantastic element then in vogue (Pulps, science fiction, Hyboria) and you have a game.

Another tradition it might evolve from is group storytelling, but the group chooses a "Lead Storyteller. Both of these options could become popular parlor games like charades.

The only thing you won't get is profit. Roleplaying games are a business, and they make money because they involve systems which you need to buy to play. So if you have a roleplaying model which doesn't sell anything, it might become very popular, but it'll never be *commercial*.

But maybe that doesn't matter. :)

Very good points. You can see the genesis of this in the simple parlour games people play that have people start with a simple phase like "It was a dark and stormy night..." and jointly complete a story. The idea of adding a lead storyteller is interesting. Don't worry about commercial success. If its a really good parlour game concept (like "Dictionary" or "Charades"), Milton Bradley or somebody else will figure out a way to box it up with pieces and a board and sell it fot 20 bucks a pop. You'd be amazed how many people will buy a boxed version of something they could do all by themselves if they wanted to.
 
Don't you think it's odd that their birth coincided with the dawn of early video games?

Not at all. Both video games and RPGs reflect an era in which it gradually became OK to sit on one's butt all day and "waste your time" in front of a TV or a bunch of papers and dice, rather than work at the five-and-store, mow lawns, or go outside and play a "real game" like baseball. It is no accident that the "outside world's" stereotype of both rabid adult videogamers and devoted (rabid?) adult RPG players is a weight-challenged, pale, unathletic, and somewhat unkempt young adult male with poor social skills.
 
Not at all. Both video games and RPGs reflect an era in which it gradually became OK to sit on one's butt all day and "waste your time" in front of a TV or a bunch of papers and dice, rather than work at the five-and-store, mow lawns, or go outside and play a "real game" like baseball. It is no accident that the "outside world's" stereotype of both rabid adult videogamers and devoted (rabid?) adult RPG players is a weight-challenged, pale, unathletic, and somewhat unkempt young adult male with poor social skills.

No, video games became popular when they did because the cheapest and smallest computer systems were getting small enough and cheap enough that many people could afford them and house them, not just institutions, and were powerful enough to actually run games, even if only very simple ones. You just can't have them without relatively cheap, small, and powerful computers, and the '70s were the first period of time when that was the case.

Besides, the popularity of conventional games (some quite complicated, like bridge), shows that even in the era when people played "real" games there was still a significant market for sit-down indoors entertainment, if for no other reason than to have things to do when you can't go outside and play. The bridge thing actually just made me think of something--what if this were targeted at bored housewives instead of young men? It seems a better market socially, they're not really expected to go out and do stuff, they want escape from dull lives that an RPG can cheaply provide, and they have a larger disposable income (at first). Obviously, the settings and themes would be really different, and most games would be more story-based than what we have today. It would be funny if the stereotypes were totally reversed, that's for sure.
 
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True - once a large enough segment of the populace has a sufficient amount of leisure time, you're going to naturally develop some form of indoor entertainment if only because there are certain days on which you're both not working and can't just go outside and play (there's a thunderstorm, or a blizzard).

The development of tabletop RPGs, then, was really more of a social phenomenon; the development of video games was, I think, largely a technological phenomenon with some social elements mixed in. If you delay the development of computers but still keep the social changes of the 50s-70s, you probably increase the popularity of tabletop RPGs.
 
As kids we role-played constantly

To address the "for-fun" part of role-playing games... As young kids we role-played a lot every summer. The "rules" were very informal -- no dice needed. Storylines were taken from adventure books, graphic novels or TV shows (emilio salgari was a great source). There were always adventures, stories would go on for days. Weapons and armor were built and feats of skill perfected. Bicycles could be WWI biplanes, armoirs spaceships, balconies parapets or crows nests. Trees and rock formations and buildings became all kinds of things. We were our own dungeon masters.
I know for a fact that my grandfather played the same games (even based on some of the same stories) with his friends when he was a kid more than 100 years ago.
Sometime around age 12 this started getting less involving and magical... And that's just about when History and Alt History became appealing... interesting!
 
The bridge thing actually just made me think of something--what if this were targeted at bored housewives instead of young men? It seems a better market socially, they're not really expected to go out and do stuff, they want escape from dull lives that an RPG can cheaply provide, and they have a larger disposable income (at first). Obviously, the settings and themes would be really different, and most games would be more story-based than what we have today. It would be funny if the stereotypes were totally reversed, that's for sure.

Interesting idea. One might imagine a merger of daytime soap operas and RPGs into some sort of interactive entertainment in which the decisions of people playing the "One Life to Live" game were phoned/sent sent to the show's producers, complied/averaged, and used to affect the scenes and plot developments on later presentations of the televised program.
 
Socially, I can see why they were unlikely to arise prior to the 20th century or at least the late 19th (insufficient user base), but it seems possible, at least, to imagine some kind of recognizable RPG being created in, say, the 1920s and becoming popular.

I hear General Washington's favorite PC was a 32nd-level Mason.

Its pretty hard not to see Ellsberg and the Wide-Awakes as LARPing gone horribly wrong.
 
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