Early Tabletop RPGs?

[Workable Goblin]

There might be some differences from what we are used to, if RPGs evolve from a kind of improvised theater, there might be an emphasis on the story over the mechanics (and might be called something along the lines of "story games" or "jeux de théâtre"), so instead of having the usual setup of a referee or DM guiding the players trough an adventure, games would be built around the idea of giving the players characters and a scenario and letting them run with them, no DM and no set goals.

I think you will see a DM-type position show up sooner rather than later if this sort of thing becomes widespread, for more or less the same reason that theater productions typically have a director: just giving people a situation and letting them have at it produces bad results a lot of the time, either because people aren't creative or because they (inadvertently or not) do something stupid like attack the gazebo. Probably this position would be less powerful, but having someone to nudge people towards "good" actions and away from "bad" actions, and adjudicate any disputes or arguments would be useful.

Rules and formulas will be simpler, with the deck of playing cards taking the place of the dice in OTL's RPGs, so instead of hoping to roll a six you will be praying to draw a king.

Maybe initially, but the deck of playing cards has a disadvantage in that you either have to reshuffle it constantly or have it become increasingly less random as you draw cards. This may or may not be a problem depending on how you set things up, but it's less work to roll a die, certainly.

 

[fraa Jad]

There were also parlor games which were more like LARPS than tabletop gaming, in the late 18th and 19th century that the nobility played, I think someone already mentioned that.

 

[Gwyain]

To see any kind of large scale roleplaying games developing, I think you need a critical mass of enough different things going. You need decent literacy rates, you need books/rules to be accessible which probably requires a large scale printing/publishing industry, but most of all you need to have a decent of amount of leisure time available. That last one is the biggest limitation, Tabletop RPG's necessitate a good deal of time commitment, so you need to have limited working hours and decent enough wages for that to be available. So without making bigger changes to the timeline, I'd say the earliest you might be able to get a TTRPG is roughly the early 20th century. I don't think nobility/gentry would be enough to sustain a tabletop industry, its already a niche hobby unfortunately, and a small niche for a small class of people that has fairly low margins doe not breed a successful industry.