Quote from: jhkimStill, there was interest in long-term fictions.  Serials and soap operas were around for decades.  

One form of this that is nearly forgotten today is the daily news paper comic strips, which were pretty much killed by TV. Frex: Terry And the Pirates, Prince Valiant, Tarzan, Captain Easy and literally dozens more in almost any genre you can think of.  
I could totally play in a Steve Canyon RPG.  Steve would probably throw me out of the plane once he got hip to my politics, though.

By the way, anyone with spare cash lying around looking for a new hobby could do worse than chasing down reprint volumes of strips from the 20's, 30's, 40's and 50's.

Quote from: stu2000In the 20s, people loved outre parlor games--Ouiji and seances and whatnot. They loved whist and strategy games. There was an appreciation of obsessive areas of interest. College kids were developing an identity as college kids. Escapist pulps were hot. I think it was a very narrow miss for rpgs to have been developed then.

This was, perhaps, the other 20th Century window when it could have happened, but I think the percentage of the population that you are talking about (e.g., college kids) was much smaller than the percentage of the corresponding segment in the early 1970s.

That is unquestionably the case.

And even for the privileged, there wasn't as much liesure time as for the seventies kids. That's important, too.

Quote from: John MorrowTo me, the success required a large pool of people both willing and able to get into the hobby.  I simply don't see where that large fertile pool of people was before the late 1960s and early 1970s.  Yes, all the pieces were there to invent the hobby a lot earlier but not, in my opinion, to make it any sort of success.

That's my take as well. Sure, you had pulp serials. And you had Dunsany and all that (for a tiny number of eccentric bookworms). But the people who had time for games were kids. And up until fairly recently, 22 year olds would not be caught dead playing the same sorts of games as 12 year olds - even if they had the time. As you point out, people either went straight to jobs, or college, and started families. You simply didn't have the 15 years of carefree adolescence that is common today.

Stunningly I think I mostly agree with Jhkim on this one. People are underestimating the influence of Tolkien as a culture-altering phenomenon, compared to Conan et al.  The popularity of Conan today is in large part only due to the breakthrough that was Tolkien.  When the LoTR craze hit in the 60s, it was gigantic.

And the genius of D&D was that it took something that was already starting to happen, namely military wargamers starting to base their wargames not on historical battles and eras but on "fantasy battles"; and adapted it one further step to have the players portraying single heros rather than entire armies, as a way to recreate the kind of adventure people imagined from reading Tolkien and other fantasy novels.

So could RPGs have shown up earlier? I doubt it very much.

RPGPundit

Quote from: stu2000And even for the privileged, there wasn't as much liesure time as for the seventies kids. That's important, too.

Monopoly gained its great fame and success during the Great Depression, ostensibly when people should have been busy just scraping by.  And that's a game that takes a good two hours or more at a sitting to finish up to any satisfaction.

Another thing to consider about the success of Monopoly was that it provided both a power fantasy in the face of great hardship (an economic fantasy, granted, rather than being combat-oriented) and poked fun at the trials and tribulations of rich fat-cats.  If a roleplaying game had been able to tap into that sense of play for the illusion of empowerment and social satire, it might have struck a chord in much the same fashion as a boardgame fantasy.

!i!

Quote from: RPGPunditPeople are underestimating the influence of Tolkien as a culture-altering phenomenon, compared to Conan et al.  The popularity of Conan today is in large part only due to the breakthrough that was Tolkien.  When the LoTR craze hit in the 60s, it was gigantic.

No, I don't underestimate how big the craze was...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2HQ1K7YyQM

Quote from: Ian AbsentiaAnd that's a game that takes a good two hours or more at a sitting to finish up to any satisfaction.

How long does your average role-playing session last?  2 hours?

I hope I'm not thread capping, but I think it is stunning that if that Mr. Wesely early on had known that a teetotum was essentially a modified dreidel, there would not have been D&D dice but D&D dreidels (or mabye just six siders).

All these years we would have been spinning tops. I wonder if dice of some sort was somehow inevitable, I wonder if it was part of the formula for success (somehow?). If it had been d6's and/or dreidals would it have made a difference.

Actually I wonder if it could be a major reason why RPGs were to be a success. Dice and their mechanics seem to be very important and 'near and dear'.

RPGs could have developed sooner, but I doubt they would have been successful. Aside from some vague accounts of the Bronte sisters engaging in an RPG-like pastime, and Fritz Leiber & Harry Otto Fischer playing a sort of Lankhmar boardgame/roleplaying game in the 1930's, there were very RPG-like scenarios being played in military wargames at least as early as 1908. An example of play is here.

bookmarked, Elliot!

You should check my livejournal, Sett (including comments). I've got more stuff there in recent entries.

Oh, I read it already up to the Svenny-stuff. You should update more often!

I guess my personal perspective is that since I had a kid and (more recently) bought a house, my gaming improved markedly.  For me, stability made gaming a lot easier.  I don't game as frequently as I did in college or grad school -- campaigns are bi-weekly rather than weekly -- but they're dependable, and I'm able to sustain multi-year campaigns that I couldn't in the past.  

Quote from: stu2000In the 20s, people loved outre parlor games--Ouiji and seances and whatnot. They loved whist and strategy games. There was an appreciation of obsessive areas of interest. College kids were developing an identity as college kids. Escapist pulps were hot. I think it was a very narrow miss for rpgs to have been developed then.

Quote from: John MorrowThis was, perhaps, the other 20th Century window when it could have happened, but I think the percentage of the population that you are talking about (e.g., college kids) was much smaller than the percentage of the corresponding segment in the early 1970s.

As I mentioned, I don't think that the leisure time is all that big a factor for the 1930s through 1960s.  See, say, the Economic History article: "Hours of Work in U.S. History", showing that average hours were similar from 1934 to 1988.  Before that, there was indeed significantly less leisure time.  

Yes, a group hobby is harder than a solitary hobby, but in prior decades there were more face-to-face organizations -- things like knitting circles or poker nights were perfectly ordinary.  Post-seventies people have tended to be more isolated, so it has been harder to get people together than in earlier decades.  

I still think that the development of fandom was key.  Model railroaders are a good example of obsessive hobby work, but you don't have the same thing for fiction until the Tolkien craze.  There are probably social factors in the rise of this as well, not simply Tolkien's writing.  It would seem to have something to do with how people engaged with media, but I'm not sure on that.

Quote from: jhkimI think that role-playing games in extended campaigns depended on the development of fan culture -- in particular J.R.R. Tolkien, though Star Trek and other fandom helped.  While there was fantasy literature like R.E. Howard earlier, there wasn't as much the phenomenon of following the work of an author in detail, the way that some people follow sports or other trivia.  

Still, there was interest in long-term fictions.  Serials and soap operas were around for decades.

You know, that makes me think that if RPGs had been invented in the 1920s it wouldn't have been based off fantasy (or even Lovecraft) at all, but crime fiction. We have pseudo-RPG murder mystery party games these days, and I can easily imagine people in the 1920s inventing such a thing as a party game, moving on to desire more freedom of action, and adding boardgame elements to get something resembling the RPG we know and love.