You think? Because I feel like the moment units become single characters, the roleplaying seed would be planted. Because look at kids playing with Barbies and GI Joes? Sometimes the toy is their friend, but often, they start telling stories with the toy as a character. That's the long and short of what we do to a given intensity of the actual storytelling.
I feel like that's the natural result of individualized minis play. If you look at RTS games with 'heroes' you see the same behavior outside of competitive play.
Personally I am very certain it is not the "natural result", because it would have happened earlier if so.
You have to jump a big wall that people aren't naturally going to jump. Dave Arneson and others helped jump that wall - and it was a wall that was a lot easier to jump in the 1970s, culturally, I'd say (it'd be easy to jump now too - but only because RPGs exist and are popular and have significantly influenced culture far beyond their actual play!).
I agree with all your examples! Yes kids playing with dolls, people speaking as their MOBA characters (which wouldn't exist without D&D, note), and in tabletop games like Warhammer, people doing voices for their characters and so on - even writing up reasons why a battle is happening! That is absolutely all stuff that happens and would happen again. That stuff is all the backstory, the basis for roleplaying. You look at the Bronte sisters in the 1800s and they're making up fantasy worlds together, they're telling stories together.
To take that from casually doing voices, and being silly and fun pretending to be cops and robbers or whatever, to formalizing an entire game-beyond-the-battle, with rules for travel, investigation, environmental dangers, interaction, going from PvP to PvE (which some people just won't do), and encouraging people to RP characters the whole time, and think in-character, not continually meta and tactically like you do in wargames, MOBAs, etc would be a huge leap and indeed the entire idea of a "Dungeon Master" or "Storyteller" or "Gamemaster" would be alien, because none of those games have that. There's a reason that RPGs didn't develop in the 1800s, or the 1920s, or the 1950s, and so on. RP and G are hard to merge. D&D was an unusual event that did so - once that idea was out there, it spread very rapidly, but technologically, conceptually, RPGs
could have existed for well over 150 years, maybe more like 300. Yet they didn't until the 1970s. Role-playing, including fantasy world-building, existed before that. Wargames existed since the late 1800s.
So I think it would take an exceptional situation for someone to take a single-character wargame (like Warhammer's Inquisitor game back in 2001) and turn it into an RPG as we know it. They'd need to:
1) Take it from being PvP to PvE. The concept at least would probably exist in computer games, so that'd be something (games like Doom would still exist in AU2021, so there'd have been games which were multiplayer and had both PvE, PvE Co-op and PvP for decades).
2) Decide to develop formalized rules for actions outside of combat. It's fascinating to think what their inspirations might have been.
3) Develop the idea of staying in-character, and only doing stuff your character could think of, and thus roleplaying, rather than merely "Playing to win".
4) Abandon the idea of a specific "win condition", which all the games it derived from would have.
5) Develop rules for developing the character and making them stronger. Again, fascinating to think about what might have inspired them on this. We'd likely end up with something wildly different to most RPGs today, and likely pretty naive.
6) Decide to create an additional role of a guy who writes the adventure and controls all the baddies, but who isn't directly opposed to the players, and is himself also roleplaying the enemies and the world and so on, rather than merely trying to make the players lose.
Now, this could well happen in stages, of course, like:
A) Someone wants to play the 1 character wargame solo, so develops some kind of randomizer to control an enemy character. It's then a small leap to extend that randomizer to multiple enemy characters, and if it was fun, to get your friends in on the action.
At this point you'd basically have a "Horde mode" like games like Mass Effect 3's multiplayer was, or Gears of War has.
B) Someone gets the idea to create levels to fight through, like computer games. Maybe he decides he wants to run the enemies to make it more dramatic than using the randomizer (probably some kind of schism here as some people wouldn't like that).
C) Situations in the levels suggest it might be cool to have some kind of skill system for the characters. It's probably very simple and only relates to combat at first.
D) People start thinking about how their characters should get stronger. Likely they have "points values" as a concept from wargames, so think they should have a system for increasing those points.
But this is likely to the dead end unless someone decides that everyone should be playing in-character and outside purely dangerous situations. Maybe, if it's a merchandised universe, that comes out of fan-fic writers/RPers (who I think would exist w/o D&D, as they seem to be a separate thing and you used to meet ones who'd never heard of RPGs, back in the 1990s, but were keen on RPing in forums/chat, as characters from TV shows etc.). Like it's an Aliens-based game, and someone wants to RP a romance between Vasquez and Ripley or whatever (let's be real, we're talking about fan-fic writers...), and so they play stuff out that's happening outside the combat area, like talking in the galley over dinner or whatever - and these ideas together with the ideas on skills maybe start to merge together to form an idea where they could play out the whole thing - not just the combat-oriented "levels". And then people want to bring their "original characters" in, because again fan-fic writers. So those characters need to be assessed for the "points value" system. So we get a character creation system (likely computer games have systems already where you can pick abilities/weapons too so it's not unfamiliar). And through all this maybe we eventually get to RPGs as we know it.
But there is that gap to jump, that leap of faith, to go from "wargame with some chat" to "staying in character and playing out stuff outside of combat".
I'm not saying it's impossible - sorry if I seemed to be! I'm just saying I don't think it's natural/inevitable in the short-term. Like, you could get from A to D in a couple of years, but then no-one might get past D for decades (probably several people would actually - but it wouldn't catch on).
