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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kronovan" data-source="post: 8667613" data-attributes="member: 6775134">I can only go by what I recall as trends and potential influencers during my childhood during the 1960s -70s, but IMO RPGs probably wouldn't have evolved out of live action game play like SCA, or even the SciFi genre. I started reading novels in my childhood about 5 years before Original D&D was released. We had the best seller lists in print at home and I can hardly recall Fantasy or SciFi novels showing up on them. While my brother and I did get more than our fill of both genres, other than a few novels like Stewart's Arthurian-based Crystal Caves, or Vonegut's avant garde books, SciFi and Fantasy were very niche.What was all the rage back then were Conspiracy/Spy novels. It seemed Baby Boomers, who were by then a big chunk of paperback buyers, couldn't get enough of those. I remember that genre always have good numbers among the best sellers, from cheesy books like Flemning's The Man with the Golden Gun to more serious stuff like Forsythe's The Odessa File. Even some of the SciFi that managed to list like Critchton's Andromeda Strain, were as much conspiracy as SF. Once in a while Horror novels like Rosemary's Baby or the Exorcist made the lists, but they were definitely uncommon. If you missed a months list, you almost always knew which made them, because without competition from home VCRs film studios made movies out of them as quickly as they could. There were also a lot of military themed (mostly WW II & Cold War) novels on the list then too, but going my older sister's college buddies, those weren't so popular among the young adult set.The other thing I recall as vividly as my 1st SciFi novel, was the arrival of affordable wargames in the early 70's. It seemed a new Avalon Hill or SSI game showed up at our local hobby every month. Those were  much more cooler than the boring gaming dreck you'd get for Xmas.  All those tiny chits, colorful gaming maps and an attempt to recreate real history, were a bit of a mind blower. When my Sis's boyfriend took my brother and I to see miniatures on a big tabletop at a local college wargaming club, I was blown away. I'm not surprised that wargaming played a part in EEG & crew's influences, because while definitely niche, they were an eye opener to lots of potential.So...without EEG-D&D, were another TTRPG to have emerged around the same time, I could envision it evolving out of the conspiracy/spy novel genre. Like D&D, I do think such an RPG would have also been created by a baby boomer, as they represented a ground swell of not just the population, but also new ideas and trends. Such a TTRPG might have at 1st featured modern or conventional settings, but I imagine it would have branched off into the more fantastical, sort of the way Vonegut and other popular avant garde writers did. It's also popular that it could have blended with Military themes creating a new subgenre or direction. That said, with the eye popping, blockbusting hit that Star Wars became in the late 70s, I can't imagine that genre would've lasted long before it was co-opted by SciFi and steered in new directions.Sorry for the long rambling, but sometimes it's fun to reminisce.</blockquote>

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