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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JEB" data-source="post: 8203291" data-attributes="member: 10148">Right, this thread has gone through a number of these, all excellent candidates. In a timeline where the only change is D&D doesn't happen in 1974, it's quite possible several of these would have spawned a RPG. In the 1980s, perhaps, or the 1990s. Maybe even the late 1970s in the best case. And that RPG could eventually lead to some D&D equivalent in 2021.But the OP limits it further. It's not just D&D that gets delayed to 2021. It's the concept of the RPG itself. For some reason, all of those seeds don't spawn the RPG concept for many decades after they emerged onto the pop-culture scene, and in many cases, well past when they peaked in popularity and influence. By 2021, they're not fresh, vibrant ideas, they're at best storied veterans of the scene, and at worst largely appealing only to a nostalgic crowd. Neither tends to be the pool from which an innovation like the RPG is likely to emerge; stuff like that generally emerges from the fringes, not the establishment mainstream. (As I noted, this is where Arneson and Gygax were in the early 1970s.)When D&D first appeared in our history in 1974, Braunsteins were just five years old. Chainmail was just three years old; medieval miniatures wargaming was the oldest reasonably direct influence, at 18 years old - the first such ruleset appearing in 1956. (I don't count "wargaming" itself enough of a seed; it's as much a seed for D&D as "video games" would be for the MMORPG. Technically correct but not nearly enough for the specifics.) The literary influences were decades old, I'll grant, but the setting is only of secondary importance for creating the RPG - it's the concept of marrying role-playing with game mechanics that matters. You could have any reasonably popular setting and still get a RPG, but you don't get a RPG without game + role-playing.So in this alternate timeline, any of the 1970s influences - CYOA, Advent or some hypothetical non-D&D-like roguelike, early text adventure games, or LARPs - should have produced a tabletop RPG equivalent by the 1980s or 1990s - their peak of popularity and beyond, and still within a few decades of their first appearance. But for the purposes of this premise, we're required to assume that they didn't. And if they didn't strike when the iron was hot, so to speak, why would they now? What sparked this sudden inspiration so very late in their pop-cultural lifespan?It's much more likely that this alternate timeline's version of the RPG, as a brand new concept invented in 2021, emerges from some fresh design influences that appeared at most within the last two decades (2000-2020), and more likely in the last several years (let's say 2015-2020, akin to Braunstein). And those influences can't depend on the existence of D&D or RPGs in previous decades, because those never existed in this timeline. These 21st-century influences could themselves descend from the 1970s-1990s sources, but they'd have to be a step beyond those earlier influences, something distinct - as again, those earlier influences had their window and missed it.</blockquote>

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