The History of Role-Playing Games (RPGs)

Role-playing games (RPGs) are games in which players assume the roles of individual characters, developing them through statistics and rules-based systems while collaboratively or interactively advancing a story, a form that emerged in the 1970s from earlier traditions of fantasy wargaming.¹¹¹ The genre gained wide popularity with the 1974 release of Dungeons & Dragons and grew into an industry that faced both acclaim and controversy, later diversifying into many settings and systems and spreading into video games and other media.¹³ The precise definition of an RPG remains contested, since almost any game can be said to involve “playing a role,” but the term as used in practice describes games that combine a focus on player characters — through character creation, dialogue, and narrative choice — with statistical gameplay such as experience points, leveling, and stat-based combat.⁸¹¹

Origins in wargaming and fantasy

The deepest roots of the RPG lie in tabletop strategy games, or wargames, developed from the late 1700s and early 1800s to hone military commanders’ skills using miniatures to simulate battles.⁵⁷ Longer traditions of role-playing — historical re-enactment, improvisational theatre, and storytelling — are also cited as antecedents, storytelling being described as lying “at the root of role playing”.³⁵ In the 1960s, fantasy elements drawn from the works of J. R. R. Tolkien began to be added to wargames, and around this time Gary Gygax’s medieval recreation wargame Chainmail, published in 1971, incorporated a fantasy supplement.⁵⁴ At roughly the same time, Dave Arneson created Blackmoor, which introduced concepts modern gamers recognize — levels, armor class, dungeon crawls, and hit points.⁵

According to accounts credited to Arneson, role-playing itself predated both him and Gygax, originating in a convention wargame refereed by Dave Wesely? called Braunstein; Arneson credited Wesely with the concept and mode of play, though Arneson and Gygax were the first to release a formal ruleset.²

The first tabletop RPGs

In 1974, Dungeons & Dragons was published by Tactical Studies Rules (TSR), created by Gygax and Arneson and built directly on the ruleset of Chainmail as its starting point.⁴⁶ Where wargames had players command military units, D&D let each player create and play a single character defined by a race — human, dwarf, elf — a class such as fighting man, cleric, or magic-user, and a set of characteristics, gaining experience points through play to “level up” attributes like Strength and Wisdom.⁴ Combat and other events were resolved with polyhedral dice and tables of outcomes, overseen by a Dungeon Master who described the world and enforced the rules; Gygax reportedly expected to sell only 50,000 copies.⁴⁵⁶ In 1977 the game split into a rules-light original version and a more complex Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, which developed separately, while Dragon Magazine was founded to support the growing hobby.⁴⁵

D&D’s success spawned competitors almost immediately. Ken St. Andre?, disliking D&D’s mechanics, developed a more narrative system and released Tunnels and Trolls? in 1975, the second RPG to reach the market and one that remained in print in multiple editions.²⁶ M.A.R. Barker? released Tékumel? and Empire of the Petal Throne alongside D&D’s launch; Simbalist and Backhaus released Chivalry & Sorcery in 1977 as a more realistic fantasy competitor.⁵ Science fiction was represented by Traveller from Game Designers’ Workshop in 1977, and Chaosium? arrived in 1978 with RuneQuest, which introduced a more realistic combat system in which powerful characters could be killed by weaker ones on a lucky roll.⁵⁶ Later titles broadened the field further into cyberpunk, horror, and science fiction with games such as Call of Cthulhu, Traveller, and Shadowrun, and live-action roleplaying (LARP), in which players physically act out their characters, grew out of the tabletop tradition.⁷

Religious controversy

As D&D’s popularity spread, it became the subject of a moral panic in the 1980s that linked the game to demonic worship and to a number of murders and suicides involving young men.⁴ No causal link was established, including through research by the Center for Disease Control, but the reputation attached to RPG players — as “nerdy” or “odd” — persisted long afterward.⁴⁶

The rise of video game RPGs

The RPG’s largest influence came in video games. Some of the earliest examples appeared on university mainframe computers such as the PDP-10, written by students who set out to digitize D&D’s rules; these games were typically open-source, iterative, and poorly preserved, and included titles like Pedit5, dnd, Rogue, and Moria.⁶⁸ In 1978 Roy Trubshaw? and Richard Bartle? created the first multi-user dungeon, combining RPG systems with a text-based adventure in a persistent world that multiple players could join, giving rise to the MUD genre that would later inspire the MMO.⁸ In 1980 Rogue, by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman, paired turn-based, grid-based, ASCII-rendered play with procedurally generated levels and permanent death, defining the roguelike genre.⁸

With the arrival of the Apple II, the Commodore PET, and the TRS-80 in 1977, personal computers gave rise to the first commercially successful computer RPG series, Ultima and Wizardry.⁸⁹ Following the success of his earlier Akalabeth: World of Doom in 1979, Richard Garriott created Ultima in 1981, selling 20,000 copies in its first year and establishing standards including tiled graphics, party-based combat, and a growing focus on narrative.⁹¹⁰ Wizardry, also released on the Apple II in 1981, introduced a 3D first-person party view and pre-constructed levels that encouraged players to draw their own maps, and became the most popular Apple II game of its year at some 24,000 copies.⁹ Both series directly influenced Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar in 1985, which shaped a character by asking moral questions rather than assigning points, and The Bard’s Tale, which introduced explorable towns.⁶ First-person “blobber” dungeon crawlers such as Eye of the Beholder followed, and games like Blizzard’s Diablo and Interplay’s Fallout shifted the genre to an isometric perspective in the mid-1990s.⁶¹⁰

In Japan, a distinct tradition emerged. Koei? — described as “the RPG company” in Japan of the early 1980s, responsible for roughly half of all titles released by the end of 1983 — produced early games including Dragon and Princess in 1982, considered by many the first JRPG, and the erotic Seduction of the Condominium Wives.⁹¹⁴ Black Onyx?, created by Dutch-American Henk Rogers in 1984 and drawing on Wizardry, became one of Japan’s best-selling computer games after Rogers personally demonstrated it to every computer magazine in the country.⁹¹⁴ Nihon Falcom? released Dragon Slayer in 1984, considered the first action RPG, and Dragon Slayer II: Xanadu in 1985, the best-selling PC game in Japan.⁹ The console era was defined by Dragon Quest, developed by Enix in 1986 with a user-friendly menu interface designed by Yuji Horii, and Final Fantasy, developed by Squaresoft in 1987, both inspired by Ultima and Wizardry.⁹ In 1986 Shigeru Miyamoto adapted the formula of Hydlide and Xanadu into The Legend of Zelda, an action-adventure with RPG elements.⁹

Settings, systems, and RPG theory

From the mid-1980s the genre diversified into generic and universal systems designed to move beyond medieval fantasy and to reduce D&D’s complexity.⁴ Steve Jackson Games published GURPS, the Generic Universal Roleplaying System, in 1986, allowing play in any setting from the Old West to noir detective fiction under one ruleset.⁴ Fighting Fantasy gamebooks by Ian Livingstone? and Steve Jackson? built on the Choose Your Own Adventure format by embedding a dice-rolling mechanic with Skill, Stamina, and Luck stats, introducing many children to RPGs.⁴⁶ Other systems followed, including TWERPS as a parody in 1987, TSR’s Amazing Engine, CORPS, FUDGE and its descendant FATE, QAGS, and the SAGA system.⁴ The 1990s also saw the emergence of early role-playing game theory and, in tabletop, a decline in popularity as collectible card games such as Magic: The Gathering and video game RPGs rose.³⁶

Open licensing and modern resurgence

The 2000s were shaped by open licensing. When Wizards of the Coast purchased TSR in 1997, it revamped D&D and released the third edition under the Open Game License in 2000, permitting third-party publishers to create compatible content and reviving the hobby.⁵⁴ Computer RPGs continued to draw on tabletop rules — Neverwinter Nights was built on D&D’s d20 system — and BioWare’s Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn established the template of companion quests, romances, and player choice that later games emulated; according to BioWare writer James Ohlen, the studio reworked its characters to match the depth of Final Fantasy VII.⁶¹⁰ The 2000s and 2010s also brought edition wars, indie RPGs, and the Old School Renaissance?, while single-player titles such as Skyrim? and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt? and MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft reached mass audiences.³⁷

The 2010s: action RPGs and the open-world era

The 2010s produced some of the most influential and commercially successful RPGs in the history of the medium, with studios such as FromSoftware, Bethesda, and CD Projekt Red launching several of their most prominent titles.¹⁷ The decade’s leading works combined action-based combat with expansive worlds that sustained player investment in their stories, drawing heavily on the affinity between the fantasy and science-fiction genres and the RPG form.¹⁷ Many of these games proved durable, remaining recommended and widely played well into the following decade.¹⁸

BioWare opened the decade with Mass Effect 2, released in January 2010, in which Commander Shepard assembles a spacefaring crew to confront an insectoid faction known as the Collectors.¹⁸²¹ Holding a Metacritic average in the mid-90s and one of the highest-rated RPGs of all time, the game received rapturous praise for its operatic science-fiction story, its character roster, and its refined third-person cover-based combat.¹⁸²¹ A mix of science-fiction powers and a wide array of weapons let players tailor Shepard as they saw fit, while its supporting cast and their distinct personalities elevated the main and side quests.¹⁸²¹ Its decisions carried long-lasting consequences into the story, some of them difficult to predict.²¹ That same year, Obsidian Entertainment released Fallout: New Vegas, built in roughly 18 months on the foundations of Bethesda’s Fallout 3.²⁰ Set in the Mojave Desert, it cast players as the Courier, a protagonist who survives an assassination attempt and tracks down the assailant while navigating a region contested by rival factions.¹⁷¹⁹²⁰ The return of reputation as a gameplay factor, combined with a focus on skills and flexible ways to complete quests, produced a strongly player-driven experience; though hampered by glitches at launch, the game became a fan favorite and aged well through community support and mods.¹⁷¹⁹²⁰

The year 2011 brought two landmark action RPGs in quick succession.¹⁷ FromSoftware’s Dark Souls, set in the dark-fantasy world of a humanity cursed with undeath by Lord Gwyn’s efforts to prolong the gods’ “Age of Fire,” did not invent the Souls-like subgenre — its predecessor Demon’s Souls had launched two years earlier — but popularized the concept in the mainstream and refined the experience.¹⁷²⁰ Famous for its brutal action and difficult gameplay loop, the game encouraged methodical combat while letting players experiment with different class builds and offered a classless character system alongside carefully interconnected, Metroidvania-like level progression that allowed players to travel almost anywhere across its connected map.¹⁷²¹ Without Dark Souls, later titles such as Elden Ring, Sekiro, and the Star Wars Jedi series might not exist.²⁰ Shortly afterward, Bethesda released The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim? to widespread critical acclaim, casting players as a Dragonborn protagonist tasked with defeating the dragon Alduin.¹⁷ Its open world functioned as a high-fantasy sandbox in which players organically encountered dungeons, characters, and quests, and its free-form progression system encouraged experimentation with combat builds.¹⁷ Skyrim sold more than 30 million copies, with its ease of modification and immense modding community widely credited as key factors in its longevity.²³

The mid-decade also saw a resurgence of classic isometric computer RPGs.¹⁹²¹ Divinity: Original Sin (2014) and Obsidian’s Pillars of Eternity (2015), the latter a spiritual successor to Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale, spearheaded a return to traditional Western RPGs in a market dominated by action titles.¹⁹²¹ Divinity: Original Sin II (2017) built on this with four-player cooperative play and extensive customization, and its success propelled Larian Studios to develop Baldur’s Gate III.²¹ Other notable entries included BioWare’s Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014), a large open-world game built on the Frostbite engine, and Gearbox’s Borderlands 2 (2012), a first-person shooter with pronounced RPG elements set on the world of Pandora.¹⁹

The decade’s most acclaimed open-world RPG was CD Projekt Red’s The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt?, released in May 2015, which closed the studio’s adaptation of Geralt of Rivia’s arc from the novels of Andrzej Sapkowski?.¹⁷²² Geralt, a monster-hunting nomad, confronts the world-ending threat of the Wild Hunt while searching for his surrogate daughter Ciri.¹⁷ The game was praised for making players feel they were exploring a deeply lived-in fantasy world, with side quests carrying weight and moral ambiguity rather than functioning as filler.²² Roughly three-and-a-half times larger than Skyrim, it sold over 20 million copies, served as a model for the genre—prompting an overhaul of the Assassin’s Creed series—and was sustained by sixteen free mini-DLCs and two full expansions, Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine.²¹²² Its success put CD Projekt Red on the map and led to a Witcher Netflix adaptation, and years after launch the game retained more concurrent players than at release.²¹²²

Indie RPGs

Running alongside the big-budget releases of the 2010s was a parallel movement of independent role-playing games, made by creators who owned the rights to their own work and operated without the demands of a corporation.²⁴ The precise boundaries of the term remained contested: some understood an indie RPG designer to be someone who owns the rights to the next edition of a game they themselves created and who employs no full-time staff, while others used “indie” to describe games with experimental or innovative mechanics, often aimed at producing a story-like experience, and still others treated the term as a byword for a particular social circle of gamers.²⁴ In tabletop, this last usage was tied closely to The Forge?, an internet forum that ran from 2001 to 2012 and was dedicated to the discussion and design of tabletop games, founded by Ron Edwards and Clinton R. Nixon.²⁴ Many of the designers later regarded as the most influential of the era spent considerable time developing games on the site, and the designer Vincent Baker likened the experience to earning a master’s degree in indie tabletop RPG design.²⁴

At the start of the 2010s the tabletop hobby was divided into three broad camps: indie or “story” games, which prioritized narrative and emotional roleplay; the Old School Renaissance, which drew on early editions of Dungeons & Dragons and emphasized problem-solving with bare-bones mechanics; and mainstream publishing, encompassing large names such as D&D, the World of Darkness, and Call of Cthulhu.²⁴ Over the following decade those distinctions grew far more flexible, a shift attributed in part to the Forge’s ethos and to the commercial struggles of D&D’s fourth edition, which opened the door to greater cross-pollination among the different parts of the design world.²⁴

The defining tabletop work of the period was Apocalypse World, released in 2010 by Meguey and Vincent Baker, who had long been active on the Forge and had earlier produced games such as Kill Puppies for Satan and Dogs in the Vineyard.²⁴ Though presented as a post-apocalyptic game of survivors, it introduced a new school of design built around “moves,” a conversational and “fiction first” tone, and formally codified principles for the game master.²⁴ Its most influential mechanic was a dice system producing not simple success or failure but bands of results, including a middling outcome in which characters technically get what they want but at a cost, reinforcing the game’s instruction to “play to find out what happens”.²⁴ The resulting Powered by the Apocalypse framework became the most influential school of thought in the hobby; more than fifteen years later, itch.io listed over four hundred works carrying the PbtA tag and DriveThruRPG nearly two thousand.²⁴ Later developments in the tabletop scene included the Forged in the Dark system derived from John Harper’s Blades in the Dark, Avery Alder’s Belonging Outside Belonging framework, worldbuilding games such as The Quiet Year, and the “lyric game” movement of short, poetic designs.²⁴

The tabletop scene was reshaped by a succession of technological and cultural changes, including the Google+ era of online communities, a migration to the storefront itch.io? and to Twitter, and two successive booms in actual-play streaming shows that drew new participants to the hobby.²⁴ The COVID-19 pandemic? accelerated the growth of solo journaling games and a second actual-play boom, and the period also saw community responses such as the Bundle for Racial Justice and organizing efforts including Session Zero Con and the #RPGSEA hashtag centered on Southeast Asian designers.²⁴ The 2023 controversy over Wizards of the Coast’s proposed changes to the Open Game License further galvanized independent creators.²⁴ Commentators within the community came to describe the resulting period as a “golden age” of indie RPGs, while noting that the same technological and cultural forces that enabled it also threatened to bring it to an end.²⁴

In video games, the independent RPG expanded alongside the broader rise of indie development, which offered an alternative during periods when large-budget production stagnated and revived genres many had thought dead.²⁶ Digital storefronts and bundle services lowered the barrier to publishing so far that the market became saturated, making it easy to release a game but difficult to have one noticed.²⁶ Amid this flood, auteur-driven successes demonstrated that a single developer or small team could reach a wide audience, the most prominent example being Toby Fox’s Undertale, a breakout success that few had anticipated.²⁶²⁷ Later independent RPGs frequently retained a small team and authorial control even when working with a publisher for distribution, as with the surrealist JRPG-influenced YIIK: A Postmodern RPG and the dialogue-driven Disco Elysium, the latter widely regarded as a spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment.²⁵ The subsequent years brought a steady stream of independently made RPGs across turn-based, tactical, roguelite, and action styles, many released first as demos or in early-access form so that developers could refine them through player feedback.²⁸

The video game RPG entered a period of sustained commercial and critical prominence in the 2000s and 2010s, a shift that later commentators traced in part to the genre’s move onto home consoles, where it reached audiences far beyond the personal-computer players who had defined its early decades.²⁹ Although the genre’s beginnings had been on PCs with text-based adventures, it was the transition to consoles—and the original Xbox in particular—that brought Western RPGs mainstream acclaim by placing them in the hands of millions of players.²⁹ Bethesda?’s The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, released in November 2002, was among the titles credited with this crossover: appearing on Xbox as well as PC, it opened up its world to freer exploration, deemphasized its main story, and let players choose their race, class, and other statistics before setting out across the island of Vvardenfell, becoming an inspiration for many of the open-world RPGs that followed.²⁹

The consolidation of the modern console RPG coincided with a broadening of the genre into recognizable regional traditions and subgenres. By this period the distinction between the Western RPG and the Japanese RPG had become the dominant way of describing the form, replacing earlier references to the platform a game ran on.¹¹ Western RPGs, typically developed in the Americas or Europe, tended toward open-ended structures that let players choose how and in what order to approach quests, offered character creation from a “blank slate,” and included extensive dialogue options—often with moral or immoral choices—that allowed players to influence the course of the story.¹¹ Their combat generally took place in real time on the same screen as the rest of the gameplay, and their tone was frequently more serious, with older protagonists.¹¹ Japanese RPGs, by contrast, usually featured a fixed, charismatic protagonist with limited customization, more linear pacing, younger characters, and a travelling party, and most relied on turn-based combat in which players selected commands from a menu, with older titles staging random encounters on a separate battle screen.¹¹ Major Western examples cited include the Fallout and Mass Effect series, Skyrim?, and The Witcher 3?, while the Final Fantasy series, the Persona series, and Chrono Trigger were held up as defining JRPGs.¹¹

The period also saw the entrenchment of RPG subgenres, foremost among them the action RPG, a role-playing game with a heavy emphasis on combat in which the player’s real-time actions determine success, exemplified by titles such as Skyrim?.¹¹ Contemporary criteria for classifying a game as a proper RPG hardened around three features: character progression through experience points and leveling, combat outcomes governed by character statistics rather than by the player’s reflexes alone, and a variety of freely chosen equipment and items.¹¹ On these grounds Fallout 3 was treated as a paradigmatic RPG—players allot skill points at the outset, earn more by completing quests, and see stats such as strength affect combat—whereas action-adventure games like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which lack intrinsic stat-based progression and freely selectable equipment, were excluded from the category.¹¹ So pervasive did RPG systems become that even titles outside the genre, such as the shooter Destiny 2, were noted for owing their addictive leveling and loot-progression mechanics to RPG origins.²⁹

The 2020s

The RPG entered the 2020s amid growing anticipation for both tabletop and video game releases, with community “most anticipated” lists cataloguing a broad slate of new systems and titles across the two forms.³²³⁰ In tabletop, the year’s most eagerly awaited releases included the fifth edition of Vampire: The Masquerade, the fourth edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, RuneQuest: Role-playing in Glorantha, The Witcher Roleplaying Game, and the second volume of the Numenera line, Numenera 2: Discovery & Destiny.³² The preceding year’s list had been headed by the Savage Worlds Adventure Edition and the second edition of Pathfinder, indicating the continued vitality of both established systems and new licensed properties as the decade began.³²

The independent tabletop scene entered the decade in the midst of what commentators within the community described as a “golden age,” a period shaped by successive booms in actual-play streaming, the migration of communities to the storefront itch.io? and to Twitter, and the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic?.³⁰ The pandemic accelerated the growth of solo journaling games and drove a second wave of actual-play shows that brought new participants to the hobby, while community responses such as the Bundle for Racial Justice and organizing efforts including Session Zero Con and the #RPGSEA hashtag reshaped who was making and playing games.³⁰ In 2023 the controversy over Wizards of the Coast’s proposed changes to the Open Game License further galvanized independent creators, even as observers cautioned that the same technological and cultural forces enabling the boom threatened to bring it to an end.³⁰ By this point the Powered by the Apocalypse framework introduced by Apocalypse World in 2010 had become the most influential school of design in the hobby, with itch.io listing more than four hundred works carrying the PbtA tag and DriveThruRPG nearly two thousand.³⁰

In video games, the decade opened with a continuing tension between large-budget production and independent development, the latter offering an alternative when big-budget output stagnated and reviving genres many had thought dead.⁸ Digital storefronts and bundle services had lowered the barrier to publishing so far that the market became saturated, making it easy to release a game but difficult to have one noticed.⁸ Independent developers frequently released their RPGs first as demos or in early-access form so that they could refine them through player feedback, a practice visible across the turn-based, tactical, roguelite, and action styles that dominated the independent output of the period.³¹ Anticipated indie projects entering development around the start of the decade spanned post-apocalyptic action RPGs such as Death Trash, party-based computer RPGs drawing on the Open Game License such as Realms Beyond: Ashes of the Fallen, and tactical and turn-based titles influenced by EarthBound and other classic JRPGs.³¹

The most prominent single event of the decade in the role-playing space was the release of Larian Studios’ Baldur’s Gate III, which met with universal acclaim and demonstrated that the isometric computer RPG could still appeal to a modern mass audience.¹⁰ Its success followed directly from Larian’s earlier Divinity: Original Sin II, whose four-player cooperative play and extensive customization had propelled the studio toward the project.³⁴ Community discussion in the mid-2020s frequently held it up among the best RPGs of the decade, alongside titles such as Divinity: Original Sin II, and as an emblem of a possible resurgence for a genre whose mainstream popularity had waned in the late 2010s.³⁵¹⁰ Other works of the decade cited as favorites within the RPG community included FromSoftware’s Elden Ring, the French-developed Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Lies of P, and Triangle Strategy.³³

By 2026 the genre’s leading works spanned an unusually wide range of subgenres and platforms, from the isometric action RPG Diablo IV and the CRPG Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous to tactical entries such as Unicorn Overlord and the long-running MMORPG World of Warcraft, still active more than two decades after its 2004 launch.³⁴ Contemporary critics characterized the RPG chiefly by its capacity to let players shape a character—through the way they interacted with a virtual world, the skills they developed, and the story they could influence—a definition that encompassed both dedicated role-playing games and titles such as Assassin’s Creed Shadows, which extended the RPG direction Ubisoft had introduced with Assassin’s Creed Odyssey into a feudal-Japan open world.³⁴ New JRPGs such as Octopath Traveler 0, released in December 2025 with a custom protagonist and expanded eight-member party, continued to refine the turn-based traditions established decades earlier.³⁴