Role-playing Games, or RPGs, emerged as a formalised, rules-based genre in the early 1970s. They developed from tabletop miniature war games – the combination of ‘toy soldiers’ and actual military strategy played with model armies. The innovation of Dungeons & Dragons (1974) was that, instead of controlling a cohort of combatants, the player assumed the role of a single character. Battles could still occur, but became episodes within a larger improvised narrative, with actions resolved by the roll of dice and overseen by a referee known, in Dungeons & Dragons, as the Dungeon Master. 

Originally based around paper, dice and conversation – hence ‘tabletop RPGs’ – the form was soon adapted into, and co-evolved with, computer gaming technology and culture as it developed in the late 1970s and 80s. The mass connectivity of the internet age ushered in RPGs played by vast numbers of participants: Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, or MMORPGs.