Why weren't TTRPGs popularized centuries before video games? Large scale printing for complex rulebooks needed the printing press, but even then, it wouldn't justify taking off as late as the second half of the 20th century
A lot of it boils down to dumb luck. Hobbies resembling modern tabletop RPGs have come and gone before, but none of the ones that came before Dungeons & Dragons ever managed to blow up into a broader cultural phenomenon.
For example, tabletop American baseball simulators that use rules tech very similar to that of modern indie tabletop RPGs – complete with d66 rolls and Big Stupid Tables full of increasingly improbable random events – have been around since the 1880s, and by the mid 20th Century, dedicated players were using them to simulate entire virtual leagues in a way that would be instantly recognisable to modern indie RPG fans as a form of solo journalling RPG. Robert Coover's 1968 novel, The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop., dramatises the hobby in a way that strikingly pre-figures the later Satanic Panic's fearmongering about D&D players becoming so immersed in the game that they lose touch with reality – pre-dating D&D itself by over five years.
It never went anywhere from there. Such games still exist, but the hobby remains insular to this day; it just never stumbled into the right combination of time and place to grow beyond its roots. And it's not even the first time a niche hobby had approached something like modern tabletop RPGs and just never taken that final step. We can speculate about the whys and wherefores, but ultimately, a lot of it – ironically, given the subject matter – boils down to a cosmic roll of the dice.
(One of my favourite counterfactuals is speculating what the modern tabletop roleplaying hobby would look like in a world where it kicked off half a century early by growing out of tabletop American baseball simulators in the 1920s rather than historical wargames in the 1970s. Imagine!)
as an aficionado of the US Naval War College, their version is that they encouraged the 1970s version out of spite when their support apparatus in Rhode Island was shut down for, ironically, military minmaxing efficiency. Handing the general public technology that let you predict nation state developments had previously been kept under wraps
they will, obviously, deny it if you actually go to Newport and ask them, but this is old news to the town itself
I'm not saying I find any of this in any way credible, but "tabletop roleplaying games became a wider cultural phenomenon at the time and in the place that they did because the global military-industrial complex had been deliberately suppressing tabletop RPG 'technology', until the US Navy let the cat out of the bag in the 1970s due to an inter-departmental pissing contest" is a fascinating conspiracy theory.
