This is the world of role-playing games. This hobby is not well-known outside of those who play. Such has been the image of these games due to a few TV movies and books from the early '80s. Role-playing games started as a branch of a much older form of game, the wargame. Wargames, which are still played today, usually consisted of fighting out historical battles by marching little lead figurines around on a map and rolling dice to determine who killed whom.
Chess is one of the earliest wargames.
When they began, wargames were for the rich, and didn't really gain a popular following until the beginning of this century. Role-playing games appeared when fantasy wargames, influenced heavily by J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, appeared. Instead of 19th-century soldiers, these games featured elves and dragons. Eventually, gamers reduced massive tabletop battles to small skirmishes, each player controlling a single figure. Finally, around the mid-'70s, rules were written that could do without the map and the figures, and just had people acting out parts.