I wrote this at Robert S. Conley's blog - I did play war games in the sixties but then it wasn't until the early nineties that I got into D&D. So that transition always fascinated me. Possibly war gaming led to fantasy war gaming which invited role playing which is the actual quantum shift between war gaming and D&D. Nobody was thinking about character motivation at Gettysburg but then in D&D it arrives as a full blown central feature because, of course, players are going to think about why their elf did this or their dwarf did that.