Tabletop role-playing games in Japan

Japanese-made tabletop role-playing games first emerged during the 1980s. Instead of "tabletop", they are referred to in Japanese as tabletalk RPGs (テーブルトークRPG, tēburutōku āru pī jī) (often shortened as TRPG), a wasei-eigo term meant to distinguish them from role-playing video games, which are popular in Japan. Today, there are hundreds of Japanese-designed tabletop role-playing games as well as games translated into Japanese.

In the 1970s, role-playing games received little to no attention in Japan because they only had English titles. However, several gaming magazines and computer magazines started introducing role-playing games in the early 1980s.

Some of the earliest Japanese RPGs were science fiction titles, including Donkey Commando in 1982 and Enterprise: Role Play Game in Star Trek in 1983. Traveller was the first translated RPG in 1984, with Dungeons & Dragons (Mentzer basic red box edition) following in 1985. One of the earliest Japanese-designed traditional fantasy RPGs was titled Roads to Lord, published in 1984.

In the late 1980s, role-playing video games such as Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy helped popularize tabletop role-playing games in Japan.

Around the same time, the Japanese game publisher Group SNE pioneered a new book genre called replays. Replays are logs of TRPG play sessions, arranged for publication in a similar style to light novels. The first replay, Record of Lodoss War, was a replay of Dungeons & Dragons that was published in Comptiq magazine beginning in 1986. It became a popular series, which led to increased interest in the fantasy genre.

Sword World RPG was published in 1989 and became popular very quickly. The Forcelia setting includes Lodoss island from the replay Record of Lodoss War. Sword World RPG had a flexible multi-class system. It only uses 6-sided dice, since other polyhedral dice were uncommon in 1989, especially in rural Japan. The paperback (bunkobon) rulebooks were inexpensive and portable.

Notable role-playing games in the mid-late 1980s and early 1990s included:

In the mid to late 1990s, trading card games (TCGs) surpassed tabletop role-playing games in popularity, and most Japanese TRPG magazines were either transformed into TCG magazines or discontinued.