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Interesting question! In fact, we can say that one of the interesting developments in the history of roleplaying games is how they came to be roleplaying games at all, when that may not have been the original intention.

The term "roleplaying game" predates Dungeons & Dragons by decades. With specific connection to gaming, it had been used since the 1950s to describe professional political-military simulations in which the participants were assigned roles and were asked to behave in accordance with them. E.g., for a "roleplaying" simulation of a Cold War crisis conducted by American military officers, academics, politicians, and diplomatic personnel, someone might be assigned the role of the American National Security Advisor, the Soviet foreign minister, an allied tactical commander on the scene, a neutral head of state, etc. For the simulation to succeed, they had to act in these roles using appropriate information, motivation, doctrine, etc.--not their worldview as faithful servants of the American government! These simulations often involved rules--even dice--and generated a narrative, although that was normally not their purpose. (Even earlier, the term had been used in the context of psychological therapy to describe techniques in which a patient attempts to take on the perspective of another person. E.g., "You've said a lot about how you feel about your wife, but imagine that you are your wife and tell me how she might feel about you . . . .")

On the other hand, although we all know D&D is a roleplaying game, it did not initially describe itself in those terms even though they were available. Indeed, in Playing at the World and more particularly his later and shorter book The Elusive Shift (both of which are essential to this discussion), game historian Jon Peterson argues that roleplaying was not an obvious aspect of D&D and notably not mentioned in the rules. Right on the box, it said: Dungeons & Dragons: Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures. It did not tell you to pretend to be a wizard and utter in-character dialogue, nor for that matter that you were going to participate in improvising a story. It was possible to play D&D somewhat like you would play chess: this piece moves here and has an interaction with that piece, with the difference that a referee was there to administer the rules and if necessary make them up. Rather, the idea of roleplaying (identifying strongly with this particular game piece, perhaps speaking in-character or trying to act based on "what the character would know") it was brought to the game by communities of players who got it from somewhere else.

Certainly there were precursors in hobby gaming although the term "roleplaying" had not been used.

Hobby wargaming is one obvious place to look, since the creators of D&D (i.e., Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson, and their respective Lake Geneva and Twin Cities circles) were both hobby wargamers and D&D billed itself as Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns.

Since the mid-60s, at least as part of advertising copy, hobby wargames had encouraged the player to identify somewhat with the historical commanders. The front cover of Tactics II (1961) published by Avalon Hill announced "Now YOU command an Army Group in this Classic Game of Military Chess." (In fact, this formula was ubiquitous on Avalon Hill offerings in this period.) In time, the identification with a particular character grew more specific. The instructions for the 1965 title The Battle of the Bulge began:

Let's turn back the pages of history . . . to that bitter December of 1944. YOU are there. YOU are Brigadier General McAuliffe. Your 101st Airborne Division is hopelessly encircled at Bastogne. The German commander demands that you surrender or face complete annihilation.

Your reply note reads, "NUTS--the American Commander."

Truly one of the most inspiring rebuffs in the annals of American history--the Americans held out.

Now, today, you CAN be there . . . re-capturing history in a new battle game that was to D-Day what Gettysburg was to the American Civil War.

So even though the player who had taken the American side in the battle was sitting at a table looking at a map and moving counters around and rolling dice, still he was at some level encouraged to identify with a specific WWII general--who had been a technical advisor for the game, we should note. (What the player moving the German counters was supposed to imagine was not expressly stated--presumably he is the German commander who received the "Nuts" note. And the American player actually controls a lot more troops than McAuliffe did.) Similar admonitions were found on the games' boxes and in print advertisements. All the early roleplaying game designers and players (e.g., Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson plus their circles in Lake Geneva and the Twin Cities) were hobby wargamers, so this was in their background.

Indeed, we can say that some level of roleplaying is found in wargames to the extent that they constrain the player based on the information and possibilities open to the "actual commander" he may be representing. Notably, professional wargames of the 19th and 20th centuries frequently limited the information available to the players and presented it in "realistic ways." So in a professional naval wargame, instead of being able to look at the play area and see the pieces representing the enemy vessels, a player might be allowed to look for thirty seconds at a blurry photo and then be given two minutes to write down orders for the next move. There was a bit less of this in hobby wargaming, but at least the idea was there, and some player do seem to have pretended superficially to be Rommel or Robert E. Lee or whoever when playing the games.

Peterson also observes that during the Diplomacy boardgame craze of the 1960s, and particularly in postal play, players would sometimes go beyond the game's rather minimal rules and introduce elements of roleplaying into the interpersonal dealings that were key to successful play. So in this mode of play Alex, the player who'd been assigned Russia, would not just write Charles, the player controlling France, a bland letter along the lines of, "Chuck, I think if we work together we can take down Germany before he gets too strong, so please support my attacks . . . ." but rather something in-character along the lines of "Tsar Alexander of All the Russias sends his greetings to the eminent President Charles of the French Republic and begs the assistance of his great nation in confronting the treacherous Prussians, our common enemy . . . ." The player who administered the rules would not just report what pieces had moved where but might write short newspaper-type accounts as though a real war were going on.

An immediate Twin Cities predecessor of D&D was a style of wargame called Braunstein in which multiple players were each given roles and goals and identified with particular pieces, rather than simply commanding an army or part of one in a bilateral clash of arms. Dave Wesely, a friend of Arneson's, put the first of these together. Here we see the roleplaying element (rather like that in the political-military simulations) mixed with the furniture of hobby wargaming (miniatures, model terrain, dice) and a concept borrowed from older professional wargaming: a referee to adjudicate the game including situations not expressly resolved by the rules. (In hobby games like Avalon Hill titles and Diplomacy, the scope of action was more limited.) Wesely's games were set in Napoleonic Europe (a favorite of hobby wargamers) or Banana Republic-type settings. Arneson's medieval fantasy iteration was called Blackmoor. D&D was, in part, an attempt to codify Blackmoor.