I've been turning this over in my head a lot since I initially read it a few days ago, since I've had thoughts about it also. I suspect some of the TTRPG appeal to conservatives/fascists/what have you comes from a mix of some of the below:
- TTRPG origins in and overlap with things like wargaming, which in turn has overlap with military history nerds, which in turn has a venn diagram overlap with the fash
- Game design around immutable and measurable race (and sometimes gender) characteristics
- Ability to take refuge in the misguided notion that something being "historical" or "medieval fantasy" means excluding broad categories of people from agency
- Stories focused around combat, which probably has some appeal to people who are really invested in the concept of might making right
- And probably the most important one: TTRPG players haven't run enough of them out of the hobby
I'm really serious about the last one, because there's that saying about how if you don't chase a Nazi or two out of your bar, suddenly it's a Nazi bar? I think, essentially—the problem really is that a lot of gamers are kind of wishy-washy about icing people out—like, a lot of people were nerds who got excluded a lot growing up, so it's really hard to convince a lot of adult nerds that they should do that to someone else, even if the "someone else" genuinely sucks and is a literal fascist.
Like, don't get me wrong, I agree that there are absolutely ways in which this is a design problem insofar as I direly want to delete any reference to "race" as a mechanical concept, because that shit deserves to die off. I think TTRPGs could also stand to rethink the relationship they have to violence and colonialism and branch away from those things. But I'm not kidding about earnestly thinking the solution is to make facists feel incredibly unwelcome and unsafe in gamer spaces, which will probably need to involve convincing people in more "mainstream" TTRPG spaces to stop straddling the fence and help out.