L
lowkey13
Guest
*Deleted by user*
Arghh! No!
Fantasy Wargaming was based off of many influences. There were different strands popping up. The primary influence was, of course, Wargaming in general, followed by medieval wargaming (but I suppose that should go without saying!).
Chainmail, however, was explicitly modeled after a particular game- Patt's Battle of Pellenore Fields. Which is why the Chainmail rules explicitly incorporated the Tolkien references. But it's also why it had additional references to expand to non-Tolkien ideas (the inclusion of the Poul Anderson Trolls, also explicitly namedropped).
Chainmail wasn't really RPG, either. Seriously- I have a copy- you should read it. There's a massive gulf between Chainmail and OSR.
It was Arneson's contribution, codified and then expanded by Gygax, that turned it into an RPG of the sort we would recognize.
And Arneson was influenced heavily by Wesely's Braunstein game, which may or may not have been the first RPG ever (and, in a way, also the first LARP) but was certainly very early.Arguably, I've often felt Dave's contributions were more important than Gary's, as far as "making the first RPG" goes.
In its original usage the word wight described a living human being.[3] More recently, the word has been used within the fantasy genre of literature to describe undead: corpses with a part of their decayed soul still in residence, often draining life from their victims. The earliest example of this usage in English is in William Morris's translation of the Grettis Saga, where draug is translated as "barrow wight". Notable later examples include the undead Barrow-wights from the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, the reanimated creatures killed by the Others from the works of George R. R. Martin and in the HBO adaption of A Song of Ice and Fire, and the level-draining wights of Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game franchise.
So I am going to put forth a slightly different theory- that the actual borrowings of Tolkien are less than what Group A would believe, but the impact of Tolkien on the evolution of D&D is greater than what Group B believes.
...but there is a danger in extrapolation. We know that Gygax (and Arneson) were prolific borrowers. We know the origin of the Monk class. We know the origin of the Cleric class. We know that neither of those came from Tolkien ...
We know that named magic swords have a long history in myth (ahem, EXCALIBUR) yet people say those came from This is the danger of starting with what you know to be true (that D&D is Tolkien) and trying to reason toward your conclusion. Instead of seeing early D&D for what it was, you try to map everything on to Tolkien. D&D wasn't Tolkien, it was an early example of remix culture, where the early gamers were just throwing everything (Myths, Lieber, Howard, Lovecraft, Movies, TV, whatever) into a blender and seeing what came out.
and that is the idea that if early D&D couldn't be used to simulate the story of the Lord of the Rings correctly, then perforce the origin of the material isn't Tolkien.
My personal suspicion is that Gygax himself would have preferred a fantasy world that was more directly medieval and inspired by the real world. Van Helsing in the background or not, his original clerics seem to have been Catholic inspired priests, and he seems somewhat annoyed to have to specify which deity that they worshiped. In the same way, I'm not sure he would have brought in halflings, elves, and dwarves all that happily on his own, but certainly his player base was excited by it and he bowed to that pressure.
I'll also add that The One Ring, which is very explicitly designed from the ground up to turn Tolkien into an RPG, also cannot simulate the story of the Lord of the Rings correctly. (Nothing against the game itself, which I love.)
I would believe that. It jibes with the possibility that D&D would have foundered and disappeared if it hadn't explicitly catered to Tolkien fans.
Honestly I'm kinda shocked that whether or not it was a big influence is even being debated. Sure, you can come up with a plausible alternative story for each element in the endless list of similarities, but at some point you have to look at the length of that list and ask yourself if you feel lucky. Well, do you punk?
(What? I just made that up on my own, out of the blue. I thought it had a nice ring to it. I, uh, was listening to Sex Pistols while typing, which is why I was thinking about "punk"...)
And Arneson was influenced heavily by Wesely's Braunstein game, which may or may not have been the first RPG ever (and, in a way, also the first LARP) but was certainly very early.
What Braunstein was not, however, was fantasy. It's set in real-ish world Europe during the 1700's (?) - I've played it* but forget some of the specifics now.
* - at GenCon '09, running on about 36 hours without sleep. Wesely was game master.