A Brief History of Tolkien RPGs

[JeffB]

Um, right. D&D is about as suitable for playing Tolkien as it is for playing Conan.

IOW, not at all.

Gotta agree with this. And it's been argued to death since D&D's origins. While clearly there are some "borrowed" elements from Tolkien, so much of the D&D system would need to be re-written or completely thrown out (e.g. arcane & divine magic) to model middle earth, I don't see how anyone could come up with the conclusion that D&D works fine, but...

Personally while MERP did not model the world of ME in game mechanics all that well, I think ICE got the time period absolutely correct for best "play experience".

 

[Haltherrion]

Enjoyed the blog posts; thanks for bringing this up.

I have to say, as a ref and a player, as much as I truly love LOTR, I'm not dying to play in a true LOTR world (as opposed to one inspired by Tolkien's works.)

Why is that? Well, partly because as a ref, what I appreciate about Tolkien is how he created a cool world and frankly, world creation is what I love to do. I.e., I'd rather create my own world.

As a player, I'm more open to it but where do you insert yourself into Tolkien's world? After the LOTR? A friend of ours tried that and I guess the reception from me and the rest of the group was tepid at best. "What? all the elves have left? WHo is in charge of Lothlorien? The janitor? Is he the janitor king?"

You could do the war of the ring itself and that could be cool if handled well but certainly could be quite problemmatic in many ways. You could set it in the first age and that could be great but requires a lot of work on the ref's part.

 

[prosfilaes]

I'm a little skeptical that Middle Earth would have been a better license then Star Wars. Star Wars D6 and MERPS were both good games, but in my limited experience I saw more Star Wars D6 for sale and most people playing it than MERPS. Both make good licenses, but neither are going to make your company super-stars or challenge D&D. As for TSR picking up the Middle Earth license, I bet it would have been an overall negative for TSR; as yet another AD&D 2E world, many of the books would have sold to people who were buying TSR books, without increasing sales to those people, and not enough sales outside their dedicated customer base would have been generated to cover the license.

Oh, and The Complete Book of Gnomes and Halflings didn't sell because it took the two least interesting core races, gave them half the space, and then wasted space by running through every iteration of the race in any D&D world instead of giving us something exciting, not because it wasn't titled The Complete Book of Halflings and Gnomes.

 

[scourger]

...I got messed over in play testing it with some of my oldest players...

I had a similar experience playtesting a different game once upon a time. It seemed like such a good idea at the time. It wasn't.

Anyway, if I ever do anything like a LOTR, I would use Savage Worlds. I've thought of things as simple as playing out a skirmish with a hobbit, a dwarf, an elf, a ranger and a wizard as the hereos (using a certain box of prepainted minis) to a full campaign of "orcs of the ring" with the players taking on the roles of orcs hunting the ring (same adversaries as above).

There just never seemed to me to be much to do that wasn't already a story told in the Tolkien world. The last set of RPG books did have some good ideas for adventures seeds in the reign of King Aragorn--missions on which he might send the heroes. Otherwise, the main story is already told. Unless Sauron wins and there is a sort of Midnight-type game.

 

[daddystabz]

Midnight is freaking awesome and I'd play in a campaign in a heartbeat. Pathfinder or Legends of Anglerre (aka FATE 3.0) would work well for it I'd think.

 

[JacktheRabbit]

Does anybody know what the "wrong kind of money" remark in section VIII (near the end of part 3) is about?

I can think of two possible answers.

The first is a licensing item. A company that wants to survive long term does not do so making all its money on license products, especially in a market where those costs can rapidly climb or be taken away from you. It can make for an unsteady business model.

The second is personal. TSR, as it was called before and even after the name change to a degree, was a rather rough place from some of the comments I have heard. Lots of big personalities and if what I read is true at one point a leader (or leadership) that did not even respect gamers. So the wrong money may have meant (depending on who said it) that the wrong credit would have to be given and the head of the company would rather not make the money as opposed to giving credit for sucess to someone he (or she) did not like. Basically your typical stab in the back approach to the political office environment.

 

[kitsune9]

Interesting read.

 

[MortonStromgal]

* The physical product MIGHT look something like Warhammer 3. Not good.

* For "doing one thing but one thing well" he cites D&D4 and WHFRP3 as examples. Not good.

I hope they realize that WFRP 3 did one thing so well they are re-releasing the core in a new format without all the cards, tokens etc and are making them completely optional.

 

[Starman]

Oh, and The Complete Book of Gnomes and Halflings didn't sell because it took the two least interesting core races, gave them half the space, and then wasted space by running through every iteration of the race in any D&D world instead of giving us something exciting, not because it wasn't titled The Complete Book of Halflings and Gnomes.

That part of his post pinged pretty high on my Sarcasm Meter. I really doubt he was being serious there.

 

[Beginning of the End]

I think that Middle Earth provides an interesting enough setting that you could have dozens of interesting stories (even during the time of the book) with the opportunity for personal triumph or disaster.

There's an entire military campaign happening in the north which doesn't make it into LOTR at all (outside of vague references in the appendices). That's where I've always wanted to set an RPG campaign.

Other ME campaigns I've imagined include "The Cults of the Blue Wizards" (as alluded to elsewhere in the thread) and "The Other Fellowship" (in which we remove Gollum, generate a party of PCs, and then create a back-story in which the Ring comes into their possession -- immediately establishing that there is no canon and then seeing what happens).

For me, Middle Earth is a boring setting, because it is cosmologically simplistic.

Theres Sauron and co.
And theres the Good Guys.
And thats it.

Um... What?

Even if we ignore The Hobbit and The Silmarillion, LOTR's factions are rather more complicated than that.

That part of his post pinged pretty high on my Sarcasm Meter. I really doubt he was being serious there.

The article appears to be a transcript. I suspect quite a few things that people are getting outraged about were probably delivered in a light-hearted manner.

I think the idea that Gary substantially derived D&D from Tolkien is a popular assumption that doesn't stand up to scrutiny. You could argue that he downplayed Tolkien's role somewhat, but dismissing his accounts as lies or delusions is outrageous.

Two points:

(1) The original rulebooks are heavily inundated with Tolkien's creations.

(2) Every play report I've heard from people who gamed at Arneson's and Gygax's tables is also inundated with Tolkien's creations.

Gygax's claims in Dragon #95 that the Tolkien influences are both "minimal" and nothing more than a "superficial" marketing attempting is, frankly, an absurd attempt to revise the known history of the game. And the core of his argument (that you can't recreate Tolkien's works by playin D&D out-of-the-box and, therefore, there is no Tolkien influence on the game) is just painfully insulting.

I also find the entire editorial distasteful for its hypocrisy. He starts by voicing outrage at those who would assert Tolkien's influence on D&D without asking him about it, and then goes on to attack LOTR as an allegory of World War II (which Tolkien had frequently denied). You can either be outraged when people assume things about a work that the creator denies or you can make assumptions about a work that the creator has denied... You don't get to do both without looking like a hypocritical idiot.

Is D&D's fantasy milieu the result of "kitchen sinking" vast swaths of fantasy literature? Of course. Does Tolkien make up a rather considerable portion of that kitchen sink? Absolutely.