Col_Pladoh said:
After some thoughtful considreation, I believe that the Good Prpfessor probably would not have raised an objection. after all, he allowed the copyrights on the trilogy to expire, and thus the Ace Books release that caused such a furor.
I'm not sure that that argument is such a dunker, because in the UK copyrights don't need to be renewed, and Professor Tolkien might simply not have been aware of the (then) peculiarities of US copyright law.
On the other hand, if you read his 'Essay on Fairy Stories', and think about the comments about historical figures, myths, and literary inventions 'going into the pot' from which subsequent tellers draw the material for their tales, I think you come to the same conclusion. I think he would have felt honoured that his inventions had become such a prominent component of the flavour of storytelling in English.
Besides, he was a philologist, and knew enough about the history of words that he must have realised that it was absurd for someone to think of owning one.
Anyway, now that I am provoked to write, I have a question:
I have read that you did a lot of experimental play before the first release of D&D, tinkering with game features until you got things right. My question is, how systematic was this experiementation? Did you map out a possibility space and try the combinations systematically to discover what worked best? Or was it more of an incremmental approach, in which you started with a design that seemed intuitively right, tested it, and changed the things that seemed to work?
Regards,
Agback