Tony Vargas
Legend
It's proof that D&D was cribbed straight from Tolkien, as the 4e Ranger is /clearly/ a knock-off of Legolas! It does all kinds of the crazy tricks he did in the movies!
D&D 5E Which parts of D&D came from Tolkien?
Parmandur
Book-Friend
You just, but...actually, the LotR mojo is strong in 4E. I would postulate the 4E Warlord also comes from wanting to play Aragorn, movie Aragorn rather than book Aragorn.
Tony Vargas
Legend
And 300, too - and, heck action movies a fantasy game had no business wanting to emulate.
4e mined movies the way 1e mined literature.
I think the warlord is excellent for book Aragorn! Aragorn's presence inspires his fellows and turns the tide of battle.
Parmandur
Book-Friend
I mean, it works: but the powers in the 4E PHB struck me, when I played one, as specific call outs to the movie scenes.
Fair enough.
The only LotR call-out I (think I) remember is a ranger archer "stab-em-with-an-arrow" ability. But that's probably about my trope uptake rather than the presence of those tropes!
A slightly different thought on 4e and LotR: once you get above mid-paragon, your abilities are not well-matched at all to the LotR flavour (eg flying; teleporting; defeating hordes of orcs single-handedly; etc). I think I could use 4e to run a fairly Tolkien-esque game, but I'd need to keep it in Heroic (and perhaps lower paragon) tier; obviously exclude quite a few races and classes; use inherent bonuses; and probably change the XP system too.
(Maybe non-coincidently, these nearly all these are features of my expectations for my 4e Dark Sun game. Upper-level 4e makes big assumptions about the cosmological scope of the game which don't fit more "grounded" or low-scale settings.)
Green Dragon
First Post
The Good-Evil alignments.
Lehrbuch
First Post
That is probably true. Tolkien's work has a pretty definite "these are good characters/races and these are evil ones" in a way that actually seems pretty unusual in fantasy literature, at least prior to him.
Of course, the Chaotic-Lawful alignment axis seems certainly inspired by Moorcock (albeit perhaps missing the substance of Moorcock's ideas).
Ideas around planar travel and a multiverse also seem very inspired by Moorcock.
prosfilaes
Adventurer
But D&D started out with just the Lawful-Chaotic axis, and Good v. Evil is hardly very distinctive to Tolkien. The races are notably Tolkien, but "there's bad guys and it's okay to beat them up" permeates pop culture works long before Tolkien, and is very convenient for old-school D&D games. You go into the dungeon, you run into the bad guys, and you kill them, and at no point does worrying about the ethics of killing a tribe of orcs have to take away from the strategy and puzzle-solving.
Lehrbuch
First Post
I'm not sure that it does predate Tolkien? The idea that a race could have an alignment, and be an inherently evil (or good) race, seems quite unusual to me. Especially for "humanoid" races. Pre-Tolkien fantasy literature obviously has inherently evil individual creatures (dragons, for example) but not so much with entire humanoid species.
I guess maybe things like vampires are often portrayed as inherently and irredeemably evil. But also prior to mid/late 20th century tended to appear as individual "monsters" rather than as a species/society. And once vampire literature started to include ideas of a vampire society it also started to be less bipolar in morality.
Lovecraft does get close to "evil" races...but these are more "alien" than "evil".
