D&D 5E Why D&D is not (just) Tolkien

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Sacrosanct]

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.

Arguably, I've often felt Dave's contributions were more important than Gary's, as far as "making the first RPG" goes.

 

[Mistwell]

Just to add fuel to the fires, this article from 1972 penned by Gygax.

And for some more fuel...

Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor and the Judges Guild’s City State of the Invincible Overlord both had a lot of connections to Middle Earth

Finally, consider Chainmail. Here is the note for the fantasy section of chainmail and note they only mention Tolkein and Howard, with Tokien mentioned first:

"Most of the fantastic battles related in novels more closely resemble medieval warfare than they do earlier or later forms of combat. Because of this we are including a brief set of rules which will allow the medieval miniatures wargamer to add a new facet to his hobby, and either refight the epic struggles related by J. R. R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, and other fantasy writers; or you can devise your own "world," and conduct fantastic campaigns and conflicts based on it. "

Second, this is the entire list of all the creatures listed:

Hobbits, sprites, Dwarves, gnomes, goblins, kobolds, Elves, fairies, orcs, Balrogs, ogres, trolls, Djinn, dragons, efreet, elementals, ents, giants, rocs, ghouls, heroes (including anti-heroes and super-heroes of the "Conan" type), shape changers, wights, wizards, wraiths (including Nazgul).

Some of that list is just listed as a parenthetical to something else. For example, gnomes are part of Dwarves. Pixies part of Sprites. Kobolds part of Goblins. Fairies as part of Elves. Nazgul as part of Wraiths. Cockatrice as part of Basilisk. Shape Changers as part of Lycanthropes. Griffons, Hippogriffs, and Wyverns are all part of Chimera. Ghouls part of Wights. Ogres as part of Trolls. So as you can see, once you actually look at the separate entries, it's a rather short list. And Tolkien-specific creatures make up a meaningful part of that list.

Now take a look at Leonard Patt's two page fantasy rules in the Courier, which are unquestionable a heavy influence on Chainmail. Yes, that's right, they're rules to re-create LOTR.

 

[Lanefan]

Arguably, I've often felt Dave's contributions were more important than Gary's, as far as "making the first RPG" goes.

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.

 

[Guest 6801328]

Just found this on Wikipedia. Of course we already knew that Morris was a big inspiration for Tolkien:

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.

 

[Celebrim]

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.

I think that is a very safe claim, especially when you start the claim by making really extreme claims about the position of the two groups.

...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 ...

Agreed, and of course, people can be wrong about specific claims.

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.

As I've said elsewhere, there are plenty of things that are not Tolkien in D&D and came from other influences. There are so many possible sources of the idea of magic, named, and even intelligent swords that it isn't possible to identify any one unique influence that created the idea within D&D. It could have come from one or many different sources, and unless you find an element of named magical swords that are unique to both the source material and D&D, you couldn't even name which was the principle.

The same however is not true of other aspects of the game, where we can identify an actual parent idea that inspired the D&D version.

But, for all you get correct, you yourself engage in one very bad piece of common but erroneous argument in your essay, 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. And while that seems like a very sound theory at first, and in isolation we might believe it, it ignores the possibility of mistranslations, misunderstandings and maladaptations in porting the source material over to D&D. Thus, for example, Tolkien's elves are immortal, while D&D's elves are merely very long lived. But this in itself doesn't prove that D&D's elves aren't Tolkien's elves, because the preponderance of the evidence - racial divisions, resistance to sleep, and so forth - suggests a Tolkien origin. Thus, even though there are plenty of elements about the D&D M-U that don't correspond to Gandalf, doesn't mean we can rule out Gandalf as the primary inspiration for a D&D M-U. We should certainly look at the works of Vance, but we shouldn't miss that invisibility, lightning bolt, pyrotechnics, fireball, knock, hold portal, light and others have their origin in Gandalf and that the original Wizard character in the wargaming rules that directly led to D&D was Gandalf.

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.

Just as it is dangerous to reason on the basis that "D&D 'is' Tolkien" that every element of it is Tolkien, so it is dangerous to reason that because "D&D is not Tolkien" that it must have some other basis.

The truth is that the "is" is the problem there. If you stop assuming that D&D "is" this thing or that, and just start listing where the various elements came from, you'll be on much safer ground.

 

[Guest 6801328]

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.

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.)

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 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"...)

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Arilyn]

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"...)

The wildly popular Disney movie, Frozen is based on The Snow Queen. The two have nothing in common, I mean nothing. But no Snow Queen, no Frozen.

Of course there are lots of non Tolkien material in DnD. But what we are arguing is that Gygax leapfrogged off of Tolkien' s popularity when he created DnD, no matter what he claimed later.

 

[Arilyn]

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.

Yes, Arneson was key to the creative end, but it took Gygax to market the game commercially.