It's amazing what influence D&D has made made for gaming in the fantasy genre, just like what Street Fighter II did for fighting games and what Wolfenstein 3d did for FPS games. If it wasn't for D&D, we wouldn't have had other tabletop games like Warhammer, Magic: The Gathering, Mage Knight, Dragon Dice, and numerous fantasy themed board games, as well as video games like Ultima, Might & Magic, Warcraft, Diablo, Elder Scrolls, and Everquest. All those games owe their existence to D&D.
D&D really opened the door for fantasy gaming
- Thread starter VGmaster9
- Start date
Rhun
First Post
This is certainly true. Though I would think that if D&D had never come to be, somebody else would have came up with the RPG idea eventually. But yes, without a doubt, lots of things owe their existence to D&D.
Good point, I'm sure Chainmail had a big impact on alot of fans of fantasy and miniature wargaming.
Also, there are other kinds of interesting videos that have the D&D type of setting, like Kingdom Under Fire and Defense of the Ancients, the latter being a Warcraft III mod that inspired League of Legends and Heroes of Newerth.
There are any number of innovations for which you can make the argument that *someone* was going to make them, eventually.
Fantasy wargaming, for example - D&D is itself an outgrowth of mundane wargames. Even without D&D, someone would have gone for a fantasy variant eventually, tossing the dragon Smaug against Panzers, and whatnot.
So, I don't know how much these games owe their existence to D&D, and how much they owe their forms to D&D. If similar things arose from slightly different roots, they might look a bit different.
Take orcs: Tolkien put forth orcs, D&D ran with them, and now they appear throughout other fantasy games of various types. But, if the fantasy genre leaked into these games from something less influenced by Tolkien, maybe that trope wouldn't be so widespread.
Fantasy wargaming, for example - D&D is itself an outgrowth of mundane wargames. Even without D&D, someone would have gone for a fantasy variant eventually, tossing the dragon Smaug against Panzers, and whatnot.
So, I don't know how much these games owe their existence to D&D, and how much they owe their forms to D&D. If similar things arose from slightly different roots, they might look a bit different.
Take orcs: Tolkien put forth orcs, D&D ran with them, and now they appear throughout other fantasy games of various types. But, if the fantasy genre leaked into these games from something less influenced by Tolkien, maybe that trope wouldn't be so widespread.
I would have surmised that wargaming covered a variety of time periods. The medieval time period would have been ripe for mixing with fantasy. Tolkien influenced gamers would have come up with recreating fantasy battles. Heck, wasn't that what happened to Chainmail, which then became D&D?
text adventures on the computer came about around 1975. Also inspired by Tolkien. These were the first computer RPGs. Its probable these would have continued to advance with game stats (hit points, skills, attributes), even if the pen and paper RPG concept never came to be.
Thunderfoot
Hero
Actually, Gary stated that other than general non-human fantasy and rangers, Tolkien had very little to do with D&D. He claimed influences of Leiber, Vance, Moorcock and Howard, which if you've read are obviously quite true. Thieves (and later rogues) owe almost their entire existence in D&D to Fahfard & The Grey Mouser (I love those books BTW). Obviously the entire original magic system owes its existence to Vance (i.e. the Vancian Magic System) and many of the warrior and magic tropes were much more in line with Elric and Conan than Gandalf and Aragorn.
It's kind of odd to me because many of the core D&D settings seem based around middle earth, like Dragonlance and FR's Faerun. As for magic, I thought it was centered around high magic and not S&S-style magic. I'm fairly new to the "Vancian" term.
Thunderfoot
Hero
It's possible both DL and FR were influenced by Tolkien, but neither one of those are part of the original D&D core. Gary had nothing to do with either of those worlds, Blackmoor and Greyhawk (pre-WotC) were much more gritty than either of the two later settings. D&D predates both of these by about 8 - 12 years, it's more a case of fans of Tolkien were influenced by D&D (or vice versa) and then wrote their own material which was added later.
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