L
lowkey13
Guest
*Deleted by user*
This poll is totally going to end up a as a classic bell curve.
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.
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.
It's a little different than what you are assuming. It's not that because you can't simulate the Lord of the Rings (or the Hobbit) correctly, it's not Tolkien.
It's more that if you play OSR/1e/Holmes Basic, you end up with an exceptionally different experience that matches, much more closely, to the S&S model that Gygax preferred. You also see this in the published adventures at the time.
It's an observation that early D&D was more about re-creating a S&S game than it was high fantasy, and it happened to have some Tolkien thrown in to appeal to a wide spectrum of gamers. Yes, Brad, we know that you're going to play Legolas the Elf again.
That was the example I thought of. Gandalf didn't seem phased by Bilbo having a ring that turned him invisible, so such lesser rings much have existed, as well, without all the corruption of the One Ring, and telling the difference wasn't easy. The D&D Rings of Elemental Command each appear to be a lesser ring of some kind until their true powers are somehow unlocked or revealed....but lifted they were indeed because there are elements of the D&D elves that are found no where else but in Tolkien. That's the standard. lacking such an example there are just too many possible sources of the idea of a magic ring to latch on to any one. On the other hand, I've always had a suspicion that the source of the 'rings of elemental' command was ultimately the Elvish rings of power.
The original thief couldn't use a magic wand via trickery, and Thieves' Cant is an older idea than Zelazny... IIRC, Lieber's Grey Mouser shared the D&D Thief's preferences for armor & weapons, including favoring the sling over the bow, and dabbled in both linguistics and magic.By the same standard, I'd love to have your textual evidence that Zelazny is "for the most part" the source of the thief class given the prevalence of sneaky characters in literature - Cugel the Clever, for just one example. Definitive, or nearly definitive, textual evidence would be an example of a thief using a magic wand by way of trickery, speaking a secret thieves cant, and other oddities of the class that aren't common to the idea of thief being found in a single source.
Possibly, if there were still the media sensations over Satanism and suicide associated with it.That only seems to be disagreement with my first and lesser claim. (And even then, I would still argue that creating a medieval "rpg" is still not a "fantasy" rpg.) Even if they invented D&D exactly as it is, would it ever have become more popular than...well, than miniature wargaming itself was, in the absence of a huge Tolkien fan-base?
While I was technically alive for it, I certainly wasn't reading sci-fi/fantasy at the time, but what I've noticed is that there was a whole lot of Conan pastiche written in the 60s (Elric, for instance, was an intentional subversion of the formula), and the Tolkien pastiche started later...I lean towards the former. Heavily. Not that I discount Tolkien's work, but a lot of amazing work gets unappreciated and undiscovered. I again note that there was a whole priming of America with the genre of sci-fi and fantasy from the 20s on, and, most importantly ... things changed in the 60s, man.
Nonsense. I measure 4.5 biblions of influence, precisely.I contend that Tolkien influenced D&D in an amount that is completely immeasurable.
Well, 4.6 biblions would simply be absurd.Nonsense. I measure 4.5 biblions of influence, precisely.