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

[Celebrim]

To my mind this sort of begs the question (and this might be best as a separate topic, so forgive me and anyone should feel free to start one): what are the most recent fantasy fiction (from any media) influences on D&D?

It's almost easier to talk about D&D's influence on recent fantasy fiction, which to me, feels as pervasive as Tolkien's influence once was on fantasy. It used to be that in any fantasy novel, it was either based on Tolkien, or it was inspired by Tolkien, or it was a deliberate and conscious rejection of Tolkien. There is still some of that, but more often what I see is practically every new writer of speculative fiction comes to that profession through gaming, so that almost every story is either based on an RPG campaign, or it was inspired by an RPG campaign, or it has taken the lessons of an RPG campaign in world building and plotting and applied those to a new media. (I don't think we are to the point of conscious rejection of and rebellion from those tropes.)

But, if I could see a trend in where D&D is being pushed by the larger fantasy culture, it is more and more forward from the middle ages. This is often no more than drape changing, since almost nothing outside of Tolkien has actually been deeply ground in Medieval thought and literature, and mostly D&D has always struck me as a largely anachronistic setting with much of it culturally drawn from say the late 18th or early 19th century. This is most blatant for me in its approach to urban life, in how it imagines thieves, or pirates, or village life or really any specific of human culture. D&D has always been largely Dickensian with late medieval weaponry - the same sort of 'ancient' world that Disney fairy tales occur in, just with more warfare.

What more and more I see is giving up on any vestiges of a medieval reality, and firmly setting the game in the 19th century (and sometimes even, as in the case of Eberron, quite late into the 19th century and arguably even the early 20th). I think this happens because there are limits to how distantly removed from one's own time and culture one can imagine (without being a true scholar of that time, which usually involves learning dead languages). It's just easier to stretch ones imagination to possibly encompass Jane Austin or Dickens or Hugo or Dumas than it is to imagine the world of Beowulf or Chaucer or Dante (to say nothing of how few people have actually studied those things). And even if you can imagine it, fewer still want to or can empathize with a character from that culture. Throw in some boredom with the conventional settings, and you are seeing more and more fantasy set in the comparatively recent past.

I feel fairly safe in imagining that this trend will continue as even the 19th century becomes more and more difficult for people to imagine, and D&D gets gatling guns and explicit call outs to the stresses of the industrial revolution and other conflicts that went into shaping our prior culture (or maybe or just prior prior culture), and this will continue to influence D&D.

 

[ART!]

That's a great idea! I'll start it (in an earlier comment, I had theorized that World of Warcraft and Manga/Anime were having an influence, but that might just be me).

Thanks! The WoW aspects of 4E have been much-discussed, and some manga-anime sensibilities have definitely influenced at least the art and designs of D&D since 3E, and Pathfinder.

 

[Salamandyr]

Honestly, the more one reads the earlier, pre-Tolkien pastiche explosion fantasy, the less Tolkien feels like the progenitor of D&D. And that's the best part of these discussions, it gives us the opportunity to promote the works of Poul Anderson (probably the single greatest influence on D&D in my opinion), RE Howard, de Camp and Pratt, Fritz Leiber (whose "Lankhmar" wargame works as a sort of proto-RPG, and who was an earlier contributor to the Dragon, including a humorous attempt to explain tabletop wargames to Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser).

Just read "Three Hearts and Three Lions by Poul Anderson, almost the entirety of which has been lifted and transplanted into D&D, to see where the greater influence lies.

Seriously D&D would be missing halflings and orcs if you took away Tolkien, but it would still be what it is. Without Anderson, you'd have an entirely different game. It's as pivotal to D&D as Dumarest​ is to Traveller.

 

[Sacrosanct]

The Ranger-as-described-in-D&D is designed around facilitating playing as Aragon, though. Somebody said "I wanna play Aragorn," and the DM, whether Gygax, Arneson or one of the other old guard started Strider up for play.

Aragorn certainly inspired the creation of the ranger class, but that's completely different from saying that Tolkien "entirely created the ranger", which is what I disagreed with. Actual people with the job title "ranger", who worked alone patrolling the wilds, existed as early as the 1600s.

If it had been more inspired by Swords and Sorcery, we wouldn't have been able to create that list from Morrus' original thread.

Am I reading this right? Are you saying that if D&D was also inspired by S&S, then it would be impossible to come up with a list of things also inspired by Tolkien? That...doesn't make any sense. Sources of inspiration aren't mutually exclusive. I can say that the way D&D portrays elves, halflings, and dwarves are clearly from Tolkien, and say the way magic works is clearly Vance, and all these monsters are from various folklore and mythology, etc, etc.

Yes, Gygax downplayed Tolkien, but that happened later, when he was feeling pressured by accusations that his game borrowed heavily from "Lord of the Rings".

This is not true. As has already been pointed out earlier in the thread and the article linked to, Gygax downplayed Tolkien in 1974, before he felt any pressure.

And finally, nobody has said Tolkien created all the things in his books

Go read some of the responses again. I think you're either skipping many of them, or something. You obviously missed the one about Gygax's opinion on Tolkien in 1974 by your above statement, and with this one, you must have missed all of those comments from people who are saying Tolkien created all these things. What do you think "entirely made this himself" is supposed to mean?

 

[Sacrosanct]

Honestly, the more one reads the earlier, pre-Tolkien pastiche explosion fantasy, the less Tolkien feels like the progenitor of D&D. And that's the best part of these discussions, it gives us the opportunity to promote the works of Poul Anderson (probably the single greatest influence on D&D in my opinion), RE Howard, de Camp and Pratt, Fritz Leiber (whose "Lankhmar" wargame works as a sort of proto-RPG, and who was an earlier contributor to the Dragon, including a humorous attempt to explain tabletop wargames to Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser).

Just read "Three Hearts and Three Lions by Poul Anderson, almost the entirety of which has been lifted and transplanted into D&D, to see where the greater influence lies.

Seriously D&D would be missing halflings and orcs if you took away Tolkien, but it would still be what it is. Without Anderson, you'd have an entirely different game. It's as pivotal to D&D as Dumarest​ is to Traveller.

Well, I think the game would look much different without halflings, dwarves, and elves (all three are pretty much Tolkien). Gary was very human centric anyway, so we'd see the game with a much more human angle than we already did. But we'd still have orcs. The name orc comes from Beowulf, and in folklore, orcs were monstrous humanoids. So they would still be in D&D without Tolkien. Original D&D orcs looked nothing like Tolkien's orcs anyway.

But to your point, I agree with you. It's like the comment I made way early on. More people are familiar with Tolkien than with Poul Anderson, by a large amount I'm guessing. I imagine there is a LOT of confirmation bias going on as to what parts of D&D were inspired by who because of that bias and the fact that most people never read Poul. So they assume it was from what they are familiar with, like Tolkien. And then as D&D grew, and people got hired on to create more material, that confirmation bias became official. Like how orcs changed from nothing like Tolkien, to now being almost exactly like Tolkien.

 

[ART!]

Like how orcs changed from nothing like Tolkien, to now being almost exactly like Tolkien.

That's funny. We probably have the popularity of the LOTR movies to blame for that. I wonder how much of modern D&D's influences are those movies and their ilk...

 

[Salamandyr]

Well, I think the game would look much different without halflings, dwarves, and elves (all three are pretty much Tolkien).

D&D would still have dwarves and elves, though dwarves might be written dwarfs. While D&D dwarves look a lot like Tolkien's dwarves, that's because both draw from the same well...Northern European mythology but D&D elves are nothing like the Tolkien's elves. For one thing...Tolkien's elves are about 2 feet taller. And both are found in Anderson's work, not to mention Dunsany. D&D elves bear some resemblance to the elves of The Hobbit, but that is more because Tolkien was working more closely to the source material (Northern European folklore) than he did in Lord of the Rings. Elves show up in 3H&3L too; and, another tie in. In there, they're soulless, as they are in old D&D (elves had spirits back in the day).

Not sure about Orc though; while yes, the name predates Tolkien (other than Hobbits, pretty much everything Tolkien wrote was drawn from folkloric sources) and Tolkien would obviously know Beowulf way better than me, I don't think it'd be the popular term of art it is these days; Gygax probably knew it, but I doubt it would have overshadowed "goblins" as the pre-eminent humanoid monster if not for Tolkien.

 

[Sacrosanct]

That's funny. We probably have the popularity of the LOTR movies to blame for that. I wonder how much of modern D&D's influences are those movies and their ilk...

I'm sure the movies probably had an influence on some level, but with orcs (and other things), it happened way before the movies. Which goes back to my opinion that it was because as D&D took off in the early 80s, many of the people they hired began to portray orcs (and other things) as they recognized them from Tolkien. For example, here is the early orc, nothing like Tolkien:

And only a few years later, they began to look like this:

 

[akr71]

AD&D orcs (the pig head ones above) were not much tougher than goblins which feels about right for LotR. The current orcs feel more like Urak-hai in their size and toughness and resemble IMO World of Warcraft orcs. I did not play 3e or 4e and don't play WoW so I can't offer an opinion on which influenced which...

It feels to me that a single 5e orc wandering into a village could very nearly decimate it, single handed. The one in the AD&D Monster Manual would be not much more than a nuisance - deadly sure, but likely dealt with in short order. Again these are just my opinions - so take it for what its worth and feel free to disagree.

 

[ART!]

Technically, there are several kinds of orcs and orc-men in Tolkien, but for the most part there are the smaller, ganglier orcs or goblins, and then the larger uruk-hai with more human-like proportions.

Those early D&D orcs look like D&D kobolds, and it sounds like they filled much the same role.