Conan would not creep down dungeon corridors poking things with a ten foot pole. I can't see him and any buddies he might have mapping out every square inch either
at no point were swords and sorcery heroes ever like beginning DnD characters.
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And all that careful dungeon crawling? The maps, the long lists of equipment?, the players spending an hour figuring out the best way to get through a trap laden room? Not swords and sorcery. Another missing trope is the fluctuating fortune of the characters. Rich warlord in this story, destitute slave in the next. It's not a slow accumulation of wealth, which the characters eventually can use to build strongholds and hire followers. It's up and down. That Dragon hoarde you just won? Not going to last...
Agreed.
In the closing pages of his AD&D PHB (before the appendices), Gygax gives advice under the heading "Successful Adventuring". The advice is all about preparation (equipment, spell load outs, putting together the right team of PCs), then careful exploration and mapping, and about the importance of setting and sticking to a goal for the mission. A game played along those lines won't resemble REH Conan stories one bit: Conan rarely has any equipment, does not carefully explore or map (eg Queen of the Black Coast starts with him jumping his horse onto a ship bound who-knows-where to escape pursuing guards; The Tower of the Elephant has him decide to loot the wizard's tower virtually on a whim), and rarely has any clear goal that he sticks to (eg in Tower of the Elephant he starts out wanting to loot the tower but ends up saving an alien being from enslavement and becoming an instrument of cosmic justice).
Then there is his example of play in his DMG, which looks absolutely nothing like a Conan story.
Classic D&D, played in a way the reflects the advice and adventures written by Gygax, looks like a tactical wargame. (Which hardly seems surprising.)
About what was being published in the 70s? Tournament dungeons.
Which don't look S&S-ish. They are wargaming scenarios, either literally (the Giants) or in dungeon-exploration mode (Tomb of Horrors, Ghost Tower, etc).
stories about dozens of protagonists dying like flies certainly doesn't scream "big bad heroes here" the way pulp stories do. And funnily enough, endless converstations about who is setting watch, and when, worrying about every day of food and water and avoiding encounters does sound a lot like The Hobbit or AD&D.
As you point to, resource management is a huge part of classic D&D play. It factors very heavily into the "exploration" aspect of the game. And resource management figures barely at all in Conan stories.
D&D mechanics are all about shorter, fast paced adventures and larger than life heroes. Those are things that clearly support exactly what he said because that was most assured not how Tolkien wrote, but match Liber, Howard, et all.
The overwhelming majority of D&D adventures were completed in a couple sessions that took from a day to maybe a week or so to complete—the same amount of time as most of the individual stories of Elric, Fafhrd, and Conan.
If you can only come up with one example from several authors and dozens of stories that do fit that pace, then it doesn’t exactly support your position.
Hour of the Dragon is another REH Conan story that unfolds over a significant period of time. A Witch Shall be Born is another. This is from memory - I haven't gone back to look over them to see how many others fit this description. (The Scarlet Citadel happens over multiple weeks, but is not as extended as the others I and [MENTION=40166]prosfilaes[/MENTION] mentioned.)
The quote you posted from Gygax didn't use the phrase "fast paced", but if he did use that phrase I would assume him to be talking about the
writing rather than the rate of passage of ingame events. REH's writing is manifestly more fast-paced than Tolkien's. Presumably Gygax would have agreed with Moorcock's criticism of JRRT in "
Epic Pooh".
Compared to the creatures Conan, Fafhrd, The Grey Mouser, and Elric were fighting on a regular basis, Tolkien characters were very much not the larger than life epic heroes.
REH's Conan fights humans, giant snakes, the occasional undead wizard, were-hyenas, living statutes, and the odd abomination from another dimension (eg the demon in Phoenix on the Sword, the plant with its roots in hell in The Scarlet Citadel). JRRT's characters fight orcs (ie humans in funny make-up), worgs (comparable to were-hyenas, I guess), trolls (comparable to living statues, I would say), some ancient undead kings, and ancient abominations like Shelob. I don't see the huge contrast, to be honest.
By the time PCs gained a few levels (fighters were called heroes at 4th level), they very much were doing over the top things. And when they reached name level, there is no question. PCs were fighting and beating dragons, fighters could take as much punishment as several war horses, magic users were throwing around fireballs and polymorphing, thieves and assassins were scaling sheer walls and were near invisible.
An 11th level AD&D thief has earned 220,000 XP, similar to a name level fighter's 250,000.
That character has the following thieving skills:
Pick Pockets 90% (+ DEX mod, up to 10% at 18 DEX, -5% for each level of the target above 3rd);
Open Locks 72% (+ DEX mod, up to 15% at 18 DEX);
Find/Remove Traps 70% (+ DEX mod, up to 5% at 18 DEX);
Move Silently 86% (+ DEX mod, up to 10% at 18 DEX);
Hide in Shadows 70%(+ DEX mod, up to 10% at 18 DEX);
Hear Noise 35%;
Climb Walls 99.1% (which, if the DMG rules are used, becomes 98.2% on slightly slippery walls, and 91% on slippery walls - a failed check means "the thief has slipped and fallen");
Read Languages 55%;
Read Scrolls 75%.
That character is not "near invisible" (a Cloak of Elvenkind is a fairly common item that the treasure tables present as being at the lower power level which generally gives better chances of hiding in shadows); and if scaling a slippery sheer surface has a good chance to take a fall.
AD&D thieves and assassins are not really "larger than life".
