Because people relate to it? I think that is the answer. And it is enjoyable for most. The fact that you are so tired of them might mean you are tired of fantasy. I mean, you have a problem with tropes. You can't stand the original Tolkien races. Maybe you just don't like fantasy right now. Play a cowboy game or one that uses dogs as characters or Masquerade. Maybe after a year or so it'll get some of its allure back.
I love fantasy. I just don't love fantasy that
exclusively restricts races to "the ones that were members of the Fellowship of the Ring, even though there are no Rings and we call them different names and they were created by different beings etc. etc. etc."
We will just have to agree to disagree on this. In my opinion, D&D is nothing like Tolkien. <differences snop> I just don't see what you keep insisting.
I didn't say those things were. I said the
cultures and races were. The things that are most directly relevant both to this thread topic, and to "what I get to do as a character in a game."
Why would they want to get rid of the tiny bit of Tolkien lore they have held onto? Why do they want to be different? That is the real question. I would say - they don't. You already have ten thousand differences between the two. To ditch the three similarities, similarities that a lot of players enjoy, seems not only silly, but also a terrible business decision. Do you also want PF they need to ditch Tolkien associations?
As stated: not talking about business decisions. I'm talking about home campaigns. I'm talking about the
literally dozens of DMs I've spoken with over the years who not only adamantly, but
proudly refuse to EVER step outside of "there are four Good Races, and Humans are the most important, and the elves hate the dwarves, and the
Also, you're committing a fundamental error here. Just because they
are enjoyed does not mean that their
absence could not also be enjoyed. Again, as noted much earlier in the thread, halflings and dwarves don't show up in numerous popular franchises (or do show up, but
very differently, e.g. the Dwemer of The Elder Scrolls...who were a type of elf before they all mysteriously vanished centuries ago.) If having the precise dwarf-elf-hobbit trifecta were so important, why did Azeroth eclipse Norrath as the most popular MMO? If having orcs and cat-people but not having dwarves were such a concern, why is FFXIV the rising star of worldbuilding and main story? Why did Guild Wars 2 become a staple of the MMO genre--about to launch its third expansion pack--despite its race list being "humans, big were-humans,
giant horned lion-bears, plant people, and flappy-eared grey pookas"? (In Tyria,
humans are the closest equivalent to Tolkien elves culturally and historically, while the sylvari plant-people are the closest aesthetically; asura are the closest to dwarves physiologically, but they're really more like gnomes, and the literally seven-foot-tall norns are the closest to dwarves culturally and aesthetically except that they
don't do a lot of mining; the miners are the
charr, who are all military-industrial and spurn all gods! It looks almost nothing like Tolkien, and yet is quite popular.)
We don't really have any evidence that you DO need to keep these things front-and-center adhering as closely as possible to the superficial details of Tolkien's constructed cultures. Business seems to be booming
either way, if you do the writing work to make an interesting and vibrant world.
So true. This is why D&D actually made an entire book just for DMs. And in that book, they tell the DM to create
their world. Don't want elves and dwarves, tell the players they can't use them. And while we are at it, get rid of the halflings too. Tell them they can only be celestials or infernals or warforged. There, you have aasimar, tieflings and warforged. Make the setting nothing but the astral planes. There - a world nothing like Tolkien.
Of course, in order to that, one would have to limit races.
Well, uh, no you wouldn't
have to limit them? That's sort of my point. Having warforged and dragonborn and, y'know,
not having your elves be ancient relics of a better time that hate the dwarves, and
not having your dwarves be "beardy fighter-types" as OSP puts it that hate the elves, and maybe not strictly enforcing the "pseudo-medieval, Eurocentric, henotheist, all-religions-are-organized" pattern that D&D enforces
because it was heavily derived from a highly superficial reading of Tolkien?
Like, I get it. Wizards aren't Gandalf (they're much stronger, actually). Dwarves aren't literally in every single possible way totally indistinguishable from Tolkien. There are
explicitly multiple literal actual gods, as opposed to the one Eru Illuvatar and his
godly angelic children who administer creation on his behalf and resemble a pantheon and....
And that's sort of what I mean. Tolkien did the work to merit it. He justified this stuff. Later authors and (I cannot stress enough)
an enormous number of DMs, not so much. They borrowed the
idea of powerful godlike beings with specific areas of interest, but didn't bother to consider the ramifications, and that's where we get
horribly awful setting elements like the Wall of the Faithless. They borrowed the
idea of Dwarves And Elves Don't Get Along, but didn't write about how the two will always have a hurdle to get over due to contested spiritual-metaphysical birthright (the Elves are Illuvatar's
first children, but the Dwarves were adopted
before the Elves appeared, leading to a built-in struggle between them, like that between Tygra and Lion-o in the Thundercats re-imagining.) They borrowed the medieval culture, without considering the consequences of widespread powerful magic and the fact that, in Tolkien's work, human (and elf and dwarf) civilization had been on the decline for centuries due to assaults by evil forces, the exile of the line of kings, an invading dragon, etc.--so the relative prosperity and plenty of cities in most settings
doesn't make sense and leads to problems.
Again, my point is less about published settings (though I agree, that's a lot easier to talk about, since we can point to them!) My point is about what
ordinary DMs make. Ordinary DMs have this INCREDIBLY frustrating tendency to be the most utterly hidebound, traditional, only-the-old-ways types I've ever seen. Pitch a single oddball idea and you get suspicion, questions about ulterior motives, implicit insults, all sorts of things. I've seen FAR too many DMs that, as noted, PROUDLY refuse to step outside of--maybe not "Tolkien's shadow" in the ABSOLUTE MOST STRICTEST POSSIBLE sense, but "Tolkien's
extended shadow," the superficial reading of his work that is so commonly invoked it
genuinely disheartens me.
