So while many people see the influence of Tolkien on DnD, Gary Gygax himself said that while the success of Tolkien did encourage him to develop the game, the overall influence was minimal. Instead he sites Conan the Conqueror as seminal influence on his “concepts of adventure”.
Conan was first recreated for Greyhawk (D&D Supplement IV) as a Fighter Level 15/ Thief Level 9 and this concept added to things like magic resistance, animal instincts and rage eventually developed into the Barbarian class. He even went on to inspire a couple of early modules and his own TSR RPG
But it was Sword and Scorcery inspired concepts of adventure that really carried DnD to what it is - over-the-top characters engaging in hard combat in a world of flashy magic. REH also had Conan come across various guarded wizard towers, lost cities with monster haunted dungeons, warring factions, which became the site based dungeons of DnD.
Its certain that Hobbits and Ents and similar were lifted from Tolkien, but Gygax calls these influences superficial as being based on the same mythologies rather than being wholesale adaptions. Gygax further claims that the seeming parallels and inspirations of Tolkien in DnD was contrived as an attempt to attract Tolkiens readers to the game even though Gygax opined that it was well nigh impossible to recreate any Tolkien-based fantasy within the boundaries of the game system.
The original forward to the game states “These rules are strictly fantasy. Those wargamers who lack imagination, those who don’t care for Burroughs’ Martian adventures where John Carter is groping through black pits, who feel no thrill upon reading Howard’s Conan saga, who do not enjoy the de Camp & Pratt fantasies or Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser pitting their swords against evil sorceries will not be likely to find DUNGEONS and DRAGONS to their taste.”
No mention of Tolkien there, as Gygax considered the Rings trilogy tedious and “considered in the light of fantasy action adventure, Tolkien is not dynamic.” and as such REH was a much better foundation to an interactive ‘fantasy action adventure Game’, than Tolkiens LotR.
Anyway what do you think, just how important is Howards Conan and other such pulp writers to DnD
(PS while Tolkien may be cited in discussion, lets not make this a debate about the merits of Tolkien v REH)
I think that Howard's influence has waned rather a lot for one key reason. Gygax saw D&D as being a logistics-and-heisting game. That's what he meant by his "concepts of adventure." But people don't play like that all that much these days. Some still do--the OSR exists for a reason--but the dominant mode of play remains a game with a deep and rich
story, where the characters fulfill personal arcs, where their moral/ethical limits will be tested, where redemptions and betrayals are forged, where ancient wrongs are righted, etc.
That sort of thing really is, IMO, closer to Tolkien than Howard. It isn't really either one of them per se, but of the two, it strikes much closer to Tolkien. The story of Aragorn going from being a powerful but mysterious figure to reclaiming his rightful throne? That's a
classic character arc for D&D play ever since Dragonlance. And that isn't going away. The absolutely riotous popularity of Baldur's Gate 3 shows just how much appetite there is for such arc-focused play, rather than the logistical "actually like a military campaign" dungeon-heisting style Gygax preferred.
We can also see this concept carried forward by later authors. One of my favorites is Garth Nix, with his
Old Kingdom series. The Abhorsen is
absolutely a story built around the same concepts as the current "narrative campaign" style of D&D. Doubly so because it's explicit that multiple times, people think the Abhorsen-in-Waiting is one person, when it's actually, secretly, someone else whose story has yet to unfold, and the person originally thought to have that title is something else (often good, but sometimes bad.)
(Also,
what "mythologies"? D&D dwarves are Tolkien dwarves, not just generic--because the generic ones were land-spirits. D&D elves are pure 100% Tolkien elves, and halflings/hobbits don't even exist outside of Tolkien, nor did "orcs," a word that was effectively dead in modern English before Tolkien revived it, drawing on his experience as a translator of Anglo-Saxon aka Old English.)
So, while I don't deny that Howard almost certainly helped spark the element of "explore multiple specific Dangerous Places in order to grow in power," most if not all of that is also present in Tolkien's work (the magic swords of
The Hobbit, the Mines of Moria, the defense of Helm's Deep, the journey through the Paths of the Dead, etc.), just less emphasized than they are in Howard's stuff, where such stuff is the meat and potatoes of the adventure. I guess what I'd say is, the Tolkien parts remain quite visible today; the Howard parts fade into the background, purely structural, little to do with the direct experience of gameplay or story or roleplay per se nowadays.
Without Howard, we might have ended up in a world where TTRPGs lean more social/political, rather than so heavily on combat, so it's not that his influence is gone by any means. It's just...well, waned, like I said.
