D&D General Are You There D&D? It's Me, J.R.R. Tol-KEEEEN!

[TiQuinn]

The only traceable influence on modern DnD is previous DnD really. The rest is just, well, all the fantasy out there. I know it’s fun to draw all these lines and stuff, get up your conspiracy wall and yarn and make the connections, but maybe back in the 70s or early 80s you could, when the totality of it was still knowable, but now, the amount of stuff out there permeating the culture makes it meaningless. Things that seem influenced by some old original source, aren’t, they’re based on something 4 layers deep of influence the creator reimagined original that resembles something you know that she’s never heard of. Types of magic have been originally created many times since the first time.

This. I strain to see the resemblance of D&D to most fantasy fiction outside of references to specific monsters or Vancian magic. I feel like the game has always been poor at simulating fantasy fiction largely due to the existence of the party versus a one or two key protagonists.

 

[mamba]

You really think 20-somethings weren’t reading Harry Potter?

no, I think people 10 years younger than that read a lot more of it however

 

[dbolack]

No idea. I have never run, played in, or even talked to anyone who ran nor played in a WOD game.

I know. I'm weird that way.

There are at least two former writers here on these boards...

 

[Charlaquin]

In all seriousness, I wonder if we're most influenced by the people we actually game with. Especially back in the old days, pre-internet, D&D players were a fairly fragmented bunch in my experience. Outside of our immediate group, many of us only interacted with RPGs through publications like Dragon or on the rare occasion we might hit up a game convention. At least in the Dallas area, I didn't even see a game store that had space for people to play games until the late 1990s.

But then I would have also been heavily influenced by movies like Excaliber, The Sword and the Sorcerer, Conan, Beastmaster, Krull, etc., etc. I expect people in their 30s would be heavily influenced by Dragon Ball, Harry Potter, and whatever other skibidi things young people like. Even if it isn't necessarily in the DNA of D&D (yet), it might still influence how the game is played.

For us Milennials, a lot of the fantasy media we consumed was young adult fiction. Harry Potter of course, but also Eragon, Percy Jackson, Artemis Fowl, Spiderwick, etc. Maybe some of the weirder stuff like Abarat and His Dark Materials if you were a real freak like me. Star Wars and The Matrix if you branched out from fantasy into scifi. And of course, Lord of the Rings by way of the Peter Jackson movies, which were the absolute pinnacle of fantasy for my generation.

 

[Charlaquin]

For me, it's primarily the prevalence of magic in 5e. When nearly every single character is a caster, it's hard not to see the influence. Is it the only influence? Nope. Of course not. The specific source isn't really what I'm looking at anyway. You're fixated on the specifics of the books to a degree that I'm not. The fact that the game isn't set specifically in schools doesn'T really matter to me.

The prevalence of magic really isn’t a Harry Potter specific influence. Rather, Harry Potter was one of many properties aimed at young adults in the late 90s and early 2000s that were all about a secret magical world. But, really, most of us just think, if I’m playing a magic-using character, I want to feel like my character is a magic user all of the time, not just once or twice a day.

 

[Charlaquin]

There are at least two former writers here on these boards...

Oh? Who else? I used to mod the Onyx Path forums, and I wrote for one 3rd party Requiem book. Also helped playtest Changeling the Lost 2e under Olivia Hill and had been looking to write for it, before the Paradox acquisition and subsequent falling out between her and OPP. Shame that went down the way it did.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Reminds me of a YouTuber (Caelan Conrad) critiquing the Potter books including the line "she's not creative, you're just American."

Britishisms making it seem exotic is something that is also true of Tolkien though. Although he predates children’s TV. From what I gather, in the US children’s TV in the late 60s to early 80s was dominated by cartoons, but the UK had a lot of live action fantasy and science fiction shows. A couple which I haven’t mentioned yet (because they were a bit late for Rowling, she was an adult by then) were Children of the Stones and Into the Labyrinth.

Oh, the Tomorrow People! That was the right vintage, and ITVs answer to Doctor Who. It was SF, but it featured young people with special powers living a hidden existence along side the real world.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Given that this is a generally free-wheeling thread, I would like to try and bring the conversation back round to Edith Nesbit. Although most remembered for The Railway Children these days, she was a prolific writer for adults as well as children across multiple genres.

Specifically, her Psammead trilogy - Five Children and It (1902), The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904) and The Story of the Amulet (1906) are what we would now consider the fantasy genre. So these are quite clearly very early examples. I doubt Gygax was familiar with them, but I detect distinct similarities with The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-56). Tolkien may well have read them, but I suspect he wouldn't have liked them.

As for modern British fantasy writers, they were adapted for TV a couple of times in the 70s and 80s, so anyone of that generation was probably exposed to them.

I've been looking at using a psammead in D&D for a while.

 

[Lanefan]

You really think 20-somethings weren’t reading Harry Potter?

Or older-somethings?

Our crew were all way beyond our 20s at the time and we still dove right in to those books...and, later, movies.

 

[Nikosandros]

But all that post-90s Fantasy is in reaction to Tolkien in some way or another: there is no escaping that influence.

"J.R.R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji."

Terry Pratchett