D&D 4E 4e Design and JRR Tolkien

[Raven Crowking]

In any case, RC, I don't think anyone was claiming that fantasy didn't start until c. 1980, just that c. 1980 there was an explosion in the number of titles that were published each year.

Hrm. I think that something very like that was said. Indeed, I think that some claimed that books such as Dracula and Tarzan of the Apes were not fantasy, nor was the film Nosferatu. Frankly, IMHO, there was a heck of a lot of fantasy prior to 1980; what did not exist was the marketting push that there is now. And, while I could easily find fantasy books in 1975 (say), I tend to think that much of the best fantasy that I've read this decade has not been marketted as such.

What we have with fantasy now, IMHO, is exactly analogous to the pulps, which certainly predate 1980.

I had actually hoped to (assuming that that is true; Hussar presented data to suggest that there was a marked increase roughly at that time) we could bang around some possible reasons why we think that may be. In any case, it's a curious thought. Although probably outside the scope of this discussion in this thread, although I do wonder if the popularity of D&D at that same time was related.

I missed the data H provided.

Certainly, booksellers and publishers saw fantasy in a different light due to The Sword of Shanara. LotR sold a lot of copies. A lot. In a lot of languages. Thereafter, publishers began to look for the "next big thing" they could market to LotR fans. SoS was it. It was the first novel marketted as fantasy to hit the New York Times bestseller list, and it eventually hit #1.

Publishers saw money. Imprints that previously existed for fantasy novels, but which did not contain the word "fantasy", began to use that word. This led to a subset of fantasy being identified in the mainstream as "fantasy" and -- within a decade -- led to publishers using different labels for less mainstream fantasy novels.

Or, at least, that's how I see it & my understanding.

Certainly, the popularity of mainstream fantasy didn't hurt D&D when it burst onto the scene. However, early D&D was informed by earlier fantasy work, and led players to discover the giants of the past as well as to create their own fantastic worlds.

Again, IMHO.

RC

 

[PeterWeller]

I'm sure you can also make a case that Vietnam, the Oil Crisis, and the heating up of the Cold War all led to mindset amongst the American public that craved escapism and a return to more clear lines between good and evil. This may have led to the rise of Fantasy as a popular genre and category similar to the relationship between World War One and the explosion of Pulp in the early Twentieth Century.

 

[gizmo33]

I've gone back a few pages and tried to figure out how the discussion got on this tangent and I'm not quite sure. The issue seems to revolve around what sort of fantasy DnD should simulate. I think. There are statements that claim that Dracula is not fantasy, for example, but I don't see anyone making this case lately. It also seems like folks arguing now have said things that support each other's arguments in the past, making this confusing overall.

The problem IMO with making DnD a fantasy novel simulator is that some parts of novels just don't work well as a game. Gandalf, as I mentioned much earlier, IMO is just way too driven by deus-ex-machina and "writers fiat" to really have statistics. Novel writers can manipulate the perception of risk, and mislead you about what you think the mechanics are in terms of the story. Misleading players in the ways that readers are sometimes mislead or misdirected, according to my gaming style, is just bad DMing, even though it might be good story-telling. Maybe one of the best examples of this is the concept of Fate - something that can exist in a novel pretty well but otherwise doesn't work in standard DnD with dice.

Ultimately, I see that many of us that learned to play DnD from Gygax's rules in the early 80s are sympathetic to Tarzan, Dracula, and those sorts of classic novels having an influence on DnD. If anyone wants to say that they're not fantasy, then fine, call them Genre X and then I'll say that I think DnD should keep an eye on Genre X as source material. Whether or not every element of Genre X is suitable to the game of DnD is something I doubt however, but the same goes for any other genre definition. Ultimately this comes down to my belief and preference that games and stories do not completely overlap.

 

[Darkwolf71]

Ultimately, I see that many of us that learned to play DnD from Gygax's rules in the early 80s are sympathetic to Tarzan, Dracula, and those sorts of classic novels having an influence on DnD.

Well, no. Nobody has said those stories had no influence on the game. But then, they don't have to be fantasy to be inspirational. As a wargamer, EGG would have certainly been influenced by historical sources as well as fantasy, mythology, the occult, and any number of other sources which may or may not overlap. The overlapping of which does not make them the same, only similar.

 

[gizmo33]

I'm sure you can also make a case that Vietnam, the Oil Crisis, and the heating up of the Cold War all led to mindset amongst the American public that craved escapism and a return to more clear lines between good and evil.

How would you explain the popularity of Tom Clancey, Rambo, Red Dawn, etc? That every popular pseudo-historical idealization of the past (like Arthurian legend) must follow some sort of historical crisis (like the War of the Roses) could just as well be a commentary on the frequency of crisis. As in - Every time I reboot my computer it seems that another war breaks out somewhere on the globe. Was there some time period in the age of general literacy where stories containing magic and monsters were not popular? (That's an honest question - I'm not sure.)

 

[Desdichado]

Certainly, booksellers and publishers saw fantasy in a different light due to The Sword of Shanara. LotR sold a lot of copies. A lot. In a lot of languages. Thereafter, publishers began to look for the "next big thing" they could market to LotR fans. SoS was it. It was the first novel marketted as fantasy to hit the New York Times bestseller list, and it eventually hit #1.

There seems to be too big of a gap, though. If LotR had publishers looking for the next big thing in fantasy, why wasn't Michael Moorcock or Ursula LeGuin or someone like that the first one to crack into the bestseller list and mainstream awareness?

There was a fair amount of fantasy published in the 60s. A lot of it was older pulp work republished (my copies of Otis Adelbert Kline's books apeing Barsoom date from the mid 60s, and IIRC, the famous Frazetta covered ERB and Conan books were published at this time too.) A lot of it was infamously copying the style of earlier works (the heyday of Lin Carter's career, for example.)

But it remained a "literary ghetto" all the same for at least another decade.

 

[JohnSnow]

There seems to be too big of a gap, though. If LotR had publishers looking for the next big thing in fantasy, why wasn't Michael Moorcock or Ursula LeGuin or someone like that the first one to crack into the bestseller list and mainstream awareness?

There was a fair amount of fantasy published in the 60s. A lot of it was older pulp work republished (my copies of Otis Adelbert Kline's books apeing Barsoom date from the mid 60s, and IIRC, the famous Frazetta covered ERB and Conan books were published at this time too.) A lot of it was infamously copying the style of earlier works (the heyday of Lin Carter's career, for example.)

But it remained a "literary ghetto" all the same for at least another decade.

The "why" is pretty interesting, but I think it comes down to the counterculture aspect of fantasy. It was pretty corner-case as entertainment back then. It took the rise of "geek culture" to make fantasy "mainstream" in the eyes of the general public.

Moorcock and LeGuin (and most of their contemporaries) were too "fringe" to make a splash with the mainstream. Truth to tell, what made fantasy mainstream wasn't The Sword of Shannara - it was Star Wars. The former just happened to be published at the right time to benefit from the latter's success. The Sword of Shannara was essentially a Tolkien pastiche with a couple elements that made it different. There were a lot of them at the time.

On the other hand, Star Wars took fantasy and repackaged it with science fiction elements. But, unlike in most sci-fi, the fantasy elements of it were pretty overt. For example, it made liberal use of traditionally "fantasy" phrases and words like: "A long time ago," knights, wizard, and princess, among others. And there was this little thing about magic (the Force) and magic swords (lightsabers) too...

So, IMO, it was Star Wars that opened the door for fantasy to become mainstream. Everyone else just capitalized on it. That's why so many years passed between the publication of The Lord of the Rings and the next BIG fantasy hit.

And it was years more before any really good "pure" fantasy movies got made.

 

[PeterWeller]

How would you explain the popularity of Tom Clancey, Rambo, Red Dawn, etc? That every popular pseudo-historical idealization of the past (like Arthurian legend) must follow some sort of historical crisis (like the War of the Roses) could just as well be a commentary on the frequency of crisis. As in - Every time I reboot my computer it seems that another war breaks out somewhere on the globe. Was there some time period in the age of general literacy where stories containing magic and monsters were not popular? (That's an honest question - I'm not sure.)

Red Dawn was, of course, an expression of its time's fears while also an expression of American heroic ideals in counter to those fears. Rambo played off largely the same feelings. I think political suspense and spy thrillers like Clancy have been popular for almost as long as the modern nation state. Even Doyle had Holmes engaging in espionage towards the end of his career. I wouldn't consider any of these idealizations of the past. Also, I believe our modern sensibilities don't consider our idealized pasts as ideal as we once did, which is where I think the current popularity of fantasy may reside. We don't have to swallow our qualms about idealizing pasts that we know aren't the rosy good things that we would like them to be, and instead, we can transmit the positive values that we attribute to those times on to a completely different world that doesn't contain the negative baggage of our own history. For example, say you would like to recapture the glory of Southern Gentility, but you don't want the baggage of slavery casting a pall over everything. You can create a fantasy world where the positives of Antebellum Southern life exists without the negatives.

You have a good point about the frequency of crisis, and I don't think there's a point in literate history where fantasy or other speculative fiction wasn't popular. Though I'd say it appears as though they weren't as popular in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries as they are today, and it would seem like they hit a low point in popularity towards the end of the Nineteenth century, though there was a great resurgence in the early Twentieth.

 

[Raven Crowking]

There seems to be too big of a gap, though. If LotR had publishers looking for the next big thing in fantasy, why wasn't Michael Moorcock or Ursula LeGuin or someone like that the first one to crack into the bestseller list and mainstream awareness?

I'd guess that the biggest reason was marketting. LotR didn't require a lot of marketing; it simply succeeded on its own merits. Afterwards, publishers were looking for something similar to LotR, which isn't LeGuin or Moorcock. If you look at "mainstream" fantasy today, you can see the stamp of this marketing strategy all over it....series of books with an ensemble cast that try to defeat the BBEG.

D&D 1e wasn't about defeating the BBEG; it was far more S&S. Until Dragonlance. 2e and 3e are very "mainstream" fantasy in this respect. 4e seems to be pulling back from the mainstream.

There is a lot of good non-mainstream fantasy being produced today. Even now, though, much of it is mired in a "literary ghetto" where it doesn't get the attention it deserves.

 

[Desdichado]

I wondered about Star Wars too, but I thought the timing was a little off.

Didn't Shannara hit in 1976? Star Wars was 1977.

Then again, just because it was published in 76 doesn't mean it climbed to the bestseller list right away.

Hmm... Again, I thought of that but dismissed it as having imcompatible dates, but maybe it's not so incompatible after all.