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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Assenpfeffer" data-source="post: 1244325" data-attributes="member: 9061">I think it's Brian Sibley who comes right out and says that in the documentaries.  He's not so much a critic as a Tolkien cheerleader.  Nonetheless, much of the commentary by other Tolkien scholars on the discs support the notion - which has at least some validity, really, though possibly no more so today than it was in the 50s.The idea being that publishers are less daring nowadays and more prone to looking strictly at the bottom line.  Which may be true, but I think it's really impossible to say whether or not LotR could have gotten published today, since Tolkien's own impact on the field of fantasy has shaped it to such a great degree that it's almost unrecognizable now.And remember that, if not for Tolkien, there would have been no D&D, though there may have been Roleplaying Games of some sort (M. A. R. Barker was experimenting with something like RPGs as far back as the late 60s, and his work grew up pretty much independently of Tolkien's.)Which makes for interesting speculation, really... what kind of hobby would we have today if the great groundbreaking game, and thus the primary formative influence on RPGs, had been Empire of the Petal Throne instead of D&D?</blockquote>