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

[Staffan]

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.

That's not really a Harry Potter influence though. I think there are two aspects of increasing prevalence of magic compared to older editions:

• More spells per caster. Old-school low-level casters mostly relied on mundane weaponry (primarily thrown daggers in AD&D, or light crossbows in 3e), but now they have the ability to cast equivalent-power spells instead. This started in late 3e with "Reserve feats", and continued with at-will powers in 4e and cantrips in 5e. I don't know if there's a specific source for this other than the desire to have wizards actually wiz. If anything, it probably comes from WoW, though at the time I believe the WoW at-will equivalent was the Wand weapon.
• More characters casting spells. This is more a matter of making everything beyond the ordinary into a spell. Rangers don't inherently know how to avoid leaving tracks when moving in nature, but they have the pass without trace spell. Totem barbarians can see through the eyes of beasts and speak with them, and this is represented as the beast sense and speak with animals spells. In 3e and earlier, these would likely be bespoke special abilities, or at most they'd be "spell-like abilities", but with 5e they instead went "Eh, we have a spell that does that, so let's use that."

 

[Paul Farquhar]

More spells per caster. Old-school low-level casters mostly relied on mundane weaponry (primarily thrown daggers in AD&D, or light crossbows in 3e), but now they have the ability to cast equivalent-power spells instead. This started in late 3e with "Reserve feats", and continued with at-will powers in 4e and cantrips in 5e. I don't know if there's a specific source for this other than the desire to have wizards actually wiz. If anything, it probably comes from WoW, though at the time I believe the WoW at-will equivalent was the Wand weapon.

It was purely a gameplay thing. In early D&D a wizard most of the time was just an extremely bad dart thrower. And that just wasn't fun to play (compare Gandalf, who was always pretty handy with a sword).

 

[CreamCloud0]

I would say real life is a bigger influence. I went to a British boarding school, and it really was just like Hogwarts (without the magic and the girls). We had four boarding houses, each of which was named after a supposedly famous man, and had a reputation for a certain type of student. Romney was very sporty, Crabbe was academic m, Talis was dossers and Scott - had me, which probably made it Hufflepuff.

this reminds me not too long ago seeing a video on youtube about 'what things did you learn weren't 'magic' but actually just british' on stuff from the HP universe.

 

[Gorck]

I can’t believe this thread is creeping up on 200 posts with no actual original post. I’m starting to think Snarf never intended to post anything and this is all a social experiment.

 

[Parmandur]

Everybody listens to Gary; until they dont.

To be fair, Gygax (I lresume) was a flawed narrator.

 

[Parmandur]

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.

Couldn't say about Tolkien, but the Edith Nesbit stories are specifically called out as canonical in the real world of Narnia in The Magcians Nephew, alongside Sherlock Hilmes, King Arthur legends, Robin Hood stories, Tolkien's Middle Earth stories (the Rings were made with Numenorean magic). Lewis liked to citr his sources.

 

[Parmandur]

"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

Precisely.

 

[Aldarc]

...I am getting concerned that my non-post has a lot more comments that some of my actual posts do!

Subtle as a finance bruh driving a bright orange cybertruck. I get it... popularity is the one insult that has not yet been offered to Snarf.

Sometimes less is more.

 

[dbolack]

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.

Myself, though I touched a very small number of things. The other(s) can choose to out themselves as they wish..

 

[dbolack]

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.

The Tomorrow People was a staple on US kids cable channel Nickelodeon in the early 80s.