Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="knifie_sp00nie" data-source="post: 4355151" data-attributes="member: 62610">The main argument seems to be a chicken-egg dilemma. Which comes first? Can DnD be a person's first exposure to fantasy, or did the seed of geekery lead them to DnD? I still say that you'd have to have been living under a rock to not be exposed to the themes of fantasy before. Think about wandering around a bookstore. It's a self-selected environment. If you have no interest in romance novels, you won't pay any attention to that section. Who are these people that randomly encounter the PHB and pick it up? Taking a step back, we're in a BOOK store? Casual reading has been in decline for a while now. Once again we're dealing with a narrow slice of population with a larger than average cultural vocabulary.What about those people under a rock? The closest we could probably get and be in the realm of plausibility would be the Amish. Literate, but the only book they've ever read was the bible (just for the experiment). We'll also assume that our Amish person doesn't outright reject the book based on its themes. Are there parallels to the bible? I'm not even a bible scholar and can think of a lot:Gods, angels, devils and otherworldly planes.Giants and those that slay them.A man swallowed by a great beast.Super-human strength.Staffs turning to snakes, miracle healing, and other magic.Kings, castles, and great cites.I also don't get why some posters think elves and dwarves have a strong cultural memory either. In the US early exposure might be from the Disney animated movies. But then the dwarves in that aren't very DnD (strangely, more gnominsh). I don't know where I might have seen an elf, maybe from other classic fairy tales, but they seem light on friendly, human like races and heavy on bridge trolls. If it wasn't for the movies Tolkien would still be just a geek thing along with all the other fantasy novels on the shelf.It's impossible to grow up human and not be exposed to the myths and stories of your culture. Most of those myths involve otherworldly beings and people. DnD is notable because it's borrowed from almost all of them and combined it into its own mythology. The themes are universal. A particular depiction of a theme, like dragonborn, is just window dressing.</blockquote>

Verification