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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Willie the Duck" data-source="post: 9238220" data-attributes="member: 6799660">emphasis added I think it's helpful to remember that EGG's first product leading into D&D was a fantasy supplement for a wargame. There, it was really just including play pieces that looked like things from your* favorite IPs, without mind to have them emulate their in-story actions (excepting how they would make opponents dead). The second stage was people using those rules during a siege's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_warfare" target="_blank">mining/countermining</a> actions, and realizing that people enjoyed exploring tunnels and finding treasure** in that scenario sometimes more than the original siege scenario. D&D started as a game where the fantasy/swords&sorcery aspect was a 'skin'*** and then the essential play loop was discovered before any attempt to pull the thing back to emulating the stories from which the skin came from. Honestly, it's rather fortuitous that what came about ended up being relatively similar to Conan, Fafhrd&Grey Mouser, and The Hobbit (because they already included a lot of treasure seeking in dangerous tunnels or caves).*or your prospective customers, if EGG truly wasn't a huge JRRT fan.**no doubt the idea of placing treasure in the winding tunnels was influenced by the fiction thus referenced, so there is that.***might be using that term wrong, not much of a computer game player.Regarding Conan's actions vs. D&D's, I think the main differences are those that emerge from his being a narrative instead of a game. Having the goal of getting treasure is fun characterization, but for a story it's more interesting if the treasure hunt ends up being saving the girl, meeting a new friend, defeating a serious villain. Likewise, as a protagonist, Conan can be a omnicompetent character with near-all 18s, who only rolls a failure when the story needs it; whereas games* need ensembles of near equals and a reasonable (and unplanned) distribution of success and failure. One thing that happened in Conan stories that D&D** has rarely been good at is him getting caught unaware, knocked unconscious, and waking up in a jail cell***. Stuff like that that rely on certain story beats playing together don't work for emergent games like early D&D. *intended for more than one player**especially early D&D, where there wasn't much in the way of defeated-but-still-alive, particularly from non-magical causes***often seducing-the-conveniently-placed-female-servant his way out of itI think D&D rage was taken from Norse berserkers (shield-chewing fearless warrior with more than a touch of madness) who were stapled to the barbarian role after the fact. Conan's occasionally described fury seems much more a minor detail and not something to build a class around. Conan, to me, was a 1974 Fighting Man (as in, before all the cagey-theme got shuffled off to another class). Other than being pretty good without armor* and not collecting magic items, Conan works pretty well as a pre-thief-roles-removed fighter who just happens to roll perfectly except as needed. *although it is clear that he wore it whenever feasible, it was story prompts that ended up with him shirtless or the like</blockquote>

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