Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="WizarDru" data-source="post: 2454182" data-attributes="member: 151">If you say "Dungeons & Dragons" as opposed to "D&D", I think you'll get a different reaction.  Most people don't really understand the complexities of the game, and probably view it as an extended board game...but they understand the vague idea of it; hence my mention earlier of Warhammer being essentially lumped under D&D in the popular imagination.  Case in point: I was watching What Not to Wear last weekend, and one of the hosts specifically pointed out that the guest's clothes for that episode made her look like "a teenage boy playing Dungeons and Dragons in his parent's basement."  Saturday Night Live had at least two sketches referencing D&D in the last year that I heard of...and I don't watch it.  I think you're expecting people to understand the subtleties of difference...and you're right, they don't.  However, not being able to tell the difference between Talisman and D&D doesn't mean that they don't understand it...they're just not interested in knowing more than what they've already gleaned about it.  I don't understand the sport of Cricket or antique car restoration...but that doesn't mean I have no knowledge of it at all.  It also may depend on what age the person you're asking is: I would people younger than I am, say in their 20s and under, have less direct knowledge of D&D than people in their 30s and 40s...because we got into D&D during it's 'golden age'...and I knew a lot of people who tried D&D, even if they didn't stay with it for any length of time.As for taking EGG at face value....there are legal issues involved, for one.  Far too many details in D&D are astonishingly close to Tolkien...at least, in AD&D.  The original D&D was fairly generic, and one could easily see the influence of Howard, Moorcock, Vance and Leiber, as well as Tolkien.  I think the issue is that many people who make the claim (and I was one of them, once upon a day) aren't as aware with the works that EGG borrowed from to notice.  Did he take from Tolkien?  Clearly, quite a few things are direct nabs....but quite a few things are direct nabs from other sources.  Paladin?  Nabbed, not from JRRT, but Poul Anderson (1953).  Magic System?  Nabbed, not from JRRT, but Jack Vance (50s).  Alignment ideas?  Nabbed, not from JRRT, but from Moorcock (60s on).  And so on and so forth.  EGG grabbed from a wide variety of sources (clearly, from his favorite authors) and from popular myth, besides.  Hence monsters from a myriad of mythologies and weapons, armor and technologies from fact and fiction over the ages.  In other words, I don't think EGG is saying he didn't take from Tolkien...more that he didn't rob Tolkien pell-mell and scratch the labels off: many of the authors he grabbed ideas from were contemporaries of Tolkien and much of the mythology was centuries older.  Many people aren't as aware how much material Tolkien himself grabbed from other sources, as well.  But Hobbits?  Well, there's one that's pretty much indisputable. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

Verification