What if... D&D had been designed BEFORE The Lord of the Rings!

[Piratecat]

Isn't Smaug red? Hardly a coincidence that red dragons are the biggest and baddest and all dragons in DnD are basically winged dinosaurs rather than winged serpents. IIRC there is mention of a black dragon as well. But, I could be misremembering.

Ancalagon the Black. And yeah, I'm a big geek for knowing that.

 

[Klaus]

Dragons would probably be akin to the wyrm monster from d20 Modern (think Reign of Fire/Dragonslayer), and we could probably see dwarves turning into dragons through sheer greed (a la Fafnir). Of course, eastern legend of dragons was already present, so there is the possibility of a serpentine good-aligned celestial dragon.

 

[WayneLigon]

Where are these numbers coming from? I seriously doubt anyone could give an accurate count of the number of copies of Romeo and Juliet just printed last year, much less accurate numbers of all fiction books over the last couple centuries.

The most cited source I can find is The Top 10 of Everything by Russell Ash, 2002. Everyone seems to cite that one source. I'll agree that book publishers actual sales figures (as oppossed to the sales figures that put things on the bestseller lists, which are just how many orders for a book there are - when I was working at a book store, it was not unusual for us to get 200 copies of a book, sell about 20 of them, then ship 180 copies back to the publisher, though it would be reported that we sold 200 copies) are one of the deepest, darkest secrets around.

 

[w_earle_wheeler]

This is probably a silly question, but have we ever determined when D&D came about in this pre-Tolkien world? Some seem to be arguing just a year or two before tolkien published The Hobbit, while others seem to be arguing the turn of the century (~1900). 1900, 1910, 1920, 1930 - all of these would result in differing styles of the game, I think.

Not a silly question at all.

I am thinking that the game would be designed in the mid to late 30s with a keen resonance of the 10s and 20s, but tempered by the harsh realities of the 30s.

As for marketing purposes, a game of just "pen and paper and imagination" might do well in a tight market.

 

[WayneLigon]

As for marketing purposes, a game of just "pen and paper and imagination" might do well in a tight market.

A very good point, indeed. You know, the more I think about it, cards or a spinner might have replaced dice as the randomizer. Cards were in no short supply since a lot of people played rummy, canasta, bridge and the like. Dice might have been thought of as 'too much like gambling', and they're not as easily portable as cards are. But you had Monopoly (A quick search on this shows the history of Monopoly goes back a lot further than I thought, to 1904) and other board games with Dice, I assume. So maybe not.

 

[Thunderfoot]

A very good point, indeed. You know, the more I think about it, cards or a spinner might have replaced dice as the randomizer. Cards were in no short supply since a lot of people played rummy, canasta, bridge and the like. Dice might have been thought of as 'too much like gambling', and they're not as easily portable as cards are. But you had Monopoly (A quick search on this shows the history of Monopoly goes back a lot further than I thought, to 1904) and other board games with Dice, I assume. So maybe not.

Good point, but more to the point, would we have POLYHEDRAL dice? Probably not, though it may have been a neat little draw into the game (like the playing pieces for Monoploy) I'm not sure that people in the 30's would have bought into it. Call it a hunch, but being from a small farm town in the mid-west, even though kids liked to think about "alien" things, the dice themsleves may have been a little too alien to get past.

The whole 'of the devil' thing might have actually still been a problem, but due to the "funny-looking" dice instead of the monsters you slay.

 

[WayneLigon]

Good point, but more to the point, would we have POLYHEDRAL dice? Probably not...

I think it would be more for the expense involved. And really, there's no need for them.

 

[w_earle_wheeler]

I think it would be more for the expense involved. And really, there's no need for them.

Yes, if it had dice, they would certainly have been d6s.

Though it might have a spinner instead. I'm not sure if that would have been cheaper to produce than dice or not.

And along the lines of cost, I wonder if it would have been cost effective to include fantasy style army men, giving the pD&D the set-up of a playset. However, I'm not even sure when "Army men" were first produced. That's something I need to research along with the history of tabletop wargaming.

 

[w_earle_wheeler]

One question about the original premise of this thread... It appears that most posts are running on the assumption that Tolkien simply never bothered to write his novels or perhaps even he hadn't been born. However, this idea isn't specifically stated in the original post, just the "what if" of pen and paper roleplaying being invented before The Lord of The Rings was published. While I'm greatly enjoying everyones posts about a version of RPGs without any Tolkien influence, wouldn't his influence have affected an existing RPG game once his books had been published?

I'm approaching this first from the idea that the game is developed before the designers read Tolkien or the many fantasy authors inspired by Tolkien. I'm not sure how quickly word of new fantasy books spread in the 30s, so I am making a fantastic assumption that the designers would not hear or read The Professor until a year or so after the pD&D game was being sold.

After that time, there could be a pD&D2e that takes into account new fantasy, but that is outside the scope of the project for the moment.

 

[mhacdebhandia]

I suspect that Anderson's elves, who are more like British or Celtic folkloric elves than Tolkien's (who aren't that much like their Nordic inspiration), would be the only kind of elves we'd see in a pre-Lord of the Rings D&D.

Man . . . I wish we played that game.