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

[ruleslawyer]

I think this question can be read two different ways that produce two different answers:
(a) What if Tolkien had either never written or written in the 80s?
(b) What if D&D had been created in the 1930s?\

QFT.

IMHO, assuming we're talking about (a), I don't actually think that fantasy gaming would have evolved much differently without LotR. The intellectual writers would have bled in from scifi anyway; Moorcock, Zelazny and Ursula LeGuin weren't really writing to emulate Tolkien, but rather to expand from speculative fiction into all-out imaginative fiction (all three started as scifi writers). A D&D based on Hyboria, Lankhmar, Earthsea, Amber, and the Million Spheres/Melnibone/etc would be a fine game.

Not that I don't love Tolkien, BTW; I just don't actually think he's an exclusively formative influence on high(brow) fantasy.

 

[w_earle_wheeler]

Good point. How many protagonists in the pre-1936 weird stories actually cast spells? Most spell-casters were the bad guys.

This is another interesting point. It was reinforced for me today while reading "The Black Stranger", a Conan story by Robert E. Howard. It was published in 1987 (or possibly republished) but since Howard died in 1936, it was obviously written before then.

"In my lust for wealth and power I sought aid from the people of the black arts -- a black magician, who, at my desire, raised up a fiend from the outer gulfs of existence and clothed it on the form of a man. It crushed and slew my enemy; I grew great and wealthy and none could stand before me. I thought to cheat my fiend of the price a mortal must pay who calls the black fold to do his bidding.

"By his grim arts the magician tricked the soulless waif of darkness and bound him in hell where he howled in vain -- I supposed for eternity. But because the sorcerer had given the fiend the form of a man, he could never break the link that bound it to the material world; never completely close the cosmic corridors by which it had gained access to this planet.

"A year ago in Kordava word came to me that the magician, now an ancient man, had been slain in his castle, with marks of demon fingers on his throat. Then I knew that the black one had escaped from hell where the magician had bound him, and that he would seek vengeance upon me."​

 

[Dioltach]

With the smaller frequency of magic-using protagonists, and the lack of specialized roles within the adventuring party, I think the character classes would bear very little resemblance to "real" D&D. I reckon there are three possible routes they could have taken:

Something resembling the Base Classes from D20 Modern: Strong, Fast, Tough, Smart, Dedicated, Charismatic (although in the 1930s I can see Strong and Tough being combined into one, and Smart and Dedicated into one)

A system without classes, but where you buy skills (possibly, in later editions, with the Talent Trees from Modern)

A system that has specialized types of fighter: the Swordsman, the Bowman, the Knifeman, the Spearman. This seems most likely to me, and with the addition of Talent Trees and feats, would actually work very well for a sword & sorcery game. Obviously, pD&D 2e would offer subclasses, like the Horseman (for Swordsman and Spearman), the Garotteman for the Knifeman, the Crossbowman for the Bowman, as well as new classes in the Clubman (a primitive fighter), the Rapierman and the Fistman.

 

[SpiralBound]

Y'know who I'd like to see post in this thread? Col_Pladoh, that's who. I'd really be interested to know what *he* would think D&D would have turned out like. After all, I kinda suspect that his somewhat unique perspective might trump some of ours... Not that I'm holding my breath on this or anything, from what I've seen there's only one thread he ever posts in.

 

[GrumpyOldMan]

It is an indisputable fact that there would be neither elves or dwarves in any such game.

There would, of course, be elfs and dwarfs.

 

[w_earle_wheeler]

Y'know who I'd like to see post in this thread? Col_Pladoh, that's who. I'd really be interested to know what *he* would think D&D would have turned out like. After all, I kinda suspect that his somewhat unique perspective might trump some of ours... Not that I'm holding my breath on this or anything, from what I've seen there's only one thread he ever posts in.

I think that once the thread has a certain amount of speculation in it, I'll compress the ideas and questions and present it to him in a more managable format in the Ask Gygax thread.

 

[fusangite]

Probably not; until Tolkien's resurgence in the 60's, fantasy authors who were not Ray Bradbury or.. well, I can't think of another one at the moment... had to couch their stories in SF terms to even get published.

You make a good point here. But I think this is more about the death of the dream that science and spirituality/religion would merge that was very prevalent until the 1930s and the de-coupling of magic and religion from politics, science and psychology.

Until the 30s, popular culture expected a psychology-magic-science-religion synthesis. You can see traces of this in religions that formed in the century from 1830 to 1930 like the Elijah Mohammed's Nation of Islam, Mormonism, 7th Day Adventism, Spiritualism, etc.

 

[mcrow]

from what I understand:

Elves,Orcs, Drarves, and Haflings in fantasy lit (pre or post LotR & the Hobbit) are based on myths and legends from across the globe. So I would have suspected that to create a game of fantasy/mythic adventure that most of these would have turned up in one form or another along with Greek,Norse, and other mythic beings.

 

[fusangite]

from what I understand:

Elves,Orcs, Drarves, and Haflings in fantasy lit (pre or post LotR & the Hobbit) are based on myths and legends from across the globe. So I would have suspected that to create a game of fantasy/mythic adventure that most of these would have turned up in one form or another along with Greek,Norse, and other mythic beings.

But there are all kinds of universals that don't make it in. For instance, myths of dog-headed men were universal. In both the ancient and medieval periods and in Europe and the Far East, dog-headed men were more common than a number of things excavated from mythological traditions by fantasy authors. Yet there is no core race or explicit PC role for dog-headed men even though the cynocephali were so prominent on people's radar in the Middle Ages that they made one of them a saint -- an honour never bestowed on any elves I'm aware of.

Fantasy authors in the twentieth century have had a huge amount of power over what aspects of earlier mythological worldviews have re-entered popular culture and which ones have never seen the light of day.

EDIT: I find your ID most distracting; I keep switching the positions of the 'r' and the 'c' and coming up with Mr. Cow.

 

[mcrow]

But there are all kinds of universals that don't make it in. For instance, myths of dog-headed men were universal. In both the ancient and medieval periods and in Europe and the Far East, dog-headed men were more common than a number of things excavated from mythological traditions by fantasy authors. Yet there is no core race or explicit PC role for dog-headed men even though the cynocephali were so prominent on people's radar in the Middle Ages that they made one of them a saint -- an honour never bestowed on any elves I'm aware of.

Fantasy authors in the twentieth century have had a huge amount of power over what aspects of earlier mythological worldviews have re-entered popular culture and which ones have never seen the light of day.

True, but there is no way that all of mythology and/or history could be included in a single game. It could be that none of the current core races showed up if it was published before LotR, but then it would have been totally up to the author who would not have been Gygaz and the like. I just think that @ some pont between the game being invented and now the core races would been represented in some way, maybe not as PC races though.

EDIT: I find your ID most distracting; I keep switching the positions of the 'r' and the 'c' and coming up with Mr. Cow.

Funny, I have the same distraction with yours, for some reason I want to call you Fungasite. j/k