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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="SpiralBound" data-source="post: 2824675" data-attributes="member: 8396">Perhaps there would have been a much stronger romantic theme to the adventures and setting. More heavily influenced by children's fantasies like Mother Goose and The Brothers Grimm, whose stories combine supernatural, macabre and romantic elements.  Perhaps "D & D" would be "Damsels & Dragons"?From a mechanics standpoint, I suspect that incorporating a random element into the system would have been much less prominent.  You certainly wouldn't have such a heavy reliance on the stereotypical bag of dice.  Perhaps one or two six-siders used communally?  Maybe a single spinner?  Using a random element within almost every event mechanic may even have been omited from the game altogether.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?Perhaps though since his concepts and literary tropes wouldn't have had "ground floor" enception access, their influence would have been different and much less prominent.  Sort of equivalent to how influencial the actual official Lord of the Rings RPG is on the roleplaying industry as a whole.  While it has it's followers, even things like Vampire, Star Wars, and other non-tolkien-style fantasy are more popular than it is, let alone the popularity collossus that D & D is within RPG circles.</blockquote>

Verification