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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 2826460" data-attributes="member: 7240">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?I think only (a) is worth answering because I don't believe that D&D would have been socially acceptable in a large enough portion of the population to carve out even the ghetto market that it did before the 60s. The way generations since the 60s have come to view imagination, creativity, collective action, etc. is actually pretty different from life before the 60s. I think RPGs owe a debt to the counter-culture of the 60s that can't be fully measured. Just look at how the Christian Right reacts to D&D to this day to get a sense of what D&D might have looked like to people in the 30s or the 50s. What would D&D look like without Tolkien? Well, I think the expected party size and racial anc occupational diversity would have been a whole lot smaller. The idea of the 6-member party with sharp divisions of labour is, in my view, Tolkien's biggest impact on the game. Both the Hobbit and LOTR featured large multi-racial parties with niche rolls for wizards, rogues, etc. I'm no expert on the pulp fantasy genre that preceded Tolkien but it seems to me that the closest thing you've got to the large, highly specialized party is Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. So I'd expect parties of 1-3 rather than 3-7. Of course, we wouldn't have gone on the AD&D PC race bonanza; I'm guessing elves and dwarves would be NPCs only, halflings wouldn't exist and we'd end up with race either being dropped out of the system or being the un-PC kind of race that the Conan game comes up with -- a whole lot closer to the meaning of "race" in popular culture in the pulp fantasy era. Anyway, those are just a few thoughts... Of course I don't believe fantasy would have become respectably intellectual enough to have attracted authors like Ursula Leguin without Tolkien. It might be that the whole genre would have gone a different way without him.</blockquote>

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