Kind of the counter to the line
"Don't call it a comeback, I been here for years," my response to the OP question would be something like
'don't call it leaving, I was never beholden to begin with' (or maybe
'I'm not leaving you, we were never a couple' but I don't like that imagery).
D&D is my first TTRPG*, and I've played it on-and-off ever since. However, excepting that 3-4 year period before I could readily bike to the FLGS and thus became aware of other RPG options, I/my main groups (with one exception) haven't really felt obligated to play using a D&D system. D&D hits a specific sweet spot of seriousness, complexity, and recklessness that works well for specific play experiences, but not others. I have one group I joined maybe 17 years ago that only plays current-version D&D. For all others, we only play D&D when we want that specific play experience.
*first played a Holmes/BX/AD&D hybrid that some older kids played, the '82-3 school year, then in summer '83 got a first printing Mentzer basic box set of my own.
In my early 20s, I joined the Army and worked in the Signal Corps. If you're not familiar, it's where the Army keeps most of its nerds so I was briefly able to play D&D 3e but walked away because of a really awful DM (short story is having PCs threatened with rape was funny to him). Fast forward 6 years and 2 moves, I tried to get into PF1e but my work schedule never aligned with any games I could join so I was back out of the hobby.
In 2016 I was out of the Army and moved back home to Minnesota where ...
Heh. There's a pocket of 90s Army SIGINT retirees over in the East metro who are part of my 'not necessarily D&D' gaming. Good guys.
That’s not true, D&D in the 70’s and early
80s actually did resemble a lot of popular fantasy literature of the time, particularly the sword and sorcery genre. Appendix N in the back of the first DMG lists all of the literary influences on the game,some of the more well known ones being Michael Moorcock’s Elric series, Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories and Fritz Liebers’s Lankhmar stuff. And early D&D and Greyhawk is full of the flavor of appendix N, and Gary wanted fans to know that. Many of the authors listed were actually writing fantasy that was purposefully counter to Tolkiens horrid fantasy, and that’s what Gary liked about it.
So, no, D&D doesn’t resemble LotR, but it does a massive disservice to the rich literary traditions that were an influence on the creation of the game by saying it only resembles itself. Yea, it ended up up becoming its own “D&D” genere in time, but the games beginnings are steeped in mid 20th century pulp fantasy and science fiction.
No, that's not true. By the end of the 80s, I'd read almost everything on the appendix N and D&D only resembles anything there in extremely narrow and specific ways. And literally nothing in sword & sorcery, or any other literary subgenre resembles the core activity of older D&D, namely dungeon crawling. The only thing that comes close, and it postdates D&D by many years, is the opening sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Conan alone spends a bunch of time in dungeons of one sort or another. I have to wonder what you were reading.
Yeah, the typical dungeon crawl cycle might have looked slightly like parts of a few stories or novels, but as a general thing it was a convenient gamification of some very, very broad fantasy stroke.
Ugh. Always on both sides with definitive how-it-really-is (to something inherently mixed and subjective). Look,
Dungeons & Dragons was this fun little doors-traps-chests-monsters treasure-hunting* game that Gary and Dave found people really liked to do (to the point of ignoring the town siege of the intended Braunstein/Chainmail** main game). No argument, the fantasy part serves the game part.
*And, honestly, despite the Dungeon part in the title, the dungeon in Dungeons and Dragons only serves the greater purpose of at-risk-treasure-hunting. **Chainmail itself being such that the fantasy element was half superficial overlay (turning cannons into wizards), and half new mechanics to enforce the fantasy theme (spells and monster rules).
However, many to most of it was present in the fantasy literature. Not just the Conan stories and their constant treasure hunts and traps and corridors and so forth*, but
the Hobbit as well*
. And Fafhrd/Grey Mouser, and parts of the
Dreaming City, and definitely huge swaths of the Pulp/Cliffhanger genre from which
Raiders of the Lost Ark took its inspiration [edit: also mythology].
Of course not all fantasy literature included dungeon crawling, and it's easier to replicated The Hobbit in D&D than Lord of the Rings. However, it seems unnecessarily hairsplitting to say that D&D didn't resemble fantasy because it hewed closer to one aspect of fantasy than another, or that it made some concessions to making the thing into a working game**.
*Honestly, the part TSR-era D&D gets wrong for Conan is no rules for being conked over the head and waking up in chains (plus seducing the evil warlord/sorcerer's beautiful assistant). **Which seems like one of the most D&D stories of all of Appendix N. ***honestly something a bunch other RPGs and licensed video games of the same era should have tried harder to do.
Either way, Gary stating that only a minute trace of Tolkien can be found in D&D was either a legal dodge or a self-facing lie on his part. If it was a bait and switch on his part, it was an unsuccessful one. A story of an adventuring party (one hobbithalfling burglerthief, a dozen dwarven fighting men, and a low-level wizard*) hitting up a goblin camp, going to face a red dragon, and then squabbling over the loot, works almost perfectly in oD&D post supplement I, hampered only by the removal of Chainmail's rule for Hero units being able to shoot dragons out of the air, making Bard downing Smaug with a single arrow impossible. Is it all of Tolkien (much less all of fantasy)? Absolutely not. Is it a bait and switch from anyone who thought they were getting Tolkien in the mix? As I said, inherently subjective, but man can I think of worse examples.
*yes, yes, Maia. Don't care.