D&D 5E Why D&D is not (just) Tolkien

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Satyrn]

This poll is totally going to end up a as a classic bell curve.

*rolls 3d6 to decide how to vote*

 

[Arilyn]

Arghh! No!

Fantasy Wargaming was based off of many influences. There were different strands popping up. The primary influence was, of course, Wargaming in general, followed by medieval wargaming (but I suppose that should go without saying!).

Chainmail, however, was explicitly modeled after a particular game- Patt's Battle of Pellenore Fields. Which is why the Chainmail rules explicitly incorporated the Tolkien references. But it's also why it had additional references to expand to non-Tolkien ideas (the inclusion of the Poul Anderson Trolls, also explicitly namedropped).

Chainmail wasn't really RPG, either. Seriously- I have a copy- you should read it. There's a massive gulf between Chainmail and OSR.

It was Arneson's contribution, codified and then expanded by Gygax, that turned it into an RPG of the sort we would recognize.

I never said Chainmail was an RPG. And yes. I have read it. My point was that DnD came off of Chainmail, and even then, it wasn't an RPG. Yes, there were other influences, but Tolkien' s huge popularity at the time, allowed for fantasy wargaming to be accepted, by enough members of the wargaming community to exist at all. A lot of the other fantasy novels were in public eye, because the popularity of Tolkien made it financially feasible for them to be reprinted, and for new authors to be published. Tolkien got the ball rolling. It's not a chicken or egg situation as has been posited. Tolkien became massively popular, which had readers looking for more. Tolkien was not my first introduction to fantasy, but without him, I wouldn't have had access to those other works. I'm thinking the same goes for DnD. But who knows for sure?

 

[Sacrosanct]

Of course there are lots of non Tolkien material in DnD. But what we are arguing is that Gygax leapfrogged off of Tolkien' s popularity when he created DnD, no matter what he claimed later.

There are references in Appendix N, that at the time D&D was created, were more popular than Tolkien's work. You're looking at it through a post Jackson movie trilogy popularity lens. So to say that D&D leapfrogged off of Tolkien but not off of more popular references at the time (like C.S. Lewis or Lewis Carrol) , seems really odd. Again, I'm not saying Tolkien wasn't widely popular. He was. But you're doing an incredible disservice to all the other references, which were hugely popular in the 60s and 70s, even moreso than Tolkien based the fact that we saw new S&S fantasy crop up all the time, and hardly any high fantasy.

The bottom line is that we didn't start to see people emulating Tolkien's style of high fantasy until the late 70s--years after D&D was created. We're not talking about people directly using his material, we didn't even see people emulate that style until the late 70s. The Hobbit movie and Sword of Shannara are probably the two most popular emulations of Tolkien of the time. Terry Brooks wasn't sued, to my knowledge, so there was nothing stopping people from emulating the same style. It was popular culture to favor S&S in the 60s and 70s over Tolkien's style. This is not opinion. We can measure it by looking at what was actually created.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Celebrim]

It's a little different than what you are assuming. It's not that because you can't simulate the Lord of the Rings (or the Hobbit) correctly, it's not Tolkien.

It's more that if you play OSR/1e/Holmes Basic, you end up with an exceptionally different experience that matches, much more closely, to the S&S model that Gygax preferred. You also see this in the published adventures at the time.

It's an observation that early D&D was more about re-creating a S&S game than it was high fantasy, and it happened to have some Tolkien thrown in to appeal to a wide spectrum of gamers. Yes, Brad, we know that you're going to play Legolas the Elf again.

None of that addresses my objection. As Arilyn pointed out earlier, just because 'Frozen' is vastly different than the source material, doesn't mean 'Frozen' isn't derived from 'The Snow Queen'.

As a self-described Tolkien loremaster, I can state with great conviction that D&D elves are nothing like Tolkien elves and I can give all sorts of textual evidence that that is true, but that doesn't mean that the D&D elves aren't directly lifted from Tolkien. Yes, adaptation - intentional and unintentional - occurred within this lifting, but lifted they were indeed because there are elements of the D&D elves that are found no where else but in Tolkien.

That's the standard. So in the case of something like a 'magic ring', we could only strongly assert D&D magic rings came from Tolkien if we found some traits in the text that were unique to Tolkien - such as for example, if rings of invisibility had drawbacks, but halflings were specifically immune to them, then this would be evidence of a direct lift. I can't think of any such examples right at the moment though, and lacking such an example there are just too many possible sources of the idea of a magic ring to latch on to any one. On the other hand, I've always had a suspicion that the source of the 'rings of elemental' command was ultimately the Elvish rings of power. Lacking textual evidence though, that's just a suspicion - the limited relationship could be a coincidence.

By the same standard, I'd love to have your textual evidence that Zelazny is "for the most part" the source of the thief class given the prevalence of sneaky characters in literature - Cugel the Clever, for just one example. Definitive, or nearly definitive, textual evidence would be an example of a thief using a magic wand by way of trickery, speaking a secret thieves cant, and other oddities of the class that aren't common to the idea of thief being found in a single source.

 

[Tony Vargas]

...but lifted they were indeed because there are elements of the D&D elves that are found no where else but in Tolkien. That's the standard. lacking such an example there are just too many possible sources of the idea of a magic ring to latch on to any one. On the other hand, I've always had a suspicion that the source of the 'rings of elemental' command was ultimately the Elvish rings of power.

That was the example I thought of. Gandalf didn't seem phased by Bilbo having a ring that turned him invisible, so such lesser rings much have existed, as well, without all the corruption of the One Ring, and telling the difference wasn't easy. The D&D Rings of Elemental Command each appear to be a lesser ring of some kind until their true powers are somehow unlocked or revealed.

Personally, I'm having trouble thinking of a lot of other sources of magical rings. The one variation on the djinni legend, the lamp your rub /with the matching ring/, and the titular ring of the Nibelung (of which the One Ring can surely be considered derivative, in story arc, if not in powers). What am I blanking on?

By the same standard, I'd love to have your textual evidence that Zelazny is "for the most part" the source of the thief class given the prevalence of sneaky characters in literature - Cugel the Clever, for just one example. Definitive, or nearly definitive, textual evidence would be an example of a thief using a magic wand by way of trickery, speaking a secret thieves cant, and other oddities of the class that aren't common to the idea of thief being found in a single source.

The original thief couldn't use a magic wand via trickery, and Thieves' Cant is an older idea than Zelazny... IIRC, Lieber's Grey Mouser shared the D&D Thief's preferences for armor & weapons, including favoring the sling over the bow, and dabbled in both linguistics and magic.
But, the Thief, like the warrior, is a hoary archetype, indeed.

That only seems to be disagreement with my first and lesser claim. (And even then, I would still argue that creating a medieval "rpg" is still not a "fantasy" rpg.) Even if they invented D&D exactly as it is, would it ever have become more popular than...well, than miniature wargaming itself was, in the absence of a huge Tolkien fan-base?

Possibly, if there were still the media sensations over Satanism and suicide associated with it.

I lean towards the former. Heavily. Not that I discount Tolkien's work, but a lot of amazing work gets unappreciated and undiscovered. I again note that there was a whole priming of America with the genre of sci-fi and fantasy from the 20s on, and, most importantly ... things changed in the 60s, man.

While I was technically alive for it, I certainly wasn't reading sci-fi/fantasy at the time, but what I've noticed is that there was a whole lot of Conan pastiche written in the 60s (Elric, for instance, was an intentional subversion of the formula), and the Tolkien pastiche started later...

 

[BookBarbarian]

I contend that Tolkien influenced D&D in an amount that is completely immeasurable.

 

[Shadowdweller00]

I contend that Tolkien influenced D&D in an amount that is completely immeasurable.

Nonsense. I measure 4.5 biblions of influence, precisely.

 

[TwoSix]

Nonsense. I measure 4.5 biblions of influence, precisely.

Well, 4.6 biblions would simply be absurd.