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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7265047" data-attributes="member: 4937">I think that is a very safe claim, especially when you start the claim by making really extreme claims about the position of the two groups.  Agreed, and of course, people can be wrong about specific claims.  As I've said elsewhere, there are plenty of things that are not Tolkien in D&D and came from other influences.   There are so many possible sources of the idea of magic, named, and even intelligent swords that it isn't possible to identify any one unique influence that created the idea within D&D.  It could have come from one or many different sources, and unless you find an element of named magical swords that are unique to both the source material and D&D, you couldn't even name which was the principle.The same however is not true of other aspects of the game, where we can identify an actual parent idea that inspired the D&D version.But, for all you get correct, you yourself engage in one very bad piece of common but erroneous argument in your essay, and that is the idea that if early D&D couldn't be used to simulate the story of the Lord of the Rings correctly, then perforce the origin of the material isn't Tolkien.   And while that seems like a very sound theory at first, and in isolation we might believe it, it ignores the possibility of mistranslations, misunderstandings and maladaptations in porting the source material over to D&D.  Thus, for example, Tolkien's elves are immortal, while D&D's elves are merely very long lived.  But this in itself doesn't prove that D&D's elves aren't Tolkien's elves, because the preponderance of the evidence - racial divisions, resistance to sleep, and so forth - suggests a Tolkien origin.   Thus, even though there are plenty of elements about the D&D M-U that don't correspond to Gandalf, doesn't mean we can rule out Gandalf as the primary inspiration for a D&D M-U.   We should certainly look at the works of Vance, but we shouldn't miss that invisibility, lightning bolt, pyrotechnics, fireball, knock, hold portal, light and others have their origin in Gandalf and that the original Wizard character in the wargaming rules that directly led to D&D was Gandalf.  My personal suspicion is that Gygax himself would have preferred a fantasy world that was more directly medieval and inspired by the real world.  Van Helsing in the background or not, his original clerics seem to have been Catholic inspired priests, and he seems somewhat annoyed to have to specify which deity that they worshiped.   In the same way, I'm not sure he would have brought in halflings, elves, and dwarves all that happily on his own, but certainly his player base was excited by it and he bowed to that pressure.Just as it is dangerous to reason on the basis that "D&D 'is' Tolkien" that every element of it is Tolkien, so it is dangerous to reason that because "D&D is not Tolkien" that it must have some other basis.The truth is that the "is" is the problem there.   If you stop assuming that D&D "is" this thing or that, and just start listing where the various elements came from, you'll be on much safer ground.</blockquote>

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