NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercurius" data-source="post: 9714777" data-attributes="member: 59082">I agree with you and Pratchett, with a few significant caveats. One, see my Babe Ruth analogy above. No single baseball player changed the game as much as he did, but it was 100 years ago and is mostly felt today through how the game shifted due to his influence, not the "looming presence of Babe Ruth," who is now a mythical figure.Secondly, there's a difference between mediums - specifically literature vs. RPGs (but we could also include film/tv, video games, etc). Tolkien's influence is stronger in literature than it is in RPGs, imo. And certainly, in fantasy lit, the publication of LotR marks arguably the most important before/after moment - everything after was, at the very least, published in the context of "post-Tolkien fantasy." But this is a bit different in RPGs.And third, we have to consider generations. I do think his influence has waned--or become more diluted--over the years. The OP is presumably 75+ years old ("late teens...seven years before original D&D [1974]") and grew up in a context well before the internet and "geek media" became prominent. Fantasy was very fringe, and only congealing as a genre in his youth (some say that the Ballantine Adult Fantasy classics, republished in 1969-74) are what crystallized fantasy as a genre distinct from literature, children's lit, adventure stories, and SF). And of course the LotR was only published in 1954-55, and the fantasy field far more sparse in the OP's youth. Furthermore, what "fantasy" means today is quite different than what it meant when D&D came out in 1974.So while "Mt Tolkien" looms large in a historical sense, especially in fantasy literature, there are various factors that diminish his overt influence, and most of it comes through secondary and tertiary influence and/or the way the genre as a whole prospered after. Or to put it another way, far fewer kids right now know or care about Tolkien than they did even 20 years ago, let alone 40+ years ago. They are influenced through lineage, but most of it is implicit.</blockquote>

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