Who gives a care about Lord of the Rings in their D&D these days?

[Deathtongue]

To put things in perspective: I'm a grognard. Not a mega grognard, but I have been buying and playing D&D games since the early 90s. I bought and got my face destroyed by Gold Box games when they came out. So this isn't just the perspective of some young whippersnapper who doesn't know their roots. And at this point I gotta ask: who gives a crap about Lord of the Rings anymore?

How many years has it been since the last Lord of the Rings movie that didn't flop? How many years has it been since the last Conan movie at all? When's the last time anyone's read a Wheel of Time novel? I seriously think more people read Drizz't novels these days than the Grey Mouser. And yet: these things still have a death-grip on our collective imagination of D&D. Why? I mean, people roll their eyes at 4E D&D obviously trying to woo the World of Warcraft crowd -- though that's more because World of Warcraft wasn't as a resilient pop culture property as we thought. I think it would've been more prudent to go after Final Fantasy. All the same, I find that attempt at being culturally relevant much less cringeworthy than people trying to return the game to its Lord of the Ring roots.

I can understand making D&D a generic timeless genre fantasy. I can understand making it its own weird idiosyncratic hodge like Warhammer. I can even understand D&D chasing the latest fantasy trends and just hoping that the next trend turns out to be a Fire Emblem instead of a Game of Thrones. But why are we wallowing in properties that were considered old hat 30 years ago?

[Thrudd]

In what way is D&D wallowing in LotR? The only thing it ever really took from Tolkien was Elves, Dwarves, Halflings and Orcs. And even then, they weren't really the same version of those creatures. Especially in current editions, they are alike in name only. At this point, old D&D is as much a reference for other fantasy works as other fantasy media is a reference for D&D. It has become its own thing, far apart from any inspirational literature, and has been for a couple decades at least.

[King of Nowhere]

To put things in perspective: I'm a grognard. Not a mega grognard, but I have been buying and playing D&D games since the early 90s. I bought and got my face destroyed by Gold Box games when they came out. So this isn't just the perspective of some young whippersnapper who doesn't know their roots. And at this point I gotta ask: who gives a crap about Lord of the Rings anymore?

How many years has it been since the last Lord of the Rings movie that didn't flop?



the last of the trilogy came out, like, 15 years ago. that's not so old. and it was good enough that there's no need to make more.
the hobbit is more recent, and i'm not sure if it was a success. i didn't like it anyway


How many years has it been since the last Conan movie at all?

i'm pretty sure they made one a few years ago. no idea if it was successful, though.




When's the last time anyone's read a Wheel of Time novel?

I'm rereading the series right now. And if you look "twitter of time", you'll see a tons of people reading it for the first time either. they are making a tv series of it, and they are doing it with huge funding, meaning that they plan to cater to the massive fandom in the long term, not run a quick project to milk as much money as possible before it flops.



I seriously think more people read Drizz't novels these days than the Grey Mouser.
Never read either.
that said, pretty much anyone I know that's in the fantasy environment has read the lord of the rings multiple times, including people not yet in their twenties. I don't know anyone who read the drizzt novels.


And yet: these things still have a death-grip on our collective imagination of D&D. Why?

I think I answered

[Lvl45DM!]

To put things in perspective: I'm a grognard. Not a mega grognard, but I have been buying and playing D&D games since the early 90s. I bought and got my face destroyed by Gold Box games when they came out. So this isn't just the perspective of some young whippersnapper who doesn't know their roots. And at this point I gotta ask: who gives a crap about Lord of the Rings anymore?

How many years has it been since the last Lord of the Rings movie that didn't flop? How many years has it been since the last Conan movie at all? When's the last time anyone's read a Wheel of Time novel? I seriously think more people read Drizz't novels these days than the Grey Mouser. And yet: these things still have a death-grip on our collective imagination of D&D. Why? I mean, people roll their eyes at 4E D&D obviously trying to woo the World of Warcraft crowd -- though that's more because World of Warcraft wasn't as a resilient pop culture property as we thought. I think it would've been more prudent to go after Final Fantasy. All the same, I find that attempt at being culturally relevant much less cringeworthy than people trying to return the game to its Lord of the Ring roots.

I can understand making D&D a generic timeless genre fantasy. I can understand making it its own weird idiosyncratic hodge like Warhammer. I can even understand D&D chasing the latest fantasy trends and just hoping that the next trend turns out to be a Fire Emblem instead of a Game of Thrones. But why are we wallowing in properties that were considered old hat 30 years ago?

Go to comic-con sometime and wander around asking randoms who gives a crap about LOTR

[Biffoniacus_Furiou]

Hear, hear!

I got my start with 2e AD&D and have heavily played 3.0, 3.5, Pathfinder, and 5e, plus tons of RPG video games in between. The things that exist in LotR and similar stories exist to further the story, it wouldn't have made a good story for the eagles to fly them to Mordor, nor would it have made a good story if Gandalf just solved every problem by casting a spell. Things that exist in D&D exist for a completely different purpose: to give the player characters fun and unique abilities. It's not a fun game if everyone is playing a hobbit with a glowing +1 shortsword, the clothes on his back, and maybe a frying pan, and a mcguffin while the DMPC shoves them along through the adventure. Literary works only have enough magic to make the story good. Games have tons of magic because magic is fun!

If you want a low-magic game, D&D isn't for you. Pick up a copy of Starfinder, it has only two spellcasting classes and they're both fairly weak.

[Tanarii]

-- though that's more because World of Warcraft wasn't as a resilient pop culture property as we thought.
I know more people that have played World of Warcraft than those who have played D&D. Its got nostalgia value the same way D&D does at this point. It's also entirely possible more people have played WoW worldwide all time than have ever played D&D.

I don't know more people who currently play WoW than 5e, but that's because 5e has unprecedented success. Seriously, it's huge. It is the WoW of DND, exploding popularity of the line. So grognarding about D&D is all very good, but something like 1/3 to 1/2 of all-time D&D players are 5e players.

Edit: on your main point, I agree. Who cares about LotR. Even D&D didn't really. Most of it's roots are elsewhere. It's the PC races that make it feel like LotR is the core. If you want LotR, play the LotR 5e knock off.

[Dork_Forge]

Honestly I'd disagree that it does have a grip on modern D&D besides some tropes like Dwarves liking to craft and drink etc. Modern D&D is too high magic with too diverse a (player) racial base to have any particularly close resemblance to Tolkien's world. From what I'm aware of there isn't even an official published setting that stays close to the feel of Middle Earth and if a Wizard in D&D did as little magic as Gandalf does then he'd be accused of being a half caster.

[Witty Username]

Do you have a specific complaint, or a general feeling? D&D as it is now is about as related to LOTR as any other fantasy genre thing is at this point, or at least any other high fantasy thing. Partially because of things copying LOTR, partially because they copy D&D, partially because they copy from mythology and folklore. What change to D&D do you propose to make it less like LOTR?

[Zevox]

And at this point I gotta ask: who gives a crap about Lord of the Rings anymore?
Some of us certainly do. My group's GM has deliberately designed his campaign setting with significant similarities to Tolkien's, including dividing up his world's history into three "Ages," having the current Age defined by the struggle between the forces of a godlike Dark Lord and the various mortal nations of the world, even using a very Tolkien-style explanation for why his world's good deity doesn't deal with that Dark Lord directly by having a past calamity that occurred when he fought another dark god that he doesn't want to repeat. All of which we find contribute to making it a very fun setting to play in.

It's fine if that's not your cup of tea, but LotR is a classic that's influenced D&D from the beginning, and the films are still more than recent enough to have kept it very well-known. It should be unsurprising that others do like it.

[Arkhios]

IIRC, Gygax himself thought LOTR was silly, and was "forced" to include 'hobbits' (later halflings due to copyright issues) because a player in his group wanted to play one.

[Warwick]

But why are we wallowing in properties that were considered old hat 30 years ago?

We aren't.

[wookietek]

Fellow Grognard here (cut my teeth on the Basic set back in '82) and I don't see the stranglehold you described. It existed to some degree back in the 80's early 90's, but storytelling in the game has evolved and so has the game itself. I don't necessarily agree with all the evolutions, but each iteration of the game is valid in its own right. Personally give me 3.5 all day every day, but 5ed made it popular and accessible and I'll take it. I actually don't see anyone trying to make either Aragorn or Drizz't, but they unintentionally build Fafhrd or Grey Mouser and don't realize it.

[Trask]

Its kind of inevitable when you see things like Elves and Dwarves and Halflings on the list of races. To this day the Middle-Earth take on these races has left an indelible mark on how they are portrayed in fantasy that I've rarely seen anyone escape. Forgotten Realms (the default 5e setting) elves literally have an island to the West that they go to in order to escape the troubles of the world. The dwarves all have ruined kingdoms under the mountains filled with orcs. Halflings are cheery and stout folk that live by rivers or pastoral farmland (when theyre not busy getting a sort of gypsy gloss), Orcs and goblins are cruel, cave dwelling monsters that ravage the countryside.

And for those people replying that D&D isn't trying to retread Lord of the Rings, I implore you to take a look at this little passage from the new starter box set "Dragon of Icespire Peak" describing the Forgotten Realms setting.

"On the roads and rivers of the Realms travel minstrels and peddlers, merchants and guards, soldiers and sailors. Steel-hearted adventurers from backcountry farmsteads and sleepy villages follow tales of strange, glorious, faraway places. Good maps and clear trails can take even an inexperienced youth with dreams of glory far across the world, but these paths are never safe. Fell magic and deadly monsters are the perils one faces when traveling in the Realms. Even farms and freeholds within a day's walk of a city can fall prey to monsters, and no place is safe from the sudden wrath of a dragon."

Replace "the Realms" with "Middle-Earth" and you have a dead ringer for the setting.

Of course many of you will protest that that's not what you're doing with your D&D, or that you don't use the Realms, but it doesn't change the fact that the officially published content sets the tone for the game and what people publish for it. Almost all the adventures on DMsguild need to be written for the Realms, and not your weirdo version of the Realms but this version of it. And therein lies the great disconnect that leads to so much fuss about D&D. It pretends like its a game where you can be from a sleepy farmstead and explore what sounds like a fantasy world very grounded in familiar, pastoral elements. But almost all the content for the game points to the exact opposite. Classes chock full of spells and magical powers, the implied setting of myriad planes and worlds and the absolute smorgasbord of wacky races to choose from, theres a visceral disconnect that leaves a lot of people less than satisfied.

So yeah even if the majority of gamers dont care about LotR anymore, the default setting for the game still leans on it heavily, particularly in the department of races and its presentation of its setting.

[Eldariel]

IIRC, Gygax himself thought LOTR was silly, and was "forced" to include 'hobbits' (later halflings due to copyright issues) because a player in his group wanted to play one.

While this is sorta true, it's worth noting that there's an absurd amount of LotR in D&D:
- Balrog
- Treant (Ent)
- Orc
- Goblin
- Elf
- Dwarf
- Human
- Halfling
- Half-Orc (Uruk-Hai)
- Half-Elf
- Dragons (the firebreathing, flying lizard sort though D&D of course developed them further)
- Trolls
To a degree Hobgoblins too.

So basically all the playable PHB races aside from Dragonborn even in 5e are straight from LotR, as well as the most common basic monstrous humanoids aside from Kobolds. LotR defined what we think of as "elf", "dwarf", "half-elf", "half-orc", "orc", "high man", etc. and those definitions persist, while diverging hugely from their folklore forebears (and combining multiple sources of folkloristics). They also setup trolls and ents as about what we expect (though D&D ultimately buffed Trolls to make them regenerate and removed their weakness to sunlight, since other creatures already filled that niché) and of course Balrogs...err...Balors (Type VI Demons) at the top of the demon hierarchy. And while LotR is low magic compared to D&D, many of the classic spells do have their roots there.

Not to mention the whole setup of an "adventuring party" with "warriors, thief and mage" (priest is of course a more subsequent addition), especially the thief-role, is something Tolkien (though of course, the Hobbit) innovated in (of course, not alone; it's an age-old idea but the particular setup typical to D&D is very LotRish).


So like all the basic races are pop culture renditions of Tolkienite races and some really iconic enemies are carbon copies from the works as well as the basic adventuring party setup and the whole setup of the game, really.

I'd say D&D has been made to play LotR in spite of Gygax's dislike for the idea since his players wanted to do just that. In that sense, caring about LotR is kinda logical since it underlies the whole system (alongside Vancian magic, pulp, etc.).

[JellyPooga]

While the roots of d&d lore share a lot with LotR, I'm not even sure it had much of a stranglehold from its inception. Early d&d modules shared much more of the episodic nature of the likes of Howard (Conan, Solomon Kane) or even Lovecraft than it ever did the "sweeping epic" style of LotR. There's more political intrigue and war in LotR than there is dungeon delving or other site-based adventure. I mean, there's like two, maybe three dungeons in the whole trilogy and I hesitate to call one of them (and the maybe) that rather than just an underground encounter.

[Yora]

After the first couple of years, Gygax was talking a lot of obvious nonsense that directly contradicts what he wrote and what he did earlier. Somehow everything was suddenly just his own ideas, or he never really wanted it in the first place.

Though I don't understand what the supposed issue is here.

[MrStabby]

There are a few reasons why LoTR can be a worthy antecedent:

1) The party dynamic. So the fellowship has pretty much the best archetypal dynamic of an adventuring group. Different personalities, diverse sidequests, different motivations and how humans, dwarfs, elves and hobbits can come together. How a group can form from a load of people who didn't really know each other is a useful thing to have represented.

2) The diversity of the world and the enemies. This isn't a simple war - there is not just some opposing army but real diversity between orcs, hostile humans, barrow wights, Nazgul, ring wraiths, demons, beasts/monstrosities...

3) It sets the standard for the exploration pillar. The depth of the available culture in LoTR is huge. Writings, images, tales all hapen within a rich historical context within the world and there is such huge work put into this element that it really adds to the game/book. Look at the mines of Moria - diverse encounters/checks beginning with a check to see who knows Elvish, how it can be used - the watcher in the water, the sound of drums in the dark and the orcs are no random encounter but party of telling of the recent history of the place. Trolls, demons, treasure and history and a lot of fighting and running - showing a pretty cool dungeon to set an example.

I am not saying LoTR does everything well. It is a book not a game and so we wouldn't expect it to. It does enough well enough that it is a useful point of reference and a good starting point for expectations.

[Arkhios]

While this is sorta true, it's worth noting that there's an absurd amount of LotR in D&D:
- Balrog
- Treant (Ent)
- Orc
- Goblin
- Elf
- Dwarf
- Human
- Halfling
- Half-Orc (Uruk-Hai)
- Half-Elf
- Dragons (the firebreathing, flying lizard sort though D&D of course developed them further)
- Trolls
To a degree Hobgoblins too.

Tolkien didn't invent most of them though.

Goblins, elves, dwarves, dragons, and trolls have roots in various folklore all of which are older than any of Tolkien's works, or D&D. Even the half-elf is originally from Norse Mythology, and Balrog (or Balor) has roots in Irish Mythology.

While it's certainly true that LOTR refined these concepts, it's false to say it's "LOTR in D&D" just because LOTR made them popular.

[Shocksrivers]

I'm not sure what a grognard is, but from context I gather I'm not one, as I wasn't alive in the 80's. I have been playing TTRPG's since I was 8, however. I did notice the halfling moving more towards the Tolkienesk Hobbit in 5th, but other than that I don't think it is much more tolkieny than earlier additions.

That said, I care deeply about LoTR, just not necessarily in D&D. I reread the books almost yearly, as they are literary and fantasy classics.

However, you list a bunch of other (unrelated to my mind) popular fantasy things. What is your point with that? Conan is a different beast from LoTR altogether, I would argue, and the Wheel of Time series a third thing. D&D is, or at least allows for, a kind of campy and silly kitchensink approach to fantasy: if you want lovecraftian horrors, hobbits, vampires and demons in one story it can accommodate that, and that is good, right? 'Cauze if you want a serious gritty horror game, that is also possible. Being able to mix and match what you and your players want is nice, not bad, right?

But again, I might miss context from the earlier games (I started D&D ten years ago with 3.5), which causes me to miss your point

[Waazraath]

To put things in perspective: I'm a grognard. Not a mega grognard, but I have been buying and playing D&D games since the early 90s. I bought and got my face destroyed by Gold Box games when they came out. So this isn't just the perspective of some young whippersnapper who doesn't know their roots. And at this point I gotta ask: who gives a crap about Lord of the Rings anymore?

How many years has it been since the last Lord of the Rings movie that didn't flop? How many years has it been since the last Conan movie at all? When's the last time anyone's read a Wheel of Time novel? I seriously think more people read Drizz't novels these days than the Grey Mouser. And yet: these things still have a death-grip on our collective imagination of D&D. Why? I mean, people roll their eyes at 4E D&D obviously trying to woo the World of Warcraft crowd -- though that's more because World of Warcraft wasn't as a resilient pop culture property as we thought. I think it would've been more prudent to go after Final Fantasy. All the same, I find that attempt at being culturally relevant much less cringeworthy than people trying to return the game to its Lord of the Ring roots.

I can understand making D&D a generic timeless genre fantasy. I can understand making it its own weird idiosyncratic hodge like Warhammer. I can even understand D&D chasing the latest fantasy trends and just hoping that the next trend turns out to be a Fire Emblem instead of a Game of Thrones. But why are we wallowing in properties that were considered old hat 30 years ago?

Some semi-random thoughts on this:

- I don't think I ever cared for LotR in D&D personally, don't think I saw others do it. But I would say a lot of people care about it a lot these days. The books are still the defining work in fantasy, and in most 'best all time fantasy'-lists. The movies aren't that old, and were widely populair. The Hobbit movies less so I think, but Tolkien is hot enough that making a movie of the Silmarilion would drive the crowds wilde.

- As for the influence of LotR on D&D, plenty has been said already, about the humanoid races, treants/ents, dragons, balors/balrogs... it's not just the names, but the way races behave, the long lived gracious elves vs the rough and bit greedy dwarves. And that's not just an influence on D&D, but on the entire genre of fantasy, Tolkien's archetypes are so strong they are very hard to escape. I don't see any reason to downplay the huge influence LotR had on the game, or to deny it.

- Looking at it more historically, I don't see any reason to stop caring about LotR in 2020. I mean, yeah, LotR is old, but it was old 3 decades ago, and wasn't exactly young when D&D was created. Fantasy is a genre in which classics are being continued to be read. The Dune's, Amber's, Wheels of Time, Dragonriders of Pern, Belgariads etc. - they are here to stay. It's a rather timeless genre by nature, these fantasy worlds don't get 'old' as science fiction does when it ages badly (with people living in a year that was written as 'the future' and with all kind of technological things that were 'invented' by a writer but that are surpassed by common technology of today). Only some really old stuff (The Worm Ouroboros was a great predecessor of Tolkien) seems to get forgotten a bit. Oh well, that was somewhere in the 20's of last century I think.

- If something aged badly, it are the Fafahrd and Grey Mouser novels. I mean, there is this one scence in which a mindcontrolled woman tries to assasinate The Grey Mouser and he rapes her out of it and she gets better. Yeah, you read it right. As a teen in the nineties I considered it already to be in a very bad taste, and I don't think any writer or publisher would get away with that kind of stuff nowadays, fortunately. More f.a.t.a.l. rpg (google if you want, but I recommend not to) than D&D.

- what the hell I started playing in the early 90's as well and I'm neither grognard nor neckbeard but a young god in his prime. This notion that people who played in this period are old grumbling folks be damned! :smallwink:

- D&D is a cool game. Tolkien wrote great books, especially for its time. The latter influenced the early editions of the former, and early editions of D&D influence later editons. Really nothing wrong with this I think.

[NorthernPhoenix]

The LOTR movies caused an explosion of interest and "care", especially because they not only were huge commercial successes for the time, but also remain some of the most critically acclaimed blockbusters ever. It's so much bigger than any property confined to book form. The only thing comparable these days would be Game of Thrones in its reach. And even Game of Thrones stood on the shoulders of the LOTR movies, as has any "serious" fantasy work in the visual medium since their release.

I'm not a believer in static, timeless properties. But LOTR isn't that, it reinvents itself for new generations, and that is for sure the best way to stay eternally relevant.

[Chronic]

I'm not sure if I eveb understand the point of the topic. Is it a rant about Tolkien? About d&d? Tolkien has created standards when it comes to fantasy settings, so yeah, elves have pointy hears, but if you go past that, I find very little of the substance of tlotr in d&d, while I see John carter, Conan and many else constantly, because d&d is pulp to his bone.

[Eldariel]

Tolkien didn't invent most of them though.

Goblins, elves, dwarves, dragons, and trolls have roots in various folklore all of which are older than any of Tolkien's works, or D&D. Even the half-elf is originally from Norse Mythology, and Balrog (or Balor) has roots in Irish Mythology.

While it's certainly true that LOTR refined these concepts, it's false to say it's "LOTR in D&D" just because LOTR made them popular.

Well, the terms exist in older mythology but how they appear in D&D is pretty much 1-for-1 of how they appear in LotR and LotR is generally a significant departure from their folklore roots. For example, Balor has 1-for-1 even the weapons wielded by the Balrog in LotR. Elves are ancient wise humans, half-orcs are orcs without orcs' weaknesses, halflings are a thing at all, half-elves are perhaps the biggest departure from LotR but even they are more LotR than they are e.g. Celtic Elves (fey as the closest common fairy tale ancestor). Tolkien didn't invent the terms but Tolkien created largely novel content for the terms that had been used in a variety of meanings in different sets of folklore for millenia and the content created by Tolkien is largely what D&D builds upon, vis-á-vis the older or newer sources considering the same creatures.

Of course D&D is not LotR, but LotR is a key foundation of D&D and one of the biggest things shaping how especially the PCs and PC races are.

[Bobthewizard]

Your post made me think of this.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1090002825461944320

My experience with this topic is that the LOTR movies are what got my kids excited to start playing D&D with their friends. The movies might be getting older but they mostly still hold up. So while it is old for us, to a pre-teen who has never seen them before, LOTR is new and exciting.

[wookietek]

And that reminds me of this: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=612

Beware the rabbit hole you are about to enter...

[Chronos]

Why is it even relevant how long ago the LotR movies were? Do you seriously think the game was based (even in part) on the movies? The game was around for decades before those movies, and indeed before any successful movies that it at all resembles.

If anything, one could argue that the modern game should be more like D&D than ever. For instance, most players still know Bilbo Baggins, but as you point out, few still remember Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, or Cugel the Clever, or the various denizens of the city of Sanctuary... So why does the rogue still resemble all those more than it does Bilbo?

[Keravath]

I'm not sure I understand the OP's point at all.

"But why are we wallowing in properties that were considered old hat 30 years ago?"

Huh? D&D doesn't wallow in LOTR style fantasy unless that is what you want to run. The DM and players choose the kind of campaign they want to run and D&D can be fitted to almost any fantasy genre (as long as you're considering a world with a D&D compatible system of magic ... the martial aspects of D&D can be adapted to any fantasy genre).

LOTR and other classic fantasy clearly influenced the early design of D&D so that iconic races and classes from a wide range of fiction were included in the game. PHB p312 lists some of the "inspirational reading" sources that likely influenced D&D over the years.

The first edition AD&D DMG p224 has a shorter list and the following comment:
"The most immediate influences upon AD&D were probably de Camp & Pratt, REH, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, HPL, and A. Merritt; but all of the above authors, as well as many not listed, certainly helped to shape the form of the game."

On the other hand, if you are asking why folks haven't taken D&D and rewritten the design to better conform with more recent fantasy sources .. the main reason might be that it then wouldn't be D&D .. it would be another fantasy role playing game. That was one of the aspects of the game that the designers seemed to miss in the transition to 4e, D&D is both the mechanics and the feel of the game which comes from classic epic fantasy, both older and more recent since the mold hasn't changed much. The 4e changes took the game in a more generic fantasy direction (in my opinion) which ended up not being as popular with many of the folks playing D&D and Pathfinder. However, there are lots of fantasy role playing systems with a different feel .. Gurps fantasy, Rolemaster, MERP (which IS specifically LOTR) and lots of others. In the end, D&D doesn't "wallow" in the sources that inspired its creation but the resulting system can certainly reproduce the feeling of that sort of fantasy world if that is what the DM and players are interested in. D&D can also be used for a wide variety of other fantasy worlds and playstyles.

[Democratus]

I'm currently running an Adventures in Middle-Earth game - which is a fantastic modification to D&D 5e (by Cubicle 7) that makes it feel much more like a Tolkien world.

So far it's gone over extremely well. Exploring the depths of Mirkwood. Meeting Beorn and Radagast. Fighting against the rising tide of Shadow.

Great stuff. LOTR is still quite alive in gaming.

[KorvinStarmast]

To put things in perspective: I'm a grognard. OK, I'll see you a grognard and raise you a start in 1975 with the three little brown books. I guess that makes me a groggin' grognard, or something. :smallconfused: Heck, I was in the Navy, I like grog. :smallbiggrin:

D&D was never all about LoTR. LoTR was one of many influences on the development of the first RPG and fantasy campaign game. On the other hand, they did put together a game called the Siege of Minas Tirith (one of the early TSR games) that I think is really hard to find. And the Fantasy Supplement to the Chainmail rule book certainly had some LoTR influences.

It's roots are in the Swords and Sorcery genre more than anything else. As I wrote just yesterday: (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=24515574&postcount=3)


... D&D wasn't written as LoTR. It was written as Swords and Sorcery, which genre LOTR is not it in. LoTR is an attempt at an epic.

Swords and Sorcery? Yeah. Everything Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser were in. Any book with Elric of Melnibone or Dorain Hawkmoon. A variety of Edgar Rice Burroughts adventure books, Barsoom foremost. All of RE Howard's Conan Books. Three Hearts/Three Lions. The Tritonian Ring (L Sprague DeCamp). Theseus going after the Minotaur. (Greek Mytholody). Ali Baba and 40 Thieves. The Thief of Baghdad. Sinbad the Sailor. Jack Vance's Dying Earth. HP Lovecraft.


These rules are strictly fantasy. Those wargamers who lack imagination, those who don't care for Burroughs' Martian adventures where John Carter is groping through black pits, who feel no thrill upon reading Howard's Conan saga, who do not enjoy the de Camp & Pratt fantasies or Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser pitting their swords against evil sorceries will not be likely to find DUNGEONS and DRAGONS to their taste. But those whose imaginations know no bounds will find that these rules are the answer to their prayers. With this last bit of advice we invite you to read on and enjoy a "world" where the fantastic is fact and magic really works! While I prefer low magic settings, magic when encountered ought to be rare, powerful, and risky. That combination seems to have gone away ever since WoTC took over.

{If there was a game like the old I.C.E. Middle Earth games that were set in the Third Age when the Numenoreans were still running about in Gondor and South Gondor and Arnor, you'd see maybe a higher fidelity between D&D and LoTR's prequel adventures} I think Netflix or someone like that is putting together a TV show.

What change to D&D do you propose to make it less like LOTR?
1. Get rid of the halflings. The are as useless as the appendix is on a human being. (I'd also be happy to see gnomes go away, but I don't think that's gonna happen). I say this having played quite a few Hobbit and then Halfling thieves, and later rogues, in OD&D and AD&D.

2. Tone down the elves. (Runequest did a decent job of this when it first came out). They are still the Mary Sue race.

3. Orcs have done OK over time, as the WoW "what if orcs are people like us" thing that began in Blizzard's Warcraft Adventures (which never got published) and became more pronounced in Warcraft III and then came to full flower in WoW. A bit more work on Orc culture would not go amiss.

4. Publish a Darksun setting for 5e.

@Yora

Though I don't understand what the supposed issue is here.
There isn't one. :smallcool:

[deljzc]

As a huge fan of Tolkien, you just can not underestimate his roll in creating the "roots" of D&D.

Tolkien created the idea of "World Building" in a fantasy setting. Everything he did was connected. It wasn't just that he threw together humans, hobbits, elves, dwarves (a word he created), orcs, ents, dragons for a story. It's that he spent pretty much his entire adult life creating a WORLD and history for everything. From the Gods to the creation of the earth to the history of each race.

It is his level of detail that many borrowed from because let's face it, no one else could put the TIME into it that Tolkien did. So yes, it was easy to "borrow" from Tolkien to create short cuts into the creation of the Dungeons and Dragons universe and world building experience.

Tolkien was first. And thereafter, any change is always going to be somewhat at odds with what the first looks like. You can make small changes (sometimes incrementally over long periods of time like Dungeons and Dragons does between editions). Sometime you have people ATTEMPT to create entire new fantasy worlds from scratch. But these often don't stick. Not to the extent Tolkien's world sticks.

Tolkien's influence is not on the small picture or daily adventure of D&D. Tolkien's influence is on the big picture. The world we imagine dungeons and dragons takes place in. The description of the races and how they behave. To try and tear that down and rebuild it just isn't worth the effort.

[Willie the Duck]

Though I don't understand what the supposed issue is here.

I'm not sure I understand the OP's point at all.

I think I pretty clearly see a 'why is this thing still a big deal?' concept being lain down, and yes it seems odd because 1) exactly to whom are these things a big deal?, and 2) boy is there a lot of stuff rolled up in there (seriously, LotR, the other inspirational books from Appendix N who haven't gotten movies, post-D&D fantasy like Wheel of Time, and something something vague about 4e and WoW which seems like an entirely different point). It's a dog's breakfast of mildly related subjects in search of a point, if there is one.


To put things in perspective: I'm a grognard. Not a mega grognard, but I have been buying and playing D&D games since the early 90s. I bought and got my face destroyed by Gold Box games when they came out. So this isn't just the perspective of some young whippersnapper who doesn't know their roots. And at this point I gotta ask: who gives a crap about Lord of the Rings anymore?

How many years has it been since the last Lord of the Rings movie that didn't flop? How many years has it been since the last Conan movie at all? When's the last time anyone's read a Wheel of Time novel? I seriously think more people read Drizz't novels these days than the Grey Mouser. And yet: these things still have a death-grip on our collective imagination of D&D. Why? I mean, people roll their eyes at 4E D&D obviously trying to woo the World of Warcraft crowd -- though that's more because World of Warcraft wasn't as a resilient pop culture property as we thought. I think it would've been more prudent to go after Final Fantasy. All the same, I find that attempt at being culturally relevant much less cringeworthy than people trying to return the game to its Lord of the Ring roots.

I can understand making D&D a generic timeless genre fantasy. I can understand making it its own weird idiosyncratic hodge like Warhammer. I can even understand D&D chasing the latest fantasy trends and just hoping that the next trend turns out to be a Fire Emblem instead of a Game of Thrones. But why are we wallowing in properties that were considered old hat 30 years ago?

Okay, after what I said above, I should state that I am somewhat sympathetic. There are plenty enough people amongst the D&D fanbase (especially the grognard set) that really resent the game and its influences from moving forward, chronologically. How dare modern gamers take their cues from anime and wuxia films and video games and modern fantasy novels (a genre that has flourished with the help of both LotR and D&D). This is a true state of affairs, but it also isn't really that different from the rest of life, where as you hit middle age you resent that life and culture isn't marketed to you and stuff that you found important at age 12 (especially if it is from your parent's generation, and the makers of which are swiftly dying off) doesn't have the same cultural permanence that you thought it would. I felt it most keenly outside of gaming, right around when Mary Tyler Moore and M*A*S*H's William Christopher died, and various young people responded with "who?" It is a natural tendency and unsurprising that it shows up in gaming as well.

However, that's a super minority, and in general modern gamers are adapting with the times. And not just young people. It's sci fi, and webcomics, but here is a great example: Howard Taylor (of Schlock Mercenary) was asked if it was troubling that kids today don't read Asimov and Bradbury and 'the classics' or 'the best' or the like. He responded that no, the best sci fi novel was The Martian, and that he was not stuck in 1980 reading novels published 25-50 years before then, and neither should his audience. Same is true with gaming. LotR was published ~20 years before D&D came out, so it is unsurprising that it influenced Gygax and his compatriots (and regardless of how much he said they influenced him or not, he included parts of them in his game, although it should be said that the game itself is very much more Conan/Fafhrd+G.M.-esque than it is a LotR story) flocked to it and the other literature thus convenient to them. Likewise today many gamers are much more influenced by stuff that came out 20 years ago than they are by Tolkien (whose work woul be temporally distant more like what HG Wells would be to Gygax).


I'm not sure what a grognard is, but from context I gather I'm not one, as I wasn't alive in the 80's. I have been playing TTRPG's since I was 8, however. I did notice the halfling moving more towards the Tolkienesk Hobbit in 5th, but other than that I don't think it is much more tolkieny than earlier additions.

That said, I care deeply about LoTR, just not necessarily in D&D. I reread the books almost yearly, as they are literary and fantasy classics.

However, you list a bunch of other (unrelated to my mind) popular fantasy things. What is your point with that? Conan is a different beast from LoTR altogether, I would argue, and the Wheel of Time series a third thing. D&D is, or at least allows for, a kind of campy and silly kitchensink approach to fantasy: if you want lovecraftian horrors, hobbits, vampires and demons in one story it can accommodate that, and that is good, right? 'Cauze if you want a serious gritty horror game, that is also possible. Being able to mix and match what you and your players want is nice, not bad, right?

But again, I might miss context from the earlier games (I started D&D ten years ago with 3.5), which causes me to miss your point

The short version:

Grognard is French for 'The Old Guard' and were the old, experienced officers in the time of Napoleon. The term has been taken on by wargamers (and later TTRPG gamers) to basically mean some arbitrary level of veterancy in gaming. Even KorvinStarmast, who has a pretty good claim of being longest-term gamer here (unless Ernie Gygax, Rob Kuntz, or Mike Mornard* decide to swing in and lay claim to the title), was once considered a young interloper by the grognards of his day (wargamers who resented these upstart 'roleplayers' taking over).
The Hafling wasn't moving towards Tolkienesque in 5e, it was moving back towards it, having been exceedingly close to novel-style (or maybe the '77 Rankin/Bass animated movie version) hobbits throughout the TSR era.
The early game very strongly resembled a pulp sword and sorcery adventure in the likes of short story version of Conan, or Fafhrd and Grey Mouser tale -- there's a mysterious location, the (relatively amoral) protagonist explores it because they are thirsty for adventure and treasure. There is adventure. Big Bad (who probably is really bad, if only to make the protagonist not just a home invading murderer) gets defeated. Maybe some innocent gets saved, but only as secondary plot point. Lather, rinse, repeat.

*To my knowledge, the longest playing gamers who have an online presence.

[Deathtongue]

However, that's a super minority, and in general modern gamers are adapting with the times. And not just young people. It's sci fi, and webcomics, but here is a great example: Howard Taylor (of Schlock Mercenary) was asked if it was troubling that kids today don't read Asimov and Bradbury and 'the classics' or 'the best' or the like. He responded that no, the best sci fi novel was The Martian, and that he was not stuck in 1980 reading novels published 25-50 years before then, and neither should his audience. Same is true with gaming. LotR was published ~20 years before D&D came out, so it is unsurprising that it influenced Gygax and his compatriots (and regardless of how much he said they influenced him or not, he included parts of them in his game, although it should be said that the game itself is very much more Conan/Fafhrd+G.M.-esque than it is a LotR story) flocked to it and the other literature thus convenient to them. Likewise today many gamers are much more influenced by stuff that came out 20 years ago than they are by Tolkien (whose work woul be temporally distant more like what HG Wells would be to Gygax).I'd like it better if D&D made a cleaner break with its origins. Yes, D&D can't be accurately described as a LotR clone anymore, but that genre still has its hooks too much into the imagination of D&D. When you consider settings like Warhammer or Final Fantasy or Dark Sun, you can see that D&D could go much, much further from its roots than it has in the past 40+ years. If you want to compare D&D to some other fantasy property like Harry Potter or Avatar: TLA or even Game of Thrones, D&D is much closer to its FGM/Conan/LotR origins than to anything that has come out recently.

As for me, personally, I don't want D&D to remain the same as it did when I'm a kid. The newer stuff is better than the older stuff, but even if it wasn't, I can't think of anything more depressing than my kids and my neighbors' kids being forced to enjoy largely the same crap I did as a kid.

[KorvinStarmast]

As a huge fan of Tolkien, you just can not underestimate his roll in creating the "roots" of D&D.

Tolkien created the idea of "World Building" in a fantasy setting. Yeah, his efforts (well summarized in his distinction on Primary World vs Secondary World in the On Faerie Stories lecture) certainly informed what Robert Jordan tried to do with Wheel of Time, what Brooks tried to do with Shanarra, etc. Yeah, credit where credit is due.

Even KorvinStarmast, who has a pretty good claim of being longest-term gamer here (unless Ernie Gygax, Rob Kuntz, or Mike Mornard* decide to swing in and lay claim to the title), was once considered a young interloper by the grognards of his day (wargamers who resented these upstart 'roleplayers' taking over). Oh, yeah, well said Willie; my friends and I were at best second wave. We were high school kids who discovered this game (we lived in Virginia) of three brown books (Greyhawk soon followed) being played by people in the MidWest (and we had no idea, but also elsewhere). We had no access to the Auld Wargamer's Network held together by news letters and rare conventions. (I think my older brother had two copies of the Avalon Hill magazine called The General). They were mostly adults, and we were utterly oblivious. And you could say that "we were working without a net." With D&D. What ever wasn't clear in the books we made up; we had to.
A lot of us were war gamers, and Diplomacy players, and board gamers, and fans of pulp fiction (Mars, Howard, Elric, Lieber) as well ... but I never read any Lovecraft until the 80's.
I didn't get to read my first Strategic Review article until a borrowed one from an upper classman in college in 1976 or 1977 ...

[Chronos]

Sure, D&D hasn't abandoned the sources that were its inspiration, but it's also taken inspiration from those later sources. There's nothing like a monk or non-evil warlock in Tolkien, but there they are alongside the other base classes. And one of the monk subclasses sure looks like specifically an attempt to fit Avatar: the Last Airbender into D&D. If you want a clean break from Tolkien, you're still free to run a D&D game without halflings, dwarves, or elves: The game shouldn't have to do it for you. By retaining both its roots and new material, the game is all the richer.

[truemane]

With all due respect, I think you have it mildly backwards. Older editions of D&D had a lot of LOTR-adjacent elements (whether for marketing purposes or whatever is up for some debate). And then, subsequent to that (and somewhat separate from that), D&D had a titanic amount of influence on the Sword & Sorcery/High Fantasy genre. D&D defined the genre for decades, to the point where we often consider fantasy works as original or derivative to the extent that they interestingly depart from the tropes of D&D.

And it's the feel of 'classical' fantasy that D&D is always trying to retain as it updates its mechanics. The "failure" of 4E was primarily a failure to capture that feel. But it didn't fail to feel like LOTR, it failed to feel like D&D.

Maybe the original Ranger was just a systematized Aragorn (down to his double-torch combo on Weathertop granting them TWF for ever after), but by now, "Ranger" is just its own legacy with its own history and its own set of tropes and expectations. No one, I think, looks at a 5E Ranger and judges it according opt how faithfully it reproduces a Dunedain.

I think it's actually D&D that has the stranglehold on D&D.

[NorthernPhoenix]

With all due respect, I think you have it mildly backwards. Older editions of D&D had a lot of LOTR-adjacent elements (whether for marketing purposes or whatever is up for some debate). And then, subsequent to that (and somewhat separate from that), D&D had a titanic amount of influence on the Sword & Sorcery/High Fantasy genre. D&D defined the genre for decades, to the point where we often consider fantasy works as original or derivative to the extent that they interestingly depart from the tropes of D&D.

And it's the feel of 'classical' fantasy that D&D is always trying to retain as it updates its mechanics. The "failure" of 4E was primarily a failure to capture that feel. But it didn't fail to feel like LOTR, it failed to feel like D&D.

Maybe the original Ranger was just a systematized Aragorn (down to his double-torch combo on Weathertop granting them TWF for ever after), but by now, "Ranger" is just its own legacy with its own history and its own set of tropes and expectations. No one, I think, looks at a 5E Ranger and judges it according opt how faithfully it reproduces a Dunedain.

I think it's actually D&D that has the stranglehold on D&D.


That's true, but it's not because DnD is inward looking. As you mention, New DnD is influenced by a plethora of other, ever more modern depending on the edition, fantasy and fantasy adjacent works, many of those themselves being influenced by Old DnD, creating a loop.

[Willie the Duck]

Maybe the original Ranger was just a systematized Aragorn (down to his double-torch combo on Weathertop granting them TWF for ever after), but by now, "Ranger" is just its own legacy with its own history and its own set of tropes and expectations. No one, I think, looks at a 5E Ranger and judges it according opt how faithfully it reproduces a Dunedain.

I've seen this referenced multiple times here on Giantitp, and nowhere else. D&D rangers didn't get specific 2-weapon-fighting benefits until 2nd edition AD&D in 1989. Long after they became their own thing, and also after a specific dark elven ranger started wielding paired scimitars (at the time a drow-specific ability). If Aragorn wielding the two torches on Weathertop was the inspiration of D&D rangers getting 2wf, this would seem to counter the rest of this argument (and I've certainly seen no quotes from the 2e designers to that effect).

[truemane]

I've seen this referenced multiple times here on Giantitp, and nowhere else. D&D rangers didn't get specific 2-weapon-fighting benefits until 2nd edition AD&D in 1989. Long after they became their own thing, and also after a specific dark elven ranger started wielding paired scimitars (at the time a drow-specific ability). If Aragorn wielding the two torches on Weathertop was the inspiration of D&D rangers getting 2wf, this would seem to counter the rest of this argument (and I've certainly seen no quotes from the 2e designers to that effect).

Huh. That's both true and mildly disturbing. That means I've somehow retroactively invented several memories of Rangers having TWF in 1E. I was only playing 1E for a year or two before 2E happened, but still. I think I need to go lie down.

And, yes, given that, I think you're right that Copyrighted Drow probably had more to do with the TWF thing than Aragorn.

[Willie the Duck]

Huh. That's both true and mildly disturbing. That means I've somehow retroactively invented several memories of Rangers having TWF in 1E. I was only playing 1E for a year or two before 2E happened, but still. I think I need to go lie down.

To be fair, 1e rangers could have fought two-weapon (with dagger or handaxe only as offhand weapon) in 1E, they just had no specific affinity.


And, yes, given that, I think you're right that Copyrighted Drow probably had more to do with the TWF thing than Aragorn.

I suspect it is, but Zeb Cook doesn't do a lot of AMA's on 2e (and most of them seem to revolve around she who must not be named).

I also think they were just trying to make the Ranger more distinct. They also didn't get the armor restriction. So I think there was a concerted effort to make them less of an army ranger and more of a (fighting) forest ranger.

[GreyBlack]

I've actually taken more to taking classical myth and spicing it up; I'm actually writing a module right now that takes old French fairy tales and reworks them to be more adventure oriented a la The Witcher series.

That said, D&D was not and never has been a good LOTR simulator; the roots of D&D come more from the Conan short stories than from anything in Tolkien.

[Tanarii]

To be fair, 1e rangers could have fought two-weapon (with dagger or handaxe only as offhand weapon) in 1E, they just had no specific affinity.
They kinda sorta did after Unearthed Arcana, which set weapon requirements. Of which dagger, knife or hand axe was one.

[LtPowers]

I'd like it better if D&D made a cleaner break with its origins. Yes, D&D can't be accurately described as a LotR clone anymore, but that genre still has its hooks too much into the imagination of D&D. When you consider settings like Warhammer or Final Fantasy or Dark Sun, you can see that D&D could go much, much further from its roots than it has in the past 40+ years.

Well it could, but it wouldn't be a very popular move.


Powers &8^]

[Zevox]

Sure, D&D hasn't abandoned the sources that were its inspiration, but it's also taken inspiration from those later sources. There's nothing like a monk or non-evil warlock in Tolkien, but there they are alongside the other base classes. And one of the monk subclasses sure looks like specifically an attempt to fit Avatar: the Last Airbender into D&D. If you want a clean break from Tolkien, you're still free to run a D&D game without halflings, dwarves, or elves: The game shouldn't have to do it for you. By retaining both its roots and new material, the game is all the richer.
Yes, this exactly. I mean, I fairly obviously love Avatar: The last Airbender, and I'm quite pleased that they at least tried to make a Monk variation that would allow us to play the fantasy of a Bender character, even if the final result could've been better at that. But they don't need to take away other things to add things like that. All that accomplishes is displeasing those who liked those things.

I'm never going to protest if you add things to the game that represent new things, whether those are things like I like such as Avatar or ones that I have no interest in such as Game of Thrones. Hell, the whole Ebberon campaign setting is largely composed of things I'm not interested in or actively dislike in fantasy, but that's fine, it just means I don't personally buy Ebberon books. But remove something like Halflings or Elves and yeah, that's going to be a fairly big problem with me. There's no benefit to anything like that, only drawback.

[Trask]

I'm never going to protest if you add things to the game that represent new things, whether those are things like I like such as Avatar or ones that I have no interest in such as Game of Thrones.

Having new things is nice but at what point do you stop? At what point are there so many new elements that the game is almost entirely diluted out of any original essence? I think D&D has nearly reached that saturation point, where it doesn't resemble anything but itself and its components are so disparate from each other that its almost impossible to take it seriously as a unified whole. You can add new things all day, but you'll reach a point where the game doesn't even resemble anything close to coherent anymore.

[KorvinStarmast]

Having new things is nice but at what point do you stop? At what point are there so many new elements that the game is almost entirely diluted out of any original essence? I think D&D has nearly reached that saturation point, where it doesn't resemble anything but itself and its components are so disparate from each other that its almost impossible to take it seriously as a unified whole. You can add new things all day, but you'll reach a point where the game doesn't even resemble anything close to coherent anymore.
I vaguely recall a post on The Forge where it was explained why, between AD&D 2e and D&D 3e, that the game was by its very structure "incoherent" but I think that had to do with the GNS model or The Big Model ... and I am so over the Forge that I don't think I'll go and have a look.

I also think that Frank Menzter got a pretty decent grip on the over arching problem by breaking the D&D game version that he had been charged with into Basic, Expert, Companion, Master and Immortal packages. I feel that this allowed for a certain amount of "scope control" based on the tone of game one was looking for.

[Zevox]

Having new things is nice but at what point do you stop? At what point are there so many new elements that the game is almost entirely diluted out of any original essence? I think D&D has nearly reached that saturation point, where it doesn't resemble anything but itself and its components are so disparate from each other that its almost impossible to take it seriously as a unified whole. You can add new things all day, but you'll reach a point where the game doesn't even resemble anything close to coherent anymore.
That's up to individual settings to decide, I feel. You can have more Tolkien-esque ones like The Forgotten Realms, more magitechy ones like Eberron, and so on and so forth, while the game itself includes enough options to allow many such variations. It enables the game to be what the DM and players desire it to be, which is wonderful, I'd say.

[MrStabby]

I really wouldn't mind if there was a much tighter focus on settings... I think.

I like content. I like the new stuff, but I could enjoy a more tight theme.

I dislike that the wizard and to a lesser extent sorcerer don't really have a strong spelialist feel. They seem very generic. Likewise with the fighter, rogue, barbarian... I think the cleric and paladin are good - a tight thematic package for each and evocative of a european style setting. I would love other, equally evocative versions for other campaigns - things like alternative cleric spell lists where priests do not heal or bless but are more... hostile or a druid spell list that eschews elemental compnents and so on. Casters do have an element of power creep if any new spells that get added are to be worth taking over the old ones, so building tight, setting specific spells would work well for me. A lord of the Rings themed wizard, or any other fantasy archetype, for that kind of campaign would suit me well.

[Hael]

That's up to individual settings to decide, I feel. You can have more Tolkien-esque ones like The Forgotten Realms, more magitechy ones like Eberron, and so on and so forth, while the game itself includes enough options to allow many such variations. It enables the game to be what the DM and players desire it to be, which is wonderful, I'd say.

5e is so lore agnostic it's to the point where I am actively bored reading their materials. Everything is so generic. I would love a little more LOTR elvish mysticism and wonder. Add1-2 really captures that pretty well in their source books.

I completely agree with the OP on a few points though. Namely that I hate halflings and gnomes. It's not just b/c they are lame, uninteresting and boring, but b/c Lotr used them more as a foil for the 'epic' and titanic forces that were at play (the ancient world of elves, the high kings of Gondor, etc). The fact that DnD makes them a playable race, instantly nerfs every other race for 'balance' reasons. They never should have been included, and I completely agree with Gary Gygax's take them on them. Campaigns where the DM forces the players to venture through gnomish and halfling lands are like my personal idea of hell.

Moreover, the modern take on fantasy is so thoroughly played out that I think I would simply stop playing if that was introduced too heavily. So while there are some elements that I like (interesting magic systems), modern fantasy is far too much wedded to the idea of making parallels to the current world (and everyone has to be the edgy flawed antihero living in various settings demonstrating systems of power oppression). Whereas I currently prefer the more mythological archetype settings, where there are actual elemental forces and iconic heroes and planar evils. I don't need to know that Aragon had an oopsie one night and has a couple of elvish rugrats at home that he currently ignores.

Anyway, I still consider DnD fundamentally to be a mix between Conan, Lotr and Elric (with a bit of mythology from various world civilizations mixed in) and settings which get away from that are the ones that I tend to not play.

[Samayu]

D&D's properties are drawn from so many sources, it's hard to say that it was overwhelmingly based on LoTR. The trouble is that elves, dwarves halflings, orcs and rangers are so highly visible. But beyond that, forget it.

They reskinned one of the major villains of LoTR into a demon? Trolls aren't he same. Goblins aren't the same. Treants aren't exactly common in D&D. Rings of invisibility are only slightly more common. And what about spellcasting? The "wizard" in LoTR was actually a divine DMPC. There was only one pantheon of deities in the world, and hardly anybody knew about them.

[AntiAuthority]

To put things in perspective: I'm a grognard. Not a mega grognard, but I have been buying and playing D&D games since the early 90s. I bought and got my face destroyed by Gold Box games when they came out. So this isn't just the perspective of some young whippersnapper who doesn't know their roots. And at this point I gotta ask: who gives a crap about Lord of the Rings anymore?

How many years has it been since the last Lord of the Rings movie that didn't flop? How many years has it been since the last Conan movie at all? When's the last time anyone's read a Wheel of Time novel? I seriously think more people read Drizz't novels these days than the Grey Mouser. And yet: these things still have a death-grip on our collective imagination of D&D. Why? I mean, people roll their eyes at 4E D&D obviously trying to woo the World of Warcraft crowd -- though that's more because World of Warcraft wasn't as a resilient pop culture property as we thought. I think it would've been more prudent to go after Final Fantasy. All the same, I find that attempt at being culturally relevant much less cringeworthy than people trying to return the game to its Lord of the Ring roots.

I can understand making D&D a generic timeless genre fantasy. I can understand making it its own weird idiosyncratic hodge like Warhammer. I can even understand D&D chasing the latest fantasy trends and just hoping that the next trend turns out to be a Fire Emblem instead of a Game of Thrones. But why are we wallowing in properties that were considered old hat 30 years ago?

Nostalgia for certain fans, though I'm not too sure how many D&D players think the game was based primarily on Lord of the Rings (I've even heard Gygax didn't like how people compared the game to Lord of the Rings, but that was some time ago).

That said, while D&D has things from Lord of the Rings in it, it's also inspired by works such as Conan the Barbarian (among others, but I can't find the list). Even then... I think D&D stopped being like Lord of the Rings or Conan the Barbarian around the time Psionics, Ki, Magitek and firearms came into the picture some editions ago, so it's clearly a Fantasy Kitchen Sink type deal at this point, so go all in on it and keep pulling from different sources isn't really any different from what the game has already been doing.

[Yora]

I'm never going to protest if you add things to the game that represent new things, whether those are things like I like such as Avatar or ones that I have no interest in such as Game of Thrones. Hell, the whole Ebberon campaign setting is largely composed of things I'm not interested in or actively dislike in fantasy, but that's fine, it just means I don't personally buy Ebberon books. But remove something like Halflings or Elves and yeah, that's going to be a fairly big problem with me. There's no benefit to anything like that, only drawback.


Having new things is nice but at what point do you stop? At what point are there so many new elements that the game is almost entirely diluted out of any original essence? I think D&D has nearly reached that saturation point, where it doesn't resemble anything but itself and its components are so disparate from each other that its almost impossible to take it seriously as a unified whole. You can add new things all day, but you'll reach a point where the game doesn't even resemble anything close to coherent anymore.

In the end it comes down to the GM of each campaign to put together a whitelist of character options that are available for that specific game they are running.
It just would be nice if there was more of an understanding among players that this is how it works. It used to be a default assumption with Dark Sun (though probably today's Dark Sun would have gnomes, tieflings, and paladins anyway), but its something you need to tell every new player again and again, even though it was part of the campaign pitch.
In my current campaign, I had no issues yet with having only five custom human-like races, and only one player who wanted to play just the three classes that were not meant to be available. (We compromised on a monk, but he dropped out right after the first session.) But I am still having trouble to get the players remember that "PHB only" also applies to spells. I now let them show me spells they really want to get and make individual case by case decisions, but it would be nice if players would just assume that the GM decideds what material will be used during the campaign setup.

[Mole]

DND drew heavily on the fantasy literature of the day. Much of the fantasy literature of the day drew heavily on Lord of the Rings.
A good DND campaign needs a certain amount of world building, Tolkien is the archetypal world builder whose work heavily influenced the world building of authors that came after.
So naturally DND began with a clear Tolkien influence, both direct and indirect.

The great thing about DND is that it up to a group to put their own slant on things and they don't have to faithfully repeat the origins of the game.
Got a bee in your bonnet about Tolkien ? Design a campaign world that doesn't have a Dark Lord, balrogs, orcs, halflings and Rangers etc. Sorted.
Don't like Conan influences ? Very easy to design a world nothing like Howard's, you can even prohibit the barbarian class.

The reason DND is still played is that it harnesses the collective imagination of the DM and players, which is timeless.
"And yet: these things still have a death-grip on our collective imagination of D&D" is a hyperbolic way of saying that a 40+ year old game has influences that reflect the era it was conceived in and when being played, the interests of the participants.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

D&D is a fantasy kitchen sink setting left out too long.

Many successful RPG's incorporate as many borrowed elements as possible, so the players can play something like the things they are inspired by. If a game is rules-heavy enough and gets enough time and editions over which to build up its own mythology the borrowed things become more and more their own thing, part of the game's own setting. Whether it's rangers and halflings or zombies, the D&D versions are D&D stuff now. They have their own strengths and weaknesses.

This same tendency to include everything was probably also what led D&D to become such a high magic setting, while much of classic fantasy literature handles magic more sparingly. To make the game as accommodating to players and their fantasies as possible a lot of magic was included. Because one player wants to emulate Gandalf, another aims to be Allanon, Harry Potter or Elsa. To accommodate all of this you need to allow many different powerful magics. All these characters are in some way some sort of one of a kind chosen one/literal god in their world, and singlehandedly shape the fate of the world, sure, but they're cool characters, so why not have them? This led to the martial/caster imbalance and that in turn led to more and more magic seeping into non-magical characters. Kitchen sink left out too long.

This is not meant as a derogatory term. D&D is a great game with a great world, but it's its own world, derived from inspiration but evolved through years of use.

And I don't think that has anything to do with fantasy not being popular or cool these days and it being so long since the last good Lord of the Rings movie because it has totally been a golden age of nerd media for roughly the last two decades.

[Willie the Duck]

They kinda sorta did after Unearthed Arcana, which set weapon requirements. Of which dagger, knife or hand axe was one.

I'm not exactly clear on what you mean. I am talking about two-weapon fighting, which is a rule in 1e (somewhere), where you could fight with two weapons, but the offhand weapon had to be those weapons. A ranger could do, but has not specific tendency towards or bonuses.

Yes, in UA, the Ranger was required to have (by 4th level) proficiency in:

either a bow or a light crossbow,
a dagger or a knife,
a spear or an axe, and
a sword (of any type)

but I'm not clear of the relevance.

[Chronos]

Multiple times now, I've seen people claim that gnomes are one of the things that ties D&D too closely to LotR. Huh? There are no gnomes in Lord of the Rings. The only time Tolkien ever used the word "gnome" (in material that didn't even get published in the Silmarillion), it was for a subrace of elves, and D&D gnomes bear no resemblance whatsoever to Galadriel.

Nor is the ranger really based on Aragorn. Aragorn's D&D stats would be much closer to paladin than to ranger. A D&D ranger is much closer to Natty Bumppo (who's not even fantasy) than to Aragorn.

[Xapi]

I happen to be a 35 yo fantasy nerd, who later got into D&D, and who is now reading The Hobbit to his 6 yo son.

I have to say that reading The Hobbit now as a more mature person and after having being immersed in the D&D world for many years without specifically linking it to Tolkien, I see a huge influence, not only in the codification of races, but also in the pace of adventures and the type of encounters the protagonists face, and the way they go about facing them.

Bilbo screws up a sleight of hand check with the trolls, and Gandalf solves it by being a clever player and using his knowledge of the creature's statblock.

The party is very mindful of their travel resources, and finding a place to rest, being able to start a fire, are all worries the protagonists have.

Being ambushed by orcs through DM Fiat / trusting something that looks too good to be true.

Now of course this influence may be indirect, and even both works may be taking a cue from earlier works, but the paralels are definitely there.

[KorvinStarmast]

Nor is the ranger really based on Aragorn. Sorry, that's incorrect. The Strategic Review (Issue #2) Ranger, that led directly to the AD&D 1e Ranger, was very much a port of Aragorn into D&D. And he didn't get spells until level 8. (I won't disagree that Aragorn as Paladin also works somewhat if you make him an Ancients Paladin in 5e)

[Tanarii]

I'm not exactly clear on what you mean. I am talking about two-weapon fighting, which is a rule in 1e (somewhere), where you could fight with two weapons, but the offhand weapon had to be those weapons. A ranger could do, but has not specific tendency towards or bonuses.

Yes, in UA, the Ranger was required to have (by 4th level) proficiency in:

either a bow or a light crossbow,
a dagger or a knife,
a spear or an axe, and
a sword (of any type)

but I'm not clear of the relevance.
There relevance is they were required to have proficiency in the weapons used for twf.

My understanding of the history of the evolution is that this is the ultimate source for Rangers getting TWF, making it a common style among ranger players at the time. Not, as many folks seem to believe, drow not receiving a penalty to twf. (Or a certain drow ranger Mary Sue.) However, as with many things in the dim reaches of our hobbies history, this many be apocryphal. Especially given that drow PCs came out with the same product.

[Sigreid]

D&D is a fantasy kitchen sink setting left out too long.

Many successful RPG's incorporate as many borrowed elements as possible, so the players can play something like the things they are inspired by. If a game is rules-heavy enough and gets enough time and editions over which to build up its own mythology the borrowed things become more and more their own thing, part of the game's own setting. Whether it's rangers and halflings or zombies, the D&D versions are D&D stuff now. They have their own strengths and weaknesses.

This same tendency to include everything was probably also what led D&D to become such a high magic setting, while much of classic fantasy literature handles magic more sparingly. To make the game as accommodating to players and their fantasies as possible a lot of magic was included. Because one player wants to emulate Gandalf, another aims to be Allanon, Harry Potter or Elsa. To accommodate all of this you need to allow many different powerful magics. All these characters are in some way some sort of one of a kind chosen one/literal god in their world, and singlehandedly shape the fate of the world, sure, but they're cool characters, so why not have them? This led to the martial/caster imbalance and that in turn led to more and more magic seeping into non-magical characters. Kitchen sink left out too long.

This is not meant as a derogatory term. D&D is a great game with a great world, but it's its own world, derived from inspiration but evolved through years of use.

And I don't think that has anything to do with fantasy not being popular or cool these days and it being so long since the last good Lord of the Rings movie because it has totally been a golden age of nerd media for roughly the last two decades.

I disagree with this. It becomes D&D kitchen sink when you take everything. What it was always meant to be is a toolbox full of tools for you to build your own game.

[Yora]

Taking all the books at face value and ignoring the role of the GM in establishing the campaign is probably the biggest cause of this entire issue.

[Tanarii]

I disagree with this. It becomes D&D kitchen sink when you take everything. What it was always meant to be is a toolbox full of tools for you to build your own game.
I always saw it as a toolbox you were supposed to throw your own pop culture references into. Then use the tools to install a kitchen sink, cabinets, kitchen table, fridge, stove, cook up a really good scramble ... where was I?

[Lvl 2 Expert]

I disagree with this. It becomes D&D kitchen sink when you take everything. What it was always meant to be is a toolbox full of tools for you to build your own game.


Taking all the books at face value and ignoring the role of the GM in establishing the campaign is probably the biggest cause of this entire issue.

Fair point...

[Clistenes]

D&D may have started taking inspiration from LotR, but it has its own thing for a long time. It's just like superhero comics: It copies itself endlessly, subverts itself, adds spins, takes bits from other genres, remixes itself, inspires works like comics and novels and cartoons and movies and videogames, takes inspiration back from those works, regurgitates it all, goes back to its origins, and start all over again...

[Willie the Duck]

There relevance is they were required to have proficiency in the weapons used for twf.

My understanding of the history of the evolution is that this is the ultimate source for Rangers getting TWF, making it a common style among ranger players at the time. Not, as many folks seem to believe, drow not receiving a penalty to twf. (Or a certain drow ranger Mary Sue.) However, as with many things in the dim reaches of our hobbies history, this many be apocryphal. Especially given that drow PCs came out with the same product.

I don't think there's any one answer, particularly since Zeb isn't forthcoming. Was it Drizzt?, a callback to Aragorn on Weathertop (despite the ranger having become it's own thing in the meantime)?, the ranger conveniently being required to be proficient in 2wf-able weapons (and perhaps then some or many 1e players stumbling upon that fighting playstyle when playing one)? We can only guess.

Edit: In particular, one thing I cannot get a strong bead on is exactly what proportion of 1E gamers actually bought and used Unearth Arcana. It seems rather reviled in the OSR and Dragonsfoot communities, but those aren't really representative.

[Arkhios]

Sorry, that's incorrect. The Strategic Review (Issue #2) Ranger, that led directly to the AD&D 1e Ranger, was very much a port of Aragorn into D&D. And he didn't get spells until level 8. (I won't disagree that Aragorn as Paladin also works somewhat if you make him an Ancients Paladin in 5e)

Also, didn't Ranger have quite strict requirements at one point, including a Good Alignment?

[KorvinStarmast]

Also, didn't Ranger have quite strict requirements at one point, including a Good Alignment? Yes, something Good in AD&D 1e and Lawful Strategic Review. And the minimum scores were a bugger to achieve rolling up in order.

Rangers are a sub-class of Fighting Men, similar in many ways to the new sub-class Paladins, for they must always remain Lawful or lose all the benefits they gained (except, of course, experience as a fighter). Strength is their Prime Requisite, but they must also have both Intelligence and Wisdom scores of at least 12 each, and a Constitution of at least 15.

[Keravath]

I don't think there's any one answer, particularly since Zeb isn't forthcoming. Was it Drizzt?, a callback to Aragorn on Weathertop (despite the ranger having become it's own thing in the meantime)?, the ranger conveniently being required to be proficient in 2wf-able weapons (and perhaps then some or many 1e players stumbling upon that fighting playstyle when playing one)? We can only guess.

Edit: In particular, one thing I cannot get a strong bead on is exactly what proportion of 1E gamers actually bought and used Unearth Arcana. It seems rather reviled in the OSR and Dragonsfoot communities, but those aren't really representative.

I have a copy :) ... but a lot of the 1e Unearthed Arcana content was pretty broken. Cavalier-Paladin anyone? Though the "code of honour" that went with playing one was pretty brutal. Or how about weapon specialization :)

[KorvinStarmast]

I always saw it as a toolbox you were supposed to throw your own pop culture references into. Then use the tools to install a kitchen sink, cabinets, kitchen table, fridge, stove, cook up a really good scramble ... where was I? Don't forget to grate on some lemon peel.

Edit: In particular, one thing I cannot get a strong bead on is exactly what proportion of 1E gamers actually bought and used Unearth Arcana. It seems rather reviled in the OSR and Dragonsfoot communities, but those aren't really representative. We used some of it, and discarded other bits of it.

We really liked Weapon Specialization at our tables. A few of the spells were kind of cool.

The Cavalier was ... clunky. Making a paladin a Cavalier sub class was also Clunky, but we all thought that it made thematic sense.

The Barbarian was a lot of fun to play though.

The "here's a new roll up mechanic to get you the class you want" was ... well, different.

Comeliness allowed DM's to put very beautiful women into our various situations and have a few of the PC's begin to drool and rather lose their focus ... it was fun once in a while, but I wish EGG had not added that.

[GlenSmash!]

Multiple times now, I've seen people claim that gnomes are one of the things that ties D&D too closely to LotR. Huh? There are no gnomes in Lord of the Rings. The only time Tolkien ever used the word "gnome" (in material that didn't even get published in the Silmarillion), it was for a subrace of elves, and D&D gnomes bear no resemblance whatsoever to Galadriel.

Nor is the ranger really based on Aragorn. Aragorn's D&D stats would be much closer to paladin than to ranger. A D&D ranger is much closer to Natty Bumppo (who's not even fantasy) than to Aragorn.


Sorry, that's incorrect. The Strategic Review (Issue #2) Ranger, that led directly to the AD&D 1e Ranger, was very much a port of Aragorn into D&D. And he didn't get spells until level 8. (I won't disagree that Aragorn as Paladin also works somewhat if you make him an Ancients Paladin in 5e)

Even a low level 5e Ranger can very well represent the 'Strider' side of the Aragorn character, who escorted the hobbits be secret ways of the wilderness from Bree to Rivendell, using herb knowledge to battle poison and dark magic, and had become through his wanderings the hardiest of Men and the greatest tracker and woodsman of his age. Or to put it another way, aside form the sharpsooting Strider can do practically anything Natty Bumppo can do.

Obviously other stuff like commanding armies of living and one army of the dead, using a seeing stone to survey his kingdoms, etc are not very present in the 5e Ranger (nor should they be).

To the topic at hand I agree with Chronos. D&D is pretty far removed from LotR at this point. The Ranger is just one example of that. Take a look at Adventures in Middle-Earth and you'll see that to play a LotR game in 5e you'll need to cut out major portions of not just the PHB but even the SRD and basic rules not to mention any setting or adventure book.

[Joe the Rat]

Lord of the Rings has such deep connections because The Hobbit is one of the best Low-Level adventure stories written (lots of travel, rations issues, encounters from simple to totally outmatched, running away is an option. The only difference is it uses Benevolent DM Fiat to avoid a series of TPKs). But it is really the Beans in the Chili recipe of D&D. And as a point, Tolkein elves were tall and graceful. Original D&D elves were just over 4' tall. It took a few editions before they "grew up."

Complaints about the Middle-Earthitude of the Realms can be laid at the feet of Mr. Greenwood. But it is also a relatively generic setting - a gateway world for new players. Greyhawk would have done as well (and has in the past). The fact that they have not released other IP settings is something to discuss with dev & marketing. I appreciate the touches to "how to stick this in another world" that some adventures carry, but that is a rather significant amount of work for everything that isn't single-site based. You want big-book lore-steeped adventure paths, this is what you get. Otherwise you need more self-contained sectors - Barovia is by nature a stick-anywhere demiplane. Saltmarsh is Oerth-based, but you can stick it on just about any coast with a little name-shuffling. Neither of which is particularly Tolkeinish. (One Hammer Horror, One Scooby Doo)

So what settings have they dipped into? Eberron. Ravnica. Whatever the name is of the Planeswalker and the Argonauts setting. Worlds that are seriously different from the base. Eberron is Magipunk Verne/Wells. Ravnica is the ultimate city intrigue game. Theros is a Classical-effing-setting-which-we-simply-don't-do-outside-parody-games. My favorite DMGuild offering is a Egyptian-based setting (Amonkhet would have been fun to upswing, but the hardbacks are MtG marketing driven). But you need the want for something different, and be at least half-baked if not reheat-and-eat. Otherwise you get every single home built world, which has its own particular mix of traits, as preferred by DM, and ideally by players.

Complaints about WoW influences on D&D is like complaining about how fathers look like their children.


I'm not exactly clear on what you mean. I am talking about two-weapon fighting, which is a rule in 1e (somewhere), where you could fight with two weapons, but the offhand weapon had to be those weapons. A ranger could do, but has not specific tendency towards or bonuses.

Two-weapon fighting required either dagger or handaxe (possibly shortsword, I am away from my 1e books atm) in the off-hand, with attack penalties ameliorated by exceptional dexterity. Dual wielding rangers is a post-Drizz't (2e) thing.


Sorry, that's incorrect. The Strategic Review (Issue #2) Ranger, that led directly to the AD&D 1e Ranger, was very much a port of Aragorn into D&D. And he didn't get spells until level 8. (I won't disagree that Aragorn as Paladin also works somewhat if you make him an Ancients Paladin in 5e) Good aligned, awesome tracking, can't gather in large numbers, access to healing magics and Palantir proficiency at higher levels. Can wear plate mail like a proper warrior. Yep.

[Willie the Duck]

Two-weapon fighting required either dagger or handaxe (possibly shortsword, I am away from my 1e books atm) in the off-hand, with attack penalties ameliorated by exceptional dexterity. Dual wielding rangers is a post-Drizz't (2e) thing.

Did you miss that that's what we had been discussing for multiple pages?
see:--

I've seen this referenced multiple times here on Giantitp, and nowhere else. D&D rangers didn't get specific 2-weapon-fighting benefits until 2nd edition AD&D in 1989. Long after they became their own thing, and also after a specific dark elven ranger started wielding paired scimitars (at the time a drow-specific ability). If Aragorn wielding the two torches on Weathertop was the inspiration of D&D rangers getting 2wf, this would seem to counter the rest of this argument (and I've certainly seen no quotes from the 2e designers to that effect).

To be fair, 1e rangers could have fought two-weapon (with dagger or handaxe only as offhand weapon) in 1E, they just had no specific affinity.


Good aligned, awesome tracking, can't gather in large numbers, access to healing magics and Palantir proficiency at higher levels. Can wear plate mail like a proper warrior. Yep.
And, if you mean the Strategic Review version, was Just Plain Better (TM) in that they got 4 XP for every 3 earned. Talk about double reward for rolling well on the stats. :smallbiggrin:

[Yora]

Now that's just plain cheating. I've not even seen anything like that from dndwiki.

[Pex]

Eh, every once in a while someone makes a Lord of the Rings reference joke, or Monty Python, or attack the darkness. We chuckle and move on.

[AntiAuthority]

Of note about D&D just being something in the vein of Lord of the Rings... Expedition to the Barrier Peaks had spaceships and robots (along with having stuff from John Carter), so it's clearly not just meant to be Lord of the Rings: The Tabletop Role-Playing Game.

[furby076]

To put things in perspective: I'm a grognard. Not a mega grognard, but I have been buying and playing D&D games since the early 90s. I bought and got my face destroyed by Gold Box games when they came out. So this isn't just the perspective of some young whippersnapper who doesn't know their roots. And at this point I gotta ask: who gives a crap about Lord of the Rings anymore?

How many years has it been since the last Lord of the Rings movie that didn't flop? How many years has it been since the last Conan movie at all? When's the last time anyone's read a Wheel of Time novel? I seriously think more people read Drizz't novels these days than the Grey Mouser. And yet: these things still have a death-grip on our collective imagination of D&D. Why? I mean, people roll their eyes at 4E D&D obviously trying to woo the World of Warcraft crowd -- though that's more because World of Warcraft wasn't as a resilient pop culture property as we thought. I think it would've been more prudent to go after Final Fantasy. All the same, I find that attempt at being culturally relevant much less cringeworthy than people trying to return the game to its Lord of the Ring roots.

I can understand making D&D a generic timeless genre fantasy. I can understand making it its own weird idiosyncratic hodge like Warhammer. I can even understand D&D chasing the latest fantasy trends and just hoping that the next trend turns out to be a Fire Emblem instead of a Game of Thrones. But why are we wallowing in properties that were considered old hat 30 years ago?

Sociology based comments like the above come off as arrogant and are typically wrong (probably because you did no actually large group, scientific analysis)

1) Age doesn't matter nor when you started playing D&D. I played 2nd ed all the way up too. I played gold box and crushed them. I still sometimes play them.. So what?
2) I never read LOTR and didn't know about it until the movies. Some of my friends did give me raised eyebrows, and comments ("OMG you never read LOTR? What kind of gamer are you). They are no longer my friends for a few reasons, but arrogance like this is one of them. I also read some of the Drizzt novels and like them.
3) I played WOW from start until the panda expansion (quit there cause life priorities changed). It's a legend amongst games and a "game" changer in the industry. It probably has the largest or one of the largest gamebase, and crushes D&D.
4) LOTR is actually IMMENSELY important to D&D today. Look when LOTR movies came out. The kids who watched it were between 10-16 (every age group watched it, yes)...but now those same 10-16 year olds are playing D&D. LOTR movies lit a spark in them to play D&D like many of my older friends (50's/60s) when they read the LOTR books.

LOTR has no grip on D&D other than it sparked imagination in players. That's a good thing. Hopefully the movies and books will get others to give D&D a try

FYI, Idon't know what Grognard is, but i assume it mans old cranky curmudgeon? I've heard the word before, but never cared to find out what it means.

I never finished the WOT novels (stopped at book 9), and i liked Conan as a kid and would never watch it as an adult (don't need to kill my childhood memories)

[Nagog]

I don't think it's LoTR specifically that people care about, it's fantasy in general. However, LoTR was the first really groundbreaking fantasy novel, and as such it's become the standard that differentiates "Fantasy" from other "Fiction". For example, if something is closer to Star Trek than it is to LoTR, it's Science Fiction, even if it includes Elves (Vulcans) and Orcs (Klingons). While D&D has massively expanded upon the foundation Tolkien set, historically the entire fantasy genre was founded there and was built from there.

In a similar vein of thought, John Carter of Mars was a groundbreaking work in the genre of Science Fiction, and many of it's concepts grew into the basis for Star Wars and Star Trek, which in modern times have defined the Science Fiction genre as a whole. Saying you'd like a Science Fiction game/medium without ties to those works would leave it lost as to how it defines itself.

[KorvinStarmast]

I completely agree with the OP on a few points though. Namely that I hate halflings and gnomes. It's not just b/c they are lame, uninteresting and boring, but b/c Lotr used them more as a foil for the 'epic' and titanic forces that were at play (the ancient world of elves, the high kings of Gondor, etc). The fact that DnD makes them a playable race, instantly nerfs every other race for 'balance' reasons. They never should have been included, and I completely agree with Gary Gygax's take them on them. Campaigns where the DM forces the players to venture through gnomish and halfling lands are like my personal idea of hell. Amen. My brother ran us through a gnomish homeland last year as we headed over the mountains toward 'the main plot' and I can't get the smell off of our party. :smallyuk:

Anyway, I still consider DnD fundamentally to be a mix between Conan, Lotr and Elric (with a bit of mythology from various world civilizations mixed in) and settings which get away from that are the ones that I tend to not play. Yeah, that works for me.

I'm not exactly clear on what you mean. I am talking about two-weapon fighting, which is a rule in 1e (somewhere), where you could fight with two weapons, but the offhand weapon had to be those weapons. AD&D 1e you got minus modifiers to your attacks

Attacks With Two Weapons:
Characters normally using a single weapon may choose to use one in each hand (possibly discarding the option of using a shield). The second weapon must be either a dagger or hand axe. Employment of a second weapon is always at a penalty. The use of a second weapon causes the character to attack with his or her primary weapon at -2 and the secondary weopon at -4. If the user’s dexterity is below 6, the reaction / attacking Adjustment penalties shown in the PLAYERS HANDBOOK are added to EACH weapon attack. If the user’s dexterity is above 15, there is a downward adjustment in the weapon penalties as shown, although this never gives a positive (bonus) rating to such attacks, so that at 16 dexterity the secondary/ primary penalty is -3/-1, at 17-2/0, and at 18-1/0.
No, not overly complicated. :smallbiggrin:

Taking all the books at face value and ignoring the role of the GM in establishing the campaign is probably the biggest cause of this entire issue. Check.
Edit: In particular, one thing I cannot get a strong bead on is exactly what proportion of 1E gamers actually bought and used Unearth Arcana. It seems rather reviled in the OSR and Dragonsfoot communities, but those aren't really representative. It was a rushed release with a lot of over the top stuff and IMHO the cantrips were a hot mess.
Lord of the Rings has such deep connections because The Hobbit is one of the best Low-Level adventure stories written (lots of travel, rations issues, encounters from simple to totally outmatched, running away is an option. {snip}
Complaints about WoW influences on D&D is like complaining about how fathers look like their children. *Grinned, I did*

Sociology based comments like the above come off as arrogant and are typically wrong (probably because you did no actually large group, scientific analysis)

3) I played WOW from start until the panda expansion (quit there cause life priorities changed). It's a legend amongst games and a "game" changer in the industry. It probably has the largest or one of the largest gamebase, and crushes D&D. Yep, Blizzard left Everquest in the dust. I stopped playing WoW due to lag. I had an account that went live when the game began. I got so tired of the connection hang ups that I quit. I few years later, with a better connection and a request from my son to try again (he was in junior high or early high school at the time) I tried again. And WoW never did it for me. Tried again a year or so ago. Still doesn't do it for me.

FYI, I don't know what Grognard is, but i assume it mans old cranky curmudgeon? I've heard the word before, but never cared to find out what it means. It comes from a French term meaning roughtly "grumpy old veteran" or "complaining old soldier" and was likely coined with Napoleon's Imperial Guard troops in mind.

[Lupine]

if a Wizard in D&D did as little magic as Gandalf does then he'd be accused of being a half caster.

I think someone earlier pointed out that Gandalf is basically an Eldritch Knight.

[Dork_Forge]

I think someone earlier pointed out that Gandalf is basically an Eldritch Knight.

If you wanted to portray how he fights for the most part, then sure an Eldritch Knight with the Duel Wielder feat (Sword and Staff, woo movies), but the limits of his power aren't that of a 1/3 caster, they're whatever the story demands, he's less of a character and more of a plot device. I'm not overly familiar with LotR outside of the movies (I've listened to audiobooks of the Fellowship and I think I got through most of the Two Towers though) and some of Gandalf's abilities I can recall:

-Manipulation of fire (besides manipulating the smoke of his pipe and fireworks, he turned a burning log into a display of fire bright enough to scare the wolves away)

-He simultaneously disarmed Aaragorn, Gimli and Legolas with magic

-He destroyed the bridge the Balrog stood on (The movie has him casting lightning at it and all sorts as they battle, but I can't recall what he actually does in the books)

-He at the very least shapes the waves that wash the Ring Wraiths away into horsemen

If he were an Eldritch Knight then his martial prowess would be his specialty and his magic would not only pale in comparison, but also mostly be complimentary to his combat.

You could build Gandalf a few ways in D&D (Eldritch Knight MC'd with Wizard being one of the best probably) but he's just better represented as an NPC.

[2D8HP]

[...] I seriously think more people read Drizz't novels these days than the Grey Mouser[...]


Which makes me sad.

I met a very frail seeming Fritz Leiber at a book signing just before he died and he had an impressive smile (I also met Michael Moorcock at a book signing and he has an impressive scowl).

FWLIW here's Gygax on what tales helped inspire Arneson and Gygax to create Dungeons & Dragons


"....those who don't care for Burroughs'
Martian adventures where John Carter is groping through black pits, who feel no thrill upon reading Howard's Conan saga, who do not enjoy the de Camp & Pratt fantasies or Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser pitting their swords against evil sorceries will not be likely to find Dungeons & Dragons to their taste."-E. Gary Gygax
Tactical Studies Rules Editor
1 November 1973
Lake Geneva, Wisconsin


"The most immediate influences upon AD&D were probably de Camp & Pratt, REH, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, HPL, and A. Merritt."

-Gygax
16 May 1979

Also, Lankhmar is San Francisco (where I work): From Lankhmar to the Tenderloin (https://www.marclaidlaw.com/fritz-leiber/) from a 1991 issue of Science Fiction Eye (which I first read from the print version in a corner of the Dark Carnival bookstore, which is where I met Leiber)


After his wife's death Leiber moved to San Francisco where he wrote "Ill Met in Lankhmar", and "The City of the black toga"/"The City of Sevenscore Thousand Smokes" which are infused by where Leiber lived in the later tales (though my '70's paperbacks insisted Lankhmar's "Street of Gods" was inspired by Telegraph Avenue across the bay in Berkeley).

I first walked into the Dark Carnival bookstore in 1979 (a year after I got the D&D "blue book") when it was on Telegraph Avenue across the street from my junior high school (the first book I bought there was A Princess of Mars[i]),

Frankly I think D&D is best when it imitates my favorite author that inspired Dungeons & Dragons, and named a genre!:


[I]"I feel more certain than ever that this field should be called the sword-and-sorcery story. This accurately describes the points of culture-level and supernatural element and also immediately distinguishes it from the cloak-and-sword (historical adventure) story—and (quite incidentally) from the cloak-and-dagger (international espionage) story too!
—Fritz Leiber, Amra, July 1961

http://www.howardandrewjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/leiber.jpg

For those reading this thread who are unfamiliar with Fritz Leiber (or just want to re-read BADASS! stories, which were published from 1939 to 1977:

Induction (http://www.baen.com/Chapters/ERBAEN0087/ERBAEN0087___1.htm)

The Jewels in the Forest (http://www.baen.com/Chapters/ERBAEN0088/ERBAEN0088___2.htm)

The Bleak Shore (http://www.baen.com/Chapters/9781625791528/9781625791528___2.htm)

Lean Times in Lankhmar (http://www.baen.com/Chapters/ERBAEN0089/ERBAEN0089___2.htm)

In the Witch's Tent (http://www.baen.com/Chapters/ERBAEN0090/ERBAEN0090___1.htm)

The Circle Curse (http://www.baen.com/Chapters/ERBAEN0088/ERBAEN0088___1.htm)

The Sadness of the Executioner (http://www.baen.com/Chapters/ERBAEN0092/ERBAEN0092___1.htm)

Beauty and the Beasts (http://www.baen.com/Chapters/ERBAEN0092/ERBAEN0092___2.htm)

The Cloud of Hate (http://www.baen.com/Chapters/ERBAEN0089/ERBAEN0089___1.htm)

Sea Magic (http://www.baen.com/Chapters/ERBAEN0093/ERBAEN0093___1.htm)

Throw in Howard's Conan, Moorcock's Elric, and Moore's Jirel tales for a great mix!

Tolkien?

Mostly the PC "Races", otherwise "pulp fantasy" is best.

Salvatore?

I tried reading the Drizzt novel Homeland, and I just couldn't get past chapter 2, but I looked at the comic book adaption which had many images of shapely Drow and that definitely seemed the right way to enjoy that story!

Speaking of comic books the 1977 The Hobbit cartoon and the Conan comics were the principal inspirations for my D&D playing circle in the early '80's, here Howard's Conan meetd Moorcock's Elric:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_DSs2bX13hVc/S76VaPmTHxI/AAAAAAAAB90/jp_QEn8jKSg/s320/conanelric1.jpg

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_DSs2bX13hVc/S76i4WQ-17I/AAAAAAAAB-E/xdEuV-lr0as/s320/conanelric2-1.jpg

Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser also had a comic book adaption in the early '70's (they met Wonder Woman!):

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/_5YsHcdKj67c/TPYPhFvhMnI/AAAAAAAAD6E/Xgq1TIn7Vp4/s400/Sword_of_Sorcery_5_00.jpg

@KorvinStarmast started playing D&D earliert than me and is a better source (and is way cooler) than me of what the inspirations were, but some literary antecedents for the "dungeon" in Dungeons & Dragons aren't hard to find: Howard's Conan in "Red Nails", Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser in "The Lords of Quarmall", the underworld in Clark Ashton Smith's "The Seven Geases", the Mines of Moria in Tolkein, et cetera, but when I started DM'ing in '78 (with my little brother as my first victim player, and when I found another DM in '79 I didn't know any of that ('cept maybe some of the Conan stories I read in the school library, but I doubt that I read anything as long as Red Nails, "The People of the Black Circle", and "The Slithering Shadow" from "Book One" Conan the Adventurer were more likely my reads back then back then), but what I do definitely remember inspired my visions of "dungeons' were: the At the Earth's Core, the Morlocks caves in The Time Machine movie, the inner moon in The First Men in the Moon (movie), the underworld of the mutants in Beneath the Planet of the Apes, and the underground shelter of the non-mutants in The Time Travelers, the magician's caves in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, plus the "Cat's Claw" episode of Star Trek.

Beside fairy tales from books and Disney movies, and the D'Aulaires' Greek Myths, my visions of magic and "Fantasy" came from the Conan, Sword of Sorcery (Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser), and Warlord (a Burroughs Pellucidar homage) comic books, Sinbad movies, and The Hobbit cartoon.

I'd be very suprised if Arneson, Gygax, Kask, Kurtz, Mornard, et cetera weren't familiar with most of that as well.

Sure "D&D is it's own thing", but Norton's Quag Keep (the first full novel inspired by D&D) was kinda lame!

Best to stick to the inspirations instead, principally Howard, Leiber, Moorcock, Moore, and (a little bit of) Tolkien.

And stay away from Dragonlance!

[Willie the Duck]

Which makes me sad.
<snip>
Sure "D&D is it's own thing", but Norton's Quag Keep (the first full novel inspired by D&D) was kinda lame!
Best to stick to the inspirations instead, principally Howard, Leiber, Moorcock, Moore, and (a little bit of) Tolkien.
And stay away from Dragonlance!

Not that I agree with everything the OP stated, but I think this is the kind of response that probably instigated this thread.
Everyone should stick to what was beloved when *you* were growing up, but the stuff that was popular when *they* were growing up is lame. That must sound incredibly off-putting.

Mind you, I personally agree with each of those individual judgements of individual products. We're doing a little bit of selective bias here in that we only really ever talk about the good pulp that came out of the Howard/Leiber/Moorcock era, yet bringing up examples of cherry picked overrated modern fantasy (much like how all of Classic Rock is better than modern music because we only ever play the good stuff from way back when we were young).

[2D8HP]

[...]We're doing a little bit of selective bias here in that we only really ever talk about the good pulp that came out of the Howard/Leiber/Moorcock era, yet bringing up examples of cherry picked overrated modern fantasy (much like how all of Classic Rock is better than modern music because we only ever play the good stuff from way back when we were young).


Well, you're likely correct (the Rolling Stones recorded some of the greatest rock 'n roll songs ever, but they also recorded a lot more dross), and odds are the very best fantasy-fiction written has been written recently (because there's so much now being published), but the advantage of sticking to the "classics" of the past is there's a lot less of it, and "greatest hits" are well known.

If you really want to support living authors, sure, go ahead, but finding gold amongst all the tin is pretty damn hard because there's so much out now and it's intimidating (the Same's is true of music)!

In the '70's the school library only had a couple of hundred fantasy and science-fiction books (I started with short stories by Asimov), and I could easily find the gold, by the '80's at the Dark Carnival and The Other Change of Hobbit bookstores they were thousands, but the folks behind the counter would have recommendations of what to read next based on what I said I liked (I can still get some recommendactions at DC and Borderlands, but only if I mention a few old books as one I liked, if I mention a newer book that I liked the odds are that we haven't both read it in common).

Of the millions of stories now available on-line, I know of no practical way to sort through them.

[D+1]

I can understand making D&D a generic timeless genre fantasy. I can understand making it its own weird idiosyncratic hodge like Warhammer. I can even understand D&D chasing the latest fantasy trends and just hoping that the next trend turns out to be a Fire Emblem instead of a Game of Thrones. But why are we wallowing in properties that were considered old hat 30 years ago?Because the fiction that D&D was originally based on is NOT irrelevant. Also, I seem to recall that at some point 5E was being pushed particularly to players of older editions. Phrases something like, "It's got more of the 1E feel," which rather suggests that the oldest editions - and the fiction they were based on - have a lot more relevance than you think. You wouldn't have orcs without Lord of the Rings. You wouldn't have gnolls without Lord Dunsany. You wouldn't have green, rubbery, regenerating trolls without Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions. You think the influence that Gandalf and Aragorn have had on wizards and rangers needs to be expunged just because part 3 of The Hobbit sucked? WotC is currently retooling everything about alignment - but alignment exists in D&D in the first place because of Micheal Moorcock's fictional character/novel of Elric of Melnibone'. Just because YOU haven't read any Conan fiction, or Fafhrd and Grey Mouser fiction, or nobody has made a movie out of them in the last 2 years doesn't make any of it valueless or irrelevant or an influence so CORE to what D&D is that, indeed, dismissive people like yourself DON'T read the fiction that any of it was drawn from, yet we all (including you) owe the very existence of this game to it. If you claim to care about D&D, whether you know it or not, whether you care to admit it or not, YOU DO care about all that old hat stuff because at least in parts it is INSEPARABLE from D&D.

[Bigmouth]

After reading the thread I'm still not exactly sure what OP was talking about. Do we want changes to D&D to make it less LotR or do we want the fanbase to stop mentioning LotR when discussing D&D?
Grognard statement! I've played D&D since 81, blue book. I was an avid reader of all things fantasy and sci-fi and while I could certainly see a lot of influence from the sources that other people have already mentioned, I always found the biggest influence to be the old Arthurian movies from the 1930s through the 1950s. Robin Hood, The Black Shield of Falworth, Ivanhoe, The Court Jester, etc. To me, the setting always seemed closer to that romanticized version of England than to anything like Hyboria, Lahnkmar or Middle Earth. The inability to be a competent fighter without fullplate always seemed like a slap in the face of anything other than Knights of the Round Table. That glaring problem (to me) was why I jumped on RuneQuest.

But I have played every edition fairly extensively and I still don't see any strong connection to any of the source material...other than a love of fantasy. To me, at this point D&D's main source of inspiration is D&D. The Ranger isn't trying to be Aragorn OR Drizzt. It's trying to be a D&D ranger that somehow satisfies a million different views on what that ranger should be. Making no one particularly happy, but maybe pissing off the least amount of people. 5E is an apology game imo. 4E was brave and pissed people off and I doubt there ever going to do that again.

[Satori01]

To put things in perspective: I'm a grognard.

Grognard does not mean a long term D&D player, it refers to table top war-gamers.... the old people with rulers and measuring tapes and excessive opinions regarding fauchards vs the guisarme.😀

To be a Mecha-Gronard you have to had bought the Chainmail rules for a $1.95 in 1972 at the latest, thought the Chainmail rules sucked, and have a pacemaker...(hence the Mecha).

Sheesh....kids and their cultural appropriation! 😇

[2D8HP]

Grognard does not mean a long term D&D player, it refers to table top war-gamers.... the old people with rulers and measuring tapes and excessive opinions regarding fauchards vs the guisarme.😀

To be a Mecha-Gronard you have to had bought the Chainmail rules for a $1.95 in 1972 at the latest [...]


The closest contenders to that description in the years that I've been reading the Forum are FreddyNoNose (https://forums.giantitp.com/member.php?146217-FreddyNoNose) (who hasn't posted in just over a year), and ZorroGames (https://forums.giantitp.com/member.php?154148-ZorroGames) (who hasn't posted since April).

I hope they come back.

[DwarfFighter]

Man, I wish I too had the wherewithal to post an inflammatory topic about essentially nuthin' that would put MY username at the top of a multi-page thread.

[2D8HP]

Man, I wish I too had the wherewithal to post an inflammatory topic about essentially nuthin' that would put MY username at the top of a multi-page thread.


'tis easy!

Just start a thread with a question about "Alignment" (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?564159-Alignment-labeling-why-any-disputes/page11)

Unfortunately what doesn't work is an "effort post" on:
D&D Alignment, a history (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?559645-D-amp-D-Alignment-a-history)

[Willie the Duck]

Grognard does not mean a long term D&D player, it refers to table top war-gamers.... the old people with rulers and measuring tapes and excessive opinions regarding fauchards vs the guisarme.��

To be a Mecha-Gronard you have to had bought the Chainmail rules for a $1.95 in 1972 at the latest, thought the Chainmail rules sucked, and have a pacemaker...(hence the Mecha).

Sheesh....kids and their cultural appropriation! ��

There's a Napoleonic mounted chasseur who is spinning in their grave over this.

[Chronos]

I think D&D trolls draw more heavily from Grendel than from any 20th-century author, and any 20th-century work that resembles D&D trolls was probably also drawing from Grendel. 2nd edition (and probably earlier) trolls even had a trait that you could pull their arms off in unarmed combat.

Heck, a lot of the things in D&D that we attribute to Tolkien were also around centuries before him.

[Willie the Duck]

I think D&D trolls draw more heavily from Grendel than from any 20th-century author, and any 20th-century work that resembles D&D trolls was probably also drawing from Grendel. 2nd edition (and probably earlier) trolls even had a trait that you could pull their arms off in unarmed combat.

Heck, a lot of the things in D&D that we attribute to Tolkien were also around centuries before him.

D&D trolls are verified-by-author references to the trolls in Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions (the 1953 novella and 1961 novel). Anderson's influences include Germanic mythology, undoubtedly including Grendel (although it is important to note that Grendel is not a troll in such mythology, but instead a different monster, while trolls also exist alongside the Grendel/Beowulf tales). I checked oD&D, AD&D, and 2e, and there are not rules for rending troll limbs by hand. There is rules for cutting them off with edged weapons (and them continuing to be active post-severing). Likewise, such de-limbing can't kill the troll. All of this seems to be reinforcement of the regeneration mechanic (inspired by the 3H3L trolls' resilience). None of which is to say that Grendel was not an influence on D&D trolls, but more that it seems to be a tangential or tertiary influence.