Even bearing these facts in mind, there can be little doubt, I think, that Gary Gygax at least took his primary inspiration from just a handful of older writers – L. Sprague de Camp, Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, H.P. Lovecraft, Abraham Merritt, Fletcher Pratt, and Jack Vance – and that his conception of the game reflects this. Despite the much-vexed question of Tolkien's influence on the game, I don't think anyone can honestly deny that Gygaxian D&D owes more to what I call "pulp fantasy" than to anything more highfalutin. One need only look at Gygax's various reading lists, culminating in Appendix N of the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide, to see this.
And yet I'm not sure that matters.
The moment Dungeons & Dragons was released into the wild – or Pandora's Box was opened, to use Greg Stafford's perfect metaphor – it was no longer the possession of any single person, including its creators. This is something Gygax himself recognized early on, even if he had his own ideas about the kind of fantasy roleplaying adventures he most enjoyed. By all accounts, the early days of the hobby were ones of wild, reckless invention, as everyone who got their hands on D&D made it their own. To some extent, this was by necessity, as the original 1974 rules were vague and unclear about just how to interpret them. It was thus an inevitability that a wide variety of mutant strains of Dungeons & Dragons would soon proliferate across the world.
At the same time, many of the game's early adopters liked the idea of D&D, but they took exception to this or that element of it. The changes they introduced to it were made, not out of ignorance of how Arneson and Gygax intended the game to played – assuming there even is such a thing in the first place – but intentionally, in order to bring the game more in line with the kind of fantasy adventures they most enjoyed. Of course, in the process of doing so, they became their own unique games – Tunnels & Trolls, Empire of the Petal Throne, RuneQuest, etc. – which, in turn, spawned their own "mutants," creating an entirely new ecosystem of creativity that continues to this day.
What's most interesting to me right now is that even as Gary Gygax was still in charge of the development of Dungeons & Dragons, or at least AD&D, there was plenty of variation in its presentation and content. Compare the work of David Cook, Lenard Lakofka, Lawrence Schick, and Allen Hammack to that of Gygax – or to each other. Each brings a different perspective and draws on different inspirations to present Dungeons & Dragons as he understands it (and, presumably, prefers it). What's remarkable is that, rather than undermining the game, this approach expands its reach. D&D, even as published by TSR, is a house of many mansions.
This probably explains why D&D was and continues to be the most popular and widely played RPG of all time. Being the first out the door no doubt helped, but I think it's more than that. D&D has always been a loose, reasonably flexible framework to which one can add (or subtract) whatever one requires for one's preferred style of fantasy adventures. Gygax unquestionably had his own preferences, but so too did everyone who's ever written for or played the game over the last fifty years. There is no reason that your D&D and my D&D should be the same, or even similar. Indeed, I remember a time when it was commonplace to assume every campaign was as unique as its players and referee, which is as it should be, in my opinion.
Dungeons & Dragons is a very strange game. It's one whose play can vary considerably from place to place, yet which is nevertheless completely recognizable to anyone who's even passingly familiar with the form of that play. I won't go so far as to say that no other RPG is similar in this regard, but D&D exemplifies this to a much greater extent than any other roleplaying game of which I can think. It's one of the most amazing things about D&D and I don't think it gets enough credit for it.
How do you think this changes with the change from TSR to WotC, and the determination to make the game "feel more like D&D", as documented by Jonathan Tweet on EN World? (https://www.enworld.org/threads/3e-and-the-feel-of-d-d.667269/)
ReplyDeleteA very good question and probably worthy of its own post someday. My gut tells me that any time someone is consciously attempting to make something more like some other thing, the battle is already lost. WotC D&D has always been its own beast IMO.
DeleteIn this case, it's a self-conscious effort to make something more like itself, which fits in with the generally self-referential nature of 'geek culture' from the late 90s onward.
DeleteAbsolutely true. Of course, D&D style fantasy then bled into video game and computer game fantasy, and thus became one of the dominant strains, and thus no longer appears so self-referential! Regarding the vexed question of original Gygaxian inspiration, one needs to separate words from deeds. Gary certainly preferred the sword and sorcery authors like Howard or Fritz Leiber or Vance or Anderson, and drew also from weird tales of folks like Merrit or Lovecraft or Smith. And Arneson's own influences (on display in First Fantasy Campaign) were also significant - horror movies, the Gor books, etc. But Gygax's own utterances ignore the fact that Tolkien had an equal or greater influence on D&D than anyone, even Vance or Leiber. From Tolkien we get: (a) dungeon adventure ("too dungeons deep and caverns old" in the Hobbit, and Moria); adventuring as parties of about 9-12 adventurers rather than 1-2 heroes of sword and sorcery; the mixed-race parties of the standard racial mix (elf, dwarf, halfling, human, and half-orc), and elves and dwarves as "good guy" races rather than (as in Anderson or european myth). We also get literal western european dragons sitting on piles of treasure, which seem to have been fairly rare in swords and sorcery (Elric had some variations). Now, you could argue that heroic teams and dragon-things on treasure do occur in Greek myth, but the basic racial and party structure of D&D is clearly from the hobbit and fellowship, and this - more than any sword-and-sorcery tropes - is the part that resonated and found its way into thousands of video games and computer games afterward.
DeleteI think the parties with 9-12 people and not of 1-2 had more to do with the number of people they happened to be playing with than any conscious emulation of Tolkien.
DeleteI think large parties were baked into early games because players HAD to have a bunch of people to take on big dungeons and large monsters. Recall how much emphasis was placed on henchmen and hirelings in OD&D. Even if it was only a couple of people playing, the adventure party was often lousy with NPCs.
DeleteMaybe. But in the 1970s, the majority of wargames were player vs. player, or sometimes 1-3 per side and a referee. Big campaigns did exist - and certainly Arneson and Gygax were involved in some - but this was not the standard mode of play. Sword and Sorcery stories also typically involved either a solo hero, pair of heroes, or hero and sidekick or girlfriend. If you needed lots of people to take on a big dungeon, this is was simply because Gygax deliberately wrote the rules that way. Gygax was also attempting, to some degree, to emulate fantasy. And the most popular fantasy (if not his favorite) was Tolkien.
DeleteBut Arneson and Gygax were doing wargame campaigns with several players. Blackmoor started as a multi-player wargame. The the dungeon was introduced. Then the game was shared with Gygax. Now while Gygax doesn't include Tolkien in his sources, Arneson may have had it as one of his sources. On the other hand, the dungeon ALSO grew out of how wargamers handled tunneling under castle walls in a siege.
DeleteGygax got the dungeon scenario from Arneson - NOT from Tolkien. But note that the swords and sorcery genre DOES include seeking treasures in lost ruins. Sure, as a singular character or a pair, not as a large party, but it's still there.
But in the wider player base, Tolkien WAS big and immediately had an impact on how the wider gaming world played D&D.
All very good points. In the early days of D&D many took it as a game that would let them emulate and play out fantasy literature. Gary (and later) TSR and WotC managers, however, took pains to stress that D&D was its own thing, not a tool for emulation of other settings (and especially not Tolkien style fantasy). Partly this likely reflected sincere belief and partly was a device to both avoid lawsuits from Tolkien et al and to build up TSR's own IP. In turn, those people who were upset that D&D did not emulate fantasy literature or myth went on to create other games that did if they were out of TSR, while another strand attempted to change D&D within TSR to emulate Tolkienesque and other fantasies (and so created Dragonlance and Ravenloft).
ReplyDeleteI'm one of those people who have realized over the decades that what I always wanted was the "game on the tin" i.e. the action packed game that emulated the fictional inspirations for D&D (S&S/pulp novels, comics, and movies), and not the gameplay/brand of fantasy, that D&D actually provides.
ReplyDeleteWe modded OD&D heavily to run the types of games we wanted to right from the start.
A fantasy multiracial party of humans, elves, dwarves, and halflings going into dungeons and fighting monsters such as orcs, balrogs, dragons, trolls, goblins, tentacled horrors, wights, with swords, spells, magical items. Hm. When you can sum it up this briefly, and it is clearly Tolkien, the people who deny his centrality have to say these elements are only surface elements. But are they?
ReplyDeleteWhen I bought the 3rd Edition to get involved in the game with my boys, I wanted to learn more about the game and its history. At that time, I read an interview with Gary Gygax (c. 2004), and in it he seemed to suggest he had never even heard of Tolkien, emphasizing almost any influence but that. Which I found odd, since I did own the older books from my youth. Some time later I found an article by him in some old magazine (Dragon perhaps?) from back in the 1980s. It was less adamant about nothing from Tolkien, but clearly he was downplaying Tolkien’s influence. But I caught something in that old article. In it, he gave a nod to The Hobbit as a delightful tale (while then going on to accuse LoTR of being allegory, something I perceived as a dig). But that has always been the elephant in the room in this discussion IMHO. Whether it’s LoTR or Conan or Lankhmar or whatever, I’ve often thought of the prevalence of Tolkien influences in the early works and thought of The Hobbit. After all, if you take the multi-racial Fellowship and drop it in the story of the Hobbit – you have early D&D. A multi-racial party driven by the desire to retrieve lost gold and treasure, traveling the wilderness, meeting monsters (trolls, spiders, goblins), finding treasures (the ring, the troll’s cave), encountering friends (NPCs: Elrond, Beorn), and surviving underground realms (Goblintown, Lonely Mountain). It even has a nice battle at the end (the game’s wargaming roots). More than any other fantasy source, I merge those two together and can’t not see the influence. Especially given the number of Tolkien nods in the early materials (including some pretty subtle ones that you’d have to know Tolkien pretty well to get). Not that Tolkien was ever the ONLY influence. Clearly all the others combined were more of a collective influence than just Tolkien alone. But the dismissal of the strong influence in light of that Fellowship/Hobbit model is tough to not see, again IMHO.
DeleteElves, dwarves, dragons, trolls, and wights are all from Norse mythology (where Tolkien got it). Tentacled horrors come from Lovecraft and pre-date Tolkien by decades.
DeleteSo you have Halflings, Balrogs, Orcs & Goblins that come from Tolkien. I don't think an of these are central in any way.
Tolkien treated elves, dwarves, and orcs/goblins as well-defined races who existed in the same world as human nations, comingling, trading, and warring with them. There are echoes of this in some mythologies, but mostly (e.g., Norse myth) these entities exist on the fringes or in an otherworld (like norse giants). What Tolkien did and D&D copied was to make them integral parts of the same world, so that, for example, a typical party of adventurers might be multi-racial, and so orcs/goblins/elves etc. were ethno-political groupings rather than weird monsters or fae.
DeleteI think Gary was completely open regarding his views on Tolkien and on his influence on D&D. Gary liked The Hobbit and disliked The Lord of the Rings (and he never read any of the posthumous stuff). The Hobbit feels very Gygaxian D&D to me, and The Lord of the Rings very little so. From the latter Gary did little more than snag a few monsters.
ReplyDeleteGary Gygax: 'Though I thoroughly enjoyed The Hobbit, I found the "Ring Trilogy"...well, tedious. The action dragged... At the risk of incurring the wrath of the Professor's dedicated readers, I must say that I was so bored with his tomes that I took nearly three weeks to finish them.'
(Dragon magazine #95, March 1985, pp 12-13)
Do you think any of that criticism from Gary had to do with the licensing issues? It was the Tolkien estate I recall making TSR eliminate "hobbit" from their lexicon, and there was ample talk of a licensed RPG on LOTR long before it came to pass.
DeleteI'd certainly take any comments from 1985 by Gary with a grain of salt. Not only had TSR endured Tolkien (and ERB) legal action by this point - not just on hobbits, balrogs, ents, etc. but also on their Five Armies game - but even as early as 1978 Gary had grown sick of people complaining that this or that bit of D&D was "wrong" because the Lord of Rings treated things somewhat differently. I have read several book reviews by Gygax, and from reading them I get the impression of someone who enjoyed a wide range of fantasy literature. While anything is possible, I would be deeply surprised by someone who liked the kind of work he liked and wrote the things he wrote disliking Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. I suspect rather he that came to dislike Tolkien fanboys who were critical of D&D, and perhaps the Tolkien estate's lawyers... That's not to say he may well have preferred the Hobbit, or Conan, or whatever. Or maybe got a bit bored with Sam and Frodo slogging through the old forest or the dead marshes. But color me skeptical.... (That said, while I chatted with Dave Arneson a few times, I never met Gary in person, so who knows?)
DeleteRe: Tolkien's influence: I think it also needs to be remembered that the American publication of the unlicensed Ace paperbacks in Spring 1965 and the authorized Ballantine paperbacks in Fall 1966 had an enormous cultural impact in the States, especially amongst high school and college students--the demographic that would be playing medieval wargames and eventually what became Dungeons & Dragons with Arneson and Gygax in the early 1970s.
ReplyDeleteEven if Gygax didn't care for Tolkien, or enjoyed The Hobbit but detested Lord of the Rings, or generally preferred pulp fantasy tropes and/or classic mythological depiction of Dwarfs (or Dwarves) and Elves, he was gamemastering for and writing for players whose interests were almost certainly informed and inspired by Tolkien (the same holds true for Arneson). The surprise would be if those elements somehow weren't in Dungeons & Dragons. A player interested in playing a Dwarven character (and that "v" in "Dwarven" almost certainly comes from Tolkien, a variant spelling he used to differentiate his Dwarves from the Dwarfs of European folklore and myth) was almost certainly thinking of Tolkien; players fighting an animate tree would almost certainly have said "We're fighting an Ent!" even if that had originally been the last thing on Gygax's mind when he thought up the encounter.
In that vein, throwing Tolkienesque Hobbit/Halflings, Elves, Orcs, Dragons, Balrog/Balors, etc. into D&D alongside the Medusae and Pegasi and Cyclops would be just smart marketing no matter how Gygax felt about them in his own games.
(And, as I think has already been suggested, Gygax distancing D&D from Tolkien's intellectual property after the Tolkien Estate had threatened litigation over the inclusion of Hobbits-as-Hobbits and Ents-as-Ents--leading to revisions of the rulebooks, although I believe at least one reference to Halflings as Hobbits still made it into one of the AD&D rulebooks--should be taken with a grain of salt. Bruised ego aside, I'm sure Gygax was smart enough not to cast Summon Estate Lawyers in the middle of an interview.)
DeleteI'd agree with most of this, with the added observation that Tolkien-derived creatures were already present in Chainmail ; to the extent that D&D is an outgrowth of that game, you would expect to find such creatures in D&D. The popularity of The Lord of the Rings pretty much guaranteed that players would want dwarves, elves, and hobbits as character options. So Gygax doesn't have to have liked Tolkien's work much for it to get into D&D. (I suspect he did like the battles, which is why orcs, dwarves, elves, etc. end up in Chainmail.)
I think player appreciation for LOTR explains how Tolkienesque features like racially mixed parties become so common in D&D. Gygax doesn't prescribe, or even recommend, such parties in the original rules, but players create them because it makes the game more like LOTR. The same goes for dungeons: if they're like Moria, that's because other people make dungeons like Moria. From what we know about Castle Greyhawk, it seems like Gygax had other ideas in mind when designing his dungeon.
On a related note: Discussion about how much D&D owes to Tolkien are quite common, but you know what clearly comes from Tolkien that I've never seen anyone mention? The idea that you can pummel a dragon into submission.
As I was wrapping up a reread of Lord of the Rings this evening by re-reading some of the Appendices and skimming others, it occurred to me that another idea coming primarily from Tolkien that I haven't seen mentioned as an influence is the way D&D handles languages: every sentient species having their own language with a common language shared by nearly all is straight Tolkien (befittingly, as much of his Middle Earth work was, for him, a way to give history and context to made-up languages the linguist invented to amuse himself).
DeleteIt could be I'm forgetting something, but I don't recall languages being much of a big deal at all in Leiber, Moorcock, or Howard--if mentioned at all, they're a passing bit of color or a plot device (the hero can't read an ancient warning or encounters somebody he can't talk to). But in Tolkien, languages are blood passing through the body of the novel--characters have entire conversations about comparative linguistics, languages are the basis of some character interactions (Merry and Theoden bonding over the similarities between the languages of The Shire and Rohan), and at least two plot turns hinge on nomenclature (solving the password into Moria and the availability of atheleas in Gondor when Aragorn is called upon to heal Faramir, Eowyn, and others afflicted by the Nazgul).
Even the alignment languages in D&D recall the Black Speech of Mordor more than anything else that springs readily to mind.