Gary Gygax himself says so. He describes the original D&D books as “Rules for Fantastic Medieval War Games” (on the cover) and “rules [for] designing your own fantastic-medieval campaign” (in the introduction).
The original D&D books (before the Advanced series) did not describe a combat system. Instead, the rules of the wargame "Chainmail" were recommended (as was the map from Avalon Hill's Outdoor Survival for adventuring between dungeons).
Which is to say, the context of Gygax's remarks was gone by the time D&D books showed up at the Waldenbooks in every local mall. D&D was literally a different game in the 1970's.
I'm not sure what you mean here. I had the original books, the supplements, then "Basic D&D" and "Advanced D&D". The rules were the same, just repackaged. The original rules didn't "recommend" using Chainmail, they assumed you had a copy and knew the rules, which was a source of confusion for newbies.
I remember being disappointed with AD&D as it was just the same old shit rules, with Dave Arneson's name cynically removed from the copyright. The next year I discovered Runequest, and later in College, Champions, and never looked back.
I think by the 80s D&D was well known, and not just because of the TV show. This was before 2nd edition, which came out in 1989.
I vaguely remember looking over 2nd edition, they tweaked a few things, but the core mechanics were the same.
3rd edition did shake things up a bit, and were the first version I considered worth playing.
People let grow a lot of misconceptions about history based on media/cinema/games representation of antiquity, medieval or even renaissance time. But that is normal. I guess reality can be boring in comparison.
The only rational way to interpret D&D is not as medieval, but as a distant far-future post-post-industrial setting.
Magic spells as ambient nanotech that's poorly understood and difficult to invoke -- hence the "Vancian" system which comes from Jack Vance's "Dying Earth" series.
Magic items as remnant tech.
Different "races" as the vast gulf of time has led to speciation.
Gods as posthuman or artificially intelligent entities that have transcended the world but still keep an eye on it from time to time.
And so forth. There's literally nothing medieval about it, but it could be 1,000,000 AD. Just think of their medical technologies in light of our era's!
(All assuming, of course, that it's "baseline reality" and not a sandbox, as it was in Neal Stephenson's The Fall.)
A very fun example of this theme is in the franco-belgian fantasy comic series Thorgal, which is set in a Conan-esque fantasy world with all the expected trappings, but in which the gods are highly advanced alien entities and magic is often framed as manipulating extremely complex and powerful heirloom technologies that the living have no frame of reference for as anything other than magic.
The titular outsider hero falls from the stars in a little space pod as a baby and is raised by the local Viking-proxy culture ala Superman or Goku. Quite an engaging read if you're into this blend of sword and sorcery with background sci-fi elements.
I read "The Archers" as a kid, and really liked it, but it was the only one I had access to. I recall it was a pretty straightforward adventure, set somewhere around northern Europe in the 10th century, without any sci-fi elements... Now I'll need to revisit it and find the others. I've got a young son who would also be interested, so perhaps that's something we can do together. Thanks, man.
I can't immediately recall any sci-fi elements from The Archers myself, so that checks out. Anything to do with the lost precursor civilization tends more towards the archaic future-tech. Like in City Of The Lost God there's a magical weapon that's basically an operational laser gun. Or The Island of the Frozen Seas, which has a palace that looks like a downed spaceship complete with sarcophagi/crypods with people in them.
And you're welcome! I hope you and your son have fun! :)
Honestly, "magic is ambient nanotech that's poorly understood and difficult to invoke" is a rather tired trope, because it's an instantly obvious approach one can take. Doesn't stop people from re-using it over and over, take e.g. "The Lord of the Ice Garden" by Grzędowicz: this twist is so obvious that all the build-up feels kinda insulting to the reader's intelligence.
Right, but I don't think that it necessarily needs to be a twist.
The first two Pillars of Eternity games leaned hard into this trope, but it was never really "revealed" as a plot point -- it was just background that you uncovered as you progressed stepwise through the game. The Gods as literal hiveminds, chained to or unbound from their original core functions to varying degrees; a fallen hyper-technological society; stuff like that...
I've never liked it as a narrative element because it's such a handwave. If you're going to have "magic is nanotech", or whatever other backing, at least actually use that backing to put narrative rules on it that the reader can understand.
That is similar to the concept of Numenara - which is set in the future 4 billion years from now. At that point in time, the earth no longer geographically resembles anything current and has been repopulated a couple of times by disparate races of non-human sentiences. The current population (as of the the beginning of Numenara) are yet another group of humans transplanted or created in-situ and living in a world where the technologies of the past resemble magic. It seemed pretty clear that, from the background, there clearly is not a thing that is magic, but its stand-in is unknown and sometimes, unknowable, creations from a lost past.
For an anti-recommendation, my experience with it is that the setting is interesting, but the system is just a weirdly boring-yet-fiddly derivative of D&D-alikes that doesn't touch on even a fraction of the narrative potential of the setting.
The Cypher system is definitively kinda shit. It’s easier to DM in some ways, but it’s just very unrefined, and badly in need of a 2nd edition subject to more playtesting.
It points out "the dungeon builders were part of a coinage economy just like the current one. There hasn’t even been significant inflation or deflation since the dungeons were built.", which doesn't seem compatible with a far-future post-post industrial setting interpretation.
I think "fantastic American history" is a rational description.
Not American history- set so far in the future that the idea of 'America' is as widely understood as we currently understand 'Sea Peoples'. Think Gene Wolfe's 'Book of the New Sun'
There's no evidence that it does stay stable- the author is making a lot of assumptions about the 'implied setting' of OD&D that aren't really supported by the game materials at the time. 40 silver pieces couple be 40 Roman denarii, 40 pre-1965 US quarters, or 40 chunks of a silver bracelet. They could represent the pocket change of a dungeon builder, but be a considerable sum to the barbarian that finds them. The implied uniformity is just because the author lacks imagination.
Even in the US, "free silver at a ratio of 16 to 1" worked - at least somewhat - by government fiat, not commodity value. (Great, I've now got the urge to write "Gresham's Law" while I flash back to high school history class.)
So I was ready to type "it's just a game", but the truth is OD&D isn't even really that- it's a set of mechanics from which a games master could select in order to make their own game. How closely you wanted to hew to the socio-economic truth of the 'Medieval period' was 100% up to the GM. "Chivalry and Sorcery", "Empire of the Petal Throne", and "Runequest" were all games that tried to implement more 'realistic' simulations of pre-modern society that came out soon after to specifically address D&D's lack of setting detail.
"'The Tempest' as an allegory for European colonialism? It's just a play."
My comments in this thread concern textual evidence which cast doubt onto A_D_E_P_T's proposal that "The only rational way to interpret D&D is not as medieval, but as a distant far-future post-post-industrial setting."
I found the thesis that OD&D draws from US expansionism to be interesting. The fact that later games tried to implement more realistic simulations is besides the point.
In fact, the essay author observes that by doing so it takes away from the 'American fantasy of empowerment and upward mobility' which was perhaps 'the last un-muddled example of the genre it inspired'.
Funny thing, the price of silver is pretty closely pegged to the amount of labor needed to dig it out of the ground and smelt it, and that doesn't change too much without late 20th century technology being involved.
Transport is a big issue. The price of silver in 1550s Iceland, where there are no silver mines, was certainly going to be far higher than Joachimsthal where silver was mined and Joachimsthalers mined.
The Great Bullion Famine[1] and subsequent Price revolution[2] fueled by Spanish expropriation of New World gold and silver tell me that prices weren't so stable over the pre-20th century period.
A lot of Japanese video games lean into this idea pretty heavily, too. It's kinda funny how the Zelda series just can't get away from it—no matter how far into the past they go, the magic is always technology from a previous civilization. Skyward Sword was supposed to be the Zelda origin story, and yet the Master Sword still has an AI companion in it from who knows where.
As far as I remember Fi is not an AI companion, she was put into the sword by Hylia. There is all the tech in the Lanayru desert though, that is most definitely tech from an ancient civilization.
Does D&D even plays on earth? I remember, there are several different worlds and realms and forces travelling between them, but nothing specifically about earth. So it can play at any time, it doesn't need to be a distant future.
This is pretty much canonical. Gygax didn't lean into it as heavily as Arneson did, but Blackmoor was pretty explicitly a post-apocalyptic setting, with remnants of advanced or alien technology being ubiquitous. Flying cars, laser guns, androids...
... Why would people be fighting with swords and maces in such a setting? And why would the rulebook present a clear dichotomy between arcane and divine magic? Or suggest bringing in Tolkien references?
What about other fantasy works that culturally influenced creation of D&D, like Lord of the Rings or Conan the Barbarian? Are those also anti-medieval?
I think a good argument for Conan being an American frontier series could be made. Especially Beyond the Black River which is about settlers fighting off natives.
The original Conan story is set in the 4th century, but the earliest stories date from the 12th century. He settled Brittany/Armorica whilst fighting for the usurper Emporer Magnus Maximus. His name seems to relate to Conan the Barbarian (cutting down the men and cutting out the tongues of women) and Meriadoc Brandybuck the hobbit who swore to the House of Rohan. The House of Rohan were the Breton rulers who claimed descent from Conan. A coincidence?
Lord of the Rings, at least, isn't even _trying_ to be medieval, is it? Like, the shire seems vaguely 18th/19th century England, Gondor seems suspiciously Roman/Byzantine... I don't think Tolkien was going for "this is [whatever period], only with dragons", and even if he was, that period certainly wasn't medieval.
Middle-earth arose from Tolkien's early attempts to reconstruct English / Anglo-Saxon mythology. Apart from the anachronistic Shire, the world largely feels early medieval.
D&D is what happens when you put pulp novels in an idea collider. The really big influences are Conan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Barbarian and Tolkein, which are themselves very different styles, but there's also a magpie effect where anything that Gygax read and thought was cool got added in.
Expecting "realism" and coherency from a fantasy world destroys the fantasy. But somehow projecting realism onto fantasy is a popular activity for fans.
Depends on what type of realism you are talking about. The details are very scant on for example how Shire is politically set up and how the farming in general work and supply lines and all such things.
So why are Bilbo and Frodo not spending all of their time on fields? Why are they not starving when coming back? What do the other hobbits trade food for, is there some trade for metal implements or something?
Because they are landed gentry. The Gamgees and other working class hobbits do the field work. Bilbo was wealthy even before his adventure. Pippin and Merry are also members of the aristocracy. Farmer Maggot was something more or less like a yeoman farmer.
The Shire is, in basically every respect, including its economics, an idealized version of the English countryside.
Apart from Sam, who is a peasant, Gandalf, who is a demigod, and Frodo, who is landed gentry with close familial ties to the local aristocracy, everyone in the company is an aristrocat: Legolas is the son of a king, Pippin and Boromir are heirs apparent to the local representative of the absent king, Aragorn is pretender to the throne of said king, Merry is heir apparent to the second most important local ruler after Pippin's father, and Gimli is a member of Durins house.
There's actually a staggering amount of thought and detail in the logistics of Middle Earth, but you have to dig into a wide variety of sources to access it. These details informed his story but didn't make it into the plot of LOTR, for obvious reasons. "In Deep Geek" is one youtube channel I enjoy for learning about
things like Aragorn's tax policy or the economics of the Shire, if you have a an interest but lack the time/obsession to piece it together yourself.
The details may be scant but you can see the outlines of history there. Tolkien doesn’t invent social structures, he adapts European history and only uses the elements he needs.
It’s a popular activity because you aren’t being graded or financially incentivized to make it all work seamlessly. You’re playing make-believe with your friends, so if you want to project some realism into your game because that just sounds like a fun idea, well then you can!
As long as everyone is on board you can kind of do whatever the hell you want, like playing with legos and toy cars and whatever else is on the ground as a kid. I’d venture to say it’s also why “rule of cool” is so popular. Sometimes you just want to do cool/funny/etc. stuff and D&D told a lot of people “hell yeah get after it.”
There are a lot of authors and RPG creators who create coherent fantasy worlds. I feel it is mostly just a matter of preference and I can enjoy both. Worlds without internal consistency like Discworld and worlds with internal consistency like Amber or any of the many worlds created by Sanderson. Excepting realism does in no way destroy the fantasy, in a world which was created with a focus on consistency it only makes it easier to play RPGs since you can use the already existing rules to easily make up new things.
But of course if you expect consistency where there is none to being with you will likely be disappointed.
It's fun to see Amber described as internally consistent, but it seemed to me obviously built as an onion of lies and most of that onion was built a layer at a time seemingly by the seat of the pants for what would be most jarring/weird/fun at the given part of the book where Zelazny thought he needed a big twist and/or gut punch to the current protagonist (and by proxy, the reader).
Perhaps that's partly why the attempt by a different author to build prequels failed so spectacularly, too, because it assumed too much the world was internally consistent and so was boring and didn't reveal anything truly new because it wasn't really trying, it was just playing out the obvious consequences for if you believed in some of the consistency of the previous books. I suppose that it didn't really understand the onion it was trying to emulate and that there should have been a lot more lies and a lot less consistency.
(ETA: It's also why sadly it felt like the last five books were all gearing up [often literally, new equipment every stage like levels in a videogame] for a war that will now never happen, because we don't know with who and for what reason or why because the lying protagonist wouldn't tell us, probably because Zelazny hadn't yet figured it out either and was waiting for the right moment to strike in the books that would have followed in some other timeline freer from cancer. I do still wonder where those books would have been leading. I don't know the author that could answer that definitively for us other than Zelazny.)
Discworld runs on Rule Of Funny just as much as Roger Rabbit does, but the author was very good about continuity so there were rarely noticeable direct conflicts.
Agreed, that's what I mean! For a series that runs on "Rule of Funny" (or as Granny Weatherwax would put it, the "story") it's all surprisingly consistent. I'm not saying there aren't inconsistencies, but far fewer than one would expect from comedy literature.
You just made me realize that what made the latest Dungeons and Dragons movie so fun is that it cribbed a lot from Discworld. It has an irreverent sense of humor but never sacrifices the consistency of its world for a cheap joke.
I find the strongest differences are between early and later Pratchett, but there are big streaks of consistency across novels, especially within a "sub-series", e.g. all the Watch novels, all the Witches novels, all the "industry" novels, etc. Even they are often consistent across subseries.
That's why I think Discworld is surprisingly consistent, all things considered.
D&D's main setting is built as a kitchen sink with tons of weird conflicting ideas happening at once so that people can exclude whatever parts they want to create their coherent setting. You want to do a vampire story? A tolkien-esque quest? Steampunk? Wizards of the Coast is happy to sell you rules for all of that.
This is the core weakness and strength of the Forgotten Realms. It has everything but if you think about it nothing makes sense. Paizo did the same with Golarion, probably because they saw that the versatility of settings like FR more than make up for the lack in coherency.
verisimilitude, not coherency. The real world doesn't appear coherent, why would a fantasy one. The consistent application of style and rules- that gives verisimilitude, and that's what counts.
By the time the original D&D books came out, the Blackmoor campaign (that inspired the original game) already had crashed spaceships and trans-dimensional travel.
I just got around to reading Howard's Conan stories a year or so ago and was surprised how much it felt like just reading a novelization of a D&D adventure. It feels like a much bigger influence then Tolkien, where the influence seems limited to borrowing some races and creatures.
I remember when our group in the 80s tried to play Chivalry. 5 of us peasants got slaughtered by an armed guard. Sounds about right for accuracy, but it was not much fun at all.
There is an entire ACOUP post [1] on what feudalism actually means, and it is a _lot_ more complex than "land in exchange of military glory for your overlord". Actually the "overlord" is surprisingly weak wrt. our current assumptions about the powers a "monarch" should have.
Violence and the State in Languedoc, 1250-1400 by Justine Firnhaber-Baker is an interesting and in-depth investigation of this power-without-power dynamic.
This was the first thing I thought of when I saw “dark age” in the post. If you want to get a historian spun up, start talking about dark ages and prepare to be educated.
Depends on the historian. The overly theatrical way some historians react to the term "dark age" is a bit revisionistic (and perpetual revisionism seems extremely popular among academic historians).
And many get similarly spun up about the term "feudalism" as well.
What is academic history other than repeated attempts at revision?
History is literally the stories we tell ourselves about the past. There are facts there, but the arrangement of such facts will (and should) always be open to revision. Anyone claiming to have figured out the One True history of humanity should be viewed with extreme suspicion.
True, but there's a difference between being open to revisionism and actively trying to spin things in a revisionistic manner because novelty brings more clout.
>What is academic history other than repeated attempts at revision?
I remember a historian answering a similar question once when an ancient list civilization nut accused historians of rejecting information that runs contrary to their narrative. History and archaeology, like the rest of science, builds upon the body of work. Every historian would love to make a discovery that overturns previous knowledge because its career defining. But almost all new work doesn't do that. What it does do is improve and refine our current understanding. It's rare that all new understandings developed.
Revisionist history does not have the connotation of improving and refining. If it did then it wouldn't need its own name because that's the normal state of things. Revisionist history is revising the record to a different understanding or narrative. And that is generally problematic because the burden of proof is very very high. Most of it doesn't live up to that standard.
Yeah, I get that people in established positions feel attacked from many angles these days, so defining things like intention become very important to justifying the belief in why they've chosen their perspective. Also, it's easier than ever for truly bat-shit crazy ideas to catch people's imaginations. But how, then, are we to recognize paradigm shifts?
Herodotus was accused of just making shit up and accepting legend as fact by his near-contemporaries. Now a lot of what he wrote is accepted as being closer to the truth than what almost anyone else wrote down then.
>But how, then, are we to recognize paradigm shifts?
The strength of the argument and supporting evidence. Big claims need big evidence. Simple as. One problem specifically in history today is many historians can get by their whole career by being an X historian where X is some political ideology or social science construct. They can write endless papers analyzing existing work through that lense whether or not it makes sense to do so or really adds anything to the body of work. This is where a lot of revisionist history comes from. They aren't performing original research and finding new evidence and sources. They are merely critiquing the work of others through their chosen lense.
The worst form of revisionist history is of course just denying the facts as they are known and inventing your own. But thats is rare within serious academia these days with a few notable exceptions.
Probably a difference in epistemology. A historian should try to start with facts and primary sources and draw a conclusion from them. A revisionist starts from a (perhaps politically motivated) conclusion and looks for facts to support that conclusion.
This is the thing: When you "draw the conclusion" you're making shit up. "The roman empire collapsed" <all good "because..." <beginning of making shit up.
All history books should begin with "A map is not the territory" to remind historians what's going on.
Many of the folks who get worked up about issues in history like this are likely themselves wrong, but in a different way, about what it “really was” back then.
We tend to have an overly romantic point of view of history. But to correct it, I think we should not add Game of Thrones type stuff (ultra violence and other grim stuff), but Monty Python’s Holy Grail: rub a little poop, stupidity, and selfishness on everything.
Most British historians. They would prefer "Early Medieval Period" (c. 410 - 1066), spanning from the Rescript of Honorius to the Battles of Stamford Bridge (ending the Viking era) and Hastings (beginning the Norman period).
Within "Early Medieval England," they will eschew the term "Dark Ages" and instead you will talk about specific eras such as "Sub-Roman Britain" (c. 410 - 597), "Anglo-Saxon England" (c. 449 - 1066), "Viking-era Britain" (c. 793 - 1066), or even "Anglo-Danish England" (c. 991-1016).
Which historians? I haven’t listened to a ton of them…
The ACOUP guy seems to be pretty even-handed, some of his best stuff is pushing back on silly/impractical/stereotypical elements of Game of Thrones (itself an over-the-top response to Lord of the Rings).
I think in historians we tend to see a lot of excitement for their special thing (like all academics), but the stuff they get excited about looks like details to us.
When reading a specialist critique of a popular notion it's important not to conflate the strength of the argument against the popular notion with the strength of the argument for what the author proposes as true instead.
Almost any specialist can muster a well-supported argument to a layperson that "X is wrong."
Unfortunately, it's a substantial turn from "X is wrong..." to "...Y is true."
And a well-supported refuting of X shouldn't be transfered into credibility towards Y.
The acoup guy is a decent author, but sometimes he makes that pivot a bit too glibly and leverages the ignorance of his readers.
It's because feudal is a technical term that has a long and misleading history of being used as a deliberately confusing term of abuse. The professors get ornery about it because they have to clear up the same misconceptions every year. For "dark age," many professors also try to take the opportunity to revise their students' perspective by deliberately highlighting brighter themes of art, philosophy, and so on to jazz up their introductions.
Part of that is just that particular specialty trying to make a case for itself in contrast to the more popular classical and modern periods. Then there is the complexity added by the fact that the classical era never really ended in toto; it just stopped being as evenly distributed.
I've long contended that most uses of the "-ism" terms in popular discourse mostly serve an emotional purpose and otherwise do more to obfuscate than they do to illuminate understanding, especially because most people have very little idea of what the -isms actually entail.
As a case in point, there was a recent conversation I was having with someone kvetching about modern-day feudalism, and when I asked them what they thought feudalism was, they were modelling it after Louis XIV's absolute monarchy. Louis XIV was the king who abolished the last vestiges of feudalism in France. (To their credit, after I explained the history of feudalism and absolute monarchy, and why absolute monarchy is almost the complete opposite of feudalism, they did understand the mistake they were making.)
As Bret Devereaux points out, I think a large part of the problem is the sheer compression of history. We take about 1000 years of history and compress it into just a few events: the Fall of the (Western) Roman Empire, Charlemagne crowned Holy Roman Emperor, the Viking Age, the First Crusade, (maybe) the Black Death, the Protestant Reformation, and two of those are bookends for the period.
It's just campaign rules for Chainmail, their medieval weapon combat rules invented for the already existing Elastolin and Starlux figures. It was a system for wargamers much more interested in the weapon speed of pole arms rather than accurate political and social structure. They needed a world of treasure and magic to fuel the adventures, so a setting of accumulated Appendix N source material was pieced together into an entirely new setting.
I think that the the game culture have changed into something where the DM (dungeon master) is just a enforcer of rules/npc builder. Most of the arguments in the text should be discretionary to the DM. If a DM chooses to enforce a "medieval" setting, the campaign will be medieval. "Knights mentioned", "any time select a land", well, I guess the DM can mention knights and not treat land as something that can be bought as long as you have money. It was very different playing a campaign in Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance or Greyhawk, or having a custom world built by a DM.
I can’t agree - if anything the role of DM has been expanding since Gygax’s day. The DM was explicitly an „arbiter” in classic D&D, a person whose role was mostly explaining/enforcing the rules and lightly tying the story together. The actual adventure was mostly determined by the setting (often premade) and by random tables (roll to see what’s in the room).
In modern D&D, by contrast, the DM is often expected to do worldbuilding, write adventures, and do NPC voices.
The steady increase of the performative acting style of play has been a key part of why I never picked the game back up. Reading that "do[ing] NPC voices" is a key part of the DMs job description doesn't help that stance of mine :)
I played D&D with Lawrence Schick (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Schick) in the 80s. He very much did NPC voices back then. It's what made playing with him as the DM amazing. I have always assumed since then, the best DMs can do NPC voices.
I'm not saying it didn't exist back then. My experience was that the performative acting style existed but was less common. But I definitely encountered it.
However I get the impression that this is the standard play style today.
Not really. It's the most VISIBLE playing style, because it make for an entertaining live play, so naturally that's what the videos on YouTube lean towards.
But at an everyday table, it's generally not expected. Some players will prefer that type of DM (just as some players prefer combat heavy or dungeon delve heavy campaigns), but I've never had anyone say to me "Why aren't you doing voices? DMs are supposed to do voices!"
To be clear, I do mean more than just NPC voices and am talking about the style of play where everyone is acting a bit. And yes, not unlike those recorded shows, albeit usually less good. And not saying there's anything wrong with it, it's just not for me.
Between what I'd seen online & from friends who play these days I've had the impression that this is much more dominant over what I encountered in the 80s - where that was the less common style. Instead I saw more "my character/I do XYZ", more of a focus on the mechanics of everything vs the RP.
Perhaps I'll poke around a bit then. I'm really only interested in 1e or perhaps 2e but I know there's the whole OSR thing going on so that's easier to find these days.
Yeah if you're leaning towards someone playing older rule sets or OSR, you're definitely going to find it to be rare. I have never seen tables with that overlap (very in-person roleplay heavy + older style rulesets) personally.
I think we're on the same page then if I understand you. My preference would be for old rule sets and not in person roleplay heavy. i.e. play styles that more mirror the norm of the older days. Thanks!
Indeed - one of my big complaints about 5e is that the rules leave way too much up to the discretion of the DM. And I say this as a DM! I'm not an expert in game design, so having a framework given by the rules is extremely important to me. But all too often 5e's designers didn't do that, just leaving it up to DMs to invent something from whole cloth.
> The actual adventure was mostly determined by the setting (often premade)
Hmm. I disagree. Greyhawk and Blackmoor were published fairly early in D&D's history, but the majority of games falling into premade settings didn't really take off until Dragonlance and then the Forgotten Realms in the mid to late 80s.
It's true that DM responsibilities have changed over time - in a way that I am not particularly a fan of - but I think it's the farthest thing from the truth to suggest that DMs weren't supposed to do worldbuilding in the days of OD&D and AD&D 1E/BECMI. If anything, they had to do more - the DM's job was to create a believable living world for the players to exist in. There were very few published "campaigns" back in those days - Dragonlance is really what changed all of this - so most modules were locales you could more or less plop down wherever. Keep on the Borderlands just needed to be in a borderland, the Caverns of Thracia could be anywhere, etc.
Players being fully in control of what their goals were and where the narrative was to head meant that the GM had to build a convincing and interesting world for the players to adventure around. It was quite rare for there to be something akin to a "big bad evil guy" in the early days of D&D, or even for there to be some overarching plot to drive the whole campaign.
> In modern D&D, by contrast, the DM is often expected to do worldbuilding, write adventures, and do NPC voices.
I'm fairly certain the overwhelming majority of D&D played these days happens with the published modules. There's a lot more people playing so I'm sure the absolute number of people writing their own adventures is higher than ever, but I would be willing to wager that the ratio of people running almost exclusively published modules and campaigns vs. their self-written adventures has shifted in the opposite direction.
I think both can be true and that seems to track with what you are saying- modern DMs being expected to do much more and overperform in some areas (theatrics, atmosphere, narrative, game/combat balance, make sure players are having "fun" and are being challenged but not too much so) and at the same time are expected to do much less in others (like knowing/refereeing the rules like the back of their hand, being the final arbitrator and having the final and often only say in a ruling). I've definitely noticed the same. And noticed how in some cases the modern approach has "bled back" so to speak and a group I played 1E both before and after 3E/4E/5E, had a completely different expectation of the older game when we returned to it out of nostalgia.
This next part is also purely anecdotal, but something I've observed in several groups so I think it's interesting to note- playing in groups of mostly pre-3E players, I hardly ever see arguments with the DM break out over rules/rulings, both then and now. But playing 3E/5E, or playing other games with people who primarily play 3E/5E, there are many occasions where the flow of the game is interrupted for quite long arguments between player and DM because a player is not satisfied with some resolution or not being allowed to do/play as something in particular and thinks the DM should do it a different way. It feels like there's a much bigger cultural expectation that the DM is there to entertain and enable the players fantasy and not to be an impartial judge for a world the players are exploring. But like all things I'm sure people can chime in with completely different experiences for all the editions
Disclaimer is very relevant because TFA seems to be very specifically discussing the original DnD, which is not what 90+% of people will think of when reading "D&D", which I think is confusing some of the discussion here. I think other settings like the ones you mentioned have a more developed society that in most cases does not necessarily fit "American dream fantasy" and is inspired by something more medieval or something else, although I still get the impression some of the things said still apply: "Most of D&D’s thousands of imitators, in game and fiction, preserve the game’s democratic bones (cash economy, guns for hire, rags to riches stories) while overlaying a medieval-European skin."
D&D is as medieval as Hollywood movies set in the middle ages are "medieval": the environment vaguely resonates with a middle-ages setting, but then you have high fantasy, epic kind of stuff (like kings fighting each other directly or pep-talking their soldiers to victory, football-locker style) that wasn't really a thing in the middle ages. That you don't have vassals and king is an implementation detail: you can totally play a game of D&D with vassals and kings, if you want. The real difference is overall "epicness", which is obtained at the rules level: if you are level 10, there's no way one (or ten) level 1 opponents can even touch you. This allows a storyline in which a small party of heroes can overthrow tyrants and slay dragons; in real life (especially in the middle ages) no matter how trained you are, a makeshift mace made of wood and nails swung by angry peasants can still end you quickly, especially if you wander alone, which means you can't get away from needing an army, a society, strategy, politics, etc.
When nobles did go into combat they were better equipped and protected.
In warring states Japan, common foot soldiers would be armed with pikes (wood shafts with a sharp metal point) but nobles might ride a horse wearing mail armor and armed with an huge and asymmetrical simple bow and be further protected by their position in the military structure.
This is more like Monster Hunter as you do not scale your ‘hit points’ by an order of magnitude but you do get gear and actual skills.
Right, but D&D exaggerates this mechanism to unrealistic lengths, in order to maintain the epicness of high fantasy. If you accumulate enough levels in D&D, you can destroy entire armies and tackle literal gods. Most of all, there's a limit (based on your AC and the enemies modifiers) under which lower challenge-rate enemies can't literally touch you (save maybe for critical hits), which is obviously not how it works in real combat.
I remember there were "realistic" alternatives to D&D in the 90s, with thousands of detailed tables and the concept of hit zones, where any enemy could potentially even kill you with enough luck (say lucky hit to the back of your armored head from peasant with a spiked club), and you could always get maimed or crippled in some ways (because you wouldn't only lose HP when you get hit, you can break your foot or arm etc).
Clearly, you had to have a much more cautious style of playing and you didn't have as much fun as in D&D, where the master would tailor a series of increasingly challenging but killable encounters until you got to destroy an epic, ridiculously powered villain at the end of the campaign.
> If you accumulate enough levels in D&D, you can destroy entire armies and tackle literal gods.
This is largely an invention of modern D&D, though. This was 100% not the case in OD&D, or stock AD&D 1E. Splatbooks in 1E added significant power level to characters, particularly after the success of the Dragonlance modules, including some truly ridiculous stuff like the power progression in the H1-H4 books. But before that point you were playing adventurers, not heroes.
Even in 2E you could still play more like adventurers, though it was clear the preference for heroic gameplay was the new norm. It wasn't until 3E that the adventuring playstyle was really made impossible.
> where the master would tailor a series of increasingly challenging but killable encounters until you got to destroy an epic, ridiculously powered villain at the end of the campaign.
The original decade or so of D&D really didn't even have the idea of campaigns ending or building up to an epic showdown with the big bad evil guy. Gygax wrote extensively of campaigns as settings, and the sort of campaigns he (and Arneson) ran wouldn't even allow for this sort of showdown, because they were more like gaming clubs. They had dozens of people playing in the campaign regularly at any given time, often across multiple characters, split into multiple groups, etc. They were big persistent worlds. There would be no way to make a specific showdown or progression like this enjoyable for that sort of group - you could never get all 30-50 people together at once, and even if you could, there's no way to make that manageable for actual play, and you wouldn't want all of the players not involved in the final showdown to feel like their years of play had ultimately missed out on the climax.
I played a little informally in the 80s. Even young me knew it never seemed to be a realistic portrait of the past world, or claimed to be. Way too many dragons compared to the historical record.
the monster manual seemed to be a mash up of monster from all over the place, including Greek myths.
Some of the weaponry was midevil but it didn’t seem like it was at all realistic. Like many fantasy books. Not like some of the war games of the time that where more historical (axis and allies and diplomacy)
Honestly if it was midevil, would it be fun? Who wants to play a game where you’re just farming. That would be such a grind and never be popular.
D&D is theme park based mostly on modern-day USA with some Wild West influences. It's very obvious for people from Europe playing it :)
The biggest thing is that in D&D most of population lives in towns & cities, and there are very few if any villages. I'm not sure Americans even understand the difference between a village and countryside.
When D&D has people living in the countryside it's often American-style single-family farms in the middle of nowhere. That wasn't a thing.
For actual medieval theme every small town should be surrounded by dozens of small villages with lots of people living in close proximity farming lots of small fields, and where one village ends - another starts.
Most places shouldn't have enough people to sustain full-time inns and shops. Weekly or monthly markets were done instead so that the same traders could be reused between many places.
The way D&D worlds are usually structured could only work if everybody has a magic car and food is abundant.
> The biggest thing is that in D&D most of population lives in towns & cities, and there are very few if any villages.
In my experience most D&D settlements have to fit onto a two-page spread in a letter/legal sized book. So they've got space for an inn, a store, and maybe one or two places with things to advance the plot.
A realistic town might need 300 houses for each inn, but there just ain't the space on the page.
And largely due to game play. Lot could be scaled down to present enough generic npcs and buildings, but having to spend time traveling through same town for 5, 10, 30 minutes or more each time is not exactly fun. Or takes special kind of player. I am not saying there is not fans of that level of realism, but it is not big niche.
Without some of that the game would be unplayable or at least highly constrained.
A 2 week ride on horseback would be a reasonable trip in that milieu but has to be compressed somehow; at best the group could meet and game out some encounters during that time period but that takes dedication, and if that was the way you rolled you’d also put them in a conference room for a long weekend to play the dungeon.
Villages are smaller so they are easier to generate and fit on a page than towns. But people design based on what they experience (in games and in real-life). So most adventures take place in towns or in the wilderness. Americans probably never seen a village.
> A realistic town might need 300 houses for each inn
300 houses in one place is already a big city in dark ages. Let's say 2 stories with 2 families on each level, with 5 people in each family - that's 20*300 = 6000 people.
6000 people would probably be top 10 city in a kingdom in 1300. Rome was 25 000 people back then.
And inns were mostly for travellers, so the number of houses weren't that important - it mattered if you are integer number of days of travel from the last trade center.
Honestly I just took the present day number of houses in the UK (30 million or so) and divided by the number of pubs in the UK (46,800 or so) which gave 641 houses per pub, then I knocked that down to 300 lest people think I was over-estimating the number of houses.
Of course, that present day number is 30 million houses for 67 million population, i.e. 2.2 people per house - not the 20 people per house from your assumptions.
> The way D&D worlds are usually structured could only work if everybody has a magic car and food is abundant.
To be fair, that's kind of the case. Sure, not everyone is an adventurer, but level 1 adventurers probably aren't particularly rare in the world. A level 1 spellcaster may be able to do two of the following things a day using their two spell slots (depending on what kind of spellcaster they are):
- feed up to 10 people for a day (and heal them, to boot) with goodberry
- create 10 gallons of potable water with create or destroy water
- double walking speed for 10 minutes without exhaustion (expeditious retreat)
- move a third again as fast as normal for an hour without exhaustion (long strider)
- load up and move 500 pounds at those speeds without having to carry anything themselves for an hour (Tenser's floating disk)
That's just food and transportation. A level 1 cleric totally trounces period-accurate medical care and compares pretty favorably to a whole modern hospital filled with specialists and equipment (and with a few more levels under their belt they do much better than modern medicine as they can bring the recently deceased back to life).
But that's starting to miss the forest for the trees. I definitely respect people, like the author of the article, that focus this deeply on hobbies -- I can barely do that for paying work. But it misses the point of D&D for me.
Fundamentally, my response to the article is that D&D's just a collection of systems meant to generate fun, not be an accurate model of a particular time and place in history.
I, for one, would expect social and political structures to deviate from history once you've added magic in the mix.
In my eyes, the article's argument is akin to people a thousand years from now role-playing in 2020s America but adding in Star Trek-style replicators and wondering why the rules don't model Homeowners Associations (HOAs). Sure, lots of current Americans are subject to them but what percentage of players would find that enjoyable? And are you sure they'd still exist in such a world?
> Sure, not everyone is an adventurer, but level 1 adventurers probably aren't particularly rare in the world.
How often do you meet other adventuring groups when you play D&D?
Post-scarcity magic utopia is one solution, but it's certainly not the setting of most D&D campaigns.
> Fundamentally, my response to the article is that D&D's just a collection of systems meant to generate fun, not be an accurate model of a particular time and place in history.
Sure, but more realistic medieval fantasy can be just as fun and more interesting (cause your players' unconscious assumptions about how any world has to work are broken).
I grew up reading Tolkein and then playing D&D. It seemed to me along with everyone in our playing sphere that D&D was set in Middle Earth, not Medival Times. It wasn't long after the original release when the Gods & Demigods manual was released to help clerics have someone specifically to worship. I never ever thought this game was in any way trying to model reality. Then, of course, you have the various astral and god planes of existence. The only "setting" that makes sense to me for D&D is bringing Middle Earth and myths into a game setting.
A lot of that is because the gods are usually part of some sort of pantheon or otherwise juxtaposed with other deities in some fashion. They have followers and creeds and lore and all these other elements that slot into the larger world. If you scoop them out, aside from just changing their name/look, you have to replace all of that in theory.
I find this surprising. I can barely get my players to learn the rules properly. I struggle to imagine people making lore accurate characters. One, because it’s a lot to learn. Two, because it’s specific and kind of dumb. We just use dnd canon at will to supplement but otherwise make everything up as desired.
Different strokes for different folks. Many people actively enjoy having a mass of written lore to consume, and prefer having a well-defined setting to act as a foundation to their stories. It's a safety net of sorts.
Back in the day we’d play the same characters for a year or so. Some background lore is nice to have in this case. It makes everything more interesting.
My primary gaming group everyone goes out of their way to learn the rules and make lore accurate characters, or build onto the lore. Regardless of which system, setting or game we are playing. We do a lot of homebrew though.
In a current PF2E game, my Cleric has a deity and I do RP him to stay in Ragathiel's favor. It's explicitly called out and I don't think it's dumb at all...
Sure. But is Ragathiel any better than Bjorn’er, the god of rapturous dance that I just made up? Imo, no. If someone wants to choose a predefined god, sure. If someone wants to make one up? Also sure.
The only thing I’d be fairly vocal about is that until some lore has reason to enter the narrative, it isn’t canon. E.g. the space faring races that appear in both dnd and pathfinder
I mean, objectively yes I do think Ragathiel is better than Bjorn’er because there is actual lore, thought, and consistency there. [0]
Look by all means, if you want to bring your own deity or $WHATEVER to a table I don't think most reasonable DMs and players would even bat an eye but you'll absolutely be expected to put some degree of effort into this beyond just showing up unprepared and cooking shit up on the fly.
I would argue it’s even better role play if players don’t know things though. If you meet some followers of Bane, a player who knows the lore will probably deem them to be a bad guy. If they have no idea, they will roll knowledge to see if their character would know. The DM providing information based on character knowledge checks is generally a great source of fun.
The DM saying “yeah I know you know Bane is a bad guy but I made your roll for it and you failed so you need to pretend you don’t know that” is never very good even if the players try to obey the spirit of things.
Indeed, some folks do re-role until fate favors their egos... lol =3
In a way, the more modern video game mechanics based on traditional starter-map games must also choose between a chaotic open-world, or a structured linear mission story (often degrading into a rail-game like snakes/chutes-and-ladders.)
Certainly, many of the iconic characters were a mix of several genres:
In higher level campaigns, you can literally go to other planes and interact with the beings there. The deities in D&D are literal physical beings that you could just go and interact with (although depending on the deity and the context they might not take kindly to being bothered). A lot of prewritten modules specifically are about stuff with various deities; even Baldur's Gate 3, arguably the most played prewritten module in some time (it was popular enough to go mainstream and win GotY) heavily features lore from deities and in a few places in the story you (or another character) can directly have short conversations with some of the deities.
I don't see why it's "kind of dumb" if people enjoy playing that way. Tabletop RPGs have always had a wide spectrum of playstyles where some people follow the rules rigorously and some people ignore them entirely, and being consistent with lore is just another dimension on that. Every successful group will settle into a pattern that's comfortable for them.
The lore itself is kind of dumb. That’s ok. Most TTRPG stories will be pretty dumb. They can still be awesome. Imo plying your own dumb story is a lot better than someone else’s dumb story.
I would say it’s not ideal for different players to have different levels of knowledge about the world for non game reasons though. It’s better when most of it is freshly discovered.
I used to play with a guy whose character was a Paladin of the God of hardtack, and before he used his Paladin skills he would in real life take out a plain white cracker and eat it.
Yeah, the way I played, I read the parts of the books about magic, combat, monsters and chatacter development, and ignored anything about society, filling it in with my own teenage ideas.
I must have missed the part where Gondorians and Orcs where sitting for months in trenches opposite to each other fighting for the same few kilometers of ground?
The entire war of the ring lasts less than a year, and most battles are won after at most a few days of fighting by glorious charges on horseback with the leader in front of his men. Making them far more similar to the battles of Arthurian legend rather than anything contemporary to Tolkien.
from ww1 we know that Tolkien took a strong dislike in industrialisation which made war and killing much more effective than before. Hence the "good" hobbits as traditional farmer-like society, and evil portayed as destroying the natural realm.
Tolkien has specifically stated that the Dead Marshes were inspired by the appearance of Northern France after the battle of the Somme. And that Sam is a reflection of the privates and batman he served with. That said, he explicitly denies that WW1 or WW2 had any influence on the actual plot.
I don't know how much you want to take the Tolkien's word for it (death of the author and all that) but there it is.
That's the "hot" period of the war. Before that there were several centuries long war of attrition between Dunedain, their allies and proxies of Sauron.
The capital city of Gondor, Osgiliath, was turned into ruins, front going straight through. And before that, the same thing happened to Minas Ithil. Those big towers next to Black Gate? Those were fortifications built by Gondor. But after Great Plague, which was probably a biological weapon of sorts, there weren't enough people to man them.
What we see in lotr, is essentially last days of war. When one side is barely clinging on, and can muster only localized offensives.
It was one swift attack that managed to push the Gondorians out of the eastern half of the town, that also marked the beginning of the war, and one surprise attack with boats 9 months later to take the western half that a few weeks before the end of the war.
I don't know if it's mentioned anywhere what happened in the meantime, but Denethor says he's expecting an enemy strike against Osgiliath shortly before the second attack happens, so it can't have been an active frontline at the time.
Trench warfare thing is a thing, a big thing, about WW1. But it isn’t the only thing that happened in WW1. It looms large in our imaginations, probably because it impacted the geopolitical situation, and that’s what we see through the zoomed out lens of history.
But Tolkien experienced WW1 in first person. When people say his books were influenced by WW1, I think they mean the experience of soldiering.
Somebody already mentioned the marshes. The Nazgûl are also described as spreading a sort of deep, supernatural sort of dread; not normal fear, but something that shatters the will of hardened soldiers, just by looming over the siege of Gondor. That could be influenced by the experience of artillery bombardments, without explicitly referencing it.
It is also a story in which the good guys are agrarian, and the bad guys are industrial; this was possibly influenced by the experience of being on the receiving end of industrial warfare. I hear it is unpleasant.
Not really, though I suppose you can interpret art how you like:
The Lord of the Rings was actually begun, as a separate thing, about 1937, and had reached the inn at Bree, before the shadow of the second war. Personally I do not think that either war (and of course not the atomic bomb) had any influence upon either the plot or the manner of its unfolding. Perhaps in landscape. The Dead Marshes and the approaches to the Morannon owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme. They owe more to William Morris and his Huns and Romans, as in The House of the Wolfings or The Roots of the Mountains.
Probably not, it doesn’t seem to have any direct power to just, like, blast stuff, as far as we see on the page. I think it is more like a wide-ranging enhancement to all the forces of evil if they get it. The power of every orc waking up on the right side of the bed to go do the day-to-day work of evil every morning.
There's no doubt a lot of WWI in there. I would guess that part of his goal was to talk about the universality of much of what was going on. For that he'd need to draw from a lot of history, and he had first-hand experience with WWI.
But the major plot element of having a weapon too powerful for humans (and humanoids) to wield (and which must be destroyed) is clearly influenced by his reaction to the atomic bomb. The ring gets a pretty big promotion from an Gyges-style invisibility ring in the original edition of the Hobbit, to a civilization-destroying force in LOTR.
There's also arguably a Japanese influence on the Orcs, as an army of people who don't look quite like the English and are fighting hard for a way of life the English don't understand. Japan was England's ally in WWI but an enemy in WWII.
> But the major plot element of having a weapon too powerful for humans (and humanoids) to wield (and which must be destroyed) is clearly influenced by his reaction to the atomic bomb.
Sorry but no. The ring had been written into existence before 1937 (in the Hobbit) and it's darker nature in TLOTR was defined sometime in 1938, long before anyone knew about the bomb [0]. Much later, Tolkien specifically addressed the relationship with WW2 by saying IIRC that if the ring war had reflected the real war, the allies would have used the ring against Sauron and Saruman probably would have made his own in the chaos that followed.
The Ring also has some very nebulous power up effect that it would give to the forces of evil. It isn’t at all clear what it does, just that it would be real bad for the bad guys to get it.
If it was a nuke, presumably Elrond would have mentioned that, haha.
I think it has more of a wide ranging philosophical power or something like that. If it fell into the hands of evil, it would mean the arc of history was going their way, all the little dice rolls would bend imperceptibly their way, they’d wake up just a little more energized than the forces of good every day, etc etc. It is better that way, because it becomes a battle for the soul of Middle Earth.
> I think it has more of a wide ranging philosophical power or something like that
The Ring was a force multiplier for Sauron (who had in effect transferred some of his power into it, for whatever reason). He could already wield extreme control over his underlings (and we see what happens when he gets distracted at the very end) and strike fear into the hearts of his enemies. All of these capabilities would have been enhanced if he got it back. He would also have been able to perceive the actions (and thoughts?) of the other ring bearers (i.e. the elves). And perhaps a load of other things that Gandalf and the other experts didn't know about (they didn't appear in middle earth until long after the ring was forged).
Tolkien continually revised his writings and published in 1954. I'm sure there are some hints looking back in retrospect at his earlier drafts.
And we know he changed the Hobbit to give the ring more power in later editions, for example making it irresistible to Golem. This sort of changed was likely propagated throughout the LOTR drafts as he made the ring more powerful.
Yes, but Tolkien knew from the outset (in approx 1938) that the Ring absolutely could not be used. This was the whole point of Frodo's mission, that the Ring must be destroyed, even though the details of the tale changed substantially as Tolkien wrote and rewrote.
By 1944, Tolkien was already writing about Frodo trudging through the dead marshes on the way to Mordor, bearing the hideous burden of the Ring. The bomb was still a year away.
Tolkien has repeatedly and explicitly said that he never wrote allegories for anything, and that he simply wanted to write a good story.
Of course he also readily admitted that his own experiences and views on life influenced his writing. He went off to fight in the trenches with his university friends and he was the only one to come back. This obviously leaves a mark. And if you read his writings aware of his views on Catholicism, then obviously quite a lot of that shines through as well.
But all of that is fairly subtle. The notion that this or that is an allegory for such and such is pretty much always wrong. Tolkien just wanted to write an entertaining story – nothing more, nothing less.
With a large work of fiction and a large set of real-world events, you can find allegories in everything. Doesn't mean the author intended this.
I never said it was an allegory. I think you're confusing two ideas. One is whether the story in as allegory, and the other is whether Tolkien was inspired by one of the most significant events in the history of humanity.
He said if he had written an allegory it would have a different ending, as in if he wanted to preserve a one-to-one mapping things would have changed. But there are story types that are not allegories and which also are influenced by things.
Sadly my English teachers in high school wouldn’t accept this as a response to their request for an essay on Tolkien. It was extremely frustrating, to say the least, given his repeated stance on the matter.
The great thing about interpreting LOTR as an allegory for WW1 is it nicely explains the lack of female characters, without us needing to say critical things about an author we like.
This is largely an issue of definition. When Tolkien spoke of disliking allegories, he was largely referring to the medieval tradition - https://slate.com/culture/2016/05/an-allegory-is-not-the-sam... - where you are quite explicitly making a direct connection to a specific thing.
He did, however, love to speak of "applicability," which many people would call allegory today. The One Ring, for example, is clearly meant to to embody power and the temptation of it/addiction to it. This is pretty unambiguously true! What Tolkien didn't want was for people to view The One Ring as some specific embodiment of power, e.g. the atomic bomb, and instead for readers to draw parallels to their own lives, experiences, and knowledge. To him, this was "applicability," but in the modern discussion of literature this sort of thing would still often be called an allegory.
I'm sorry but the proposed metaphor is just completely unworkable. The ring is not "too powerful for humans" it's not useful at all to humans! it induces irrational desire for it, but actually is of minor real utility, one person at a time can become real stealthy, it's cool but it's not beating an army. oh but actually when you try and use it for that minor ability, it secretly calls goons on you. Not desirable!
So it's like the atomic bomb, except there's only exactly one, and only the nazis can use it as a bomb, when the americans have it it just poisons the local groundwater a bit. But they have to keep it around and just let it do that because it's really important to guard it against the axis getting their hands on it.
The Ring provided much more power than that, especially to bend (masses of) people to your will, see their minds, etc. It was believed that if Sauron got it, he would be unstoppable. IIRC, some character said it provided power matching the user's 'stature'.
> the major plot element of having a weapon too powerful for humans (and humanoids) to wield (and which must be destroyed) is clearly influenced by his reaction to the atomic bomb.
Didn't he write mostly before the public knew about the bomb?
Definitely both imho. Tolkien’s own ww1 experience shines through. But then his sons served in ww2 and you can feel a lot of bilbos pain come through as Frodo has to take on the burden of fighting evil.
You can clearly see the pain at the end of return of the king where Frodo and Bilbo together just leave. They had both been through too much and are basically shell shocked.
It’s really hard to not view it as an allegory of the journey of two generations through ww1 and ww2 imho.
Tolkien was influenced by many things, such as the rings of the nibelungen and other proto germanic stories, his studies of the english language especially in its older forms, christianity for core values, and indeed his experiences in ww1.
DnD is primarily based on Jack Vance and Michael Moorecock’s fantasy. Moorecock’s work being a direct rebuttal of the pastoral conservatism Tolkien was peddling.
Gygax was adamantly not a fan of LoTR. The creatures of DnD are clearly not based on Tolkien’s works, and the player races you believe Tolkien invented predate his work by centuries.
Howard and Burroughs rather than Vance and Moorcock, though Tolkien would be number three. Gygax only argued otherwise after he was sued by the Tolkien estate.
I would say that the description of dwarves as middle-sized strong men that live underground and are known for good forgery, and elves being tall, old, singing folk indeed comes from Tolkien. Previously Dwarves were imagined as magical folk with powers more close to Cinderella's God Mother, and if I'm not mistaken, Elves too (i.e. dwarves were elves really) according to Germanic mythology. For example, if you read Andre Norton's Witch World this world differs greatly from Tolkiens' - especially in this matter.
The word "Eldritch" as in "Eldritch Horror" comes from the same root as the word Elf.
Elves were terrifying forest creatures akin to djinn. They were horrors that would give you amazing things at a terrible cost, and from the medieval period we hear only the stories of the rare survivors of their actions.
(like Tam Lin who was given temporary immortality at the cost of being the slave of the elf queen and being tithed to hell unless some other mortal saved him)
or would literally kill you and drag your soul to hell if they encountered you
(the Wild Hunt)
or tricksters who would ask you for a favor and in the process attempt to steal you away as a slave
(there was a midwife who was summoned to help with an elven childbirth, after she was done the husband tried to get her to eat or drink of their food, but the elf-wife had warned her that if she did she would become his property)
They were not cutesy Santa's helpers or Legolases (Legolai?) or whatever flavor anime blonde girl you're thinking of. They were horrors you hoped to never encounter, the dark things in the forest looking for their next plaything.
Ah, I was referring to physicality not the personality. They hold the Trickster archetype prior to Sinter Klaus and Tolkien for sure. At least in Asian cultures a fox (trickster) sometimes has wisdom.
Have you read Susanna Clarke? Her faeries are like djinn if djinn had hopes and plans of their own. Amoral, egotistical, slightly insane, and sometimes petty beings of immense power, born of ancient pacts with the elements of nature.
> Elves were more imps than tall, eternal sages. See Santa’s elves.
Post-christian elves were diminutive. But Tolkien was using pre-christian myths as a foundation for the LOTR. The elves leaving Middle Earth is a metaphor for the old legends being replaced by sanitised children’s stories.
Chainmail drew heavily on LotR, in no small part because Chainmail was heavily influenced by 'Rules for Middle Earth,' and halflings were even explicitly called hobbits early on, there were explicitly balrogs, etc.
Gygax himself lists Tolkien and The Lords of the Rings in Appendix N in the 1e DMG.
After Saul Zaentz started threatening lawsuits about the similarities Gygax did a lot to distance D&D from LotR and Tolkien but in the mid 70s this was hardly the case.
D&D is obviously not just a recreation of Tolkien-esque fantasy, particularly since the players weren't even anything resembling heroes in the early editions and instead just adventurers trying to eek out a living, but the idea that D&D is anti-LotR is largely revisionism from Gygax and TSR trying to avoid a lawsuit from the person who owned the merchandising rights.
Not as much as you'd think. D&D's conception of elves, dwarves, and halflings was straight out of Tolkien, and...that was very nearly it as far as really unique elements (barring a few monster names and specific magic items, out of hundreds). Those three races are highly visible but kinda superficial. The Howard/Burroughs/Vance/Moorcock/etc. style of swords-and-sorcery/murderhoboism is a lot more deeply baked in.
Tolkien was a/the leading scholar and Old English and the associated languages and cultures, including the myths. His knowledge was far deeper and wider than Beowulf. Much of the material in his books were from those myths.
Also, WWI was perhaps the greatest influence on Tolkien's life. Tolkien was an officer at the front; almost all his friends died in that war and his entire battalion was killed or taken prisoner (while Tokien was away recovering from illness).
Hm, while D&D borrowed a lot of the trappings (and creatures) from Tolkien, I think Middle Earth is all about birthrights and kings and noble (elven or "old human") bloodlines. Tolkien is all about the legacy of your blood, ancient prophecies fulfilled that have to do with birthrights, vassals and fealty and whatnot... and I believe none of this plays an important part (or at all) in classic D&D.
If you like at the skills of each class then it's pretty obvious that wizards, rangers, halflings, elves, dwarves, and orcs are modeled after Gandalf, Aragorn, the hobbits, etc.
Gandalf calls Aragorn the world's best hunter, and Aragorn literally listens to the earth (in the pursuit of Merry and Pippin) like the Ranger class skill. If D&D isn't based on LOTR, weird that so many of the classes are 1:1.
Then look at the way Dragons in D&D affect their environment (e.g. the weather changes as you get near a dragon's den) and it's even more obvious that D&D is based off LOTR. Not to mention the assault on Minas Tirith beginning with a change in weather due to the power of Sauron (or the way Saruman changes the weather on Caradhras). Or look at the mechanics of being frightened, that's pretty much the core class trait of the Nazgul.
Reading LOTR after reading through the Player's Manual makes it extremely obvious where each of the class skills came from - the came from events in LOTR.
Yes, but that's it: the trappings of LotR. I don't think there's anybody that would deny the elf, dwarf, halfling, ranger, wizard [1] of D&D are based on LotR.
The thing is D&D stops at the trappings of LotR, and completely ignores Tolkien's world is a kind of feudalism, with vassals, oaths, birthrights, "noble blood", etc. Upstarts are frowned upon in Middle Earth, and in fact, much shedding of tears is caused by people overstepping their bounds or wishing to dethrone their rightful lords. The very concept of "rightful lord" is so very Tolkenian. Denethor in his pride forgets he is a mere steward and not the rightful king of Gondor. Saruman in his pride forgets he is tasked with a "sacred" task and should seek no earthly glory. Wormtongue covets both Eowyn and the throne of Rohan.
D&D has none of this, as the article explains. You can "earn" your way to having a fortress, lands, etc, without the pesky concept of vassalage. D&D is all about the upstarts seeking fame, coin and glory.
[1] except D&D's magic is Vancian in nature, unlike LotR's. You cannot "learn spells" in LotR, and in fact, Elves don't even consider what they do magic and are suprised of it being called as such.
I assume you haven't read anything written by Vance, because magicians in there are so much more like wizards, especially in the '70s, and arguably still today, than anything Gandalf ever did. Such as their continual quest to amass more spells and their memorizing of The Excellent Prismatic Spray.
If you read the books D&D lists as influences, it's pretty obvious where most of this stuff comes from.
Agreed. And not only the spells: magicians in Dying Earth (Vance) behave pretty much like the psychopathic murder-hobo trope of the D&D player stereotype.
Vance's magicians are childish, petty, reckless, vindictive and power hungry.
Hah yeah. I like to say that D&D has the soul of Vance with a coating of Tolkein. It's not 100% true as there's lots of influences, but as a DM reading that series made me think "this explains so much".
D&D world draw heavily from Middle Earth but also from other authors like Vance, Moorcock, Leiber, … The list is officially documented as “Appendix N” in AD&D 1st ed manual[0]
Kind of like Warcraft, I personally started playing around the Warcraft 2 release and it was always kind of the same world of everything medieval fantasy mixed in, never realistic.
> The most immediate influences upon AD&D were probably de Camp & Pratt, R. E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, H. P. Lovecraft, and A. Merritt; but all of the above authors, as well as many not listed, certainly helped to shape the form of the game.
IIRC D&D was so directly based on Tolkien that they used the terms "halfling", "goblin", and "magic user" to avoid a fight with the Tolkien Estate over the terms "hobbit", "orc", and "wizard". This article thus makes little sense to me: how many half-elf magic users do you see popping up in medieval history?
I have long considered the relationship of OD&D to historical medievalism as equivalent to the vaporwave genre vs. music actually produced in the 80's.
I'd say that (1) there's a lot more to the medieval period than just the high middle ages in England and France and (2) a world with orcs, owlbears, etc is going to tend to be more thinly populated than similar historical analogues, meaning finding unclaimed land becomes more plausible.
I mean, this is like saying "because DND has magic, and the real medieval age didn't have magic, that means DND is anti-medieval". It can be accurately described as "medieval" without replicating every element of actual medieval society. And there are enough medieval like elements in there that it strikes as a sufficiently resonant descriptor for me.
I did read it :) I disagree that not being feudal is enough to disqualify something as medieval. Loads of DND components are medieval, the timeframe, the architecture, the technology (excluding magic), the vague element of religion like cleric/etc. It's like a very blurry view of medieval times, with certain elements dropped out. But not enough elements removed to say that it's not based on medieval times; let alone anti-medieval!
Gygax's own campaign was decidedly medieval and the rules were written before his milieu was published, so he left it as an exercise of the imagination for rule-book consumers to produce their own milieus until such a time as his could be published. The rules include descriptions of the possible selection of governmental structures. Technologically represented in the rules (aka weapon types) were decidedly medieval, as the author concedes.
That it was left to the DM to implement bureaucracy does not mean that it was anti-medieval.
There is a certain propagandistic line about capitalism that implies that it is the natural state of affairs and everything leading up to it was a proto-captialist society (see the myth of a barter society, which never existed). I wonder how much revisionist media like this that makes people associate medieval aesthetics with an economy that works like the American frontier aids that propaganda. Not that I think D&D is a purposeful piece of propaganda. Just that it unknowingly reinforces the brainwashing of the public into believing capitalism is an immortal and immovable default state of human being.
‘Capitalism’ is a term that was coined by its enemies, if it had its own way it would have no name but be the thing that “there is no alternative” to.
Christopher Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism is about the 1970s (early middle Technetronic?) but also about the late 19th and the old pagan empires such as Rome and is popular in Japan as a critique of the Tokugawa era culture.
I imagine urban people in cosmopolitan centers (like that university town Corinth that my namesake wrote a letter to) of an artisan or merchant or intellectual class would have very much liked a game like Dungeons and Dragons and would have come up with similar weapons tables, monster books, spell lists, theology, etc.
Merchants of course would have loved it since they were the few people living in a reality that would actually become capitalism.
I disagree with your initial statement since there were obviously alternatives throughout history and countries that never fully bought into full trappings of capitalism. It is only our opinion that capitalism, heavily influenced by our education that lends us to believe that capitalism is the only way things can be.
Yeah I do think some level of market is natural. But I do think on the whole humans would rather live in a society that leans socialist with market forces than a rugged individualist nuclear family hyper-capitalist society. Like, being a frontier cowboy is only fun for a short amount of time. After your adventure you just wanna return to the shire and share vegetables and chill with your friends.
But do they want to play that game? Dungeon and Dragons, plus the computer RPGs that it inspired, represent an idealized version of the "building up of the self" that one does in, say, contemporary urban China, U.S., etc.
What would a game set in a world of positive socialism be like? Is it like Sim City or can we tell compelling stories about people who are part of the plan?
Fiction needs compelling villains. Time Bandits on Apple TV fails at this and instead is a madcap ramp through character and setting where good and evil seem equally bad. Contrast that to Foundation where Tellum Bond was quite terrifying and set expectations for the Mule to be much more terrifying in the next season.
I read an interesting take that the Free Market and Capitalism are natural enemies- in that, the ideal capitalist investment, one that makes tbe best returns, is in the creation of a monopoly, thus subverting the free market.
We can see that today that, given the USA has largely stopped externally enforcing anti-monopoly measures, that companies grow and grow in size in a very un-free-market way.
Fr. I find libertarians so laughable because I'm like... your ultimately free market would just lead to mega monopolies that would go from being warlords to emperors real quick. Which would immediately destroy the free market.
I wonder about the real quick part. Eventually surely, but before that would it not be cheaper to affect political system so that government takes these actions by themselves, with tax money from everyone and with good loaning of money to boot. Paying for all that gear and people is expensive, better have someone else to boot the bill and then when system crashes down capture it...
> education that lends us to believe that capitalism is the only way things can be.
It seems to be the only stable system that has allowed relatively stable and continuous growth to occur long-term.
> capitalism is the only way things can be.
Of course it depends on how you personally define "capitalism" (because it's really not clear at all) and obviously humanity has attempted to implement various different systems, they never really worked out.
Other more "natural" (i.e. not imposed by the use of violence) systems of course have existed (e.g. various hunter gather societies) but they seem to have a very low cap on productivity and therefore can't sustain any long-term economic growth and therefore were outcompeted by "capitalism".
> that it is the natural state of affairs and everything leading up to it was a proto-captialist society (see the myth of a barter society, which never existed).
Wasn't that one of Marx's ideas? Certainly the part about everything leading to capitalism (including the proto-capitalist part). We're stuck at this stage for longer than he might have expected but I don't see how that invalidates his core ideas...
> capitalism is an immortal and immovable default state of human being.
Depends on how you define "capitalism" but in many ways it (at least many aspects of/proto-capitalism as you said) just seems like the default equilibria state human societies converge to without someone using excessive force/violence to mould it into something else.
At the end of the day humans need/want food/stuff to survive. Them giving it away them altruistically wouldn't be the best from the evolutionary perspective (i.e. their descendants if they kept doing the same would soon be outcompeted by more selfish individuals). Mutually beneficial (on the individual level) exchange of goods services seems seems to lead to extremely high productivity and no other system/approach can really compete with it.
Yeah it is sort of a Marxist idea, that doesn't mean its correct nor does it mean that it's not co-opted and warped by capitalists to make their own points.
Some level of market seems sort of natural but I think I would say full blown capitalism was a temporary stepping stone that was necessary in order to bring us to modern industrial civilisation. And now there is really absolutely zero reason to have as high as possible productivity. Like most people are being forced to pretend to be super productive at totally bullshit jobs because we really do not need that much labour any more to get things done. As humans it would feel more natural and less miserable to not live under this system.
> And now there is really absolutely zero reason to have as high as possible productivity.
Why? Redistribution is a problem and of course there are negative externalities (environmental and other) associated with the high growth over the few hundred years. But it doesn't mean that productivity can't continue growing even if we find ways to handle those things.
> Like most people are being forced to pretend to be super productive at totally bullshit jobs because we really do not need that much labour any more to get things done
So they aren't super productive? Inefficiencies exist in every system. And people spending a lot of effort working without producing any real value is not particularly "capitalist" at all.
But I do think that "capitalism" (again, it's very hard to provide any meaningful arguments when it's not at all clear what you mean by that specifically) enables higher productivity but it doesn't necessarily force you to maximize your productivity (due to technological and institutional progress we should be able to have enough surplus, at least for a generation or so, unless people start having children again..)
This is to say nothing of the modern "baristacore" fantasy, which seems to be a projection of modern American urban life, with many of its social attitudes and creature comforts, into a fantastical set-dressing evoking a mixture of high-fantasy and medieval aesthetics. Like a fancier-looking version of the Columbia U bar scene.
For recent examples, Dragon Age, Warcraft, and D&D itself are pushing further and further in this direction lately.
For me, that book sits in a weird crux of interesting yet underwhelming. I think it suffers a lot from the implied quasi-D&D setting intersecting with modern assumptions. It has a lot of absentee worldbuilding that amounts to a blank space implying all the stuff you're already used to from the real world, instead of doing anything interesting with it being fantasy.
There's a huge retrojection problem going in a lot of fantasy right now.
I really wish authors would write books that authentically described an alien society, rather than wish casting "vague liberal fantasy with different clothes"(usually liberal, but libertarian authors do it too, same problem, different lumps under the clothes).
Now, I wonder: would that sell? I dunno.
But I might scream the next time I read or see an "other" society dumping duty for individualism as per European upper crust romanticism. Again.
Consider this: Why not write fantasies about non-anthropomorphized dogs or jellyfish?
Art, inclucing fantasy, always has been a mirror to reality (not 100%, of course). Otherwise, nobody would understand it, it wouldn't move them, and they wouldn't care.
Also, it would be very hard to write well. People write well about what they know. Hemingway famously advised that you need to know the entire iceberg to write convincingly about the tip.
Many stories throughout history have spoken to deeper metaphysical truths rather than reflecting contemporary society and its ills. There's a perfect modern example. While calling it a "story" is a stretch because of its creator's famed preference for leaving the bits scattered about and letting players put together the pieces, once reassembled, Elden Ring's background lore is an excellent counter-example.
It tells a story of deeply alien societies ruled by mysterious and grand powers. Unsettling, strange, and defined by extremes. But those extremes have roots in the deepest parts of the human psyche and immediately resonate when uncovered. Ideology, faith, rebellion, hierarchy, immortality, death. All of its characters, motifs, and locations are so clearly derived from classical myth and tragedy, even carrying many of the same metaphorical lessons. But taken at its face, it bears no resemblance to anything that has ever existed in human history. It is not immediately relatable and confuses most people until things start to click into place.
I'm convinced of two things by my experience digging through Elden Ring: 1) Most people are not creative enough to imagine something uncomfortably alien but which still has something timeless to say, and 2) as you said, it's astoundingly difficult to write such a thing well. For example, I regularly read Year's Best Sci-Fi compendiums, and many of those short stories miss the mark. They reach too far and are unable to connect. But each book has at least one story nails what good sci-fi should: Saying something resonant in the context of a human or alien society with technology and practices that are uncomfortably different, but where that difference elevates the central thesis.
> Many stories throughout history have spoken to deeper metaphysical truths rather than reflecting contemporary society and its ills.
We agree; we are just misunderstanding each other: Deeper metaphysical truths fit in what I intended by "mirror". I wasn't restricting it to "contemporary society and its ills", though those also fit.
I meant that it's hard to write something that is not a reflection of our experiences, perceptions, emotions, etc. It's hard to write from a bat's actual perspective, for example, or from the perspetive of a fictional alien with no connection to human perception or experience.
Its my long standing observation that people with a varied and interesting life history make the best fiction authors, rather than those who loved books and went straight into writing fiction.
let's rewrite to "no living human encountering the text" and we find that, e.g., we can delve deeply into early 1800s texts, worldviews, and experiences and produce something shocking and strange to encounter.
there's a whole light genre of cracked-esque material "10 things you had no idea about from back when" that exists, just dial that up to 11. Get _deep_, and you will put the player / reader into someplace most will never have dreamed of. ( https://writerthereseoneill.com/ makes a specialty of doing pop history in that genre - I recommend her books)
imo when you dig hard enough into a very different human society, you start getting into the heavy questions of "what makes us human", and that is _interesting_.
Despite never directly playing AD&D or any other TTRPG, I consistently get sucked into the fandom aspects of it, including a period of binging the Mann Shorts productions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UW8kYzDNw1I
D20 rules applied, usually, to "slice of life" situations and mixing in four strong personalities, with zero production values, just talking heads around a table, rolling dice.
When did that change? Because I have played since ADnD 2nd Edition and I do not think it has ever been highly customizable. Customizable? Yes, but not highly so.
I feel like as the game evolved to fit more of a trope-y Tolkienesque quasi-medieval setting it definitely got more and more out of place. 1e, especially earlier on, and before was much more of a genre mishmash. Fantasy in the truest sense.
We never combined them either but I did find it cool that the 1e DMG gave explicit advice on how to do so. Heck, there was even that one module where the characters can find laser weapons. [1]
Having read that, I really wish to back to being GM and trolling players by awarding them non-fungible plots of land as rewards. Then players get challenged since they failed to occupy the land, so at a later visit, they discover their plot occupied by squatters.
Or coming back from year or two on adventure and wondering where is everyone and why there is tribes of whatever creatures around. Just to find that your peasants are really really angry for abandoning them and not doing your duty to protect them and moved to neighbour who is actually around to do their job.
There are long term/generational campaigns that run like this. It's just that the majority of the playerbase is playing a different game, whether they're murderhoboing or badly copying Critical Role.
It can be a lot of fun if the players actually do occupy the land and start influencing the game world at a higher level than just adventuring all of the time
It also gives them something to invest their hard earned treasure into that isn't just trying to buy more and more powerful magic items to minmax their builds
It's actually very practical and useful. A common problem is absent players (their characters are busy trying to run their domain). Another common problem is too much money among the adventurers: easily fixed with costs of construction, required finery, and a constantly deficit-running domain. Sometimes it helps if one of the player has some form of authority over the others - set the adventure in or near their domain.
I think I'm missing something here - what is "OD&D" in this context? Is this just some back formation for the original D&D once AD&D existed?
Looking at the "Basic" D&D rules (red books), they don't cover characters up to the levels where they would be landowners etc. They only cover up to 3rd level.
The "Expert" D&D rulebook (blue books) covers characters up to 14th level, and includes sections on strongholds and land ownership. Once characters are 9th level, they can gain land but the narrative is definitely rooted in feudal concepts (fighters get land from a higher lord, and their realm is a barony etc)
What to call the many editions of D&D to differentiate them is a bit nebulous. Here is an article with an infographic at the end that explains what the community started calling the various editions.
OD&D usually refers to the 3BB (three brown books;Men & Magic, Monsters & Treasure, and The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures.), there is a fourth called Sup1:Greyhawk that has additional content. Thats what is usually referred to as OD&D.
However everything is a little fuzzy in that sphere, sometimes anything before 1e is called Classic D&D.
Basic/Expert (and the BECMI -> Rule Cyclopedia) line were parallel to AD&D. TSR claimed these were the rules meant for "Home" play and AD&D was meant for "Tournament" play. More plausibly, this was an attempt to escape from having to pay Arneson any royalties for continued editions of D&D.
I have seen the ruleset for Pathfinder where you can purchase land and titles, etc. and it is pitifully boring. I would be surprised if someone seriously into crunching the numbers behind real estate would be interested in a game based centrally on die rolling. I have also seen rulesets that tried to be more medieval and they were near unplayable. Someone who was serious about playing that sort of game is generally not the same kind of person who would play the more popular forms of TRPGs. I think there's not much about medieval life that is exciting enough to be able to make a sustainable ruleset for TRPGs.
There's very little in modern society that is pro-medieval. Even the Ren fairs that so many people are into have almost nothing to do with recreating actual medieval life.
Being pro-something does not always mean being anti-something else. Sometimes it means that a certain group just isn't interested.
And in the context of modern TRPGs, medieval is a marketing term, not an actual descriptive term.
There are plenty of campaigns out there that are politically oriented and traveling hobos aren't likely to get positive attention from the local lord or lady.
Turns out that having a stake in local society is one of the best ways to get that positive attention, just following logically.
Rules like these are for people playing the setting appropriately. But these days I think it's appropriate to assume that large numbers of roleplayers are doing so to play out chiefly their own fantasies and all of the modern sensibilities that comes with.
In my country, Sweden, one of the most popular RPGs used to be Eon and that game i s much more medieval than DnD and it is very playable. I would argue more so than DnD, that that is subjective. And it was a very popular game so your guesses are wrong. There are also a whole bunch of the games which are semi successful which are more or less about medieval life, e.g. Pendragon. And then we have Warhammer Fantasy which is renaissance.
DnD is mostly just big in the US due to historical reasons.
OK so where is my high fantasy 4X feudal city state tabletop sim? Maybe HRE Tabletop lol. I'd play that if I could find a group of people insane enough to do it with me
As someone who could find such a thing interesting, I googled a bit and there seems to be some RPGs with more of that focus, although I think people mostly play video games for that:
And if you want people slightly less insane (lol), maybe a mixed game with management elements would be easier to swallow? The ASOIAF RPG, Pendragon and the Border Princes region for Warhammer Fantasy all have some type of feudal lordship elements in addition to the usual RPG fare for example.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 321 ms ] threadThe original D&D books (before the Advanced series) did not describe a combat system. Instead, the rules of the wargame "Chainmail" were recommended (as was the map from Avalon Hill's Outdoor Survival for adventuring between dungeons).
Which is to say, the context of Gygax's remarks was gone by the time D&D books showed up at the Waldenbooks in every local mall. D&D was literally a different game in the 1970's.
I remember being disappointed with AD&D as it was just the same old shit rules, with Dave Arneson's name cynically removed from the copyright. The next year I discovered Runequest, and later in College, Champions, and never looked back.
I think by the 80s D&D was well known, and not just because of the TV show. This was before 2nd edition, which came out in 1989.
I vaguely remember looking over 2nd edition, they tweaked a few things, but the core mechanics were the same.
3rd edition did shake things up a bit, and were the first version I considered worth playing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons_(1974)
People let grow a lot of misconceptions about history based on media/cinema/games representation of antiquity, medieval or even renaissance time. But that is normal. I guess reality can be boring in comparison.
Magic spells as ambient nanotech that's poorly understood and difficult to invoke -- hence the "Vancian" system which comes from Jack Vance's "Dying Earth" series.
Magic items as remnant tech.
Different "races" as the vast gulf of time has led to speciation.
Gods as posthuman or artificially intelligent entities that have transcended the world but still keep an eye on it from time to time.
And so forth. There's literally nothing medieval about it, but it could be 1,000,000 AD. Just think of their medical technologies in light of our era's!
(All assuming, of course, that it's "baseline reality" and not a sandbox, as it was in Neal Stephenson's The Fall.)
The titular outsider hero falls from the stars in a little space pod as a baby and is raised by the local Viking-proxy culture ala Superman or Goku. Quite an engaging read if you're into this blend of sword and sorcery with background sci-fi elements.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorgal
And you're welcome! I hope you and your son have fun! :)
The first two Pillars of Eternity games leaned hard into this trope, but it was never really "revealed" as a plot point -- it was just background that you uncovered as you progressed stepwise through the game. The Gods as literal hiveminds, chained to or unbound from their original core functions to varying degrees; a fallen hyper-technological society; stuff like that...
https://youtube.com/watch?v=k5ulTt5Km3Y
It takes place billions of years in the future in what it calls the "9th World", when some mysterious beings just went away.
It points out "the dungeon builders were part of a coinage economy just like the current one. There hasn’t even been significant inflation or deflation since the dungeons were built.", which doesn't seem compatible with a far-future post-post industrial setting interpretation.
I think "fantastic American history" is a rational description.
How does a currency system stay so stable across thousands of years?
Even in the US, "free silver at a ratio of 16 to 1" worked - at least somewhat - by government fiat, not commodity value. (Great, I've now got the urge to write "Gresham's Law" while I flash back to high school history class.)
https://archive.org/details/dndbook1/page/15/mode/2up?q=gold tell us that in D&D a copper, silver, or gold coin weighs 1 unit.
Further, 1 silver piece = 5 copper pieces, making the D&D economic system not just bimetallism but trimetallism.
"'The Tempest' as an allegory for European colonialism? It's just a play."
My comments in this thread concern textual evidence which cast doubt onto A_D_E_P_T's proposal that "The only rational way to interpret D&D is not as medieval, but as a distant far-future post-post-industrial setting."
I found the thesis that OD&D draws from US expansionism to be interesting. The fact that later games tried to implement more realistic simulations is besides the point.
In fact, the essay author observes that by doing so it takes away from the 'American fantasy of empowerment and upward mobility' which was perhaps 'the last un-muddled example of the genre it inspired'.
Transport is a big issue. The price of silver in 1550s Iceland, where there are no silver mines, was certainly going to be far higher than Joachimsthal where silver was mined and Joachimsthalers mined.
The Great Bullion Famine[1] and subsequent Price revolution[2] fueled by Spanish expropriation of New World gold and silver tell me that prices weren't so stable over the pre-20th century period.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bullion_Famine
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_revolution
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_4HBH6Z-Iw
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_Meriadoc
Expecting "realism" and coherency from a fantasy world destroys the fantasy. But somehow projecting realism onto fantasy is a popular activity for fans.
That certainly isn’t the case for The Lord of the Rings and the rest of Tolkien’s development of his world.
The Shire is, in basically every respect, including its economics, an idealized version of the English countryside.
https://nathangoldwag.wordpress.com/2024/05/31/the-moral-eco...
As long as everyone is on board you can kind of do whatever the hell you want, like playing with legos and toy cars and whatever else is on the ground as a kid. I’d venture to say it’s also why “rule of cool” is so popular. Sometimes you just want to do cool/funny/etc. stuff and D&D told a lot of people “hell yeah get after it.”
But of course if you expect consistency where there is none to being with you will likely be disappointed.
Perhaps that's partly why the attempt by a different author to build prequels failed so spectacularly, too, because it assumed too much the world was internally consistent and so was boring and didn't reveal anything truly new because it wasn't really trying, it was just playing out the obvious consequences for if you believed in some of the consistency of the previous books. I suppose that it didn't really understand the onion it was trying to emulate and that there should have been a lot more lies and a lot less consistency.
(ETA: It's also why sadly it felt like the last five books were all gearing up [often literally, new equipment every stage like levels in a videogame] for a war that will now never happen, because we don't know with who and for what reason or why because the lying protagonist wouldn't tell us, probably because Zelazny hadn't yet figured it out either and was waiting for the right moment to strike in the books that would have followed in some other timeline freer from cancer. I do still wonder where those books would have been leading. I don't know the author that could answer that definitively for us other than Zelazny.)
What don't you find internally consistent about Discworld?
Yes, it's full of gags and references to the modern world, but is that inconsistency? Or do you mean something else?
I find the strongest differences are between early and later Pratchett, but there are big streaks of consistency across novels, especially within a "sub-series", e.g. all the Watch novels, all the Witches novels, all the "industry" novels, etc. Even they are often consistent across subseries.
That's why I think Discworld is surprisingly consistent, all things considered.
I don't know about realism, but coherency is absolutely required for any fantasy world(imho).
https://www.filfre.net/2012/02/ultima-part-3/
[1]: https://acoup.blog/2024/07/12/fireside-friday-july-12-2024/
And many get similarly spun up about the term "feudalism" as well.
History is literally the stories we tell ourselves about the past. There are facts there, but the arrangement of such facts will (and should) always be open to revision. Anyone claiming to have figured out the One True history of humanity should be viewed with extreme suspicion.
I remember a historian answering a similar question once when an ancient list civilization nut accused historians of rejecting information that runs contrary to their narrative. History and archaeology, like the rest of science, builds upon the body of work. Every historian would love to make a discovery that overturns previous knowledge because its career defining. But almost all new work doesn't do that. What it does do is improve and refine our current understanding. It's rare that all new understandings developed.
Revisionist history does not have the connotation of improving and refining. If it did then it wouldn't need its own name because that's the normal state of things. Revisionist history is revising the record to a different understanding or narrative. And that is generally problematic because the burden of proof is very very high. Most of it doesn't live up to that standard.
Herodotus was accused of just making shit up and accepting legend as fact by his near-contemporaries. Now a lot of what he wrote is accepted as being closer to the truth than what almost anyone else wrote down then.
The strength of the argument and supporting evidence. Big claims need big evidence. Simple as. One problem specifically in history today is many historians can get by their whole career by being an X historian where X is some political ideology or social science construct. They can write endless papers analyzing existing work through that lense whether or not it makes sense to do so or really adds anything to the body of work. This is where a lot of revisionist history comes from. They aren't performing original research and finding new evidence and sources. They are merely critiquing the work of others through their chosen lense.
The worst form of revisionist history is of course just denying the facts as they are known and inventing your own. But thats is rare within serious academia these days with a few notable exceptions.
All history books should begin with "A map is not the territory" to remind historians what's going on.
Within "Early Medieval England," they will eschew the term "Dark Ages" and instead you will talk about specific eras such as "Sub-Roman Britain" (c. 410 - 597), "Anglo-Saxon England" (c. 449 - 1066), "Viking-era Britain" (c. 793 - 1066), or even "Anglo-Danish England" (c. 991-1016).
The ACOUP guy seems to be pretty even-handed, some of his best stuff is pushing back on silly/impractical/stereotypical elements of Game of Thrones (itself an over-the-top response to Lord of the Rings).
I think in historians we tend to see a lot of excitement for their special thing (like all academics), but the stuff they get excited about looks like details to us.
Almost any specialist can muster a well-supported argument to a layperson that "X is wrong."
Unfortunately, it's a substantial turn from "X is wrong..." to "...Y is true."
And a well-supported refuting of X shouldn't be transfered into credibility towards Y.
The acoup guy is a decent author, but sometimes he makes that pivot a bit too glibly and leverages the ignorance of his readers.
Part of that is just that particular specialty trying to make a case for itself in contrast to the more popular classical and modern periods. Then there is the complexity added by the fact that the classical era never really ended in toto; it just stopped being as evenly distributed.
As a case in point, there was a recent conversation I was having with someone kvetching about modern-day feudalism, and when I asked them what they thought feudalism was, they were modelling it after Louis XIV's absolute monarchy. Louis XIV was the king who abolished the last vestiges of feudalism in France. (To their credit, after I explained the history of feudalism and absolute monarchy, and why absolute monarchy is almost the complete opposite of feudalism, they did understand the mistake they were making.)
As Bret Devereaux points out, I think a large part of the problem is the sheer compression of history. We take about 1000 years of history and compress it into just a few events: the Fall of the (Western) Roman Empire, Charlemagne crowned Holy Roman Emperor, the Viking Age, the First Crusade, (maybe) the Black Death, the Protestant Reformation, and two of those are bookends for the period.
I think that the the game culture have changed into something where the DM (dungeon master) is just a enforcer of rules/npc builder. Most of the arguments in the text should be discretionary to the DM. If a DM chooses to enforce a "medieval" setting, the campaign will be medieval. "Knights mentioned", "any time select a land", well, I guess the DM can mention knights and not treat land as something that can be bought as long as you have money. It was very different playing a campaign in Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance or Greyhawk, or having a custom world built by a DM.
(Alcohol may have helped. And hindered.)
The steady increase of the performative acting style of play has been a key part of why I never picked the game back up. Reading that "do[ing] NPC voices" is a key part of the DMs job description doesn't help that stance of mine :)
However I get the impression that this is the standard play style today.
But at an everyday table, it's generally not expected. Some players will prefer that type of DM (just as some players prefer combat heavy or dungeon delve heavy campaigns), but I've never had anyone say to me "Why aren't you doing voices? DMs are supposed to do voices!"
To be clear, I do mean more than just NPC voices and am talking about the style of play where everyone is acting a bit. And yes, not unlike those recorded shows, albeit usually less good. And not saying there's anything wrong with it, it's just not for me.
Between what I'd seen online & from friends who play these days I've had the impression that this is much more dominant over what I encountered in the 80s - where that was the less common style. Instead I saw more "my character/I do XYZ", more of a focus on the mechanics of everything vs the RP.
Perhaps I'll poke around a bit then. I'm really only interested in 1e or perhaps 2e but I know there's the whole OSR thing going on so that's easier to find these days.
Hmm. I disagree. Greyhawk and Blackmoor were published fairly early in D&D's history, but the majority of games falling into premade settings didn't really take off until Dragonlance and then the Forgotten Realms in the mid to late 80s.
It's true that DM responsibilities have changed over time - in a way that I am not particularly a fan of - but I think it's the farthest thing from the truth to suggest that DMs weren't supposed to do worldbuilding in the days of OD&D and AD&D 1E/BECMI. If anything, they had to do more - the DM's job was to create a believable living world for the players to exist in. There were very few published "campaigns" back in those days - Dragonlance is really what changed all of this - so most modules were locales you could more or less plop down wherever. Keep on the Borderlands just needed to be in a borderland, the Caverns of Thracia could be anywhere, etc.
Players being fully in control of what their goals were and where the narrative was to head meant that the GM had to build a convincing and interesting world for the players to adventure around. It was quite rare for there to be something akin to a "big bad evil guy" in the early days of D&D, or even for there to be some overarching plot to drive the whole campaign.
> In modern D&D, by contrast, the DM is often expected to do worldbuilding, write adventures, and do NPC voices.
I'm fairly certain the overwhelming majority of D&D played these days happens with the published modules. There's a lot more people playing so I'm sure the absolute number of people writing their own adventures is higher than ever, but I would be willing to wager that the ratio of people running almost exclusively published modules and campaigns vs. their self-written adventures has shifted in the opposite direction.
This next part is also purely anecdotal, but something I've observed in several groups so I think it's interesting to note- playing in groups of mostly pre-3E players, I hardly ever see arguments with the DM break out over rules/rulings, both then and now. But playing 3E/5E, or playing other games with people who primarily play 3E/5E, there are many occasions where the flow of the game is interrupted for quite long arguments between player and DM because a player is not satisfied with some resolution or not being allowed to do/play as something in particular and thinks the DM should do it a different way. It feels like there's a much bigger cultural expectation that the DM is there to entertain and enable the players fantasy and not to be an impartial judge for a world the players are exploring. But like all things I'm sure people can chime in with completely different experiences for all the editions
In warring states Japan, common foot soldiers would be armed with pikes (wood shafts with a sharp metal point) but nobles might ride a horse wearing mail armor and armed with an huge and asymmetrical simple bow and be further protected by their position in the military structure.
This is more like Monster Hunter as you do not scale your ‘hit points’ by an order of magnitude but you do get gear and actual skills.
I remember there were "realistic" alternatives to D&D in the 90s, with thousands of detailed tables and the concept of hit zones, where any enemy could potentially even kill you with enough luck (say lucky hit to the back of your armored head from peasant with a spiked club), and you could always get maimed or crippled in some ways (because you wouldn't only lose HP when you get hit, you can break your foot or arm etc).
Clearly, you had to have a much more cautious style of playing and you didn't have as much fun as in D&D, where the master would tailor a series of increasingly challenging but killable encounters until you got to destroy an epic, ridiculously powered villain at the end of the campaign.
This is largely an invention of modern D&D, though. This was 100% not the case in OD&D, or stock AD&D 1E. Splatbooks in 1E added significant power level to characters, particularly after the success of the Dragonlance modules, including some truly ridiculous stuff like the power progression in the H1-H4 books. But before that point you were playing adventurers, not heroes.
Even in 2E you could still play more like adventurers, though it was clear the preference for heroic gameplay was the new norm. It wasn't until 3E that the adventuring playstyle was really made impossible.
> where the master would tailor a series of increasingly challenging but killable encounters until you got to destroy an epic, ridiculously powered villain at the end of the campaign.
The original decade or so of D&D really didn't even have the idea of campaigns ending or building up to an epic showdown with the big bad evil guy. Gygax wrote extensively of campaigns as settings, and the sort of campaigns he (and Arneson) ran wouldn't even allow for this sort of showdown, because they were more like gaming clubs. They had dozens of people playing in the campaign regularly at any given time, often across multiple characters, split into multiple groups, etc. They were big persistent worlds. There would be no way to make a specific showdown or progression like this enjoyable for that sort of group - you could never get all 30-50 people together at once, and even if you could, there's no way to make that manageable for actual play, and you wouldn't want all of the players not involved in the final showdown to feel like their years of play had ultimately missed out on the climax.
the monster manual seemed to be a mash up of monster from all over the place, including Greek myths.
Some of the weaponry was midevil but it didn’t seem like it was at all realistic. Like many fantasy books. Not like some of the war games of the time that where more historical (axis and allies and diplomacy)
Honestly if it was midevil, would it be fun? Who wants to play a game where you’re just farming. That would be such a grind and never be popular.
The biggest thing is that in D&D most of population lives in towns & cities, and there are very few if any villages. I'm not sure Americans even understand the difference between a village and countryside.
When D&D has people living in the countryside it's often American-style single-family farms in the middle of nowhere. That wasn't a thing.
For actual medieval theme every small town should be surrounded by dozens of small villages with lots of people living in close proximity farming lots of small fields, and where one village ends - another starts.
Most places shouldn't have enough people to sustain full-time inns and shops. Weekly or monthly markets were done instead so that the same traders could be reused between many places.
The way D&D worlds are usually structured could only work if everybody has a magic car and food is abundant.
In my experience most D&D settlements have to fit onto a two-page spread in a letter/legal sized book. So they've got space for an inn, a store, and maybe one or two places with things to advance the plot.
A realistic town might need 300 houses for each inn, but there just ain't the space on the page.
A 2 week ride on horseback would be a reasonable trip in that milieu but has to be compressed somehow; at best the group could meet and game out some encounters during that time period but that takes dedication, and if that was the way you rolled you’d also put them in a conference room for a long weekend to play the dungeon.
> A realistic town might need 300 houses for each inn
300 houses in one place is already a big city in dark ages. Let's say 2 stories with 2 families on each level, with 5 people in each family - that's 20*300 = 6000 people.
6000 people would probably be top 10 city in a kingdom in 1300. Rome was 25 000 people back then.
And inns were mostly for travellers, so the number of houses weren't that important - it mattered if you are integer number of days of travel from the last trade center.
Of course, that present day number is 30 million houses for 67 million population, i.e. 2.2 people per house - not the 20 people per house from your assumptions.
To be fair, that's kind of the case. Sure, not everyone is an adventurer, but level 1 adventurers probably aren't particularly rare in the world. A level 1 spellcaster may be able to do two of the following things a day using their two spell slots (depending on what kind of spellcaster they are):
- feed up to 10 people for a day (and heal them, to boot) with goodberry
- create 10 gallons of potable water with create or destroy water
- double walking speed for 10 minutes without exhaustion (expeditious retreat)
- move a third again as fast as normal for an hour without exhaustion (long strider)
- load up and move 500 pounds at those speeds without having to carry anything themselves for an hour (Tenser's floating disk)
That's just food and transportation. A level 1 cleric totally trounces period-accurate medical care and compares pretty favorably to a whole modern hospital filled with specialists and equipment (and with a few more levels under their belt they do much better than modern medicine as they can bring the recently deceased back to life).
But that's starting to miss the forest for the trees. I definitely respect people, like the author of the article, that focus this deeply on hobbies -- I can barely do that for paying work. But it misses the point of D&D for me.
Fundamentally, my response to the article is that D&D's just a collection of systems meant to generate fun, not be an accurate model of a particular time and place in history.
I, for one, would expect social and political structures to deviate from history once you've added magic in the mix.
In my eyes, the article's argument is akin to people a thousand years from now role-playing in 2020s America but adding in Star Trek-style replicators and wondering why the rules don't model Homeowners Associations (HOAs). Sure, lots of current Americans are subject to them but what percentage of players would find that enjoyable? And are you sure they'd still exist in such a world?
How often do you meet other adventuring groups when you play D&D?
Post-scarcity magic utopia is one solution, but it's certainly not the setting of most D&D campaigns.
> Fundamentally, my response to the article is that D&D's just a collection of systems meant to generate fun, not be an accurate model of a particular time and place in history.
Sure, but more realistic medieval fantasy can be just as fun and more interesting (cause your players' unconscious assumptions about how any world has to work are broken).
The only thing I’d be fairly vocal about is that until some lore has reason to enter the narrative, it isn’t canon. E.g. the space faring races that appear in both dnd and pathfinder
Look by all means, if you want to bring your own deity or $WHATEVER to a table I don't think most reasonable DMs and players would even bat an eye but you'll absolutely be expected to put some degree of effort into this beyond just showing up unprepared and cooking shit up on the fly.
[0]: https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Ragathiel
The DM saying “yeah I know you know Bane is a bad guy but I made your roll for it and you failed so you need to pretend you don’t know that” is never very good even if the players try to obey the spirit of things.
In a way, the more modern video game mechanics based on traditional starter-map games must also choose between a chaotic open-world, or a structured linear mission story (often degrading into a rail-game like snakes/chutes-and-ladders.)
Certainly, many of the iconic characters were a mix of several genres:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Dealer_(painting)
It was initially about people having fun, and a shared experience with friends on a rainy day. The golden age before the rise of the Internet. =3
I don't see why it's "kind of dumb" if people enjoy playing that way. Tabletop RPGs have always had a wide spectrum of playstyles where some people follow the rules rigorously and some people ignore them entirely, and being consistent with lore is just another dimension on that. Every successful group will settle into a pattern that's comfortable for them.
I would say it’s not ideal for different players to have different levels of knowledge about the world for non game reasons though. It’s better when most of it is freshly discovered.
Tolkein, I think, is pretty much Beowulf + WWII
The entire war of the ring lasts less than a year, and most battles are won after at most a few days of fighting by glorious charges on horseback with the leader in front of his men. Making them far more similar to the battles of Arthurian legend rather than anything contemporary to Tolkien.
I don't know how much you want to take the Tolkien's word for it (death of the author and all that) but there it is.
The capital city of Gondor, Osgiliath, was turned into ruins, front going straight through. And before that, the same thing happened to Minas Ithil. Those big towers next to Black Gate? Those were fortifications built by Gondor. But after Great Plague, which was probably a biological weapon of sorts, there weren't enough people to man them.
What we see in lotr, is essentially last days of war. When one side is barely clinging on, and can muster only localized offensives.
You have the several turns on the Battle of Osgiliath, and Boromir alluding to Gondor paying the cost for holding the frotiers with Mordor.
I don't know if it's mentioned anywhere what happened in the meantime, but Denethor says he's expecting an enemy strike against Osgiliath shortly before the second attack happens, so it can't have been an active frontline at the time.
But Tolkien experienced WW1 in first person. When people say his books were influenced by WW1, I think they mean the experience of soldiering.
Somebody already mentioned the marshes. The Nazgûl are also described as spreading a sort of deep, supernatural sort of dread; not normal fear, but something that shatters the will of hardened soldiers, just by looming over the siege of Gondor. That could be influenced by the experience of artillery bombardments, without explicitly referencing it.
It is also a story in which the good guys are agrarian, and the bad guys are industrial; this was possibly influenced by the experience of being on the receiving end of industrial warfare. I hear it is unpleasant.
The Lord of the Rings was actually begun, as a separate thing, about 1937, and had reached the inn at Bree, before the shadow of the second war. Personally I do not think that either war (and of course not the atomic bomb) had any influence upon either the plot or the manner of its unfolding. Perhaps in landscape. The Dead Marshes and the approaches to the Morannon owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme. They owe more to William Morris and his Huns and Romans, as in The House of the Wolfings or The Roots of the Mountains.
Letters, no. 226
But the major plot element of having a weapon too powerful for humans (and humanoids) to wield (and which must be destroyed) is clearly influenced by his reaction to the atomic bomb. The ring gets a pretty big promotion from an Gyges-style invisibility ring in the original edition of the Hobbit, to a civilization-destroying force in LOTR.
There's also arguably a Japanese influence on the Orcs, as an army of people who don't look quite like the English and are fighting hard for a way of life the English don't understand. Japan was England's ally in WWI but an enemy in WWII.
Sorry but no. The ring had been written into existence before 1937 (in the Hobbit) and it's darker nature in TLOTR was defined sometime in 1938, long before anyone knew about the bomb [0]. Much later, Tolkien specifically addressed the relationship with WW2 by saying IIRC that if the ring war had reflected the real war, the allies would have used the ring against Sauron and Saruman probably would have made his own in the chaos that followed.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructing_The_Lord_of_the_R...
If it was a nuke, presumably Elrond would have mentioned that, haha.
I think it has more of a wide ranging philosophical power or something like that. If it fell into the hands of evil, it would mean the arc of history was going their way, all the little dice rolls would bend imperceptibly their way, they’d wake up just a little more energized than the forces of good every day, etc etc. It is better that way, because it becomes a battle for the soul of Middle Earth.
The Ring was a force multiplier for Sauron (who had in effect transferred some of his power into it, for whatever reason). He could already wield extreme control over his underlings (and we see what happens when he gets distracted at the very end) and strike fear into the hearts of his enemies. All of these capabilities would have been enhanced if he got it back. He would also have been able to perceive the actions (and thoughts?) of the other ring bearers (i.e. the elves). And perhaps a load of other things that Gandalf and the other experts didn't know about (they didn't appear in middle earth until long after the ring was forged).
And we know he changed the Hobbit to give the ring more power in later editions, for example making it irresistible to Golem. This sort of changed was likely propagated throughout the LOTR drafts as he made the ring more powerful.
By 1944, Tolkien was already writing about Frodo trudging through the dead marshes on the way to Mordor, bearing the hideous burden of the Ring. The bomb was still a year away.
Of course he also readily admitted that his own experiences and views on life influenced his writing. He went off to fight in the trenches with his university friends and he was the only one to come back. This obviously leaves a mark. And if you read his writings aware of his views on Catholicism, then obviously quite a lot of that shines through as well.
But all of that is fairly subtle. The notion that this or that is an allegory for such and such is pretty much always wrong. Tolkien just wanted to write an entertaining story – nothing more, nothing less.
With a large work of fiction and a large set of real-world events, you can find allegories in everything. Doesn't mean the author intended this.
He said if he had written an allegory it would have a different ending, as in if he wanted to preserve a one-to-one mapping things would have changed. But there are story types that are not allegories and which also are influenced by things.
Sadly my English teachers in high school wouldn’t accept this as a response to their request for an essay on Tolkien. It was extremely frustrating, to say the least, given his repeated stance on the matter.
He did, however, love to speak of "applicability," which many people would call allegory today. The One Ring, for example, is clearly meant to to embody power and the temptation of it/addiction to it. This is pretty unambiguously true! What Tolkien didn't want was for people to view The One Ring as some specific embodiment of power, e.g. the atomic bomb, and instead for readers to draw parallels to their own lives, experiences, and knowledge. To him, this was "applicability," but in the modern discussion of literature this sort of thing would still often be called an allegory.
So it's like the atomic bomb, except there's only exactly one, and only the nazis can use it as a bomb, when the americans have it it just poisons the local groundwater a bit. But they have to keep it around and just let it do that because it's really important to guard it against the axis getting their hands on it.
Didn't he write mostly before the public knew about the bomb?
You can clearly see the pain at the end of return of the king where Frodo and Bilbo together just leave. They had both been through too much and are basically shell shocked.
It’s really hard to not view it as an allegory of the journey of two generations through ww1 and ww2 imho.
Tolkien was influenced by many things, such as the rings of the nibelungen and other proto germanic stories, his studies of the english language especially in its older forms, christianity for core values, and indeed his experiences in ww1.
> thats a little reductive.
I prefer to think of it as dimensionality reduction :)
Gygax was adamantly not a fan of LoTR. The creatures of DnD are clearly not based on Tolkien’s works, and the player races you believe Tolkien invented predate his work by centuries.
Elves were terrifying forest creatures akin to djinn. They were horrors that would give you amazing things at a terrible cost, and from the medieval period we hear only the stories of the rare survivors of their actions.
(like Tam Lin who was given temporary immortality at the cost of being the slave of the elf queen and being tithed to hell unless some other mortal saved him)
or would literally kill you and drag your soul to hell if they encountered you
(the Wild Hunt)
or tricksters who would ask you for a favor and in the process attempt to steal you away as a slave
(there was a midwife who was summoned to help with an elven childbirth, after she was done the husband tried to get her to eat or drink of their food, but the elf-wife had warned her that if she did she would become his property)
They were not cutesy Santa's helpers or Legolases (Legolai?) or whatever flavor anime blonde girl you're thinking of. They were horrors you hoped to never encounter, the dark things in the forest looking for their next plaything.
Have you read Susanna Clarke? Her faeries are like djinn if djinn had hopes and plans of their own. Amoral, egotistical, slightly insane, and sometimes petty beings of immense power, born of ancient pacts with the elements of nature.
Post-christian elves were diminutive. But Tolkien was using pre-christian myths as a foundation for the LOTR. The elves leaving Middle Earth is a metaphor for the old legends being replaced by sanitised children’s stories.
Gygax himself lists Tolkien and The Lords of the Rings in Appendix N in the 1e DMG.
After Saul Zaentz started threatening lawsuits about the similarities Gygax did a lot to distance D&D from LotR and Tolkien but in the mid 70s this was hardly the case.
D&D is obviously not just a recreation of Tolkien-esque fantasy, particularly since the players weren't even anything resembling heroes in the early editions and instead just adventurers trying to eek out a living, but the idea that D&D is anti-LotR is largely revisionism from Gygax and TSR trying to avoid a lawsuit from the person who owned the merchandising rights.
Tolkien was a/the leading scholar and Old English and the associated languages and cultures, including the myths. His knowledge was far deeper and wider than Beowulf. Much of the material in his books were from those myths.
Also, WWI was perhaps the greatest influence on Tolkien's life. Tolkien was an officer at the front; almost all his friends died in that war and his entire battalion was killed or taken prisoner (while Tokien was away recovering from illness).
Gandalf calls Aragorn the world's best hunter, and Aragorn literally listens to the earth (in the pursuit of Merry and Pippin) like the Ranger class skill. If D&D isn't based on LOTR, weird that so many of the classes are 1:1.
Then look at the way Dragons in D&D affect their environment (e.g. the weather changes as you get near a dragon's den) and it's even more obvious that D&D is based off LOTR. Not to mention the assault on Minas Tirith beginning with a change in weather due to the power of Sauron (or the way Saruman changes the weather on Caradhras). Or look at the mechanics of being frightened, that's pretty much the core class trait of the Nazgul.
Reading LOTR after reading through the Player's Manual makes it extremely obvious where each of the class skills came from - the came from events in LOTR.
The thing is D&D stops at the trappings of LotR, and completely ignores Tolkien's world is a kind of feudalism, with vassals, oaths, birthrights, "noble blood", etc. Upstarts are frowned upon in Middle Earth, and in fact, much shedding of tears is caused by people overstepping their bounds or wishing to dethrone their rightful lords. The very concept of "rightful lord" is so very Tolkenian. Denethor in his pride forgets he is a mere steward and not the rightful king of Gondor. Saruman in his pride forgets he is tasked with a "sacred" task and should seek no earthly glory. Wormtongue covets both Eowyn and the throne of Rohan.
D&D has none of this, as the article explains. You can "earn" your way to having a fortress, lands, etc, without the pesky concept of vassalage. D&D is all about the upstarts seeking fame, coin and glory.
[1] except D&D's magic is Vancian in nature, unlike LotR's. You cannot "learn spells" in LotR, and in fact, Elves don't even consider what they do magic and are suprised of it being called as such.
If you read the books D&D lists as influences, it's pretty obvious where most of this stuff comes from.
Vance's magicians are childish, petty, reckless, vindictive and power hungry.
Kind of like Warcraft, I personally started playing around the Warcraft 2 release and it was always kind of the same world of everything medieval fantasy mixed in, never realistic.
[0]https://goodman-games.com/blog/2018/03/26/what-is-appendix-n...
From the D&D original author:
> The most immediate influences upon AD&D were probably de Camp & Pratt, R. E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, H. P. Lovecraft, and A. Merritt; but all of the above authors, as well as many not listed, certainly helped to shape the form of the game.
Edit: citation
Gygax's own campaign was decidedly medieval and the rules were written before his milieu was published, so he left it as an exercise of the imagination for rule-book consumers to produce their own milieus until such a time as his could be published. The rules include descriptions of the possible selection of governmental structures. Technologically represented in the rules (aka weapon types) were decidedly medieval, as the author concedes.
That it was left to the DM to implement bureaucracy does not mean that it was anti-medieval.
Christopher Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism is about the 1970s (early middle Technetronic?) but also about the late 19th and the old pagan empires such as Rome and is popular in Japan as a critique of the Tokugawa era culture.
I imagine urban people in cosmopolitan centers (like that university town Corinth that my namesake wrote a letter to) of an artisan or merchant or intellectual class would have very much liked a game like Dungeons and Dragons and would have come up with similar weapons tables, monster books, spell lists, theology, etc.
I disagree with your initial statement since there were obviously alternatives throughout history and countries that never fully bought into full trappings of capitalism. It is only our opinion that capitalism, heavily influenced by our education that lends us to believe that capitalism is the only way things can be.
What would a game set in a world of positive socialism be like? Is it like Sim City or can we tell compelling stories about people who are part of the plan?
Fiction needs compelling villains. Time Bandits on Apple TV fails at this and instead is a madcap ramp through character and setting where good and evil seem equally bad. Contrast that to Foundation where Tellum Bond was quite terrifying and set expectations for the Mule to be much more terrifying in the next season.
Real life doesn't.
We can see that today that, given the USA has largely stopped externally enforcing anti-monopoly measures, that companies grow and grow in size in a very un-free-market way.
It seems to be the only stable system that has allowed relatively stable and continuous growth to occur long-term.
> capitalism is the only way things can be.
Of course it depends on how you personally define "capitalism" (because it's really not clear at all) and obviously humanity has attempted to implement various different systems, they never really worked out.
Other more "natural" (i.e. not imposed by the use of violence) systems of course have existed (e.g. various hunter gather societies) but they seem to have a very low cap on productivity and therefore can't sustain any long-term economic growth and therefore were outcompeted by "capitalism".
Wasn't that one of Marx's ideas? Certainly the part about everything leading to capitalism (including the proto-capitalist part). We're stuck at this stage for longer than he might have expected but I don't see how that invalidates his core ideas...
> capitalism is an immortal and immovable default state of human being.
Depends on how you define "capitalism" but in many ways it (at least many aspects of/proto-capitalism as you said) just seems like the default equilibria state human societies converge to without someone using excessive force/violence to mould it into something else.
At the end of the day humans need/want food/stuff to survive. Them giving it away them altruistically wouldn't be the best from the evolutionary perspective (i.e. their descendants if they kept doing the same would soon be outcompeted by more selfish individuals). Mutually beneficial (on the individual level) exchange of goods services seems seems to lead to extremely high productivity and no other system/approach can really compete with it.
Some level of market seems sort of natural but I think I would say full blown capitalism was a temporary stepping stone that was necessary in order to bring us to modern industrial civilisation. And now there is really absolutely zero reason to have as high as possible productivity. Like most people are being forced to pretend to be super productive at totally bullshit jobs because we really do not need that much labour any more to get things done. As humans it would feel more natural and less miserable to not live under this system.
Why? Redistribution is a problem and of course there are negative externalities (environmental and other) associated with the high growth over the few hundred years. But it doesn't mean that productivity can't continue growing even if we find ways to handle those things.
> Like most people are being forced to pretend to be super productive at totally bullshit jobs because we really do not need that much labour any more to get things done
So they aren't super productive? Inefficiencies exist in every system. And people spending a lot of effort working without producing any real value is not particularly "capitalist" at all.
But I do think that "capitalism" (again, it's very hard to provide any meaningful arguments when it's not at all clear what you mean by that specifically) enables higher productivity but it doesn't necessarily force you to maximize your productivity (due to technological and institutional progress we should be able to have enough surplus, at least for a generation or so, unless people start having children again..)
Anyway. What alternatives would you propose?
For recent examples, Dragon Age, Warcraft, and D&D itself are pushing further and further in this direction lately.
https://www.amazon.com/Legends-Lattes-Novel-Fantasy-Stakes-e...
I haven't read it myself, but apparently it is big on TikTok. Perhaps for some HN readers this is the sort of thing they are looking for ;-)
There's a huge retrojection problem going in a lot of fantasy right now.
I really wish authors would write books that authentically described an alien society, rather than wish casting "vague liberal fantasy with different clothes"(usually liberal, but libertarian authors do it too, same problem, different lumps under the clothes).
Now, I wonder: would that sell? I dunno.
But I might scream the next time I read or see an "other" society dumping duty for individualism as per European upper crust romanticism. Again.
Art, inclucing fantasy, always has been a mirror to reality (not 100%, of course). Otherwise, nobody would understand it, it wouldn't move them, and they wouldn't care.
Also, it would be very hard to write well. People write well about what they know. Hemingway famously advised that you need to know the entire iceberg to write convincingly about the tip.
It tells a story of deeply alien societies ruled by mysterious and grand powers. Unsettling, strange, and defined by extremes. But those extremes have roots in the deepest parts of the human psyche and immediately resonate when uncovered. Ideology, faith, rebellion, hierarchy, immortality, death. All of its characters, motifs, and locations are so clearly derived from classical myth and tragedy, even carrying many of the same metaphorical lessons. But taken at its face, it bears no resemblance to anything that has ever existed in human history. It is not immediately relatable and confuses most people until things start to click into place.
I'm convinced of two things by my experience digging through Elden Ring: 1) Most people are not creative enough to imagine something uncomfortably alien but which still has something timeless to say, and 2) as you said, it's astoundingly difficult to write such a thing well. For example, I regularly read Year's Best Sci-Fi compendiums, and many of those short stories miss the mark. They reach too far and are unable to connect. But each book has at least one story nails what good sci-fi should: Saying something resonant in the context of a human or alien society with technology and practices that are uncomfortably different, but where that difference elevates the central thesis.
We agree; we are just misunderstanding each other: Deeper metaphysical truths fit in what I intended by "mirror". I wasn't restricting it to "contemporary society and its ills", though those also fit.
I meant that it's hard to write something that is not a reflection of our experiences, perceptions, emotions, etc. It's hard to write from a bat's actual perspective, for example, or from the perspetive of a fictional alien with no connection to human perception or experience.
Its my long standing observation that people with a varied and interesting life history make the best fiction authors, rather than those who loved books and went straight into writing fiction.
which probably is the problem.
How does one "authentically" describe something no human has ever encountered?
there's a whole light genre of cracked-esque material "10 things you had no idea about from back when" that exists, just dial that up to 11. Get _deep_, and you will put the player / reader into someplace most will never have dreamed of. ( https://writerthereseoneill.com/ makes a specialty of doing pop history in that genre - I recommend her books)
imo when you dig hard enough into a very different human society, you start getting into the heavy questions of "what makes us human", and that is _interesting_.
D20 rules applied, usually, to "slice of life" situations and mixing in four strong personalities, with zero production values, just talking heads around a table, rolling dice.
Some of the sourcebooks were extremely accurate in describing the Middle Ages. Others didn’t even try.
I do like the articles core criticism: the goal of D&D is social advancement.
D&D always was a Western at heart. A group of desperadoes going town to town taking up jobs and fighting the baddies.
With Forgotten Realms it shifted from more of a pulp swords & sorcery to a medieval-ish Tolkien-esque environment.
Over time it shifted from low fantasy to high fantasy.
And not only did the theming start to solidify, but over time the tropes arguably became self-reinforcing.
They have guns and smoke powder in 5e and it just doesn't feel right.
Game of Thrones with cowboys carrying torc grenades?
We never combined them either but I did find it cool that the 1e DMG gave explicit advice on how to do so. Heck, there was even that one module where the characters can find laser weapons. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expedition_to_the_Barrier_Peak...
And the murderhobo style is as old as D&D itself.
It also gives them something to invest their hard earned treasure into that isn't just trying to buy more and more powerful magic items to minmax their builds
Looking at the "Basic" D&D rules (red books), they don't cover characters up to the levels where they would be landowners etc. They only cover up to 3rd level.
The "Expert" D&D rulebook (blue books) covers characters up to 14th level, and includes sections on strongholds and land ownership. Once characters are 9th level, they can gain land but the narrative is definitely rooted in feudal concepts (fighters get land from a higher lord, and their realm is a barony etc)
In theory they catered to different playstyles, in practice it was largely to escape paying Arneson royalties.
OD&D is the original 1974 release co-authored by Gygax and Arneson
https://daddyrolleda1.blogspot.com/2024/06/editions-of-dunge...
OD&D usually refers to the Original Edition that was first released in 1974. It consists of 3 little brown books.
Direct link to infographic
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi8QrcSdtdy...
However everything is a little fuzzy in that sphere, sometimes anything before 1e is called Classic D&D.
OD&D predates both and was the original release.
There's very little in modern society that is pro-medieval. Even the Ren fairs that so many people are into have almost nothing to do with recreating actual medieval life.
Being pro-something does not always mean being anti-something else. Sometimes it means that a certain group just isn't interested.
And in the context of modern TRPGs, medieval is a marketing term, not an actual descriptive term.
Turns out that having a stake in local society is one of the best ways to get that positive attention, just following logically.
Rules like these are for people playing the setting appropriately. But these days I think it's appropriate to assume that large numbers of roleplayers are doing so to play out chiefly their own fantasies and all of the modern sensibilities that comes with.
DnD is mostly just big in the US due to historical reasons.
https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/city-building-manage... https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/ll6z4d/games_that_have... https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/2zazc9/rpg_systems_whe...
And if you want people slightly less insane (lol), maybe a mixed game with management elements would be easier to swallow? The ASOIAF RPG, Pendragon and the Border Princes region for Warhammer Fantasy all have some type of feudal lordship elements in addition to the usual RPG fare for example.