If you’ll go back and reread my posts, you’ll see that I didn’t say it was. I said that the trinity grew out of and maps “at least three” of the classic fantasy RPG classes. I even said in my first post in this thread that modern games tend to map thief functions onto other classes.
Now that you say it, the Buck Rogers game also had a Medic class I believe.
I think that the D&D characters were based on cultural archetypes to begin with, drawn from Tolkien, who probably drew them from historical and literary sources, so it’s not at all surprising that the same archetypes would be translated to other things.
I mean, having the standard “warrior/fighter/leader”, “magic user/scholar/wise man”, “thief/streetwise person/stealthy guy” and “bard/confidence man/trickster/smooth talker” is pretty much an ancient trope. Little John, Friar Tuck, Will Scarlet and Robin Hood more or less fill those same roles, to use an example.
I think the problem with seeing them as character classes is that you tend to get wound up in the rules- part of the reason they made the character classes so distinct is so that everyone had to play differently- you can’t play a cleric like a warrior, or a thief, and vice-versa. But the archetypes can have more overlap- you could easily have a gun-toting preacher for example. Or a warrior-scholar (really common in the real world) too.
Well, not just from Tolkien. The D&D Thief owes something to Bilbo Baggins, for instance, but it owes more to the Grey Mouser and to Cugel the Clever.
Sure, I just meant that D&D draws very heavily from Tolkien, and the races and character classes are drawn in large part straight out of the books. Of course there are other influences- Leiber, Howard, Moorcock, etc… all come to mind.
Either way, the point I was trying to make is that D&D character classes are kind of like… formalized and structured archetypes for playing, and the archetypes themselves already exist in literature, film and television, so the OP’s question is kind of moot.
In his writings, Gygax himself downplayed how much influence Tolkien had (though I suspect that part of that may have been the result of legal settlements that led to “hobbits” being renamed as “halflings” in the game).
I’d agree that the core races, at least, had clear Tolkien influences. The classes, less so, other than ranger (pretty clearly a nod to Aragorn) and, to an extent, thief (as Chronos has noted). Magic-users in the original D&D owe much more to Jack Vance’s Dying Earth stories, paladins are pretty clearly inspired by Poul Anderson’s “Three Hearts and Three Lions,” and if clerics had any particularly strong inspiration in fantasy fiction, it probably wasn’t from Tolkien.
I was thinking back and back in the 80s TSR actually had a Modern setting version of D&D. They would sometimes mention it in Dragon Magazine. It was basically James Bond type adventures. I think it was called Top Secret.
Top Secret was not a modern setting version of D&D. It was a completely different game system.
However, in the 2000s, Wizards of the Coast did publish D20 Modern, which was a modern setting version of D&D 3rd Edition. However, instead of using D&D-like classes, it used classes based on the six Ability Scores. The “core” classes were the Strong Hero (Strength), Fast Hero (Dexterity), Tough Hero (Constitution), Smart Hero (Intelligence), Dedicated Hero (Wisdom), and Charismatic Hero (Charisma).
In the OD&D “White Box”, “halflings” were “hobbits.” The wight monster entry explicitly referenced Tolkien’s barrow wights, and the wraith entry explicitly referenced Tolkien’s ring wraiths. As you state, though, other fantasy authors clearly had at least as much influence.
D&D’s magic system was explicitly based on the depiction of magic in Jack Vance’s “Dying Earth” stories. The thief class was largely based on Fritz Leiber’s Gray Mouser character. Trolls and giants were clearly based on their depictions in the “Compleat Enchanter” series of stories. And so on.
I’d have guessed Sir Galahad was the ur-Paladin, and that’s probably where all of them got the idea.
My guess is that the cleric as healer and lesser fighter springs from medieval monks as healers and the examples of Odo of Bayeux swinging a mace, so as not to spill blood, and Friar Tuck using a quarterstaff. Combine that with some religious-based powers such as turning the undead, and that’s pretty much it.
Either way, the character classes didn’t spring up from Gygax’s mind unbidden- they were a way to codify and standardize the archetypes made from Tolkien, Vance, Leiber and the other fantasy authors of the time.
In other words, the idea of the “warrior”, “cleric/healer”, “thief”, etc… weren’t conceived of because of the game’s character classes, but rather the character classes modeled existing archetypes.
Three Heart and Three Lions is also where D&D’s version of a Troll comes from.
As I understand it, the proximate inspiration for the cleric was actually Van Helsing.
Everyone always says that the ranger was based on Aragorn, but despite the fact that he’s called a “ranger”, the class is a pretty poor fit. If anything, he makes more sense as a paladin. But there’s no shortage of other characters who do fit the ranger class: Robin Hood, Natty Bumpo, etc.
And while Vance was the origin of the “memorize a spell, cast it once, and forget it” system, it’s not all that close a match to the D&D wizard, in that, except for a very small number of super-wizards (who were nigh-omnipotent and unbothered by such petty concerns as spell memorization), they were mostly much less powerful.