Aka “Tolkein was hippie lovefest before Jackson ruined it, redux”.
To me, The Hobbit evokes images of the original, late 70’s d+d: minimalist cultures, set-piece “precious” encounters, adventure-ish mood, lots of unexplained wonders out there, perfectly matching the mood of airbrushed wilderness late 60s-70s fantasy posters.
LOTR, on the other hand, shares more with current (A)D+D than it does with The Hobbit: Epic mood, large complex cultures, legionary foes (rather than set-pieces), most things are explained.
The saving grace of LOTR and the Silmarillion is that most fantasy and sci-fi mileaus lose a lot of awe-inspiring potential when they explain everything. Middle Earth loses a little, but the explanations add something of their own.
Plus, there’s this one scene in The Hobbit where Bilbo kills a giant spider, and the way Tolkien describes his new-found confidence clearly indicates that he’s gained an experience level.
I don’t have 3.5, so it could be anywhere from 1st to 3.0.
I’m aware that the D20 system can represent many cultural milieus, but my observation still stands for the “default” world for 3.0 (i.e. Greyhawk or the Forgotten Realms.)
Does anyone else think that the OP has it somewhat backwards? Tolkien’s books came before any version of the role-playing game, after all, so it should be more a matter that D&D evokes The Hobbit and AD&D evokes The Lord of the Rings.
And I’ve never played the original D&D, so I can’t really comment, there.
The man most generally held responsible for Dungeons and Dragons (and, for that matter, the modern FRP game), one Gary Gygax, has long acknowledged his debt to various fantasy authors and milieus in his creation of the game and its settings… most notably J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, and Jack Vance.
If you actually sit down and read these authors’ fantasy stories, it actually becomes pretty obvious. This is, however, speaking of First Edition Dungeons and Dragons and its offspring, Advanced Dungeons And Dragons 1.0; the first D&D set was published in 1974.
After that, they bought out Gygax and gave him the boot, so other hands handled the upgrades and rewrites. This didn’t occur until the eighties, so it’s very much up in the air as to who or what might have influenced any changes.
Versions 3.0 and 3.5 didn’t happen until the nineties, and incorporated many who’d worked on Magic: The Gathering, among other fantasy projects. It’s all still based on the foundations those three authors set up, though – Tolkien, Howard, and Vance.
(…although it could be argued that Vance was influenced by guys like Walpole and Dunsany, but who reads THOSE guys these days?)
Indeed, Wang-ka, there was a small summary of Gygax’s influences in an appendix to the 1st Edition DMG. However, I always thought Tolkein got short shrift in that list, being mentioned but nowhere near as much as his actual influence was.
Chronos, yes, you could say that. I didn’t, however, because I was struggling to come up with grammar that implied that d+d and The Hobbit were more similar to each other than to LOTR. (Similarly to ad+d and LOTR.)
The Hobbit was originally written, at least in part, as a story for children, so there is more of an episodic feeling to it, rather than long, drawn-out forced marches or epic treks across the wilderness, so it stands to reason that it would carry over into a small-concept role-playing system.
Since those days, we have added an immense amount of scope to the worlds of gaming, with volumes of information about the history, races, and magic of the gaming worlds, so it again stands to reason that Jackson’s version of LOTR, with its mass-market appeal and huge cinematic vistas would seem more in keeping with the more modern versions of AD&D.
I happen to think the “newer” D&D games (and let’s face it - Greyhawk hasn’t changed a whit since Gygax created it, it just took a long time for people to get away from simple dungeon-delving) are very, very much like LOTR.
Everything from the races, politics, specific magical effects to the ancient history that flavored Middle Earth and the amazing geography are in Tolkien’s works.
It’s just that he was a shitty storyteller, so we tend to forget.
In original D&D, there were 7 character classes:[ul][li]fighting man,[/li][li]cleric,[/li][li]magic-user,[/li][li]thief,[/li][li]elf (!),[/li][li]dwarf (!), and[/li][li]halfling (!).[/ul]Melee rounds were 10 seconds long, and turns were 10 minutes long, but somehow 10 melee rounds made 1 turn. Two-handed swords were so slow and unwieldy that it took 2 melee rounds to make one attack with one, while daggers were so quick that you could make 2 attacks per melee round with one; yet all weapons did 1d6 damage. All 1st-3rd level characters used the same attack chart, and the rules didn’t go up to 4th level. Clerics couldn’t cast spells until they reached 2nd level. The monetary exchange rate was 5 cp to the sp, 5 sp to the ep, 2 ep to the gp, and 5 gp to the pp.[/li]
However, it did have one thing in common with Advanced D&D: You still only had a 1-in-3 chance of opening an unlocked door. :rolleyes:
Are we talking about the campaign settings, here, or the game itself? Because D&D, with its gazillion suppliments, is whatever people want it to be. Most DMs can’t really pull off Tolkien-style epics, and fewer players are capable of going along with it, so what you usually get is low-grade Howard/Lieber. But I’ve had Tolkien campains; I’ve had George R.R. Martin, or Stephen King, or Zelazney or even Pratchett.
Read the passage yourself, and see if you don’t agree.
BTW, when I saw this thread’s title, I thought people were commenting on the movies, not the books and the game system(s). I was expecting to see posts like:
“The scene in Hobbit where Bilbo fumbles around in the dark cave with Gollum in it reminded me of the scene in D&D where Ridley had to run through the maze full of traps in the Theive’s Guild to get the giant ruby. And Smaug’s voice? Clearly Jeremy Irons overacting again.”
[QUOTE=tracer]
In original D&D, there were 7 character classes:[ul][li]fighting man,[/li][li]cleric,[/li][li]magic-user,[/li][li]thief,[/li][li]elf (!),[/li][li]dwarf (!), and[/li][li]halfling (!).[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
The “thief” class didn’t appear until the Greyhawk supplement - it wasn’t in the original three booklets.
And it was “hobbits” not “halflings” - Tolkien’s estate didn’t kick up a trademark fuss until the game got some popularity. They became “halflings” in AD&D, the same as “ents” became “treents” and “wargs” disappeared.
> LOTR, on the other hand, shares more with current (A)D+D than it does with
> The Hobbit: Epic mood, large complex cultures, legionary foes (rather than set-
> pieces), most things are explained.
The Jackson movies are closer to Dungeons and Dragons than the book is. Dungeons and Dragons certainly took some of its ideas from the book, but only in a fairly superficial way. But then that’s typical of most mediocre fantasy written since Tolkien. They steal individual ideas from Tolkien without understanding how it fits into the book as a whole.
Rik, a person who sits down and takes years of his or her life to create a rich, colorful world with truly ancient histories, its own languages, geography and amazing places of interest and then puts an epic adventure of good vs. evil in it - especially when all these things are original - is pretty cool and deserves recognition for all the hard work.
Tolkien was this.
When reading these books, did your blood pound in your ears? Did you feel Frodo’s desperation? DId any of the characters besides Sam actually seem to have any thought processes at all, or did they just perform as the script demanded?
LOTR was intricate, but intensely boring and lacked any character at all. By thend, I wouldn’t have given a crap if Frodo had died because beyond saying, “I have to do this because it’s the right thing to do,” we are given no indication what he’s really like as a person. Same goes for every. single. character in the damn series.
Only in ROTK are we allowed into the thoughts of a single character, and Sam’s saying “Mr. Frodo” constantly to his best friend is bloody annoying as hell.
LOTR was good stuff, but practically no better than a listing of what happened, because it utterly lacked anything having to do with character, and it’s kinda hard to care about an epic journey when you know nothing about those taking it and their motivations.
As far as character development and how he actually feels, I’d rate Beowulf (sp?) way above LOTR.
