The LOTR vs RPGs

Cafe Society
1

The creators of so many role playing games and video games and such have been originally inspired by The Lord of the Rings but seem to have missed the central theme of the books: Frodo is not out to acquire riches or power. He is trying to get rid of them. Instead, the goal of most games is acquisition. Gaining a Ring of Power would help you win the game, instead of losing it. The philosophical core of the books is discarded and warped but a scoring system is easier to write.

Just a thought. Discuss it amongst yourselves.

2

While a goal of RPG is to acquire riches and/or Power, it is not always the only goal.

In one of the current D&D campaigns I am in, we have had several artifacts of Power fall into our hands that we have been given the task of getting them safely somewhere to be destroyed or locked away for safekeeping, which gets us Good Karma for those time when we are just in it for the loot.

The appropriate gods also smile on us for these little quests, since most of them have been because their people are the ones wanting us to do this.

I think it falls more on the Game Master to make those kinds of themes part of the game.

3

Well the “G” in RPG does stand for game. The scoring system in D&D is made up of booty, magical items, and experience points. Experience points are earned by solving problems and killing things. And of course with more experience points the more powerful your character becomes.

As many who play RPGs have found out it can be very difficult maintaining the same philosophical core as the inspirational material. Tolkien only have to contend with his own mind when writing his stories. At any given RPG table you’ve got many players and a DM (the guy who controls the game). Each of those people may have a different idea of what direction they want the game to go and how their characters will behave. The poor DM has to make sure the adventure is enjoyable by all who play.

Marc

4

Several points:

Since when are RPGs trying to mimic LotR? They’re not. They’re borrowed from Tolkien, for world details, and such things, but a GM, or a module writer, or whatever are writing their own story - with their own themes which may, or may not coincide with Tolkiens.

And, of course, the stereotypical fantasy quest isn’t ‘gain money and power’, but ‘save the world (or at least a little part of it)’. The thing is, not every quest can accomplish this by destroying an item. In one of the current games I’m in, 4 of the characters (including mine) have powerful artifacts…that we’re holding onto until we can give them to the proper owner. (Also a member of the party, but giving them to one person at this point is a Very Bad Idea.) The other…we’re just trying to keep 2 factions from killing us until we can find out what the third wants of us. (If Faction 3 gets what they want, Bad Things happen.) The one I’m GMing at the moment IS ‘gain money and power’, but I’m just getting used to the mechanics, and this is a sort of throwaway campaign.

And not every fantasy story, or RPG is even that, of course. Personal growth is a major part of many stories and games, often the main theme.

And what’s wrong with the characters gaining power/items in order to fulfil their quest, anyway? Just because Tolkien, in LotR had Frodo’s quest be to destroy the One Ring, doesn’t mean EVERY writer in the genre has to do it. Hells, TOLKIEN didn’t do it that way every time. The Hobbit followed the above stereotypical quest: Bilbo was helping the Dwarves regain their kingdom, they collected powerful items, either deliberately (the Elven weapons like Orcrist or Sting), or accidentally (The One Ring) in that quest.

OK, I’m getting long winded. Needless to say I disagree with every part of the premise.

5

In every RPG I’ve played (not counting the computer ones, which miss most of the point), there has been no such thing as “winning the game”. You have goals, of course, and you may or may not achieve them to various degrees, but regardless of how they turn out, you can just keep playing. A Ring of Power will, in fact, help you achieve some goals (escaping from the goblin caves, surprising your buddies, surviving the Battle of the Five Armies), but it can make other goals more difficult (like destroying the stupid thing). On the other hand, there are other items in the book which are indisputably good to have (the mithril shirt, Sting, the Phial of Galadriel, the elven-cloaks), and there are characters (such as Aragorn) who are motivated by power.

6

Lord of the Rings is atypical in many ways. Who here would think that a good ending to a book/movie/game would be for the main character and the bad guy to never be in the same room together? Who here would enjoy a huge epic battle whose outcome pretty much doesn’t matter? Have a great wizard who casts almost no spells?

7

Arden Ranger wrote:

Shhhh! They’ll take away your Munchkin membership card if they hear you talking like that!

8

Apologies, but this conclusion can only be drawn from a simplistic interpretation of both the Lord of the Rings and role-playing games. You’ve also made the common mistake of attributing the fantasy genre to Tolkien, whereas in reality Tolkien was drawing from a wealth of material already written. Please see the works of Lord Dunsany and James Branch Cabell for some examples of excellent pre-Tolkien fantasy.

The game I’m currently running is exploring the theme of transformation; what makes a man into a monster, or a hero? I’ve adopted the French Resistance as a model, in a fantasy setting, and the party’s quest is to assist refugees, coordinate resistance efforts, and gather intelligence on Kedulla’s ongoing persecution of non-human races, in preparation for Torana joining the war.

If you’ve been stuck on dungeon crawls, getting treasure for bashing monsters, and are growing tired of it, then maybe you need to move on to a more sophisticated approach. I’ve been running the above campaign in 2nd edition D&D.

The fault lies not in our RPGs, in other words, but in ourselves.

9

Sorry, but Lord Dunsany and Cabell were long forgotten when the first RPGs came out. They came back into print after the LOTR took off, but not before. Tolkein, OTOH, was red hot, and large chunks of his world were appropriated for the “dungeon crawling” games, which were far too boring for me (yeah, there’s a disconnect between my objections to them as described above and my objections to them because they are boring). And, because I don’t know anybody IRL anymore who plays RPGs, my greatest exposure has been with the computerized games. EEEEEEK! Absolutely insufferable!

I’m glad to see that the newer games have become less “simplistic.” I’m especially glad that you are using that “French Resistance” model in your gaming. I had the idea twenty years ago to create a game based on getting a busful of Jewish children out of Occupied France, so it is good somebody is doing something like that.

10

Except that Tolkein was not the central inspiration of Dungeons and Dragons, it was merely convenient window-dressing. D&D grew out of table-top war simulations, hence the strong number crunching/score-keeping model of early RPGs. Tolkien provided easily recognizable archetypes, but the gameplay and mechanics owes more to Axis and Allies than Lord of the Ring.

11

Nor was it the only window dressing. Even in the early days, greek myth, Voodoo, Judeo-Christian iconography, history, Robert E Howard, Norse myth, and countless other sources provided monsters, character classes, settings, weapons, and all the other things used in the game. None of the window dressing ever really resembled their namesakes (Try modeling Aragorn as a D&D Ranger, or Alladin and his lamp using D&D Genies, or putting a D&D Druid at Stonehenge, or using a D&D Zombie in a story on Voodoo…), and are even further now, for the most part.

(As a sidenote, the game that Gygax and friends based OD&D on was called Chainmail - a Medieval Wargame. The name has been ressurected by WotC - as a Fantasy Wargame, a la Warhammer.)

12

An RPG character’s goal is what the player makes it. My current character is a wizard whose primary goal is accumulating knowledge. Not wealth, not power, not fame. He had a falling-out with his guild/academy, and he’s hell-bent on proving that he was being “held back”; that he can learn more about spellcasting outside of highly structured academy life. For him, money is a means to an end: He spends all of his money on adding new spells to his repertoire. Yes, it’s petty, but that’s the kind of person he is.

Each character I make has a different overall goal; wealth is important to some of them, but not many.

Besides, in Fellowship of the Ring, the fellowship isn’t trying to “get rid of wealth”. It’s trying to destroy an evil artifact. Frodo and the hobbits are in the fellowship because they aren’t strongly tempted to use the ring for personal (or national) gain like the humans, elves, and dwarves are. It isn’t a story about destroying wealth, it’s about resisting the lure of immeasurable power.

RPG’s borrow from Tolkien when it comes to setting, but certainly not the characters’ goals. What made you think it was supposed to?

13

This is categorically wrong (or I’m confused about the origin of RPGS).

Tolkien had a wave of popularity in the USA in the mid/late '60s when ACE books published it’s “pirate” editions*. Ballantine got the legal rights to the trilogy and used their popularity to springboard their “Adult Fantasy” line. For several years they published a bunch of new fantasy books (Katherine Kurtz’s Deryni stuff first appeared here) and reprinted a ton of classic fantasy books, including Dunsany and Cabell. It was the popularity of this series that led to a reawakening of interest in the fantasy genre.

IIRC, Gary Gygax started writing a series of articles for Chainmail (a magazine for people doing wargames with sandtables and minatures) in um…1971 (towards the end of the Adult Fantasy run) about rules for wizards and heroes.

I read an article where one of the first (and most widely publicized) games using of these rules involved a bunch of minatures escorting a caravan belonging to an Elf King the board/sandtable.

As Dunsany was one of the most popular authors in the Adult Fantasy line (something like 5 or 6 books reprinted), it’s pretty likely that he was familar to early wargamer/role players.

Fenris

*From what I understand, morality aside, it was perfectly legal for ACE to publish them, due to a pretty large loophole (since closed) in the copyright laws.

14

The influence on D&D certainly went beyond Tolkien in the first edition in 1973. Supposedly they based the magic system off of the writings of Jack Vance and the character alignment system based on Michael Moorock and Poul Anderson’s writings.

There were some legal problems with Tolkien’s estate based on D&D using a race called Hobbits which they changed to halflings. Of course TSR also got in trouble with Lovecraft people for using Chtulhu.

I think the influence Tolkien had on D&D is without much doubt. The Ranger class, the halfing race, their potrayal of elves, and the orc race were all pretty much ripped off of Tolkien.

Marc

15

Yeah, if only Planescape: Torment, Xenogears, and Final Fantasy 6 could have had actual plots, or characters as complex as Frodo. Frodo is one of the most boring characters in western literature. He has no desires, motivations, hobbies, lusts, or, in fact, any appreciable personality traits, beyond looking up to Bilbo in a very vague way, and being good at following directions. I’m not even sure he qualifies as a cipher.

Or were you thinking of games like Guantlet and Hack? Those are no more based on Tolkin than Galaxia was based on Doc Smith.

Had he been trying to “get rid of riches and power,” he probably would have ditched his upper-upper-class man-of-leisure lifestyle, first of all. Which the rest of the hobbits picked up after the whole thing was over. And didn’t the classical hero of the story, Aragorn, go from a drifter with a famous name and some powerful friends to the King?

And while Tolken may have been at the head of 70’s popular fantasy, he was hardly the whole of it. D&D’s biggest single influence seems to have been Jack Vance, actually. Even a bunch of the spell names carried over.

The thing is, even the most formulaic of cRPGs have motives beyond ‘get power and wealth.’ Even most fantasy themed shooters or hack-em-ups always seem to have a Dark Guy who needs to be taken out somehow to rescue something or save the world.

The reason PnP RPGs tend to have little overall plot is that that kind of thing takes either considerable effort on the game masters part, or very good improvisation. Most people enjoy the PROCESS of playing the games, they’re not doing it to make a point or explore themes, and aren’t willing to expend all that extra effort on something that will probably never be realized. (What percentage of long-campaign RPGs actually last long enough to reach anything resembling a conclusion? 15%? 8%?) And even that being said, most all of them have a motive at LEAST as complicated as “We have to stop the dark guy.” Power and wealth is usually, again, means to an end.

Though admittedly, D&D has always been too ‘stuff’ oriented. But it’s hardly the only game in town.

And what ‘scoring’ system are you referring to?

Summary: I disagree with you. The central theme of LotR was not “getting rid of power and money,” it was “Getting Rid of the Dark Guy.” RPGs and cRPGs aren’t necessarily based heavily on Tolkin. And even if I accepted your basis, the conclusion doesn’t follow. Having a similar setting does NOT imply that you should have the same “philosophical core.”

And in fact, I think that fantasy in general and RPGs in particular have been far too similar to Tolkin’s formulas and themes.

Interesting enough D&D itself has probably had as much an influence on modern fantasy as Tolkin, if not more. “A wizard who casts almost no spells” was basically the standard of the pre-Gygax fantasy era. Now it’s an exception. (Wish A Song of Fire and Ice had stuck with it’s guns and gone that way, actually . . .)

–
“Augh! I fell on my ten sided dice!”

16

Just to expand a bit on what was said earlier, the magic system in D&D was heavily based on Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth stories. The infamous “memorize spell then forget it as soon as it is cast” is a direct lift from Dying Earth.

The alignment system, especially the Law-Chaos axis, is directly from Michael Moorcock’s Elric series.

Yes, the original D&D was based on Chainmail, a set of medieval minatures rules. Specifically, it is based on the “fantasy supplement” to Chainmail. This was essentially an appendix to the rules to allow combat in fantasy worlds (elves, dwarves, orcs, that sort of thing). There are still recognizable miniatures conventions in D&D today. (Distances measured in inches, saving throws and the way armor classes work for example.)

(As a side note, TSR also produced a set of miniatures rules for WWII armor called Tractics.)

Supposedly the original D&D games begin from the Chainmail games being played by Gygax, Arneson and company up in Lake Geneva. The different players each controlled an army and it’s leaders and heros. They started acting out the interactions between their leaders and eventually they decided that this aspect of the game was more fun than the actual fantasy battles. They then drew up the prototype of the D&D rules to allow the leaders and heros to act outside of the grand fantasy battle context. The rest, as they say, is history. (This is from a panel at GenCon years ago; sorry I can’t provide a better cite.)

As for the original question, there were enough direct lifts from TLOTR that the Tolkein estate forced some changes. For example, the original rules contained “Hobbits” and “Ents”. This was changed early on to “Halflings” and “Trents”. Still, a good deal of influence remains. For example, Halflings are considered to be good thieves in D&D because Gandalf introduces Bilbo as a “robber” in The Hobbit.

TLOTR was hardly the only influence though. Vance I mentioned above and there are several other influences mentioned in the thread. One other one I don’t see mentioned is Fritz Leiber who’s Fafhard and the Grey Mouser series had to be an influence as well. They got things from everywhere though. The “Vorpal Blade”, for example, is from the poem Jabberwocky!

Oh yes, you mention the problems with Cthulhu. My understanding is that it was a bit more complex than that. The original Deities & Demigods included both Lovecraft’s creations and those of Moorcock. Apparently TSR got permission to use both of these from Chaosium (who has RPGs based on both of them) but Chaosium turned out to not have permission to give secondary rights to TSR.

17

I’ve heard about “treant” and “halfling” being changed because Tolkien’s estate objected to the use of “ent” and “hobbit”, but what about “orc”, “mithril”, and (I think) “balrog”? Those stayed in the game, even though they’re also recognizably Tolkien coinages.

18

“Orc” was apparently an old word for “Goblin” even before Tolkien came along which seems to be why that one got by.

I thought “Balrog” had been changed to “Balor”. If I had any idea where my D&D books were I could look that one up. If it’s still Balrog I don’t know.

Don’t know about Mithril either.

19

Just backing up what tanstaafl said: there aren’t any balrogs in D&D anymore, although there is a powerful demon lord named Balor, who may or may not fit the description of the Balrog, depending on where you come down on the “wings” issue. Balor got dropped from the 2nd edition when TSR caved to parent’s groups and cut all references to demons and devils, but is now back in the 3rd edition.

20

tanstaafl wrote:

According to The Fantasy Role-Playing Gamer’s Bible, D&D was almost nothing at all like Chainmail!. The Chainmail! system didn’t even have Armor Class in it.