[mybrid]

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.

[tarsinge]

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.

[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

[jncfhnb]

I’m amused that people use the actual canon and not just asserting a god into existence

[Forgeties79]

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.

[BizarroLand]

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.

[rcfox]

There's actually a race in D&D, the Kuo-toa, that did exactly that.

[the_af]

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.

[vantassell]

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.

[SeanLuke]

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?

[ants_everywhere]

D&D was definitely, uh, borrowed quite heavily from Tolkein. Even using creatures that Tolkein invented.

Tolkein, I think, is pretty much Beowulf + WWII

[Zardoz89]

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.

[ekianjo]

thats a little reductive.

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.

[actionfromafar]

Pretty much, except World War 1.

[mmooss]

> Tolkein, I think, is pretty much Beowulf + WWII

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).

[PhasmaFelis]

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.

[Jeff_Brown]

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.

[lnxg33k1]

Also for me same experience, only difference is the setting, I was playing Dragonlance