Why D&D?

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Martin has played GURPS. Granted most of the details we know about his roleplaying were in the context of superheroes and the Wild Card series, however he was undoubtedly aware of GURPS Fantasy.
Martin said his Wild Cards series was directly inspired by a long running Supers campaign that he was involved with BRP - Chaosium's 'Super World'.

(He also played RuneQuest at some time, I'm not sure if that had any bearing on A Song of Fire & Ice or not. The combat plays pretty gritty, so he may have been attracted to that side of it)
 
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Sorry, what?! Are you trying to claim that the 'Children of the Forest’, or whatever, are like D&D Demihumans?! Have you not read the books? They are nothing like Elves, Dwarves and Halflings. Where are the Half-Orcs?!
Martin roleplaying in the 1980s with GURPS. If he was anything like me, he took D&D's tropes mashed up and recast them in a nearly unrecognizable form for his purposes when he developed the setting of Westeros. You are forgetting that in many cases playing D&D or similar fantasy games like GURPS Fantasy was just as much as becoming a king/magnate/lord as it i about fighting centaurs, orcs, bulettes, and the like. While I did not opt to tone down the D&Disms for the Majestic Wilderland it obvious that Martin did for Westeroes. Well as it was pointed out I am wrong on this point it was BRP and Superworld that Wild Card was based on. Some of my points still stands as GURPS and BRP both jettison class and level in favor of skills. Also focus more on the adventure to be found in the conflict between NPCs groups rather than just fighting monsters and toning down the D&Disms. Which was a common thing happening through the 1980s.

For example Midkemia in the Raymond Feist's book has the D&Dism toned way down. But not as much as Martin. I loved Game of Throne when I first read it because it was a way better version of the things I was doing with my own campaign.
 
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The one concept I think could have come close in an alt universe is a gladiatorial arena. But that's better served by solo gaming (hence "Arena of Khazan" did so well for Tunnels and Trolls).
Actually ITTL (In this Time Line) it actually happened. It picked up speed in mid to late 3.X D&D, reached its height in D&D 4e, and still present in D&D 5e. It mostly manifests as adventure formatted as a series of intricate combat encounters.
 
Martin said his Wild Cards series was directly inspired by a long running Supers campaign that he was involved with BRP - Chaosium's 'Super World'.

(He also said played RuneQuest at some time, I'm not sure if that had any bearing on A Song of Fire & Ice or not. The combat plays pretty gritty, so he may have been attracted to that side of it.)
I am wrong, for some reason I thought it was GURPS.
 
I am wrong, for some reason I thought it was GURPS.
From what I am aware, George R.R. Martin was introduced to rpgs through D&D or AD&D, but the campaigns that he ran at that time were often in BRP, using RuneQuest and SuperWorld. Having an interest in BRP, I suspect that he may have also had other titles like Stormbringer and Call of Cthulhu, especially given their literature connections, but don't quote me on that one.

He did like the gritty side of BRP however, and was impressed that SuperWorld felt so 'down and dirty' even though the characters had super powers, and he liked having a 'mature' edge to his campaign - very much like Alan Moore's Watchmen. So that's where Wild Cards originated.

Given the era that he was playing, it's quite likely that he could have also checked out other systems like T&T, The Fantasy Trip, Traveller, Rolemaster, and later GURPS as well; the shoe fits, so you may not be wrong.
 
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No, Wild Cards came out around the same time as GURPS or a little after .

I know Duncan's series, which I was funnily thinking about the other day in the way it pre-anticipated the Isekai genre in anime.
Isekai? Anyhow, after ten books of A Man of His Word (which has a pretty rigid and contrived magic system) I didn't get into The King's Blades at all. I wonder if I can find them.

I think one should accept that a counter influence is still an influence. If you're trying to avoid doing D&D fantasy you're still influenced by D&D.

I don't think Tanith Lee is much like D&D, though I've only read one or two of her novels. Something about sea people coming up and mating with land people, I think. Do we have a big fantasy literature discussion thread? Should we? We could call it Fantasy Fight Club.
 
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I think this is crucial. Give a 13 year old D&D and they'll be able to knock up a dungeon to run for their mates. Where I remember my reaction to Traveller being "this is so cool but I have no idea what to do with it". The dungeon structure is excellent for first time GMs.
In addition to first mover, and the wide openess of the "setting" this is a major factor. I keep playing other styles of game and keep running into struggles. With other game systems I can more easily run wilderness expeditions (RuneQuest and Cold Iron for example), but the general idea of the dungeon still makes for the easiest engagement with the game.

Tunnels and Trolls could have been a good contender had the spell names not been open to being called silly and childish that combined with the simplified rules made it easy to dismiss as a lesser game.

Traveller as mentioned by several is not as easy to approach and is harder to bend to just any kind of science fiction.

Most everything else in the early days was either in a niche of genre, or a niche of complexity and/or realism.

Getting into the bookstores certainly helped, but that might have been doable for whichever game took off, but it certainly reinforced the momentum D&D had.
 
In addition to first mover, and the wide openess of the "setting" this is a major factor. I keep playing other styles of game and keep running into struggles. With other game systems I can more easily run wilderness expeditions (RuneQuest and Cold Iron for example), but the general idea of the dungeon still makes for the easiest engagement with the game.
Yah, you know, I'm often hesitant to GM anything these days because it feels like a lot more work than it used to be. Back then, one of us would buy a new module and offer to run it straight-up, with the understanding that the players would buy-in to the module as written, and not wander off in various directions, or worry too much about grand narratives or open settings or anything like that.
 
So there are three main reasons the first is only supportive. That D&D's class, level, armor class, hit points, vancian spell casting are minimalist concepts compared to many of the competitors that arose later. This is not the cause of D&D's dominance but more about why D&D has remained "good enough".

The second and most critical reason is ....
the dungeon.

No other RPG ever came up with a more straight forward way of running an adventures then the dungeon. The concept is easily explained.

1) Take a piece of graph paper
2) Draw a maze with rooms
3) Fill some rooms with monsters, some with traps, some with treasure, some leave empty.
4) Your players start at the top of the stairs leading down into the maze.
5) If you want to expand then make another maze like the above fill it with tougher creatures and better treasures.

The format was critical in allowing D&D to retain its first mover advantage. No other type of adventures or even campaign ever rivaled it. Some equaled it like the The Fantasy Trip. But the Fantasy Trip system wasn't superior enough over D&D's good enough system and the Labyrinth was the same style of adventure as the Dungeon so it only matched it's simplicity not exceeded it.

Finally it was the 1st, the 1st to build a social network of hobbyist to play the game. Because it was "good enough" and because of how straight forward the most basic adventure was, the dungeon, it never lost it grip except once. And that was to another RPG that was also D&D, Pathfinder.
Sorry, saw this after my last post (this thread has quickly become TLDR...). This is so very important.

Also note in comparison to TFT, D&D's level system combined with the suggested dungeon level structure puts players in control of the level of risk they will assume. Also, the level situation makes it easier to eventually take on greater monsters. While the original TFT had greater advancement than the re-release, in the re-release TFT campaign I've been playing in, it's become clear the PCs will never get good enough to fight, say a 7 hex dragon... We lost several PCs to a bear (and the only reason my PCs didn't succumb because I played missile PCs that allowed the others to engage it...).
 
Yah, you know, I'm often hesitant to GM anything these days because it feels like a lot more work than it used to be. Back then, one of us would buy a new module and offer to run it straight-up, with the understanding that the players would buy-in to the module as written, and not wander off in various directions, or worry too much about grand narratives or open settings or anything like that.
I've been running some play by post D&D using a simple dungeon, though play by post plays slow enough that I can populate it "just in time". For my RQ game, I grab modules (sometimes D&D modules that I adapt on the fly) but if the PCs go a different direction, I adapt.
 
Whereas, 13 year old Viktyr was absolutely an idiot but 40 year old Viktyr is trying to remind the world that once upon a time, the way 13 year old Viktyr played D&D was a very popular playstyle and it's still totally legitimate, you guys.
I didn't say it wasn't a valid play-style, only that when I was younger I couldn't conceive of anything but D&D as being valid . . . hence I was kind of a dumb-fuck.
 
Finally it was the 1st, the 1st to build a social network of hobbyist to play the game. Because it was "good enough" and because of how straight forward the most basic adventure was, the dungeon, it never lost it grip except once. And that was to another RPG that was also D&D, Pathfinder.

Adequacy is (and I'm being serious here) a positive argument in D&D's favor.
 
Another key to D&D’s appeal compared to other RPGs that I don’t think should be discounted is its omnivorous kitchen-sink incorporation of every type of fantasy (and fantasy-adjacent - supernatural horror, “soft” sf, historical adventure, etc). D&D includes Tolkienesque high fantasy and REH-style swords and sorcery, Arthuriana and fairy tales and Greek mythology and Arabian Nights and Bible stories and ghost stories and wuxia and chanbara and Gothic stories and swashbuckling pirates and monster movies and comic books and mixes it all together. What this means is that no matter what somebody’s preconceived notion of “fantasy” is they’ll find something familiar in D&D - it won’t be authentically or accurately portrayed and will have been bent to fit the D&D paradigm of monster-hunting and treasure gathering adventure, but it’s in there and will be recognized and provide context to everything else.

Experienced gamers grouse about the Disneyland kitchen-sink nature of D&D fantasy (and nowadays there’s a whole additional layer of criticism around cultural-appropriation) and almost every other rpg has a narrower focus and makes more of an attempt to be authentic to its sources, which is why experienced gamers tend to like them better and consider them superior, but it also gives them narrower appeal and makes them less immediately accessible than D&D.
 
Tunnels and Trolls could have been a good contender had the spell names not been open to being called silly and childish that combined with the simplified rules made it easy to dismiss as a lesser game.

hmmm...Strength and Dexterity requirements for weapons and armour, scalable scales, missile attack difficulty multipliers, attribute multipliers for non-humans and monsters. It was more rational at times but also all over the place. T&T was never as simple as OD&D or Basic. It just wasn't.
 
Experienced gamers grouse about the Disneyland kitchen-sink nature of D&D fantasy (and nowadays there’s a whole additional layer of criticism around cultural-appropriation) and almost every other rpg has a narrower focus and makes more of an attempt to be authentic to its sources, which is why experienced gamers tend to like them better and consider them superior, but it also gives them narrower appeal and makes them less immediately accessible than D&D.

The one exception to that (and I think it backs up your point rather than negates it) is early WFRP. I actually think that could have been more of a contender in the UK than it was, but from GW's point of view it was mainly an auxillery to the wargame.
 
TristramEvans TristramEvans I have to disagree with you on this one, man. I am having a harder time thinking of D&D sytle fantasy books outside the popcorn novels published by TSR and WoTC.
Running through the list and I come up with David Eddings, Even Weis and Hickman's non D&D works, Feist, Jim Butcher, Guy Gavriel Kay, Robert Jordan... From the world of all of them, the only commonality I can see to D&D is the heroic character in a psuedo Medieval setting. Other than that, they seem to be more influenced by classic fantasy literature rather then D&D.

It's important to keep in mind that D&D will always seem to influence these works because it itself was heavily influenced from mythology and other writer's works. I am more inclined to say that D&D is a branch off of Fantasy as much as other worlds created by other Authors are.
I see D&D's influence more in game design than setting tbh.
 
WFRP has not had the international influence of D&D, but I feel like there's a lot of UK fantasy lit that takes its cues from WFRP and FF. Joe Abercrombie, frex, has mentioned being a GM in the Warhammer setting. Dan Abnett, who has written tons of 40K stuff, wasn't a WFRP player, but he was a gamer and aware of what GW was doing. And so on.
 
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1. Being first, it mainstreamed and thus became the face of the hobby.
2. In a proof of the “No publicity is bad publicity” concept, the Satanic Panic catapulted D&D into the zeitgeist of a nation.

Game Over

For the rest of humanity’s existence every other RPG will be a game “you know, like D&D but...”
This, and also:
3. Had the best distributors.


I think the archetypal nature of D&D is one of the most important aspects of its appeal, actually. Even though it has frequently been cited in the past about how awful fundamental design features like Class and Level are, I have to admit I find them quite compelling and addictive even.
Really? I just find them vaguely vomit-inducing:shade:!

...And I want to like those things like all those other people! Then I'd have no trouble finding fresh meat willing to be subjected to my Refereeing From Hell groups to play with! Why can't I:brokenheart:?

TristramEvans TristramEvans I have to disagree with you on this one, man. I am having a harder time thinking of D&D sytle fantasy books outside the popcorn novels published by TSR and WoTC.
Running through the list and I come up with David Eddings, Even Weis and Hickman's non D&D works, Feist, Jim Butcher, Guy Gavriel Kay, Robert Jordan... From the world of all of them, the only commonality I can see to D&D is the heroic character in a psuedo Medieval setting. Other than that, they seem to be more influenced by classic fantasy literature rather then D&D.

It's important to keep in mind that D&D will always seem to influence these works because it itself was heavily influenced from mythology and other writer's works. I am more inclined to say that D&D is a branch off of Fantasy as much as other worlds created by other Authors are.
I see D&D's influence more in game design than setting tbh.
Minor nitpick: Robert Jordan and David Eddings are my go-to examples for "non-obviously influenced by D&D, class and level included" fantasy:devil:.
 
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I've never bought into two of the most commonly cited explanations (precedence and simplicity), for a variety of reasons that I think make these weak arguments.

But I do think there is an excellent reason why D+D has always and continues to dominate: Most of the page count of its biggest foundational editions (1E AD&D; Basic) is devoted to the 'meat' of the creative content in any fantasy roleplaying game: monsters, spells and items. The rules of D&D are not unusually simple; in fact, I would say the only reason it feels simple is we mostly ignore or replace a lot of the rules. And the market has provided many contenders, including during times when D+D sagged badly and left the playing field open. But there is no other game system that has done such a good job at supplying the DM and players with tons of creative 'stuff' to work with. Many competing games thought they were being clever by changing the core rules while basically copying D&D's creative content. This just shows the strength of that content in the original and the weakness of the idea that a few new core rules (classes; no classes; parry rolls or not; spell points or spell slots; etc.) will fundamentally change how it feels to play a fantasy roleplaying game.
 
I started playing D&D in '75. I don't know about everyone else's experiences, but mine were sort of the same was seeing Star Wars for the first time. Star Wars didn't invent science fiction, and borrowed a lot of stuff from Flash Gordon and others, but the way it came off was just amazing. Special effects better than any we'd ever seen before, awesome soundtrack; Star Wars was just awesome and anyone who experienced it in '77 knows what I mean.

D&D was sort of like that. It wasn't hard to get a game started and from a wargames and miniatures background I could grok what we were trying to do very quickly. D&D had an emphasis on things we knew from literature -- elves and dwarves and the balrog and minotaurs and dragons and stuff we knew already. D&D didn't have to spend paged describing dragons, because Tolkien already did it for us. D&D didn't have to explain elves and dwarves. D&D didn't have to explain what a wizard was. This stuff was just natural, for anyone who had read Swords & Sorcery style fiction. D&D was a somewhat generic "do it yourself" kit where you could take the books and movies you'd seen and just play those ideas. There has been a lot of discussion about post-D&D fiction and I think that some authors tried intentionally to AVOID the general stereotypes of D&D just to be different, and perhaps that was one of its bigger influences. At the time, D&D was just awesome and seemed so natural to play and had a little of everything we had seen in Leiber and in Howard and in Burroughs and in other popular authors of the day.

Traveller didn't have that advantage. Find five random scifi books off of the shelf in 1975 and you probably got five totally different vibes. Each had its own aliens. Each had its own starships. Each had its own tech. None of the "we all know what an elf is" from D&D, Traveller had to build it all and hope that you got it. In this way, Traveller doesn't model Star Wars well. Or a number of other scifi franchises. Science fiction is just too diverse.

Just my take on it.
 
I started playing D&D in '75. I don't know about everyone else's experiences, but mine were sort of the same was seeing Star Wars for the first time. Star Wars didn't invent science fiction, and borrowed a lot of stuff from Flash Gordon and others, but the way it came off was just amazing. Special effects better than any we'd ever seen before, awesome soundtrack; Star Wars was just awesome and anyone who experienced it in '77 knows what I mean.

D&D was sort of like that. It wasn't hard to get a game started and from a wargames and miniatures background I could grok what we were trying to do very quickly. D&D had an emphasis on things we knew from literature -- elves and dwarves and the balrog and minotaurs and dragons and stuff we knew already. D&D didn't have to spend paged describing dragons, because Tolkien already did it for us. D&D didn't have to explain elves and dwarves. D&D didn't have to explain what a wizard was. This stuff was just natural, for anyone who had read Swords & Sorcery style fiction. D&D was a somewhat generic "do it yourself" kit where you could take the books and movies you'd seen and just play those ideas. There has been a lot of discussion about post-D&D fiction and I think that some authors tried intentionally to AVOID the general stereotypes of D&D just to be different, and perhaps that was one of its bigger influences. At the time, D&D was just awesome and seemed so natural to play and had a little of everything we had seen in Leiber and in Howard and in Burroughs and in other popular authors of the day.

Traveller didn't have that advantage. Find five random scifi books off of the shelf in 1975 and you probably got five totally different vibes. Each had its own aliens. Each had its own starships. Each had its own tech. None of the "we all know what an elf is" from D&D, Traveller had to build it all and hope that you got it. In this way, Traveller doesn't model Star Wars well. Or a number of other scifi franchises. Science fiction is just too diverse.

Just my take on it.
Actually, I was a big fantasy fan when I first encountered D&D, and I remember being surprised at the portrayal of wizards.
But a lot of people actually seemed to grok them, and I didn't want to play one anyway, so I didn't even mention it to the GM.
 
TristramEvans TristramEvans I have to disagree with you on this one, man.

That's fine, I'm sure you can appreciate my heart's just not in arguing my PoV on this one any longer.



Anime genre where the protagonists are normal people from our world who become trapped in the body of a fantasy character in a fantasy world (often an MMoRPG come to life, but not exclusivelly). It started with the .Hack series I believe, but it's become one of the most popular genres in anime in the last two decades.
 
Pointing out your factually incorrect statements is not a personal attack.
And calling people dishonest is. That is why you are called on it.

I don't need to requote the thread to you. You made a series of strawman arguments and I pointed them out.
No I didn’t. No you didn’t.

I said it was clear to anyone reading this thread, and I stand by that statement. I didn't appeal to them to do anything. I haven't ignored anyone, but then, again, you're changing your argument. In your last post you said I was misinterpreting other posters in this thread. I call you out on that, and now you say instead that I'm ignoring other posters on this thread. I have to wonder if you legitimately believe you are pulling a fast one, that it's not clearly obvious when you continue to do stuff like this?
I provided evidence of that, from this thread.

You can try to spin it however you want, I replied to a comment that you made. It doesn't matter that it was made in reply to someone else's comment. It was still a statement that you made, and my response was clearly directly to that comment. The context doesn't change anything. If you wanted to continue to argue that point with another poster, no one was stopping you. But it was absolutely disingenuous of you to, when convenient, ignore the arguments I actually made and pretend that I was making an argument that someone else did. But, I mean, compounded with the multiple strawman fallacies, it was par for the course. My only mistake was assuming good faith for too long.
It is not a spin. You are evidently wrong on this.

lol, you just quoted me saying "I'll make it easier".
lol. Read it again - that is not your quote. The actual quote was: "But I'll make this a bit simpler”, and in context with the rest of the statement, it shows that you were merely shifting the goalpost.

Let me, for the benefit of readers, state this clearly. I asserted the majority of fantasy novels after D&D gained popularity were clearly influenced by D&D (specifically I said maybe 1 in 1000 was an exception)

Your response was to rattle off the names of 4 books.

Which...doesn't counter what I said at all. 4 book series do not represent a majority of those published.

When I pointed this out, you pretended that you were saying that those books meant that D&D didn't reshape fantasy fiction in it's image.

But that wasn't a response to someone else's comment that D&D reshaped fiction into it's image. I could argue that point , maybe, but I didn't and don't have any interest in arguing someone else's point. That was your response to my assertion. And it was a failure. And when I pointed that out, you've since tried, misdirection, strawman fallicies, tried some BS about using my mod status to say I shouldn't argue with you, tried dismissing my responses as emotional, and now claim that you feel personally attacked, rather than address it.
Then your comments were irrelevant because that was what the debate was about.

And I see right through all those attempts.
You may need to adjust your lenses.

I never said I was going to - again, I specifically said that I wasn't going to. I asked you if thought it wasn't possible? You know, one of those straightforward questions that you ignored?
Yes. The reason why you weren’t going to was because you couldn’t back up your argument. You were demanding evidence from me, but you weren’t prepared to do the work for your own argument.

Straightforward questions...

Here are some straightforward answers:
Do you really think that I couldn't name 297 fantasy books published from the 70s as counterpoints?
Yes.
I mean, I dont think it's worth my effort to compile the list, but I'm actually curious if you're unaware of just how many of those exist?
No.
Can you likewise name several epic psuedo-medieval fantasy books that have no influence from D&D?
Yes.
...is that confirmation that you aren't aware of the hundreds of fantasy novels that aren't exceptions?
No.
You don't think maybe the reason you are able to rattle those three titles off the top of your head, what made them stand out and contributed to their popularity, was that they're exceptions to the norm?
No.

Happy? Of course you aren’t, because they weren’t straightforward questions after all, eh?

I mean, if you're going to be disengenuous, at least make it more effort than me going back one page in the thread to prove you wrong, lol.
I wasn’t being disingenuous, and I have read every word. Here we are again with you accusing myself of dishonesty. You are personalizing the argument.

Obviously, since that's not what I stated. I would gladly assert that - but I didn't. Clearly.

"are you under the impression less than 3000 fantasy novels have been published since D&D's cultural influence asserted itself on the genre?"

What was the point of this question? It's clearly NOT me stating "3000 books have been published under the direct influence of D&D", those are your words. It's clearly a completely different meaning than my question.

No my question was pointing out that your 3 examples of fantasy series NOT influenced by D&D are NOT a rebuttal to me saying 1 in a 1000 books is an exception. I was being nice - I framed it as a question, rather than stating the obvious - that your 3 examples don't, never did, and couldn't possibly form a MAJORITY of fantasy literature. Not 1 in a thousand.

THAT's what I said and why I said it. So when you claimed I was saying something else, even if I agree with what you claim I was saying, I once again pointed out that you were being dishonest.

So, instead of caps, we have to underline everything now? You did assert "3000 fantasy novels have been published since D&D’s cultural influence asserted itself on the genre", yet we have established already you can’t be bothered to name 297 of them from the 1970s - so you aren’t backing up your assertions with evidence. Nor are you showing us, clearly how D&D has influenced them any more than influential fantasy novels that were released before D&D.

this one again?

That's YOUR words, not mine.
Yes, "Tolkienesque Demi-Humans” was my words, which you then changed to “D&Desque Demi Humans” in your reply.

And yes, all of those are in the books.
And none of them are relevant, because they are not Tolkieneque or D&Desque DemiHumans. They are not Elves, Dwarves, Halflings or Half Orcs. They are a range of legendary creatures and monsters that are not "DemiHumans” in the Tolkien or D&D sense, are not exclusive or original to D&D, and in all cases completely miss the argument. Ask yourself, are any of these examples of player character races, in the same sense of Tolkien-esque DemiHumans found in D&D?

"Centaurs lived in the eastern grasslands of central Essos in the Dawn Age."

"Deep Ones are a species mentioned by Maester Theron in his manuscript Strange Stone. Theron drew a connection between the black stone of the Seastone Chair and that of the ancient fortress that serves as foundation of the Hightower. Theron suggested they were created by the Deep Ones, a "queer, misshapen race of half men sired by creatures of the salt seas upon human women", according to Maester Yandel."

"Following the Battle of Oxcross, some House Lannister men attribute Robb Stark's success to the aid of giants.[44]
Lark tells Chett that giants and wargs are in the Frostfangs."

"Jon Snow sees hundred of giants in the rearguard of the host of Mance Rayder, King-Beyond-the-Wall, near the Milkwater."

"Grumkins are mythical creatures that appear in Westerosi folktales. They are associated with granting wishes, either by crafting magical objects which make wishes come true, or by directly giving people a number of wishes, of which the third wish is the last and must be used carefully. Grumkins are implied to be of short stature or otherwise of very small size and may also steal and replace children."

"Old Ghis ruled an empire when the Valyrians were still fucking sheep, and we are the sons of the harpy."
—Kraznys mo Nakloz to Missandei

"Qyburn: The slave revolt in Astapor has spread to Meereen, it would seem. Sailors off a dozen ships speak of dragons ...
Cersei: Harpies. It is harpies in Meereen."

"Tyrion hears stories of rock goblins and giants warring. The goblins won but were seduced by swan maidens from the lakes and were made thralls. The Andals then rose up and killed them all."

" the mazemakers of ancient Lorath were destroyed by maritime foes, such as merlings, walrus-men, or selkies."

"one of the many actions that the Bloodstone Emperor committed as part of the Blood Betrayal that ushered in the Long Night was taking a tiger-woman for his bride."

not to menton, these guys...

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Now, you went from Tolkien-esque (all of these are "Tolkien-esque") to "D&D-esque" and then straight-up demanded the player character races from D&D (which are not "D&D-esque races" they're just D&D races), but I feel no obligation for my response to your original assertion to keep up with those....shifting goalposts.
You shifted from my comment of "Tolkien-esque" to "D&D-esque” - not the other way round, and I made it clear what races I was referring to in the comments you replied to. A “demihuman” is a Tolkienesque term, carried in to D&D, specifically to differentiate races like Elves, Dwarves, Halflings and Half Orcs from standard humanoid monsters. Read for yourself from the Forgotten Worlds wiki:

"Demihuman" was a collective name for races that were not human but had a similar appearance. Among them were peoples of the dwarves, elves (including drow), halflings, and gnomes.[1][2] Half-elfs and half-orcs held a special position, as they were indeed half human.[3] https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Demihuman

And wiktionary:

demihuman (plural demihumans)
  1. (fantasy, mythology) A human-like race or a member thereof; in fantasy, sometimes distinguished from the more bestial humanoid races. quotations
None of the examples you have cited are demihumans, regardless of whether they are Tolkienesque or D&Desque, and many of them are not actively in the books beyond legendary tales from history. So, you are entirely wrong on this.
 
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As someone with only minimal exposure to WoD games, what is Vampirie's clear structure for play?
You have a simple and easy setting - your own hometown or a city you know well. This makes it very easy for players and GM to know what's what. If the PCs need to know something everyone has a good idea where they can go to find it out.

At the same time, you don't need to worry too much about the millions of people in the city. By and large, they're not important. Vampires only are important, and you only really need a handful of those and the feudal structure means that when you do want to add more it's easy to find a place to slot them in.

You have clear archetypes to play with. The prince is probably a ventrue, there are probably Brujah who oppose him, the Nosferatu live in the sewers. The feudal structure is simple and intuitive for a political game - there's nothing complicated you have to learn to get what's going on or how to influence things.

Vampire isn't quite as structured in the minute to minute as a D&D dungeon crawl, but it's more structured in it's overarching nature as a political game.

This is why people who complain that vampire has no support for political games because it has no mechanics for such are full of it. They're looking in the wrong place.
 
D&D was sort of like that. It wasn't hard to get a game started and from a wargames and miniatures background I could grok what we were trying to do very quickly. D&D had an emphasis on things we knew from literature -- elves and dwarves and the balrog and minotaurs and dragons and stuff we knew already. D&D didn't have to spend paged describing dragons, because Tolkien already did it for us. D&D didn't have to explain elves and dwarves. D&D didn't have to explain what a wizard was. This stuff was just natural, for anyone who had read Swords & Sorcery style fiction. D&D was a somewhat generic "do it yourself" kit where you could take the books and movies you'd seen and just play those ideas.

My experience was very different. The first time I played D&D I was totally confused . For me elves were the guys that worked for Santa Claus and dwarves lived in forests with Snow White or were scary, magical creatures in Norse mythology. I had read the Arthurian legends, the chronicles of Narnia, lots of mythology and I knew Conan from the the Roy Thomas comics but none of that prepared me for D&D, dungeon crawling and its inherent assumptions I don't think any one else at that game session, other than the GM, had a clue either. I should that was a one off session. I would return to roleplaying for another decade and by then computer roleplaying games more successfully illustrated what the whole thing was about.

But that was just my experience. You can't generalise from one person's (or in this example one group of people's )experience.
 
My experience was very different. The first time I played D&D I was totally confused . For me elves were the guys that worked for Santa Claus and dwarves lived in forests with Snow White or were scary, magical creatures in Norse mythology. I had read the Arthurian legends, the chronicles of Narnia, lots of mythology and I knew Conan from the the Roy Thomas comics but none of that prepared me for D&D, dungeon crawling and its inherent assumptions I don't think any one else at that game session, other than the GM, had a clue either. I should that was a one off session. I would return to roleplaying for another decade and by then computer roleplaying games more successfully illustrated what the whole thing was about.

But that was just my experience. You can't generalise from one person's (or in this example one group of people's )experience.
Well, that's actually a second person and group:smile:.
Though we knew about dungeoncrawls from Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. I think it also prompted questions like "why imitate the most boring examples of Fighting Fantasy, instead of the better ones", though:wink:.
We were totally amazed at the GM answering that travel overland is much more dangerous to our characters, since we didn't think the Forest of Doom was harder than the Firetop Mountain.
 
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I wish D&D had been more Howard and less Tolkien.
From what I understand, and from hazy recollection from actually hearing him talk about it at a conference a few decades ago, I think Gary Gygax wished the same thing.
 
From what I understand, and from hazy recollection from actually hearing him talk about it at a conference a few decades ago, I think Gary Gygax wished the same thing.
I vaguely recall that. Something about him mainly putting that in there because his players wanted it.
 
I feel like, the Tolkienish races, in particular, have aged very badly. They've become incredibly dreary cliches. I can't remember the last time I read a fantasy novel that included them. (Well actually elves are not that unommon but they're often a far cry from D&D being more of the Terry Pratchett, strange and terrible fey variety - like in Shadow of a Demon Lord).
 
I vaguely recall that. Something about him mainly putting that in there because his players wanted it.
Yep. And in the early years I’m sure he was more than happy to take the Tolkien fans’ money. It was only later, when he got sick of receiving letters telling him to fix all the errors in D&D to make it truer to Tolkien (mostly by making elves better than humans) and after the Tolkien estate sued TSR for copyright infringement and they had to change out all the references to hobbits, balrogs, ents, wargs, and Nazgul in the rules, that he changed his tune and started minimizing and lamenting the influence of Tolkien on D&D.
 
I think, on the whole, demihumans are just lazy human stereotypes as used in D&D, but the stereotypes themselves make it easy to build a character, cookie-cutter style. The debate is on, I guess as to whether this is an addictive quality of D&D that lends to its success, or whether it is vaguely vomit-inducing as how AsenRG feels! :thumbsup:

In the case of Tolkien’s original use, what they did narratively is transport the reader into a fantasy where humans could be perceived in an external way - so the Hobbits are observing the culture of Men in Middle Earth from a first time experience in the same way the reader is experiencing it.
 
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The lengths of these replies are getting annoying, so I've s-blocked it so it doesn't rain on the fun of other people in the thread. Click only if you care about me pointing out the obvious to Trippy for the upteenth time...

No I didn’t. No you didn’t.

Encore...

Just to point out again, that the epic pseudo-medieval fantasy genre was already well established way before D&D came about. D&D didn’t invent that. You can’t just claim that it didn’t exist before D&D came along,

Trippy said:
You think these all come from D&D?!

Trippy said:
Sure, if you limited yourself to fiction published by TSR

Trippy said:
Did D&D influence Led Zeppelin?

Those are a few of your very obvious strawman arguments.

I provided evidence of that, from this thread.

No, you haven't.

It is not a spin. You are evidently wrong on this.

lol, I dont need to spin anything. I just quote yourself back to you again and again.

lol. Read it again - you didn’t quote you saying that. The actual quote was: "But I'll make this a bit simpler”, and in context with the rest of the statement, it shows that you were merely shifting the goalpost.

No, I didn't. You should look up the definition, and see every way that it doesn't apply to what I said. Of course, with the amount of strawman fallacies you used, it's quite amusing to see you harp on trying to pin an offer I made to you to make things easier on you to demonstrate your point as goalpost shifting.

Then your comments were irrelevant because that was what the debate was about.

Here's the entirety of our debate:

Trippy said:
If that was the case, then why does so much fantasy literature, released since D&D was first published, bare so little comparison to D&D?

Tristram said:
Like what? I mean seriously, I'd say finding fantasy novels post D&D that aren't D&D influenced is like a 1 in a thousand shot.
1 in a million for fantasy videogames.

That's it. That is the entirety of the debate between me and you. It doesn't matter what your debate with someone else is, that's what you asserted, that's what I asserted. That's what you failed to address. Everything else is just....weasling.

Yes. The reason why you weren’t going to was because you couldn’t back up your argument. You were demanding evidence from me, but you weren’t prepared to do the work for your own argument.

Nope. I stated the reason why, and on top of that I specifically did not demand the evidence from you...

Tristram said:
...so, I'm fine leaving that up for you to prove, I guess, if you want to cite hundreds of examples necessary to support that statement. Though I won't blame you if you don't want to even attempt it, as I don't expect you to consider it any more worth it than I do...

That hole is getting...

Here are some straightforward answers:

No. No. Yes. No. No.

Happy? Of course you aren’t, because they weren’t straightforward questions after all, eh?

What's not straightforward about them? You giving snippy answers after initially ignoring them and then lying and saying I never asked the questions?

How big a hole are willing to dig?

I wasn’t being disingenuous

*snicker*

So, instead of caps, we have to underline everything now?

No idea what you are talking about.

You did assert "3000 fantasy novels have been published since D&D’s cultural influence asserted itself on the genre",

This is your third time attempting to reword this question:

Tristram said:
are you under the impression less than 3000 fantasy novels have been published since D&D's cultural influence asserted itself on the genre?"

I'm just going to keep throwing the actual words back in your face, lol

yet we have established already you can’t be bothered to name 297 of them from the 1970s - so you aren’t backing up your assertions with evidence. Nor are you showing us, clearly how D&D has influenced them any more than influential fantasy novels that were released before D&D.

Absolutely, I'm not going to waste that effort on you, especially after you've clearly demonstrated from this thread is you would refuse to acknowledge the evidence when it was thrown in your face. See re:your strawman arguments above. See you repeatedly mis-quoting me above. See how this has pretty much become just me constantly re-quoting your own posts as you try to change your claims.


Yes, "Tolkienesque Demi-Humans” was my words, which you then changed to “D&Desque Demi Humans” in your reply.[ And none of them are relevant, because they are not Tolkieneque or D&Desque DemiHumans. They are not Elves, Dwarves, Halflings or Half Orcs. They are a range of legendary creatures and monsters that are not "DemiHumans” in the Tolkien or D&D sense, are not exclusive or original to D&D, and in all cases completely miss the argument. Ask yourself, are any of these examples of player character races, in the same sense of Tolkien-esque DemiHumans found in D&D?[

You shifted from my comment of "Tolkien-esque" to "D&D-esque” - not the other way round, and I made it clear what races I was referring to in the comments you replied to. A “demihuman” is a Tolkienesqe term, carried in to D&D, specifically to differentiate races like Elves, Dwarves, Halflings and Half Orcs from standard humanoid monsters. Read for yourself from the Forgotten Worlds wiki:

"Demihuman" was a collective name for races that were not human but had a similar appearance. Among them were peoples of the dwarves, elves (including drow), halflings, and gnomes.[1][2] Half-elfs and half-orcs held a special position, as they were indeed half human.[3] https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Demihuman

And wiktionary:

demihuman (plural demihumans)
  1. (fantasy, mythology) A human-like race or a member thereof; in fantasy, sometimes distinguished from the more bestial humanoid races. quotations
None of the examples you have cited are demihumans, regardless of whether they are Tolkienesque or D&Desque, and many of them are not actively in the books beyond legendary tales from history. So, you are entirely wrong on this.

well, one, a "demihuman" is NOT "a Tolkienesque term carried into D&D". Its a Gygaxian term popularized by D&D. But here's your claim...

Trippy said:
. There aren’t any Tolkienesque Demi-humans

"aren't any" means we only need one example to disprove your statement right?

Here you go:

18556252_1134107383361179_8455193750195007708_n.jpg

Humanoid, not bestial, huge role in the books. Specifically stated by Martin as analogous to fantasy elves.

Game. Set. Match.
 
I don’t think it is my posts that need anything to be pointed out about here.
 
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