That’s Gygax’s own words. He was more into the stuff like Conan and other pulp low fantasy.
Yeah, I’m not a huge fan of Tolkien’s work either. Like I recognise how important it is in the evolution of Fantasy as a genre, but as actual literary works I find them super boring. It’s way too black and white.
Warhammer Fantasy, Warcraft and Conan are the Fantasy settings I enjoy the most as standalone products.
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But… but … the memes generated by the movie adaptation of lotr…
I’m just here, possibly with a twitchy eye and muttering about how warcraft isn’t dnd or tolkien and dnd isn’t tolkien either
Taters, boil em, mash em, stick em up my…
Now you go.
But there is but one Mashed Potatoes song
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DnD is whatever the DM says it is and a lot of campaigns are based around concepts from LoTR. It’s insane to try to discount the influence Tolkien had. DnD has also evolved a lot since what it originally was and the games that would likely have influence on WoW would have been from post the time it was just a fight monsters simulator. The story often matters much more now then in the super early days.
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There’s literally a quote by Gygax stating what a boring villain he thought Sauron was like 10 posts up.
man sauron freaked me out lol and the balrog was scary too. and the dark riders were creepy
I’m aware you realize the game has evolved since Gary right? A lot of what is now referred to under the overarching umbrella of DnD is stuff like Pathfinder the Paizo adventure paths, horror campaigns based on lovecraft etc. DnD is an umbrella term that covers far more than just combat campaigns.
Also you guys should try reading DM of the Rings sometime.
h ttps://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=612
On the creation of the game? Practically no influence. People brought it in with setting and their own games, but that’s their own game not DnD as a whole.
Story has always mattered to some people who played, and there’s still enough dungeon slogging ‘Don’t you dare even suggest that my game has anything resembling a plot!’ players around today.
I didn’t say there weren’t combat only players I would bet money that Ion was but people like GC I would also bet played more than just combat campaigns under that overarching umbrella.
Personally my all time favorite campaign I did was a diplomacy campaign where we literally had 2 stretches of over of a month where we didn’t have a single combat encounter.
I don’t know how you could possibly claim that Tolkien influenced story-centric Fantasy. His writing had great world building but awful writing when it came to characters.
“The orcs are evil.”
“Why are they evil?”
“They just are, shut up.”
It’s very black and white as one would expect from someone raised in a strong Catholic background.
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If I wanted to play WHY CANT I HOLD ALL THESE ELVES…I would play ESO.
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they were created by sauron and later, more were created by saruman, for the express purpose of ending the age of man. they didnt start off as a nice group of shamans corrupted by an evil guy. they were grown in a lab as killing machines
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Same thing.
Morgoth.
Those were Uruk-hai, not orcs.
Uruk-hai were orcs you NOOB.