RPG Cliches

Creature cliche: aggressive (giant) rats. These critters in various forms seem to be almost essential for a RPG.

 

The makers of D&D hadn't even read Tolkien. They based it on books by Michael Moorcock, a complete asshole who hates Tolkien and various other authors better than him.

 

The part where you're the Hero, and the only one able to complete all these quests, I quite like one of the hyped features of the upcoming (heh, yeah right) STALKER. You're just one of a number of Stalkers running around the game area, and it's entirely possible other Stalkers will take and complete quests before you, they had even said it might be possible for an NPC to complete the main quest before you.
Heh, being beaten to the end of the game by a random schmuck.

 

What's wrong with Moorcock? At least his fantasy doesn't have elves and fucking hobbits. His concepts (well, not really his, but...) of absolute good being as bad as absolute evil are refreshing after vanilla Tolkien crap. Uh, I meant masterpiece.

 

If you like Moorcock, read his real hero - Mervyn Peake.

 

Why do dwarves always have to have overplayed Scottish accents? I'm not scottish or anything, but it's such a tired, hackneyed device to build character depth.

edit: oops I think someone brought this up already

 

I'm sorry, but this is not correct at all.
Of course they read Tolkien - you only have to look at the creatures and races in every single edition of D&D to see that they are Tolkienien. Perhaps you are just being a dick, I don't know.

As for the magic - it was heavily influenced by Jack Vance's Dying Earth books. Even down to some of the spell names.

As for Moorcock being crap, he wasn't. He was one of the first "high fantasy" authors to remove that coddled preachy crap and replace it with cynicism and a more "grey" outlook, etc. A totally different outlook at the time.

(Mind you, Poul Anderson's "The Broken Sword" beat both authors to the punch, to a certain degree. And, yes, Moorcock considers it a a better example of the form than Tolkien)

 

D&D had Hobbits, they were forced to remove that name.

Gary Gygax said hee liked The Hobbit but found LotR boring and they only put Hobbits in to sell the game.

I always find it funny when people say LotR was a big influence on D&D as besides the obvious Hobbits rip-off there is nothing else on it but I blame more the "Tolkien created fantasy" mentality that anything else ...

 

Alright, I guess I screwed up. Gygax had read Tolkien, he just didn't like Tolkien. I thought I had read somewhere that he didn't read any until the movies were being made.

I also haven't read anything by Moorcock other than his essay on how much a bunch of other authors suck. That's why I insult him.

 

Without implying that he's better than those he trashed, the next logical step should have been to read a few of his books and compare to the work of those he criticized, not to jump to the conclusion that he's an asshole.

 

I second that, absolutely.
But that's not exactly Tolkien fault... it's the Christian morality crap.
Tolkien was fucking religious - therefore, ideas of Absolute Good and Absolute Evil (that, once destroyed, will allow people to live happily ever after and so on) was burned into his brain by the church.
Same goes for his followers.
So, no wonder that most interesting writers are atheist bastards that cannot care less about God, Absolute Good/Evil and try to create plots that are realistic, not just cheesy stuff about evil orks vs goody-two-shoes elves. (Terry Pratchett is an example you all must recognize).

Damn, I wish you could have read the "Last Ringbearer" by Kirill Eskov.
While it may sound like a cheap parody akin to "Bored of the rings", it gives the story behind the invasion of Mordor a much greater detail.
To sum it up, orcs, trolls and other 'inhuman races' were just labeled as such by ‘PR department of the side that won', Mordor is a technically advanced government that posed a threat to backwards societies of the west (and, by making a mistake in irrigation, turned their lands into desert like we see in the books), so on, so forth.
Damn, it's too much to write, too bad.
I doubt it was translated from Russian, though... but it's completely kickass.
I enjoyed it much more then the LotR.
Like someone noted, "Tolkien put so much detail in his worlds and it's history, that his mountains are much more 'lifelike' then his main characters".
No wonder I hate religion.

 

Like a lot of authors, he has his opinions and isn't afraid of presenting them. I'm certain he probably is arrogant (a lot of successful people are), but I think he has been invaluable to the fantasy/SF/literary world; and you won't find many authors that were part of the scene in the mid-60's onwards that would disagree with that.

He's a pretty cool dude too - he's written stuff for both Hawkwind and Blue Oyster Cult, and even performed with them live. As for deriding stuff like LOTR, he makes up for that by championing stuff by the likes of Mervyn Peake etc.

 

What with all the time I waste on the internet, I haven't read much fiction in a while. I still haven't gotten past the Modron cube in PS:T, where I've been for some months now, because I haven't gotten around to playing it much. After I finish my extensive backlog of games that I've posted earlier, I still plan on finishing Pilgrim's Progress and then moving onto Paradise Lost and Dante's Inferno and The Song of El Cid, so I don't think I'll be reading Moorcock to feel better about talking bad about him any time soon.

 

BTW, TheGreatGodPan, is your name based on that most excellent story by Arthur Machen??

 

if your talking about console rpg's then it's due too the lack of space in the game cartridge(nes,snes,sms,genesis,gbc,gba etc)
if it's a pc rpg then it's just due to the lazyness of the artists.

 

It was - at least to Polish .

As for Moorcock - I read his Runestaff tetralogy and Corum trilogy when I was a teenager and I don't think it was a waste of time; the books are so short that I'm considering re-reading them to see if I still see the charm in them.

 

That would be Corum trilogys
The first is where he becomes rather uber by the end of it (I think it might be called the "Swords" trilogy) and it is set across multiple planes. The second trilogy is where he is summoned to go up against the Fomorians or "Cold Gods" and is set against a Celtish background.

They bear re-reading, and Corum was my favourite of the Eternal Champions, though Elric gets the most critical acclaim and popularity.

 

Because he invented elves and dwarves as they are used in every single stupid fantasy book ever made. Not to mention hobbits and balrogs...and the trolls being exactly the same. He is the one who made that stuff up though it is based to some extent on mythology, therefore by using it you can't help but be tokienesque.

 

Goddamit Drakron, the elves and dwarves and halflings/hobbits in D&D are all of the Tolkien-esque type. The only other author to use Scandanavian-style Elves (i.e. not the little English-style ones) before then in popular fiction was Poul Anderson (and only a year earlier) and believe me that book does not get the recognition it deserves. And I doubt that the doughty little dwarves were based on Snow White's, amongst others.

Goddamnit, Orcs are Tolkien, same with fucking Ents. The whole fucking D&D thang is so Tolkienesque that you would have to put on blinkers to miss it. I mean - fucking Rangers fer chrissakes.
Of course, as mentioned in my other post up, there are other influences from other literary significants - but it doesn't take rocket science to see that the D&D milieus have been more of a Tolkien influence than Moorcock, Vance, Howard or Peake (to mention but a few).

I applaud Gygax's attempt to distance himself from the Big T, what with trying to do the whole Greyhawk thing (where I assume he was trying to bring other less Tolkien-esque influences in, including Lieber), but the taint is still writ large upon its forehead. There are more Tolkienesque entities in D&D than there are from any other significant author.

As for the "Tolkien created fantasy" mentality, yes that annoys me as well, despite the fact that I enjoyed the books and movies. But there are plenty of fantasy authors I would rather read, some predating him.

 

Spotting influences in D&D is fun.

The ranger class is straight out of Tolkien. The rogue class seems to be inspired in Fritz Leiber's Gray Mouser. The regenerating trolls are from Poul Anderson's "Three Hearts and Three Lions". And so on.

There are good religious authors and there are good atheist authors. Chesterton was deeply catholic and his "The man who was Thursday" is a masterpiece. Gene Wolfe, whom many consider the best living sf author, is a catholic too. Orson Scott Card (not my cup of tea) is a mormon.

R.A.Lafferty (a great author unjustly forgotten) was deeply religious, too.

By the way, I don't think that believing in good and evil is silly or makes you a bad writer. It all depends on your talent, really.

 

You got it.

On atheist and religious authors: A lot of my favorite authors were religious and put religious themes in their work. My absolute favorite though is Lovecraft, who wrote about a universe with no gods (or at least sane and fathomable ones). However, if I were asked who is the best author I have ever read, that would be Lord Dunsany, an atheist whose style comes from the King James Bible and who could utilize both cynicism and idealistic fantasy to great effect.

 

That's the one I read. Thanks for the info, I didn't know there was a second one.

 

No, its NOT.

http://www.mjyoung.net/dungeon/char/clas022.html

I hate when people look at 2nd ed and 3rd ed and forget they are a evolution of 1st edition were the roots of D&D are found.

The ranger was simply the druidic version of the paladin.

 

Good lord. For fuck's sake, the Ranger is a Tolkien-influenced entity. Just because they included spell abilities in their specific implementation does not change that.

Jesus fucking christ they even refer to a 2nd level Ranger as being a "Strider"! Fuck!!

I cannot believe you cannot see the influence there...oh well.

AS for being "the Druidic version of the Paladin", not correct; Rangers in D&D have always been capable of both Druid and Magic User spells in 1st and 2nd ed*. It's even in the page you reference. Don't try to do that "but...in 1st ed D&D..." crap, because you got that wrong anyway; I was playing the game when you were probably in nappies.

Edit:
Okay, okay...I've taken my uppers and de-grouched myself. I'm willing to concede that you may be right in taking exception to "straight out of Tolkien", simply because you may be trying to take the "straight from" very literally, when "based on" may have been more accurate. Very picky if that is your thinking.

*They revamped the magic system as of 3rd ed

 

As opposed to ugly/uglies that aren't misunderstood, ie the hundreds of monsters and demons in every RPG ever made, eh?

This is true, but I guess it has to do with the idea in human culture that the sword is somehow a noble weapon as opposed to a barbaric axe or a infantry's pike.

This is more of a overused plot device than anything else, but yeah, it's overused.

Agreed.

If the Chosen One storyline was actually dealt with in a non-plot-device manner, it could work very well (ie Baldur's Gate series). That would require it to be integrated within the plot instead of simply as some justification for the player going around killing monsters.

Again, if amnesia was dealt with as a theme (Torment, Memento) instead of as a plot device, it could be very original.

Agreed. This has to do, however, with the general idea that age = power in a fantasy world. The older something is, the more powerful it is. This is inherent to the fantasy genre (and it's creeping into sci-fi with all those lost alien civilizations), so I'm not surprised it's used. I guess it has to do with the idea that fantasy is forever a backwards-nostalgic genre, hence fundamentally placing more value on what's past than what is to come.

As opposed to comrades that never betray you? Again, here we have a situation in which it's cliche either way, so there's no getting out of it.

Agreed.

The fact that there's a guard at all is a cliche, but it's a necessary one, I think. Players want to work for their rewards, and you have to fulfill that desire somehow.

This is a way of developing the villain. There are other ways though, so I agree.

As far as the influence from Tolkien goes, I fail to see need to deride works because they take ideas from other works. Influence is the way by which works build ontop of one another, and the epic fantasy of Tolkien and its subsequent transformation into high fantasy is a major hallmark of the genre. It's not a matter of "if it weren't for Tolkien, D&D wouldn't be so ghey". If not for Tolkien, fantasy would've arrived at a different definition of cliche, and this post would persist in complaining about *that*.