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Recent release of a new entry in the hit crpg series Baldurs Gate, has prompted me to look into the history of the parent franchise, Dungeons and Dragons. It's influence is immense1, crossing borders2.
But like any cultural product, it is itself a product of its surroundings. It's a game that exalts the American values of self-reliance, ability, and the ruthless accumulation of money.
It is not only non-medieval, it is anti-feudalistic and anti-aristocratic. Creatures with more XP and hit dice rule lower-level ones, from settled barons and goblin kings to wandering bandits and nomads. Level requirements for baronies are at odds with the hereditary gloss added to D&D in nearly every subsequent setting.
Obsession with money-gathering for its own sake that is suggestive of mercantilism or capitalism.
Gygax original pre-publication Greyhawk campaign drew heavily from his own American experience. It took place on a United States map, with Greyhawk at Chicago, and Dyvers at Milwaukee. His buddy Don Kaye’s Greyhawk character, Murlynd, was a gunslinger from Boot Hill.
Most of D&D’s thousands of imitators, in game and fiction, preserve the game’s democratic bones (cash economy, guns for hire, rags to riches stories) while overlaying a medieval-European skin.
Gygaxian levelocracy, where a villager can rise to become a baron or a “Conan type”, is fundamentally incompatible with the European fantasy typified by Lord of the Rings, in which no fellowship can alter the fact that Sam is by birth a servant, Frodo a gentleman, Strider a king, and Gandalf a wizard.
1:D&D invented "leather armor" and those "leather bracers" we see in so much historical fiction today. Even in documentaries!
Also D&D started the myth of bows being a "dexterity weapon". In reality, the sword is a much more suitable weapon for weaker people (blades require so little strength, we hide knives from children, and cut ourselves unintentionally while cooking), while a bow requires strength to operate. A war bow requires bodybuilder tier strength to use, and its shoulder and back muscles, the hardest ones for a woman to pack.
I'll also blame D&D for popularizing dumb weapons, like flails, which probably never saw battlefield use and were just dumb ornaments. I've tried to play with one, its more dangerous to the wielder than to his opponent. And, of course, the overall size of weapons is exaggerated in official art, but that was already bad and only got worse in other media.
2: Record of Lodoss War, Porcine appearance of orcs in Japanese media
Edit: Restoring this post, warts and all, because when I deleted it I didn't see the notification count increase. If I had, I would have left it up. Now that they did and a discussion has started (and accusations of trolling), deleting it is pointless.
That's because D&D is (was) really a Western dressed up in an anachronistic pseudomidieval setting. And it's settings and monsters owe more to Conan and Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser than to Lord of the Rings.
Now it's become an alice-in-wonderland tea party for non-binary tiefling warlocks.
I like my rpgs to be as Tolkienesque and possible and have collected about all of the relevant systems, but I find that it's difficult to get a group together which shares that aesthetic taste. By and large, people really do seem to prefer pop-fantasy. Damn millennials. They ruined the millennium!
What exactly do you mean by Tolkienesque?
I’m curious as to which systems you think get closest. Most of the people who I’ve seen complain about pop-fantasy fall into one of two groups. Group 1 thinks pop-fantasy is trite and demands more weirdness. Group 2 thinks it’s too soft and looks for something more grounded. I’d say the latter tend to more simulationist, and that they get excited about OSR games. Group 1 either ends up playing dice-pool games or just collecting materials without running any sessions.
Point is, neither of these groups seem like they’d end up at Tolkien, and I can’t think of any systems that really try to implement such a style. Maybe a low-magic variant of 2e?
Well there are several overtly based in Middle-Earth. MERP is the OG here, with more modern versions such as The One Ring and even a series of supplements for playing in Middle Earth using the 5E rules. I want to run a One Ring game but haven't found the time or people for it. Hopefully in a decade I'll be able to do it with my kids.
Yeah, I really like 2E for this, with 1E attitudes toward magic, i.e. it's very rare. A +1 sword is a big deal for even mid-level characters, and giving a magic weapon of any kind to a minion is a huge deal.
There's a style of play called 'E6' (idk why) where the basic premise is that characters can ascend to level 6 as normal but advancement stops there. This keeps them feeling roughly mortal which I think counts for a lot. Beyond that point in normal campaigns it becomes more and more difficult to give them real challenges beyond simply enemies with comparably-scaling stats, which feels clicky to me. In E6, as the campaign goes on, they continue to accumulate wealth and prestige, which opens the door to interesting options. And of course magic items, while hard-won, gradually serve to give them a sense of legendary prowess. But at the end of the day, one bad encounter with a gang of low-level enemies can still wreck them entirely. And they never really get the sense of being able to walk into combat without concern.
In one game I tried something out where beyond level 6 they could only attain further advancement in levels by eating dragon hearts, and dragons were as difficult to find and kill as you'd expect. I liked this approach because it really slowed down advancement and provided some kind of justification for why normal people could get so superhumanly powerful. Also it ends up feeling a little bit like Birthright, which I've always loved.
Haven't tried it, but I bet that Westeros campaign setting from... 20 or so years ago? probably would be a good fit as well. IIRC it was partly based on the idea that the players are, and only ever will be, eminently vulnerable. And it seems to be very low-magic, in keeping with the setting.
In theory bounded accuracy does this with DnD 5E. Unlike 3.5 where a first level fighter has a base of +1 to hit and a 20th level fighter has +20 (setting aside ability scores), in 5th edition a 1st level fighter has +2 to hit and a 20th level fighter has +6. AC also scales less so it is easier to be hit. And magic items are as a baseline fairly rare and powerful ones need to be attuned which limits how many you can have.
It has advantages and disadvantages but even reasonably low CR monsters can be a threat to a high level party. Well the martial half at least. Spell casters still scale into the stratosphere. Even though their save bonuses don't improve much, they just get more and more tools. Which is a slightly different issue than the fundamental maths of the game.
The catch is that character improvement is exponential. Increased hit chance, yes, but also number of attacks, damage per attack, and additional triggered effects. Bounded accuracy reins in the biggest of those but leaves the others untouched.
E6 puts pretty hard caps on attacks and (via magic item limits) damage per attack. It does allow feat progression, so there are still options to add damage kickers, but that’s a soft cap on the power provided by higher-level class features.
Same goes for survivability. Bounded AC and saves or not, having 20 hit dice offers a certain insurance. Fireball and other standards simply cannot threaten someone with enough HP. They have to be superseded by bigger, stronger spells.
This was actually one of the explicit motivations for E6. Stopping before casters get 4th-circle spells was intended to rule out some of the more absolute effects—globe of invulnerability, dimension door, enervation.
Yup it still has issues, but it does make 30 basic goblin archers able to actually hit and damage a high level party in a way that 30 goblin archers in 3/3.5 would have been unable to do. And if using cover/prepared positions the party might actually miss them in return on occasion.
Spell casters are as always the fly in the ointment. Whether there should be a martial/caster divide in power/utility levels and if so how big it should be has been an ongoing debate since Elves were both a class and a race, Pathfinder 2E has kind of answered one way DnD 4th tried to answer another and got scorched whereas 5th (and the upcoming 5.5 or whatever it will be) basically wearily throws up its hands and says fine, you want Linear Warriors and Quadratic Wizards, then you have them, but just slightly less so than 3rd.
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I was forgetting about E6. “Epic 6,” due to borrowing the post-level-cap advancement system from a particular Epic Handbook. I think I’ve seen a couple variants.
Also reminds me of this argument for modeling our world’s heroes as low-level characters.
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