Ralif Redhammer
Legend
So, spinning off from the Not-TSR thread, I thought I'd try starting a separate thread for specifically discussing Appendix N's influences on the game.
@Mannahnin said that "the game itself is definitely not a particularly good Tolkien emulator." Very true, but I would go further in that it's not really great at directly emulating any single Appendix N work. It's hard to picture Conan, for example, striding into a dungeon and getting dissolved by green slime - the indomitable Cimmerian is, I would posit, far more easily brought to life in 5e with its nigh-superheroic characters.*
And that's okay - what makes D&D so great is that it is not any one single thing, but a stew of influences. Tolkien, REH, Anderson, Leiber, Vance, et al. It's all of them and none of them.
*This is also something I think about a lot with DCC RPG. It frequently emulates the high lethality of early D&D, but if you look at Appendix N, characters frequently survive against all odds, again and again.
@Mannahnin said that "the game itself is definitely not a particularly good Tolkien emulator." Very true, but I would go further in that it's not really great at directly emulating any single Appendix N work. It's hard to picture Conan, for example, striding into a dungeon and getting dissolved by green slime - the indomitable Cimmerian is, I would posit, far more easily brought to life in 5e with its nigh-superheroic characters.*
And that's okay - what makes D&D so great is that it is not any one single thing, but a stew of influences. Tolkien, REH, Anderson, Leiber, Vance, et al. It's all of them and none of them.
*This is also something I think about a lot with DCC RPG. It frequently emulates the high lethality of early D&D, but if you look at Appendix N, characters frequently survive against all odds, again and again.