Hobbits and Habilitation

Here's about the worst confession I could ever make here. I'll play it out as a historical drama. It was early in 2002, Peter Jackson's Fellowship of the Ring had just come out, and I was interviewing for a job at Turbine for the Dungeons & Dragons Online team. I thought we were having a wonderful get-together, and I was generously invited out to lunch with two of the producers.Then this happened:

Producer: "Have you seen the new Lord of the Rings movie?"

Me: "Oh yes! I loved it. I've actually seen it three times!"

Producer: "But do you think you'd appreciate it as much if you'd never read the books?"

Me: "But that's just it -- I've never read Lord of the Rings."

Is that what scuppered the job offer? Who knows? But here it is 16 years later -- and I've still never read Lord of the Rings.

Let's be honest: D&D junkie that I am/was, a lot of this is due to Gygax-worship. In the aftermath of the cease-and-desist letter from the Tolkien estate, he made a whiplash-inducing change of direction to consistently deny any cross-pollination between D&D and Middle Earth. Even to the point of badmouthing Tolkien's work in print. (E,g., in Dragon #95: "Considered in the light of fantasy action adventure, Tolkien is not dynamic. Gandalf is quite ineffectual, plying a sword at times and casting spells which are quite low-powered (in terms of the D&D game). Obviously, neither he nor his magic had any influence on the games... "). Fanboy that I was, a largely inherited a distaste for Tolkien from reading all that propaganda.

I do think that I've managed to discard the hero-worship at this point (and try to escort others in that direction as necessary), and committed to finally reading those works on my winter break this year. Starting with The Hobbit, which I recently completed. I have some thoughts on that as a decades-long fantasy gamer -- and of course the way I process such things is here on the blog. Of course, you probably already know everything here, but let me organize my thoughts below:

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Concerning Hobbits

It seems like we can identify five major traits that Tolkien repeats about Hobbits (see also here):

• Stealth (hiding & moving silently)
• Stout and durable (good, or at least equal saves)
• Deadly ranged attacks (due to eyesight)
• Excellent eyesight (better than dwarves in dark)
• Slower than dwarves

The first three -- stealth, saves, and shooting -- are pretty consistently represented in any edition of D&D. Regarding stealth, most of the emphasis is on the Hobbit being able to instantly disappear in undergrowth in the wilderness; but Bilbo is also silent underground (Ch. 12: "So silent was his going that smoke on a gentle wind could hardly have surpassed it, and he was inclined to feel a bit proud of himself as he drew near the lower door."), although we might pin this to skill in the D&D Thief class.

But the last two items do not figure so prominently in D&D. The constant emphasis on Bilbo's amazing vision is probably the top point of highlight in The Hobbit. In Ch. 4, Bilbo is so slow compared to dwarves that it is faster for him to be carried by them like a satchel; yet in Chainmail and classic D&D, halflings are given a much higher standard move rate than dwarves.

Elves & Dwarves

There are several tropes here that are usually mentioned in passing in D&D, and yet I'm somewhat unused to seeing them get played out live. Such as: We usually get a line that elves & dwarves don't trust each other, but I've never seen a game where elves literally imprison dwarves, or in which they march armies against each other (as in The Hobbit). It would seem that the D&D alignment system in which they are both in the Good classification squeezes out that rivalry. Likewise: truly near-sinister elves, and dwarves being greedy to the point of unreason and violence ("There it is: dwarves are not heroes, but calculating folk with a great idea of the value of money; some are tricky and treacherous and pretty bad lots...") are themes I should perhaps work into my games more.

Also the refrains of dwarves casting spells to make powerful weapons and armor are of course familiar from mythology, and somewhat at odds with D&D. They have some unique gear in that regard ("Each one of his folk was clad in a hauberk of steel mail that hung to his knees, and his legs were covered with hose of a fine and flexible metal mesh, the secret of whose making was possessed by Dain’s people..."). So too the elven army may possibly have magic weapons throughout ("Their
spears and swords shone in the gloom with a gleam of chill flame, so deadly was the wrath of the hands that held them"); a trait which is fairly evident in early Chainmail, for example, but transitions into a special +1 skill in later editions.

On Geography

There's a motif in which each geographic area seems to have main controlling intelligent race. This is kind of a nice idea, in that it focuses the idea of the area, and presents nice opportunities for roleplaying and political complications (kind of a B2 or D1-3 on steroids; lots of races who can be played off one another). 

Additionally, every region has a distinct flavor and monster population. This is not so evident if we use D&D-style encounter tables keyed only by terrain type. We can consider transitioning to a model where every region has its own encounter table: perhaps just 1-6 options will suffice. We would do well to compare to the D&D underground charts, which in truth represent the Castle Greyhawk population, and other dungeons get custom tables; likewise, the D&D wilderness tables are really the Outdoor Survival-style wilderness locale, and perhaps other lands should get their own custom tables.

Underground tunnels don't fit on 10' scale graph paper; they always go for many miles, bypassing hills and mountains and entire regions above ground (think: Goblin caves, Smaug's mountain, etc.) Perhaps this argues for more D1-style mile-hex underground regions around the campaign world.

On Animals

Consider that every animal species apparently is apt to be intelligent, speak a language, and have some sort of ruling prince. E.g.: Wolves, spiders, eagles, thrushes, crows, bats, etc. Bears and horses appear to obey Beorn, at least. The birds and bats all serve as spies and messengers for different humanoid races. I don't think there's a single "normal" (unreasoning) animal in the entire work.

This is something you can observe in the earliest D&D works: the propensity for any animal to speak and possibly threaten or negotiate with the PCs. In times past I thought this was simply sloppy nigh-oversights by the dungeon designers. Have read The Hobbit, I'm maybe looking in a direction where that really does offer more points for roleplaying activity. (And language acquisition.)

On Dragons

In the earliest printings of Chainmail, Gygax had written this:

We will deal here with the great Red Dragon Draco  Conflagratio, or Draco Horribilis) which is typified in Tolkien's THE HOBBIT... 

So classic D&D dragons represent Smaug, despite how later power inflation might make that seem unreasonable to later players. The main thing that troubles me about that is the scene in Lake-town, where Smaug makes a lengthy attack, and the hosts of men fire arrows by the volley with no effect against him, at least until Bard uses his "Black arrow". (Big money quote: "I am armoured above and below with iron scales and hard gems. No blade can pierce me.")

Having crunched copious statistics for Book of War and the Monster Metrics program in the past, one of my primary observations -- and conclusions that surprise other players -- is that D&D dragons with their AC 2 go down real fast to mass missile fire. Like, they're pretty much insta-killed by 30 or 40 normal men archers. Now, in Chainmail, dragons are indeed immune to attacks by any normal men; they can only be hit by special hero-types or monsters -- much like wights, wraiths, elementals, and wizards. Note that the first three in that list are hit only by silver or magic; wizards have the "protection from normal missiles" spells which replicates their defense. But because dragons do not have that in D&D, they are pretty vulnerable to normal men, and not a major threat on the open battlefield. Perhaps that really does cry out for a little edit (noting that later editions do given older dragons a defense in this direction, with the 2E text almost directly quoting the description from The Hobbit).