A Ranger, a Wizard, an Elf, and a Halfling Walk Into a Tavern…

And the bartender says, “What is this, a party?”
…
All right, well, that would’ve gone over a lot better at my D&D game.
For those of you who don’t know me–which is, uh, most of you, I imagine–I’m Ari Marmell. For some years now, I’ve been doing both freelance writing for role-playing games, and RPG tie-in fiction, all while working toward publishing original fiction. Spectra’s releasing my first such novel, The Conqueror’s Shadow, as of next month. They’ve invited me to contribute to Suvudu, and, well, here I am. I figure that, at least initially, I’ll be using this column to talk about some of the connections, interactions, and shared history between role-playing games (the old-fashioned tabletop variety, like Dungeons & Dragons, not the online games) and fantasy fiction. After the first few installments on that topic, I’ll see where the muse takes me from there.
Or where you guys want me to go from there. Whichever. I’m easy.

Also, everything that follows is my own analysis (read: guesswork), based on what I know, think I know, or am willing to pretend I know. It’s quite possibly wrong, but hey, that’s why I normally write fiction.
These days, the fantasy fiction mainstream doesn’t pay as much attention to fantasy tabletop gaming as it used to. Oh, sure, people notice when R.A. Salvatore’s or Paul S. Kemp’s latest Forgotten Realms novels become bestsellers, but games like D&D just aren’t as prevalent as they used to be. That’s partly because online fantasy games such as World of Warcraft have user bases that dwarf the tabletop audience, and partly because the sorts of fantasy that are popular today have expanded well beyond the traditional fantasy depicted in most RPGs. Today, you’ll find that the bulk of tabletop fantasy RPGs tend to mirror fantasy fiction, rather than to guide it. The most successful ones, like the current and most recent incarnations of Dungeons & Dragons (as well as its successful offshoots, like Pathfinder), reflect the current zeitgeist of fantasy. What I mean by that is, they tend to look at what’s currently popular in fantasy, or at least what’s been popular recently, and run with it. D&D’s current edition, for instance, has taken the more “high-magic” approach, whose popularity is reflected in many current online games and more action-oriented fantasy. It’s a slight departure from the game’s older editions, due to a (fully understandable) desire to keep up with the market.
On the other hand, a number of the successful “second-tier” fantasy RPGs succeed not by reflecting the current trends, but by deliberately appealing to smaller “niche” markets that still enjoy older sorts of fantasy that have fallen outside of mainstream appeal.* For instance, games that focus on a more old-fashioned down-and-dirty sword-and-sorcery fantasy–Conan, Elric, Solomon Kane–tend not to have the broad appeal of other games, but often tap into a sufficiently loyal market to make at least a moderate success of themselves.
*Or at least, conventional wisdom maintains that they’ve fallen outside mainstream appeal. I’m not so sure of that, and I’ll address that in a future column.
The point that I’m (gradually) getting to is that, regardless of which direction they choose to go, fantasy RPGs of today are a microcosm of fantasy fiction, and only a portion of fantasy fiction, at that. If it’s popular in fantasy–either in the mainstream, or among certain diehard fan bases–you’ll almost certainly find it appearing within the RPG community. And again, that makes sense; these games are competing with everything from online gaming to their own older editions, so following the trends is not only smart, but arguably mandatory.
But it’s definitely a change from the early days of gaming and the early heyday of fantasy fiction. Both role-playing and certainly fantasy fiction existed well before the 1980s, but I think one could argue that it was during this time that both achieved the first of their major peaks of popularity. In the ’80s, everyone had heard of D&D–even if many of them only did so because of the ludicrous “Satanic” nonsense that was being spread at the time–and this was also when a large number of fantasy novels began hitting the best-seller charts.
And it was during this time that one of the basic models of fantasy fiction–the “adventuring party” consisting of disparate races, and people with different skills, banding together to achieve some epic goal–really seemed to become the core of “standard” fantasy. Obviously, this isn’t where that model originated; Grandpa Tolkien did that. But in the decades following Tolkien, while some fantasy followed that model, plenty more did not. Much of the pre-D&D fantasy, from Moorcock to Vance, was nearer in feel to pre-Tolkien sword and sorcery.
So what tipped the scale? Why, in the ’80s, did the “party” model of epic fantasy, become so prevalent that, even today, huge amounts of fantasy fiction make use of it? I’d argue that it was because of Dungeons & Dragons. Unlike today, the D&D game (as well as a few others) of the time weren’t just reflecting the fantasy zeitgeist, they were steering them.
Partly, this was because D&D was a greater part of the fantasy “consciousness” at the time. Fantasy fiction was just coming into its own, and there was a larger portion of overlap between fantasy gamers and fantasy readers than there is today. (Well, that may not be true of online RPGs, but again, I’m talking tabletop.) But it’s also because a lot of fantasy writers were drawing ideas from their own gaming experiences. Raymond Feist’s Midkemia and Steven Brust’s Dragaeran Empire, just to name two influential examples, were both based–albeit only in part–on ideas, characters, and/or events taken from their own gaming experiences. Whether this was because more readers were also gamers, and therefore more writers were gamers, or because these games attracted people with the same sorts of creative impulses as the writing profession, I can’t say. (Though I have my theories.) And of course, this was also the time when several pieces of gaming-related fiction–such as the Dragonlance series–also became mainstream successes.
Add to this the fact that the D&D “model” also happens to correspond to a very effective model for character development in fiction: specifically, the hero’s journey (as described by Joseph Campbell). In most RPGs, characters begin as relative weaklings, and (rather rapidly) advance to the status of uber-heroes. You’ve seen this elsewhere in (just for example) a certain farm boy from Tatooine. Luke Something-or-other. It’s far from the only way to tell a story about your main characters, but it’s a common, popular, and effective one. So the fact that the games already overlapped a great deal with not just fantasy, but basic aspects of storytelling, doubtless factored into their influence as well.
The result of all of this is that the precepts of fantasy gaming (D&D primarily, but others as well) made their way ever more frequently into fantasy writing–and because the fans, for the most part, liked those books, it created a demand for even more fantasy of that same sort. For the first (and arguably last) time, fantasy gaming was strongly influencing the direction of written fantasy fiction–and this, in turn, intertwined the history of those two hobbies to an extent that, even today, they cannot entirely be separated. To fully study the overall fantasy genre today, one must include RPGs as well as novels, movies, and the like.
All of which is particularly ironic considering the fact that D&D was written to reflect the fantasy tastes of its creators, Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax–and those tastes most assuredly did not run to the high-fantasy/high-magic/Tolkien-esque. But more on that next time, along with my explanation as to why the current sword-and-sorcery “resurgence” isn’t a resurgence and all, and why “tie-in” isn’t an ugly word.