Why hate Tolkien-esque settings?

My problem with DnD is that it's just too high fantasy, to the point where magic stops being something extraordinary and starts feeling mundane.
I don't have anything against high fantasy, but if you overdo it, I think it kills the fantasy in the setting.

I know that feel.

The issue with DnD is that it's entirely directionless. It isn't high fantasy because it wants to be low fantasy in some of it's elements, it's not low fantasy because it wants to be high fantasy in more of it's elements. It doesn't even have anything to do with it being high fantasy because none of the magic is fantastic. Everything is quantified and set in stone because it wants to act like it's balanced and every mechanic it has gets in the way of telling a story. It's has all the very worst elements of a high-crunch system with none of the benefits. You can have a high fantasy setting where magic is used to get yourself out of bed in the morning and it will still be fantastic, the issue is with outright system design which is flawed on a base level.

Wizard-centric stories can be done right though. You just have to treat them as people.

I mean, I would be okay with a couple of wizards (that are extraordinary individuals thanks to their power) existing in the world and trying to save the day (nit by themselves, but with help). My problem is when everyone becomes a wizard and when there is a spell for everything.
For example, if you have a mind reading spell, there is no need for detectives or lawyers, you just need wizards.
Need to fly? Fuck the pilots and tinkerers, you just need wizards.
Seriously, this needs to stop. We are getting to the point where everyone, at birth, is going to become a wizard, because apparently wizards are the only thing this world needs.

>B-b-but those things take spell slots! SO THEY'RE ENTIRELY BALANCED!

The DnDrone autists screamed, their spittle dribbling down their chin and combining with the shit coming out of their mouth like a diarrhea waterfall.

At this point, I am honestly surprised that there isn't a spell that restores spell slots.
That is just how fucked DnD and other extreme high fantasy settings are.

Detectives and Lawyers become even more redundant than that when you can just cast detect good and evil and find out whether someone is guilty. I'd like to see a setting where the inhabitants just cast that on their newborn youth and slaughter the evil ones before they are capable of commiting anything.

It's like B movie ripping-off Rambo First Blood without understanding why it works.

It's called fucking off into a pocket dimension and taking a long rest. In 3.5/Pathfinder, this is particularly retarded because you can alter the flow of time in your pocket dimension so only a few seconds pass in the real world while you take a few hours to rest.

Yet again an issue with DnD's design of 'everything needs to be quantified'. Not an issue with high fantasy. DnD is a holy cow made almost entirely out of other holy cows and either needs to be entirely remade from the ground up (which people would shit their pants about) or scrapped entirely.

Gary Gygax was more into Conan. He didn't like Tolkien's writings at all. Tolkien influence came from his friends, if I remember right.

This more or less.
People only takes the cosmetic apects of tolkien, and even then they do so badly. I love Tolkien work, like hard core fan, but I hate the DnD and other "fantasy" than are a kitchen sink without any kind of amalgamating history/idea of why are things like that. USA "pop" made RPGS are the worst at that, tough there are a few than get it right.
Strangely enough I love the setting of FF game books, but I don't know if its because the largely satire of all it, nostalgia or the top tier art than put it all together.

because it has filthy elves and legit all-powerful wizards. This triggers the badwrongfun male human fighters

They did try to do that with 4e.

4e had casters with extremely limited, focused, thematic spell lists that couldn't do everything, martials that actually had options and cool things to do in combat, and status that actually changed based on remaining HP.

DnDrones fucking HATED it, and flocked to Pathfinder in droves, until 5e brought back the "mages have cheat codes for every aspect of the game" design-philosophy.

Here's the keyword: "esque." I personally don't mind heavily Tolkien-inspired settings, but many people view it as a mark of unoriginality, and think that if you want to play a "Tolkien-esque" setting you should just play a Tolkein setting instead of "it's like Middle Earth BUT..."

4e only really made the issue worse by trying to quantify even more: What can a dude with a sword do? How many times can he do it per day? What are the exact effects of said action? How long is 'a day'? Sure, they threw out many of the issues but they only ended up reinventing most of the core problems because DnD still has to be like DnD.

There are only 4 all powerful wizards in the entire population though.

I think magic should be a thing where you can have Han Solo-like characters who call it a bullshit ancient religion. It can be powerful enough to get shit done, but rare enough throughout history that people can doubt its very existence. Of course, Star Wars itself royally screwed the pooch on that one by turning a weird power a guy had to go to a buttfuck nowhere planet to learn into something thousands of guys walked around with every day within the focus of the main story.

I don't; I just don't like Tolkien's writing that much.

There's quite literally a thousand as many populated planets in the Republic as there are Jedi, so I think it's fine.

>Dorfs
There is nothing wrong with Dorfs as playable characters in a LotR game. Now elves, that's where it gets fucky, so it should be either All Elf or No Elf

>Why do you dislike Tolkien influenced in your settings, Veeky Forums?

Because it's old, and old things are boring and bad.

Are we doing one of these again?

>obligatory quote of Gaygax

"Tolkien includes a number of heroic figures, but they are not of the "Conan" stamp. They are not larger-than-life swashbucklers who fear neither monster nor magic. His wizards are either ineffectual or else they lurk in their strongholds working magic spells which seem to have little if any effect while their gross and stupid minions bungle their plans for supremacy. Religion with its attendant gods and priests he includes not at all. These considerations, as well as a comparison of the creatures of Tolkien's writings with the models they were drawn from (or with a hypothetical counterpart desirable from a wargame standpoint) were in mind when Chainmail and Dungeons & Dragons were created."
Source:grognardia.blogspot.com.tr/2010/01/gygax-on-tolkien-again.html

>obligatory remark that D&D is more of a dungeon crawl rather than a roleplaying game so the point is trying to burn the slots of caster with combat, it falls apart the moment you are trying worldbuild with D&D levels magic

>obligatory advice to anybody who is displeased with the levels of magic and fantasy of D&D to try Mythras.

Legolas isn't that much better at doing things than Gimli or Boromir or Aragorn. The days of Feanor and Fingolfin are long gone by the time LotR takes place. The only really powerful elves we see on page are Elrond, Galadriel and Glorfindel

REEEEE WIZARDS CASTER SUPERIRIOTY REEEEEE!
>loud, violent defecation
It matters not if there are only 4 or one in 4. The badwrongfun hive-mind of Veeky Forums detests the fantastic in all its forms

Note that I said "within the focus of the main story." Even if they are rare by galactic standards, it cheapens it for the viewer to have a literal army of them running around. Not to mention you have the power creep of Yoda going from barely being able to lift an X-Wing in ESB to him sweeping aside a whole phalanx of droidekas in the Genndy cartoon.

Genndy cartoon isn't canon, primarily because he just can't stop going over the top.
Yoda's duel with Dooku would be a better example I think

>your game's old, no one likes old stuff
>such as old bikes with big wheels
>they aren't good
>your game must be made of wood

And therefore a witch

Indeed, and Mirkwood Elves were the main playable elf culture early on. I think they've increased it with the elves of Lothlorien and the High Elves of Rivendell, and the latter are a "special" culture like the Rangers of the North/Dunedain. Really, the Lord of the Rings never really contained overpowered characters. Not in the way D&D players would imagine them. The argument could be made for the first age with bigshots like Fëanor, Fingolfin etc, but that time is long since passed and is even more mythological than LotR.

fucking gygax

Didn't he write for a Tolkien fanzine in his youth? Because that whole statement reads like someone who either didn't bother to read Tolkien, or misunderstood him completely.

The One Ring does this very well, I think. You'll only ever encounter magic in the form of magical items with special properties, and even then they're not about massive displays of power, but things like glowing blue when the weapon's "bane creature" (ie its intended foe) is nearby, like how Sting glows when orcs are near. Or in the case of a ranged weapon; a bow that always shoots true whether it's storming or very dark (letting the wielder ignore any negative modifiers for his ranged attacks)

Then of course the dwarves have a cultural virtue they can get called Broken Spells which includes a few half-remembered spells of old, like marking your campsite with a certain rune, and being made aware of any who breach it, but that's roughly it as far as magical power levels go.

To be fair, some of us haters had no issue with the classes, and instead complained about the rest (like skills, the (seeming) default to boardgame movement, and how the tiers worked).

Because frankly, 4e *nailed* classes (in the opinion of this PF fan).

>but there seems to be a generally negative approach towards Tolkien-esque settings on Veeky Forums

Try not to lose any sleep over the opinions and attitudes of people on this board.

Ultimately, it doesn't matter what a bunch of strangers from the internet think.

as other anons have said, part and part of the badwrongfun Veeky Forums hive mind, you won't really find any interesting or thoughtful arguments against a Tolkeinesque setting itt, or any others for that matter. sometimes you'll even see an user mock this attitude, e.g. 'what was Tolkein's tax policy?'

you forgot to understand Tolkein elves correctly

>DnDrone autists

This inflammatory label pretty much sums up all the reasons why you shouldn't care what the angry contrarian neckbeards on Veeky Forums think.

Only here on this board will you find this kind of shameless self-destructive spite aimed at the very genres you'd expect people here to protect and care about. Probably because DnD is becoming more popular.

The problem I have with people trying to copy Tolkien's world-building approach, aesthetics and general tone is that the get it COMPLETELY FUCKING WRONG, and they do it over and over and over, to a point where it literally became a canon of the entire genre and medium.

Tolkien himself, and his work, are absolutely amazing, admirable, and quite seriously underrated and misunderstood. But the attempts to emulate him have failed, one by one. Not a single one got even close to his work - all I see fantasy world-building doing these days is absolute butchering of his work. It's actually this COMPLETE misunderstanding of what he did (people are actually still fucking dumb enough to think that Tolkien wrote his fiction in a speculative, "world first story second" fashion for fuck sake!) and absolute refusal to draw away from his tropes that turned Fantasy, one of the potentially most fascinating genres of fiction, into what it is today: Pure, undilluted garbage.

So yeah, I don't blame Tolkien for it, but people who are still trying to emulate him are part of the problem of this genre.

Pretty sure his process went:
Languages --> Mythology and stories --> World --> Adventure narratives (Hobbit and LotR)

With each step influencing its predecessor back

>Mythology and stories
Should be "Mythology, Poetry and other in-setting stories"

Actually, no. So first of all, what the everliving fuck is an "adventure narrative" and how does that differ from "stories" in the mythology and story step?
Second of all, what is the difference between the "world" and "mythology"?

You really, really get all of this completely fucking wrong. IT'S ALL MYTHOLOGY. It has never been anything else but telling stories. The "world" is just a character in the myth, it's part of the myth, it's a fucking story-fucking-always-fucking-first-and-FUCKING ONLY THING THAT FUCKING MATTERS.

I don't know about you, but ever since I heard about the Golden Age and Jedi way back, I wanted to see a bunch of Jedi fucking shit up. So I was pretty happy with that in the Prequels and Cartoon.

It's always the same thing with special elements in stories, be it Jedi, Space Marines or Wizards. People want see and do THAT instead of the remaining 99.9% of the world and I can't fault them for it. If you make something way cooler than most of the other stuff, you are drawn to that.

The funniest thing is that adventure narratives were created on their own, but later were tied with Silmarilion mythos. Technically Tolkien's work were indeed "world first story second", but in case of Tolkien it simply worked. Not everyone had the same background as Tolkien, but for some reason a ton of hack frauds felt obligated to do the same.

I'm assuming the people who separated mythology from the world are implying there is an underlying mythology which affects the world at a somewhat different level than a simple history/backstory would.

The world itself is explored only within mythological narratives and the like of LotR/The Hobbit. Tolkien didn't write stories for a map he'd made, he made a map for the stories he had written.

Yes, these are people who assume that the world is speculative, driven by internal rules and needs for internal consistency. These people believe that Tolkien's stories "naturally emerge" from the rules of the world. They believe that Tolkien speculated - set up some rules (explained through the myths) and then asked himself "if the world was driven by rules like this, what kind of stories would happen in that world?".
But that is, I firmly believe, getting the whole point completely backasswards: the whole point was to tell stories - great, classical mythological tales, and everything only then naturally emerged to accomodate those great mythological tales. The tales themselves, as most mythological stories, are driven by ethical and aesthetical sensibilities, not by casualities and rationality.

Tolkien was amazing, truly amazing and he managed to make these tales feel highly consistent and interconnected, making people think the consistency is the point, but it's not - it's a by-product.
And this is why virtually all attempts to emulate Tolkien fail. They fail to understand that his strength lies in the strength of the core STORIES, not in the world that only exist to accommodate them.

Because none of the multitude of others approach the quality of the original, yet there are so damn many of them.

Something that bothers me is how people go out of their way to subvert all these tropes that originated with Tolkien. The thing is; they've often lost track of what they're actually trying to subvert, "raging" against some "boring original" that they either haven't read or don't understand.