Questing in Elfgames II - LotR as D&D AKA 'Ring-Quest'

Following on from the last posts about the (lack of) epic scope in D&D, I'm looking at the relationship between D&D and the literature that is supposed to have spawned it. Out of everything, I'm most familiar with the work of Tolkien so that's where I'm going for the majority of my examples.

So I'll look particularly at LotR, from the perspective D&D. What happens in 'adventure' terms is Gandalf tells Frodo that Bilbo's Ring is the One Ring and that it must be destroyed. That's just a bit of backstory as a plot-hook. The meat of the matter is that Frodo is to meet Gandalf at Bree. After some preparation and prevarication, Frodo, Sam and Pippin travel towards Buckland. They meet a Black Rider, Gildor and his Elves, and Farmer Maggot. Then they meet Merry and Fatty. After that, Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin head into the Old Forest, to have adventures with Old Man Willow, Tom and Goldberry, Barrow-Wights (afterwards, they get proper armament during some tomb-looting) and on to Bree to meet Gandalf.

So apart from the 'proto-Fellowship' of Frodo, Sam, Merry, Pippin (and the missing Gandalf), we already have potential PCs in Gildor Inglorion and some other Elves; Farmer Maggot and Grip, Fang and Wolf; Fatty Bolger; Tom Bombadil and Goldberry, who could all potentially have joined the 'party' (for what is the Fellowship if not a D&D party?).

But Gandalf isn't at Bree. They meet Strider who offers to take them to Rivendell. Meanwhile, more Black Rider action. They set off across country. In a beautiful touch (in my opinion) they find the cave of Bilbo's trolls (the relationship between The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings is more than I can go into here, but it provides a nice backstory at least). More encounters with Ringwraiths ensue. Then the party meets Glorfindel and the race to the ford is on.

So - the Hobbits' original quest is small: take the Ring to Bree. Even then Fatty doesn't come; and Schrodinger's Fellowships of Farmer Maggot and his dogs, Gildor, Tom and Golberry must remain entirely speculative. The next stage of the quest - really a new quest - is 'take the Ring to Rivendell'. During this phase the party is again joined by an Elf-lord, in this case Glorfindel (or Legolas or Arwen if you want to bring in the filmic versions, and why not, they're all potential narratives? In D&D terms, three DMs running this adventure had different PCs in the party here: the fact that JRR Gygax has Glorfindel maybe doesn't make a lot of difference. Maybe it does because the original story is listed in 'Appendix N'; I don't know, but it's a demonstration that the same story can be told differently).

Then at Rivendell something else happens. The Ring, it is decided, must go to Mordor. But the heroes - 4 Level 1 Halflings, a Level 6(?) Ranger-Paladin (Cleric in Basic D&D terms I think) and a highish-level Magic User - are joined by a Dwarf, an Elf and a (Human) Fighter. But, that means Legolas, Gimli and Boromir must subsume their own quests to the 'Ring-Quest'. For Boromir that's OK - his quest was to go to Rivendell to understand the prophetic dreams he and Faramir were having. They were linked with the Ring anyway - and the 'Ring-Quest' is leading him back home. For Legolas and Gimli, the links are more tangential, and the quest would end up taking them far from home. Yes, the mysterious Dark Messenger that had arrived at Erebor was sent by Sauron. Yes, Gollum's escape was orchestrated by Sauron's agents. It's all linked. But the 'Ring-Quest' was not Gimli's, Legolas's or even Boromir's to begin with.

Looking at Legolas for an example... in D&D terms, there is a party of Elves whose task is to hunt for and then guard an enemy spy - they're helped by a higher-level NPC ranger and NPC wizard (because to a PC everyone else is an NPC... Legolas doesn't know they're PCs in a different adventure). They have a fight with Orcs, the prisoner escapes, so they must hunt him, but also go and tell the other Elf-Lords that the prisoner has escaped... once at the stronghold of the 'other' Elf-Lord they have the possibility of a side-quest to find some lost travellers (Bakshi the DM's use of Legolas in place of Glorfindel trying to find the Hobbits here). Then there's a big meeting and a new quest is proposed - the 'Ring-Quest'. The Legolas PC volunteers for this quest.

Is there a way to simulate this in Elfgames? Along with the Wandering Monsters and Random Treasure, is there a way to generate these 'big-scale' evolving plots, in any meaningful way that preserves player agency? It should go without saying that PCs are puppets only of their players, not of 'fate' (ie the DM), and should only have control taken from them in relatively-trivial short-lived situations (eg being under a magical compulsion such as a spell, or a cursed Ring of course).

It should also go without saying that actions should have consequences. Frodo taking the Ring to Mount Doom saved the West. Likewise, Schrodinger's Frodo not taking the Ring to Mount Doom allowed the Nazgul to seize it and return it Sauron. Alternatively, Gildor took it to Tom and they took it to Rivendell, where the Council of Elrond proceeded very differently. PCs should be allowed to refuse quests, or 'do them differently', as Gildor, Fatty, Tom, Goldberry, Barliman, Glorfindel, Erastor, Elladan, Elrohir and Elrond himself (for example) all demonstrate.

There is something like the standard D&D character-path in LotR, to be fair, but it's way in the background and almost totally unexplored. Aragorn's previous career as Thorongil, effectively a wandering soldier in the south; Boromir's earlier service in the army of Gondor; Aragorn, Elladan and Elrohir as Imladrian exterminators, going and breaking up Orc-infestations in the Trollshaws and Misty Mountains: all of these somewhat resemble the way D&D is played, but these are only the background to the story, not the story itself.

What this might imply is that, when they get to higher levels, PCs might be involved in something like the Ring-Quest. Levels 1-5 of D&D are 'the bit before the book happens', or something like that. But it might also imply that in terms of the Lord of the Rings, the PCs are Sir Not Appearing in the Film, and it's the 'other' characters that get the story - rather than one of the PCs, it's the NPC in the inn that the PCs didn't hire as a guide that turns out to be the lost heir of the Ancient Kingdom... the rival NPC party going the other way in the caves is the one that has the world-spanning adventure and confronts the Dark Lord after levelling up 7 times, etc.

Either way, D&D is not simulating fantasy literature. The stories we read are not the stories we are generating for the PCs. The party is not a group of heroes: the party isn't 'The Fellowship of the Ring', it's the 'Fellowship of the Freelance Pest-Controllers', which of course you've never heard of, because no-one wrote about them (except Ghostbusters obviously... but even then the Ghostbusters get to save New York, which is like getting to save Minas Tirith as a first adventure... which First Level party gets to do that?). It's either 'to early' in the career of the hero/heroes, in which case the PCs don't get to do epic stuff until half-way through the 'Expert' set and all the early stuff is just a bit of background, or the PCs, and/or the things they are doing, are not important enough to feature in the fantasy literature at all.

So is level the problem? Is it that fantasy literature is actually about 9th Level characters? I don't think it is. The Hobbits (all of them), the characters in the Many Coloured Land or the Fionavar Tapestry or Daggerspell or Magician or the Forge in the Forest or The Belgariad are 1st Level, surely? Some have particular skills or talents but mostly they are just starting out. They have help and guidance from people who know more about the world (Gandalf, Loren, Belgarath or whoever) but the 'heroes' are just beginners mostly.

Is it then that there aren't enough 'mentors' or 'patrons' around? Is the stricture not to go adventuring with mixed-level parties a part of the problem? Could it be that we need more 9th Level wizards telling the PCs legends and the history of magic artefacts and warning them about Dark Lords and digging out lost heirs... or even being lost heirs? Or can the PCs do that themselves without a Gandalf or a Loren Silvercloak or a Belgarath, a Dain Ironfoot or Thranduil or Elrond, without some lord to send them on a mission or magical mentor to help guide them? Maybe, as many characters in literature have this, PCs need a patron to give them quests (this is what the guy who gives you missions in Traveller is called... "Responding to a job advert, you meet at a sleazy spacers' bar near the Starport - a thin balding man approaches and introduces himself as Alan Eborp before offering you a ...").

Let's assume there are 100 quests started every year. If only one is legendary (ie written about) every 50 years (for example) then there must be 4,999 quests in that time that aren't important enough. But the one that is written about should be the PCs' quest. The story that the PCs are involved in should (surely?) be the most important one around.

Or is this all completely wrong? Ignoring 'Appendix N' and all the rest, the claims that D&D is a game where the DM and players write a fantasy novel, is D&D (or anything like it) really that game?

OK - a caveat: in D&D there must be the possibility (should be an even chance at a guess but explaining why I think that would probably take another post) that the quest will get to the Dead Marshes/edge of Fangorn, and the Nazgul on the Fell Beast finds Frodo and Sam/Grishnakh kills Merry and Pippin. It should be possible for the PCs to fail. But it should be possible for them to fail at massive and heroic things, rather than failing at tiny and insignificant things.

If Tolkien had written a short story about how some young men (or young Hobbits, I don't mind) had been spooked by sinister horsemen and run away to the woods and never come back, that would be fine. If the story had been that, it would have assumed a Lovecraftian significance I think (what's in the woods? Who are the mysterious black riders?). That's OK, you can start to build a game on that. But the 'heroes' would be the investigators who go and find out what's really going on... and then perhaps have to fight off the Nazgul and become Ringbearers themselves... so 'Ring-Quest' continues, with different protagonists.

I don't know. Pratchett says that stories want to be told. Why then are fantasy games such a resistant medium to telling them?

Jens has turned me on to the 'Random Narrative Generator'. This is a good thing - it beats just checking the 'Big List of RPG Plots' and hoping for the best. Not that there is anything wrong with the Big List of RPG Plots. But Jens has integrated a list of story-themes into a set of tables that can be directly plugged into the setting - with a bit of thinking about how they integrate into the 'story', such as it might be. They will be my new way to generate plot across different scales and I'll give the players the opportunity to join in with them. I shall try this out and maybe it can start to push me towards answering some of these questions.