"[Dave Arneson] began running a heavily modified campaign about a group of feudal lords charged with protecting their fiefdoms from invading armies. Between battles, Arneson gave his players the option of exploring dungeons to fight monsters and find magical treasures, while he himself took on the unusual role of “referee.” Before long, players had gotten so absorbed in dungeon delving they began to neglect the defense of the realm. “Well, all that running around in the dungeons finally got the castle wiped out while our flock of heroes went looking for adventure and treasure,” Arneson drolly reported in his newsletter. “Our priest got drunk and engaged in a totally debauched orgy in Wizard’s wood while Swenson’s freehold burned to the ground.” Gygax thought this sounded like a game in its own right; his daughter liked the name Dungeons & Dragons.
The game was a massive success, especially among fantasy readers. But there was, as Gerald Nachtwey puts it, an aspect of ludicrousness in the fantasy role-playing game that the fantasy novel, if it could not eliminate it, had tried to discourage. Tolkien, in his 1947 essay “On Fairy-stories,” had written that fantasy was the province of literature, where the natural glamour of the written word could make anything plausible. Dungeons & Dragons was more akin to the Gothic plays put on by the March sisters, whose magical proceedings are undercut by amateur stage effects, collapsing scenery, and unintended farce. Theater, Tolkien felt, had no business with fantasy; the audience was already too busy trying to accept the “magic” by which the players disappeared into the most mundane roles. “It is a world too much,” wrote Tolkien. But this is precisely what Dungeons & Dragons offered that the fantasy novel never could: the chance to enter an imaginary world with one’s disbelief miraculously intact — to be Quixote and Sancho at once."
Commentary
I think ludicrousness was very much present if not prominent in Sword & Sorcery, i.e. the sort of fantasy that mostly informed D&D's worldbuilding and overall vibe. "Our priest got drunk and engaged in a totally debauched orgy in Wizard's wood while Swenson's freehold burned to the ground" is from a Dave Arneson campaign, but it could easily be from a Jack Vance novel. (Replace "priest" with "rogue", and it IS from a Jack Vance novel, I'm positive Cugel the Clever did something like that somewhere.)
I also think Tolkien was comically wrong to claim the theatre has no business with fantasy, though I'm sure I'm missing some context on what he meant, exactly. Like, what? Where does that leave A Midnight Summer's Dream?
But the last sentence is REALLY on point. And of course it's not exclusive to D&D, it applies to any roleplaying game with actual rules (as opposed to fully freeform improv, where you can just get absorbed in the performance). You DO get to be Quixote and Sancho at once. Half your brain is immersed IN the story, getting carried away and ignoring reality, while the other half is decidedly OUT of the story, fully aware of the real world because it has to. It's got to operate the story-making machine (the dice, the rules, the math) from the outside. Plus, there are snacks.
