Shockwave wrote:"Cutting Tolkien out of equation" isn't good move IMO as Tolkien is part of the OD&D equation - no matter how hard some people try to deny it and claim otherwise.
I never said he's not part of the equation. I just said I prefer to have him out of it.
Honestly, while I love the Hobbit for what it is (though I do think Farmer Giles of Ham surpasses it in certain aspects), and read Lord of the Rings many times when I was a teen, I dislike his simplistically Christian worldview, and am quite irked by the unending recurrence of his disfigured image in modern fantasy.
And his mutated legacy is guilty of something even more horrid than endless reiterations of the journey of naive farmboys through a world of peril. It's the assassination of fantasy itself, the total extirpation of wonder. Tolkien was able to make orcs and trolls look truly horroristic, especially in Moria; and to make elves truly wondrous... but he was the only one who could do that. Pseudo-Tolkien fantasy lacks soul. It lacks imagination. It lacks, well, fantasy.
Add to this that in the world of gaming, Tolkienic tropes evoke a genre that is completely foreign from the picaresque-like adventuring that makes role playing games truly fun, and help give rise to the "story-driven adventure", bane of all tabletop gaming.