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Trampling the Legacy, Remaking the Myth - Page 2

© Michael Martinez

But maybe the worst influence that Dungeons and Dragons has had upon the legacy of Tolkien is the confinement of "magic" to special people, special races. Magic is such a hard thing to define, unless one resorts to Arthur C. Clarke's famous observation "Any sufficiently advanced technology seems like magic." But Tolkien's magic isn't really a technology. It is a primal force, like gravity and the weak and strong nuclear forces, upon which technologies may be built. Part of that primal force involves calling upon stronger beings for help, and both Sam and Frodo are able to do this. But in gaming, only a Cleric or a related professional would be able to do this. A game ref can, of course, have a god or angelic being intervene directly on any character's behalf. But neither Sam nor Frodo got experience points for calling upon Elbereth. The subtlety and beauty of Tolkien's magic has been lost amid a sea of misperception and pseudo-classification. Many people believe that magic in Tolkien is based on race, but Tolkien couldn't really define it that way. He tried to. He wrote an extensive account of magic for a letter he was composing, but he abandoned the whole discussion. He realized, after reading what he had written, that his rules were improbable, based on what had been published. That is, he was arguing that men were incapable of working real magic themselves (which explains why we cannot share in the Elvish gifts). But then he remembered that the Numenoreans made magic swords. So much for drawing distinctions based on race. The fantasy community has become so much more sophisticated than Tolkien since those days. Without really understanding what Tolkien's magic was about, how it worked, or why it should have worked, they turned their backs on it and began devising new magic methodologies. So you now have costs and penalties for using magic. Dungeons and Dragons requires players to roll dice to see if their characters lose a point of constitution when they make permanently enchanted magic items. Why? To keep people from flooding the game with magic devices. One popular author had his magicians walking around with "sources", fellow characters who somehow contributed their strength to the magicians. The magic process was draining, and supposedly the good magicians would do whatever they could to avoid killing their close friends and companions. There is nothing elegant or useful in such a magic system. It makes magic seem industrial, rather than natural.

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