Bad Roleplaying? I blame Tolkien.

[Valamir]

Ok, after several aborted attempts at rereading LotR, I decided to get the books on CD and have them read to me on my long long long drives over the holiday.  I successfully finished FotR and realize once again why I've never actually enjoyed reading these books.  J.R.R. has no sense of pacing.  Like zero.  He couldn't make up his mind whether he was writing a story or an encyclopedia and it shows.  He skims over the climactic moments so he can rush into the next lull where he can present 14 more pages of history lesson, exposition, and bad poetry.  Jackson's ability to take that morass and turn it into something actually exciting to watch is true genius.  As far as I'm concerned Jackson's version is now the definitive one for me and 'ole J.R.R. can be relegated to the dust bin.

But I digress.  It suddenly hit me on one of those long stretches between rest stops that FotR is the source of much of the bad role-playing I'd experienced in my childhood and have since come to loath.

The first book reads...not like a book at all...but like a transcript of a year's worth of RPG sessions.  Like J.R.R. was role-playing once a week with 'ole C.S. and his other cronies and the book was a record of their gaming sessions.  In reality, of course, this is not what happened, rather it was just the opposite.  An entire generation of role-players in the 70s and 80s had modeled their role-playing so perfectly on Tolkien's model that reading Tolkien now seems like a role-playing session itself.

So much of the winding pointless nonsense that went on in FotR reads just like an RPG campaign...and by this I mean old school D&D and games of similar ilk.  How many campaigns have you played in where there was ostensibly some overall plot (to retrieve the macguffin or what have you) that was interrupted several times by tangential adventures and side plots?  The actual story of FotR could have been told in 100 pages or less if you edit out all of the side plots and the like.  Its like J.R.R was a GM who, having come up with an excuse to make his party travel from the Shire to Rivendell, was bound and determined to not actually ever let them get there without a new "adventure" to delay them each week.  Or to put things in the proper order, its as if every GM for a generation took the journey to Rivendell (and the extended trip beyond) as the model for all future campaigns.

Several specific incidents in the book brought immediately to mind some of the worst RPG experiences I'd ever had.

Consider for a moment the hobbits' encounter with Old Man Willow in the Old Forest.  

1) first the "GM" comes up with a limited set of choices...the party can only choose between the road and the Old Forest.

2) second the "GM" makes clear that the road is a Bad Idea in that way all railroading GMs have that suggests dire consequences for defiance...hmmm...a choice that is no choice at all...check...FotR is full of those.

3) No matter where the party goes in the Old Forest they must wind up by the river where the GM's "kewl encounter" is.  The GM can't possibly conceive of scrapping the encounter or even moving it to somewhere else.  Instead the only option is to use every means possible to force the party to the river.  Tolkien goes so far as to have the trees and very geography conspire against the hobbits, forcing them ever eastward despite their attempts to go north.  One can almost picture J.R.R. the GM writing notes about the forest to the nature of "make 1 tracking check every 10 minutes.  Each check is at a progressive -1.  10 successful checks are required to reach the road to the north.  After 3 failed checks the party will wind up at the river...goto page 7"  In other words, calling for rolls in a manner that makes it seem like it's the characters' own abilities resulting in their fate, but which are statistically so stacked against them that's they don't really have any real chance of success.  After J.R.R. goes to such absurd lengths to herd the party where he wants, how can any GM not feel the right to do likewise.

4) The hobbits simply fall asleep.  Here even the language of the book is awkward and jarring.  Go back and reread the scene.  The line where J.R.R takes great pains to point out that Merry and Pippin fell asleep with their backs to the tree is almost painful in its heavy handed obviousness.  Yup, more GM using the dice to railroad the players.  How many Saving Throws vs. Magic, or Petrification Polymorph did the GM call for to ensure that somebody would fall into the trap.  Heck, we've all seen modules that call for such rolls and keep calling for them "until someone fails"...in other words "until a victim is randomly chosen".  There's no real possibility that there won't be a victim...because then the Kewl Encounter would be missed.

5) Now look at how the encounter is handled...oh my.  I nearly banged my head against the steering wheel as I listened to this.  In the back of my head I could hear the GM continually asking "ok, what do you do now" and the players frantically trying to come up with a solution to the GM's latest puzzle.
"Can we pull them out?"
"make a roll...you fail"
"Can I work myself free?"
"make a roll...you fail".
"Hey...what about getting an axe and chopping the opening wider..."
"Do you have an axe listed as part of your equipment?"
"No...but I'm sure my character would have remembered to bring one"
"If its not listed you don't have one"
"Hey...I have a hatchet..."
(oh shit, the GM now thinks...this could spoil everything...I can't let this work, it's not the solution I planned and will spoil my whole encounter)
"Sorry, a hatchet won't help"
"What!!!"
"Its too small to effect this tree.  The tree is really old and the wood is too tough for a hatchet to have much effect" (yeah, yeah, that's the ticket)

<insert 30 minutes of arguing over whether a hatchet could chop a willow tree complete with examples from experiences at camp and offers to demonstrate...all of which are futile...the hatchet can't be allowed to work>

"Wait a minute...what about fire...we could start a fire, and threaten to burn the tree unless it lets our friends go..."
(oh shit...well...I could say that the ground is too swampy and wet for them to start a fire...but they're already pissed at me over that hatchet business...ok, I'll let them start the fire, but instead of setting them free I'll have the tree threaten to just kill them outright...they'll have to put the fire out and then keep guessing what my perfect puzzle solution is...the solution that I've already decided on...I can't let anything else work because the players need to see how clever I am in the solution I came up with myself...)

6) The super-cool-way-more-better-than-you pet NPC.  We've all seen these.  The NPC that is kewler, more powerful, and more effective than the PCs.  The pet NPC who is basically the GM's own personal character that, since he's the GM, he gets to do whatever he wants with.  How did the hobbits manage to escape from Old Man Willow after all?...oh that's right...enter the GM's pet NPC Tom Bombadil.  an aside:  I hereby nominate Peter Jackson for sainthood for eliminating all traces of that monstrosity from the movie.  If you ever thought reading the Tom Bombadil sequence was annoying with all of his bizarre habits and silly rhymes...its 1000 times worse on book on tape where you're forced to listen to them all...in detail...and can't just skim ahead

7) And what comes after the Willow...the Barrow Wights...yet another Kewl Unavoidable Encounter.  Gee, after seeing how stupid J.R.R. makes the hobbits look, can you really blame GMs for feeling free to make their players' characters look equally stupid?  I mean how many rolls did Frodo have to fail (starting once again with the 'ole "you all fall asleep" gag...hey it worked once right...) before the GM railroaded him into the barrow despite every attempt by the player to not to be diverted from his goal of the road.  And hell Merry and Pippin didn't even get to roll did they?...they just wound up captured and helpless in the barrow.  Yet another bad GM trick compliments of Tolkien.  Oh...and how did they escape from the barrow (which could have actually been a pretty cool encounter)?...yeah that's right...pet NPC Bombadil to the rescue to show-up the PCs yet again.  Oh the Humanity.


I could go on...and on...and on.  Pretty much the ENTIRE FotR is exactly like this.  The whole book is a template for every bad GM habit you can think of.  Enter Pet NPCs Aragorn and Gandalf who do everything cool there is to do while the PCs cower in fear.  No matter what the PCs attempt, its futile and often used by the GM to trigger yet another encounter demonstrating how foolish and helpless the PCs are and how cool and amazing the NPCs are.  Jackson at least (if memory serves) allowed Frodo to solve the riddle at the door to Moria...in the book, pet NPC Gandalf gets to do that too.  I've been in campaigns loaded with such pet NPCs.  In fact, I remember getting told by the GM that I was supposed to look like a goob at first level.  The coolness of the NPCs was there to show me how cool I *could* be if I survived to higher level.  But alas no.  Even at higher level, there are always higher level and cooler pet NPCs to show you up.  Where did the GM get such a ridiculous idea?...hmmm, upon looking at how foolish J.R.R. made the hobbits look at the beginning and how successful they were at the end...I now know.

There are tons more examples of other horrible RPG features to be found in Tolkien as well such as:

1)   Getting lost in Moria.  A maze of passages, and if Gandalf had chosen wrong they may have wandered aimlessly for weeks.  J.R.R. takes great pains to demonstrate how clever Gandalf is at choosing the right path based on the clues.  How many GMs took that as permission to leave obscure clues about the right path (if the players remember to ask for them) and then let the party get completely lost if they miss them?  Gawd how tedious and boring.

2)   Marching Order.  How many different times does Tolkien take great pains to show who followed who and who was guarding the rear.  Enough times that GMs started to believe this crap was fun and go to great lengths to get "marching orders" from players.  Hell I've played with groups that had half a dozen standard marching orders depending on hall width and lighting conditions and health of the party that they'd announce and switch between like a SWAT Team clearing a crack house.

3)   Watches:  Oh ye gods.  Even more tedious and more futile then marching orders how many hours have been wasted on establishing watches.  I definitely blame this bit of nonsense on J.R.R. who took unnatural delight in describing in great detail who was on watch when.  Boring to read...boring to play.

4)   Obsession with equipment:  On no less than 3 occasions readers were subjected to Samwise waxing on about how much he wished he'd remembered to bring a rope and how sorry he was that he'd forgotten it.  Add to that the trouble caused by Old Man Willow because the hobbits had no axe, and the lack of torches in Moria (a point J.R.R. makes very clear...no torches); add further tedious descriptions about leaving behind the cold weather gear once they got far enough south (done in dialogue no less) and you have the beginnings of one of the worst traditions in all of gaming.  I can still recall the hours wasted in recording lists of Iron Spikes, 10' Poles, 50' of Rope, and flasks of oil.  


In other words, after re "reading" Tolkien for the first time in well over a decade I was struck point blank with exactly how many features that I grew to loathe and despise in gaming could be traced directly to LotR (and FotR in particular).

It astonished me to discover how many bad gaming habits can actually be characterized as successful emulation of Tolkien.  Emulation of an author whose creativity was pure genius, whose recording of every conceivable fact was Herculean and whose love of history was profound...but emulation of an author whose actual story telling abilities (and sense of pacing especially) left A LOT to be desired.  Is it any wonder that so much of 70s and 80s gaming (IME anyway) consisted of meandering pointless quests where lists of equipment and marching order was more important than any sense of plot or pacing...

Bad Role-playing...I blame Tolkien.

[Mark Johnson]

Best... post... EVER!!!

Happy New Year.

[Lxndr]

So, so true Ralph.  I really can't think of any rebuttal.  Thank you for putting my reluctance to enjoy Tolkien into a much more researched and articulate form than I ever could.

Edited to add:  Ralph, you have to post that on the rpg.net forums, or if you won't, let me!

[LordSmerf]

I must admit that i agree with you somewhat.  I also feel the need to point out a couple of things.

1. Fellowship is by far the worst written of Tolkein's books.  I'm not sure exactly what happened, but your point about pacing is spot on.
2. The Two Towers is paced better and The Return of the King even more so.
3. The Hobbit is brilliant.

I get the feeling that when Tokein was putting Fellowship together he was torn between writing a book similar to the Hobbit (which he had yet to write) or the Silmarillion (ditto.)  I would almost say that Fellowship was Incoherent.  It's almost as if Tolkein couldn't decide if he was telling a story or presenting a world...

Thomas

[Paganini]

What Smerf said, except that the Hobbit had been published prior to Tolkein starting on FotR.

Oh and Ralph, your mistake is that you've confused the protagonists. Aragorn and Gandalf are obviously the PCs. :)

(Not that that changes the overall point... people have been role-playing for years as though the hobbits were the PCs....)

[Trevis Martin]

Wow Ralph...what a fantastic insight.

I remember thinking my own reading of Tolkien was like seeing a beautiful story through the crude and painfull storytelling.  It is a testament to Tolkien that people can admire the story even after and in fact despite the way it is written.  Remarkably, in fact, I remember thinking the same of some of my early game experiences.  The possibilites of the game, beautiful as they were, obscured by this odd and clumsy fashion of playing.

regards,

Trevis

[Brian Leybourne]

2. The Two Towers is paced better and The Return of the King even more so.

I'm sorry, I just can't keep quiet at that comment.

Two Towers and Return of the King are even more poorly written than FOTR. They're PAINFUL to read. No the least example of which is the literary-suicide of having half of each book be one group of characters, then the entire second half be Frodo and Sam. Painful doesn't even begin to cover it, and, rightly, no author who knew the slightest thing about writing would ever do that today. Jackson knew what he was doing when he changed that and interwove the stories.

I have to agree 100% with Ralph. I love Lord of the Rings, but anyone who says they're literary masterpieces has had a very sheltered life and needs to read more books. The story is fine, but the writing style, composition and structure are rubbish. If Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings today, no publisher would touch it.

/rant

Brian.

[M. J. Young]

As a matter of fact, Tolkien didn't know where the story was going until he had them nearly to Rivendell, according to something I read somewhere. Up to that point, he was trying to create an adventure story from the starting point, not from the destination.

That may be another aspect of RPGs that spring from him; I'm not entirely sure of the alternative, though. When I was writing Verse Three, Chapter One, I realized very early on that I needed a pretty clear idea of where the story was going if I had any hope to get there; and that writing a book was very different from running a game for precisely that reason. It turned a lot of my thinking on its head--for example, in most Multiverser games, gather worlds are pretty open in the possibilities, while if you've got a tightly plotted world it generally works better as a solo. In writing the novels, I've found that when I get the characters together my plotting has to be a lot tighter than when they're on their own.

So maybe this is a subject for another thread, but is there a way to run an RPG that starts with how it's going to end and works toward that from the beginning, or are we stuck because of the nature of the beast with starting from "we can do something cool with this" and meandering for a while until we figure out where it's going, like Fellowship did?

--M. J. Young

[quozl]

And I'll blame Peter Jackson for the next generation of crap roleplayers emulating his crap movies.  (Correction: Bad Taste was a good movie.)

Happy New Year!

[John Kim]

The whole book is a template for every bad GM habit you can think of.  Enter Pet NPCs Aragorn and Gandalf who do everything cool there is to do while the PCs cower in fear.  No matter what the PCs attempt, its futile and often used by the GM to trigger yet another encounter demonstrating how foolish and helpless the PCs are and how cool and amazing the NPCs are.
...
It astonished me to discover how many bad gaming habits can actually be characterized as successful emulation of Tolkien.  Emulation of an author whose creativity was pure genius, whose recording of every conceivable fact was Herculean and whose love of history was profound...but emulation of an author whose actual story telling abilities (and sense of pacing especially) left A LOT to be desired.  Is it any wonder that so much of 70s and 80s gaming (IME anyway) consisted of meandering pointless quests where lists of equipment and marching order was more important than any sense of plot or pacing...  

Um, hello?  Is it seriously true that anyone isn't going to argue this?  I'm really not a huge Tolkien fan.  I only read through the full LotR four or five years ago.  However, I certainly think there's a reason why Tolkien continues to sell like hotcakes after fifty years, while the plays of so-called skilled storytellers like Lajos Egri are disintegrating in moldy corners.  

Here is my counter-rant, which might be overstated but no more so than Ralph's...

You're absolutely correct that the protagonists are foolish and helpless in LotR.  This was a clear mistake of Tolkien, who violated all rules of fantasy writing by having his heroes be pathetic little midgets instead of massive brawny barbarians.  So you're right.  If what you want out of your RPGs is kewl, kick-ass PCs -- then you can go right ahead and blame Tolkien for encouraging the opposite.  He is to blame for stupidity like thinking that moral character is interesting in protagonists, when really he should have been making sure that they were kewler than the NPCs, and powerful enough to control their destinies instead of swept up by them.  

Tolkien is also to blame for thinking that trivial details like landscape, objects, food, and language can be an important part of the fantasy instead of just getting on with the sword-swinging action which is what is important to the story.

Personally, I could care less about so-called "skilled storytelling".  Time and time again I find that writers whom I enjoy are amateurs who never learned -- or innovators who deliberately ignored -- the "correct" pacing and structure.  Meanwhile, the shelves are filled with well-paced, tightly-plotted pieces of drivel which everyone is thrilled with at the time, and whose paltry content is inevitably forgotten by the following week.

[Endoperez]

I don't really understand what do you mean by this? That Tolkien would have been a bad GM? Well, then it's good that he wasn't! For he was a good WRITER, whose job is to tells his story. His books are still sold and read, and that shows how he was in that. So good that still his books are the base from which to build. In good and in bad: there are too many stories where group of heroes travel somewhere to save the world from evil overlord... But then, among those many fantasy books and stories, there are many masterpieces too, many really original ones that might not exist if there never was Tolkien and his LotR.

But I digress. It suddenly hit me on one of those long stretches between rest stops that FotR is the source of much of the bad role-playing I'd experienced in my childhood and have since come to loath.

I'm not sure about the sessions of your lifehood, but the examples you gave are examples of bad GM. I identify the problem they had is the want to tell their story. More spesifically, not the players' story, but the GM's. For them, the players are only ruining a good story, while for the players, he is not letting them to play.

And this is the problem Tolkien might have, unknowingly, put into his books to wake up in the GMs of this kind. These GMs haven't really grasped the reason rpgs are rpgs, why people play them and are not reading books. Because of this, they write up a scenario and not a book, hoping that players fill in anything he didn't do, without knowing what is to come. The 'railroading' aspect can be found in most books: when a choice is made, in most cases there is the reason for the characters to choose one route instead of other. He thought that hobbits would more willingly choose the supposed danger instead of known danger, and went to the forest because of that. He showed the reader that there are big problems in the world (old man willow), and that those of us who have the means should help in these occasions (Tom Bombadil showing the way). In one way, Fellowship is like a childrens' story, like hobbit. It tells about the good, and the bad, and there is a teaching in it.

But as it also is describing Tolkien's dream, the world he had made up, the world he describes so lively (I think you could find out many places that are in  the books if you walked all over the England reading his descriptions), the world which he tries to make as complete as possible. a GM with a world like Middle-Earth and passion for it as great as Tolkien had would be simulationists dream... Of course, only if he could be a good GM. But Simulationist would enjoy playing in a world like that, unless the GM was bad enough to even out all the world's plusses. Tolkien might have been that bad, IF he had been a GM. But again, he wasn't, he wrote a story, sometimes dark, not often merry, heavy to read, but indeed a story. Not a perfect one, but still a good story. And even if it was as perfect as possible for a mere human to make, not everyone would like it.

Valamir sees everything he hates in a GM in this book. He also sees a good story, but he hates the way it was told. I like the story, and I remember that when I read it, I read it enjoying it. I'm not a native english speaker, but FotR is one of the few (well, I have read over dozen, but still no many) books I have read in egnlish. It tested my skills quite a few times, but still I was able to enjoy it. But I didn't read the two other books. ;) There is school and life and all that, and the text Tolkien wrote is heavy and you have to concentrate on it. I had no time, or even desire, to read the other books at that time. I should also add that LotR (as one book) is the first 'real' book I ever read, the book for me for many years, and the start for my reading. I have read a lot of fantasy literature, but only recently have I understood that there are many other good books there too. I have started to think reading the world's classics, the masterpieces everyone should read. Maybe after finishing them I agree with Valamir if he still says that Tolkien wasn't very good in telling his great story. Just maybe.

- Endoperez -
Oh, and maybe I will some day say what I am saying with less words... Until then, I'm afraid I won't be very good storyteller, GM, or writer in general.

[Eero Tuovinen]

This one's quite hard to answer. On the one hand, I'd really want to go to the whole literary merit of Tolkien thing, to explain about literary taste and the fact that the very points fantasy fanboys nowadays detest in the LotR are in fact significators of it's quality. I'd like to contrast and compare american and european taste in literature, perhaps even literature and entertainment (largely the difference between LotR and those crude Jackson movies) themselves.

But this isn't a forum about those things, and most of us have probably talked quite enough about it anyway. I simply cannot understand anyone who would blame the nowadays unique focus and pacing of Tolkien's fantasy and prefer some calculating, easily palatable rewrite of the pulp authors. I don't expect anyone from that camp to understand the opposite view either, what with the assumptions about literature being so different.

So I won't go to that. Instead we have to focus on the contention; is LotR to blame for bad GM habits? As Endoperez already noted, the habits Valamir enumerates are actually a mark of a, in the lack of a better word, 'literary GM', who tries to play illusionist genre simulation. Is this playing style Tolkien's fault?

For now I'd like to see some refined arguments for the contention to believe it. Why it is specifically Tolkien that encourages illusionist practices? Couldn't one get the same ideas from reading any literature? Imagine a Howard-fanboy running a game where a player character is forcibly crusified, and will die horribly if he doesn't understand to kill and eat carrion birds with his teeth. Why is it that Tolkien gets the blame, when superficially any book can be so abused?

On the other hand, I could believe that Tolkien has confused entire generations of fantasy gamers. If Valamir doesn't understand LotR enough to appreciate it, is it any wonder most all other gamers do not? Then a GM comes along, rips Tolkien for plot structure, and never stops to think that mixing Tolkien up with vancian sword and sorcery is a horribly bad idea. Tolkien being strongly christian in his themes and ethics, with helpless hobbits run aground by fate, how can you expect it to work with those brawny barbarians that are the staple of fantasy gaming? Of course you get discordant play. So I can readily believe that Tolkien isn't understood and if there is a real dependence between LotR and rpgs themewise, then Tolkien indeed has confused many.

But, as said, I don't buy the contention that pastiching Tolkien is bad because his literature is bad. It seems clear that it'd be bad even if you did it to a good book (which LotR is to my mind) if you didn't know what you were doing. And clearly the examples given by Valamir are a sign of a GM not knowing what he is doing, if not for any other reason, then because this kind of GM clearly doesn't understand the style he is striving for. If you want illusionist genre simulation, do you really want to throw dice all the time and deceive yourself with giving your players a "choice" in a place where you really aren't giving one? Nothing in Valamir's examples is specifically linked to Tolkien, and there's even nothing bad there, assuming you find illusionism palatable.

[Valamir]

Oh and Ralph, your mistake is that you've confused the protagonists. Aragorn and Gandalf are obviously the PCs. :)

Heh.  Aragorn and Gandalf couldn't have been the PCs.  First Aragorn was the exiled heir to the throne of Gondor.  No way the sort of GM I'm talking about would have let a player get away with putting that into their background unless they were playing GURPS or Champions and had payed the requisite points for the background.  And second Gandalf turned down the ring.  What player playing 1978-1983 D&D would turn down a magic ring of power?

But more seriously

John:  I have no idea what you're actually responding to.  I get the sense that you had some emotional reaction to my post and now you're argueing against that...but really nothing you posted really relates to anything I posted at all.

Is it true that anyone is going to argue that Tolkien wasn't a huge influence on early role-playing?  I doubt it.  Nor did I say anything of the sort.  What astonished me was how many specific activities of Tolkien's characters were translated 1:1 into expected behavior of most early D&D groups.  I knew the influence was there, but didn't realize how absolute a copy it was.  Marching order, who's on watch, damn I forgot to bring rope...all lifted verbatim from FotR.  Not just influenced...slavishly emulated.

As for your rant.  I'm having trouble figuring out your point through all the hard to decipher sarcasm.  But I never said PCs needed to be kewl or kick ass.  What I pointed out is the simple truth that a GM who makes their player characters look foolish and shows them up with cool NPCs is a bad GM.  And drew attention to my recent revelation that in doing so he was exactly copying the way Tolkien portrayed the hobbits.  Whether you think the hobbits make good protagonists or not, I doubt you'd argue that railroading PCs into situations that make them look stupid is a good GMing technique.  Yet many GMs (especially back in the day) would do just that and no doubt felt secure that this is how it was supposed to work because that's what Tolkien did.

As for the rest all I can do is shrug.  I don't have much desire to debate what is good story telling with you or the merits of Egri's work or how popular it is.  Can't really see why you brought any of that up since non of it is remotely related to the topic...which is:  Bad GMing and RPing habits that originated from slavish emulation of Tolkien.  

I look forward to further comments from you on that topic...but ask that you leave the other topics to other threads.

[xechnao]

I'm not sure about the sessions of your lifehood, but the examples you gave are examples of bad GM. I identify the problem they had is the want to tell their story. More spesifically, not the players' story, but the GM's. For them, the players are only ruining a good story, while for the players, he is not letting them to play.

How are the good examples defined and where could the good examples come from?
Do you see any good examples because of Tolkien in role playing?

Well, it is true Tolkien and D&D have all this success. Although it is not about plot, it seems to be about the joy of an exploration and understanding of a new world.
But it is still true this is heavy. About other books, someone mentioned that they are forgotten in a week, I would like to say that this is not necessarily bad. You read it, enjoy it and then you go on. That is it's purpose: mental food that you have to consume, filling your time and needs.

Now, staying on topic could we try to discuss on the good examples matter, thus trying to spot the balance of things?

[Troy_Costisick]

Bad writer?  Maybe.  Bad world builder?  Never.  Tolkien created the most engrosing and thuroughly thought out world ever.  While I agree that the events in The Lord of the Rings are probably the least exciting in all of the history of Middle-earth, they never-the-less showed a love and depth for a world that few of us could ever replicate.  If I can develop a world half as beautiful, detailed, tragic, and enthralling as Tolkien, then I will have lived a satisifying life as a designer.

Peace,

-Troy