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D&D's Impact on Fantasy

As far as I can tell, Dungeons & Dragons had a great impact on the role of the wizard in fantasy fiction, a role I think is for the worse.

D&D was introduced in 1974, and there had been fantasy fiction, of some sort, for millenia before. The role of the wizard or spellcaster or whatever had generally been restricted. In Homer's Odyssey, Circe was not a witch, but rather a priestess, and it was with divine power that she turned Odysseus' crew to animals. In the medieval Amadis of Gaul, a man, armed and armored like Amadis, uses a spell to help defeat him. In the Arthurian legends, Merlin's usual value is that he knows everything. Merlin is also useful for disguise spells and making a few neat artifacts (the sword in the stone test), but that is less important.

Moving into this century, we have the magicians in E. R. Eddison, who can accomplish great things with great effort, or minor things more freely. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is the most popular fantasy work of recent times. Magic is important but not critical. Gandalf's main impact is as an advisor and orator, not in the relatively minor magic he wielded.

In virtually all pre-D&D fantasy fiction, magicians are rarely all that powerful, and the powerful ones are almost always evil. The heros are men like Odysseus and Conan, who use no magic but are preyed on by people who do, or men like Lord Juss and Gandalf, who know magic but rarely use it for effect. One of the most powerful magicians in this literature is Xaltotun, from Robert Howard's Conan the Conquerer, who intended to transform an entire continent. He was thoroughly evil, and could do very little without considerable advance preparation. Magicians are also rare, and typically live independently. You do not casually hire one, but rather seek him or her out with much trepidation.

Then the medieval wargame Chainmail was introduced, with a fantasy supplement. The authors included wizards, but had to give them the ability to do something useful. In the first edition, they were able to throw around powerful fireballs and lightning bolts, and more spells were added for the second edition. There was, in fact, little to use traditional wizards for, and so the authors made stuff up.

Dungeons and Dragons originated when Dave Arneson began running what we would now recognize as a role-playing game using the Chainmail rules, and it was released after considerable work by Gary Gygax and other members of the Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Group. It codified the idea of the wizard as artillery, for lack of a better idea. This was probably the only possible role of the wizard in this game. Early D&D was not a role-playing game of the more modern sort where the players interact with a fictional world in various ways, but rather a hack-and-slash game of the sort that is now mostly the domain of computer solitaire games. It is always difficult, in a role-playing game, to make a character truly wise, and in early D&D such a character would have been mostly useless anyway.

Since D&D, many fantasy authors have appeared, and have used the D&D model of the wizard. The effect is obvious in directly game-derived novels such as the Dragonlance and Rift War series. It exists in independently written books. The Deryni exist in numbers, are mostly good, and have notable spells. Most of the "Yet Another Fantasy Novel"s you will see have magicians of the D&D sort.

The post-D&D wizard is fairly common, and frequently does work for hire. He or she is fairly knowledgeable, but not necessarily wise. The wizard has limited ability to make magical items, but can cast powerful spells at a moment's notice.

I think the effect is clear to anyone who surveys the literature. Whether this is good or not is your decision.