Follow the Leader/Tabletop Games

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• Dungeons & Dragons casts the same sort of shadow over role-playing games (and that's all role-playing games ever produced, whether they be tabletop or video games) that Superman casts over superhero comic books. If it's a role-playing game, it's playing Follow the Leader with D&D.
  • Recently, more experimental games have broken away from it by having more loosely-defined and user-contributed rules; My Life with Master is one such example.
  • D&D was the first RPG. It's easy to influence everyone when you're the seminal example.
• Magic: The Gathering is the Trading Card Game equivalent of D&D.
• Champions was the original point-buy roleplaying game. Originally, that made Champions unique; but nowadays point-buy is the preferred method of character generation among tabletop gamers. This means that a majority of roleplaying games out there (including, amazingly enough, D&D) are now playing Follow the Leader with Champions.
  • In a more specific manner, GURPS was a directly Follow the Leader creation, inspired by Champions.
• Dungeons & Dragons followed J. R. R. Tolkien
  • Warhammer Fantasy Battle followed Dungeons & Dragons... and Michael Moorcock.
  • Meanwhile, Starship Troopers codified Power Armor, Bug War, and Space Marine as tropes back in 1959. It is not the Ur Example, which may be the Lensmen series of the late 30's.
    • The many variants of Powered Armor (including 40k) are based on Laserburn's GZG Japanese Powered Armor. Which existed 7 years before Warhammer 40,000. And those Laserburn minis could represent the Mobile Infantry of Starship Troopers and be entirely appropriate. The MI even packed mini atomic rockets on Y-shaped frames of some kind.
    • Warhammer 40,000 began as a spin-off of Warhammer Fantasy Battle set In the Grim Darkness of the Far Future!, with everything that appeared in Warhammer Fatnasy having some futuristic counterpart. And Power Armor. While the setting has since matured and has in fact overshadowed its predecessor, 40k has gone on to inspire other works -
      • Compare its power-armored Space Marines, psychic and technological Eldar, and skittering hordes of Tyranids to the power-armored Terran Marines, psychic and technological Protoss, and skittering hordes of Zerg found in StarCraft.
      • This inevitably leads to arguments and flame wars when gamers don't realize that 40k is Older Than They Think, such as when one reviewer accused THQ and Games Workshop of ripping-off Gears of War for the game Space Marine.
      • Besides video games, 40k and Warhammer Fantasy helped spawn other tabletop wargames, most notably War Machine and Hordes which are ironically enough made by Wizards of the Coast, the publishers of Dungeons & Dragons, which helped inspire Warhammer in the first place.
      • Fading Suns is an obvious attempt to approach most of the same themes as 40k (minus Moorcock's Order Versus Chaos) without making everything ridiculously over-the-top.