My experience was almost exactly the opposite.  Trying to make the game feel like what the genre featured was the only way we could figure out how to even get the ridiculously bare bones rules to even work.  I mean early on my play group’s touch stones were pretty much limited to Prydain and Narnia, but we absolutely were trying to figure out how to make the game play like those stories.  Sometimes literally…we had a character named Taran Wanderer and another one named Reepicheep…before we started defaulting to Bob the Fighter #4.

But both of those series featured parties having adventures.  The scene from the Black Cauldron where Adaon gives Taran his brooch and later the witches demanded it as payment, totally colored how we did magic item loot for years to come.