Khisanth the Ancient
Explorer
I agree that Dragonlance doesn't really need many special rules, at least in the War of the Lance-Chaos War era and the post-War of Souls era when magic is 'D&D normal'.
The distinctive elements have more to do with the setting; it's a somewhat more "constrained" setting than, say, FR (all wizards are part of one organization which aggressively monopolizes arcane magic, the gods fit into a balanced 7x3 pattern, there are no orcs...)
In some ways that constrained nature does tend to make things 'simplified' in some ways, but only really on the cosmic level (purely mortal conflicts can still be quite ambiguous), and even then, in the Chaos War the Knights of Takhisis who want to control the world are opposed to the forces of Chaos who want to destroy the world. So "all evil is always united" isn't a theme of the setting. (In fact, "evil turns upon itself" explicitly is, in the original setting at least...)
The distinctive elements have more to do with the setting; it's a somewhat more "constrained" setting than, say, FR (all wizards are part of one organization which aggressively monopolizes arcane magic, the gods fit into a balanced 7x3 pattern, there are no orcs...)
In some ways that constrained nature does tend to make things 'simplified' in some ways, but only really on the cosmic level (purely mortal conflicts can still be quite ambiguous), and even then, in the Chaos War the Knights of Takhisis who want to control the world are opposed to the forces of Chaos who want to destroy the world. So "all evil is always united" isn't a theme of the setting. (In fact, "evil turns upon itself" explicitly is, in the original setting at least...)