marionde said:
How much of the 30 years of D&D fluff can be changed before the game is called D&D in name only?
If you change to much you lose the connection that makes this game Dungeons and Dragons instead of just a sword and sorcery RPG.
The main draw to me about this game has been the levels of lore that has been built up over time by many very creative individuals. I think the value of the brand is in the history, not the number crunching.
It appears I may finally make the transition to a grognard with the introduction of 4e.
If you ask me, I say they can change the "fluff" of D&D entirely and it would still be the same game. After all, that is exactly what many DMs do all the time anyways.
For many people (I would guess most), D&D is not a setting. It is a rules system. So long as you use the same ruleset, you are playing the same game.
I mean, I have never used
any of the outer planes in one of my homebrew games, I would never use Sigil, the demon/devil distinction is insignificant, there is no Blood War, I don't use PHB gods, I would never refer to the "classic" archfiends like Asmodeus, and I would completely scrap the idea of the Far Realms and avoid using 99% of all Aberrations, including Mind Flayers and Beholders. I would be happier if there was no assumption of planes at all in the core rules.
However, it would never cross my mind that doing all of this somehow makes the game "not D&D". I would not even have to change a single rule, other than me simply omitting certain monsters and a very small number of spells.
As a whole, I find the notion that every D&D campaign must be part of Planescape to be verging on insulting. Why set the double-standard of "Make your own world!" and "Outside of your world, it has to be canonical Planescape!"? It doesn't make any sense to me. Why should I even care that Planescape exists, when I don't like the setting, and most of the material for it was written before I even got into D&D? Why should the game be chained to
a single setting from the past, when even mighty Greyhawk has fallen away from the center stage?
I mean, even the idea of D&D style planes is foreign to the fantasy genre as a whole. On a certain board of the D&D forums where D&D and Magic the Gathering players joined together to make a new setting, the D&D players had to explain the idea of D&D planes to the Magic the Gathering players, because even a game dominated by beings called Planeswalkers has a completely alien and incompatible idea of what planes are. I don't even need to get into the complete mythological faultiness of the concept.
Not to mention the wierdness of the term "Outsider", and how it has lead to such nonsensical terminology as "native Outsider".
Argh... Sorry if my post just came across as rude. I don't intend for it to be so. But it was a bit of a catharsis...