Nightfall said:
It's only finite as your imagination.
No. there are all kinds of worlds I can imagine that I can't express in D&D terms, starting with the one we're inhabiting right now.
ruleslawyer said:
Depends on your definition of the "D&D system," I guess. Given the number of house rules and campaign tweaks I had in my 1e/2e games, I feel like most d20 heroic fantasy variants are basically as "D&D" as my previous-edition games were "D&D" games. It's hard for me to see games like Iron Heroes as stand-alones so much as rules variants.
Let me put it this way. I understand the rules of the game to be the physics of the universe. By virtue of being a game system, any set of rules will exclude certain kinds of settings because physical laws are an aspect of setting.
The D20 skills mechanic is certainly one I have used in other systems I have designed. I guess you could define these settings as OGL by virtue of my use of it. But I would not hold with the belief that all settings can be represented by OGL systems any more than I would with the view that BRP or GURPS can represent all settings.
Mallus said:
Doesn't that depend, more or less completely, on the specific group of player's specific set of expectations?
No. You can't represent a Christian system, for instance, in D&D because in D&D, evil is an active principle not simply the absence of good. You can't represent settings where people suffer and are motivated by permanent maiming or deformity as a result of specific battles, if you use the D&D damage mechanic. And so on.
I agree with your statement, in theory. But it doesn't jive with what I've experienced in practice. People find ways to make a of wide variety of worlds work for D&D. Attribute that to whatever you will; gamer creativity, ignorance, pure mule stubborness.
What I have seen is a lot of shoehorning of worlds that should be run under other systems into D20. What I have seen are a lot of worlds where the physical laws of the universe work one way near the characters but increasingly differently, the more remote from the party the event is. It's kind of like an amateurish graft of quantum physics/postmodernism onto the system to try and bridge the gap between the actual physics of the world and those prescribed by the rules.
This was brought into sharp relief in a game in which I played where our characters witnessed the hamstringing of an enemy war captive,
a fate that the PCs could neither inflict nor suffer because of the game's damage mechanic. Nothing, in my opinion, is more corrosive to suspension of disbelief is forcing people to confront events that can only be caused by NPCs and only happen to NPCs because they exist outside the rules.
Take a look at some of campaign worlds described in the Story Hours, created with D&D 3.x. SepII's Wyre, Destan's Valus, my own beloved CITY.
I'm not arguing that there exists no range in what D20 enables. You should see some of my D&D settings. What I am arguing is that just like the sonnet form, or cartouche painting, D&D radically circumscribes and structures creativity. Is this good or bad? I have no opinion. It is good for some things and bad for others, I guess.
I can see how extrapolating a world out of the ruleset can be enjoyable (thought its not my thing). But you shouldn't overstate the case regarding the difficulty of "shoehorning" all manner of wildly different campaign worlds into some reasonable facsimile of the current D&D rules.
I'm not overstating the point at all. Some people can tolerate high levels of dissonance between their empirical experience of the universe's laws and the theory of universal law in which they purport to believe. But that tolerance doesn't mean there is not profound dissonance.
You tell me, how broken is that? Now if you say "Well I'd get rid of draco-liches." I might see that but then you have to elminate the Cult of the Dragon and that kind of weakens the setting to me. But there you are.
