Mearls: The core of D&D

[rounser]

Hmm. To some extent, but... with all the different settings that D&D has seen over the years, I'm not sure you can pin down a handful of flavor elements and point to them and say, "That's D&D. Those other approaches and flavors? Aren't."

Yet thousands of people have done exactly that when they saw the themes and flavor of 4E. I know I did.

This is a big detail. The implied setting paints worlds. Do you want to play in a world with dragonborn, eladrin, warlords and tieflings in it as a core theme, or a world with dwarves, elves, clerics and magic-users in it as a core theme? The implied setting decides that for you, because your players will be playing those classes and races. If you don't like it, and it's in the core PHB, you either ban it (annoying and inconvenient) or walk away from that vision of D&D.

Many people have walked away. It's hard to rule out that this still might not be on WOTC's radar if Mearls is talking about mechanics as "the road home".

 

[amerigoV]

Does this article hint at that we may see version generic products?
Why does the virtual table which is in beta have campaign system tab listing 4th ed down to ad&d 1 ?
Makes you wonder.

I have a corollary to it: It they want to unite, they need to focus on new ideas and not new systems. The fracture comes from the edition treadmill - if I spend $1000 on edition X, I will be leery of edition Y when it is introduced if I need to spend another $1000 to run essentially the same game (yes, I know I can just buy one or two books, but we are in a hobby and want to spend money). I thought 2e was a mess mechanically (others may disagree), but both 3e and 4e are very sound. Sure they have their problems, but the person paying a ton of dough for one of them is generally happy through the cycle until they get to the end - usually when the Book of Artifacts and very experimental PC crunch books roll into town. Its hard to compel someone to move on when they are not all that upset at what they got and you are literally offering the same thing with new numbers.

Unfortunately, D&D is in the position where player and GM crunch is the moneymaker. Until this cycle is broken (ie, they need to sell new content like Eberron was in 3e), they can print all the editions they want with those "D&D" elements and you will see the population continue to fracture.

Its funny, if Wizards announced 5e at GenCon half this board would erupt in fits of angst (and another half would snicker, and the third half would run out an buy it). Immediate accusations of "money grubbing" would surface in seconds after the announcement. Over at Pinnacle (Savage Worlds), people are screaming at them to allow them to give Pinnacle money for the equivalent of going from D&D 3.0 to 3.5 - mostly minor tweaks from what they have said. I have not seen a negative word yet - heck I even tried to start an edition war and it went nowhere. Why the difference? D&D update/new edition = tons of new books of regurgitated old material (PHB 1-3, DMG 1-2, MM 1-5 - update of classic modules (Expedition to...Return to...) - update the campaign settings (FR, Eberron) - you can set your watch by it). SW: One book, and it does not make all the other books useless, and people continue to make cool new settings like Day After Ragnarok, Runepunk, Agents of Oblivion, and more Deadlands.

 

[Terath Ninir]

I'd say that the article is a lead-up to 5e. Either that, or WotC is going to switch to Pathfinder and Mearls is doing a REALLY slow lead up to that bombshell.

 

[pemerton]

Is it just me, or does alignment seem out of place in that list, in a "one of these things is not like the others" way?

I can see it on a list of elements of D&D, but on a specifically mechanical list, I don't get it.

Well, in Basic D&D, AD&D and 3E (and maybe OD&D, but I don't know from memory and don't have my books to hand) mechanical alignment is a central mechanic: it determines teams, it provides moral legitimation to much of the conflict, and it provides a type of personality/roleplaying tool by which the GM can keep the players in line.

4e is the first edition of D&D ever (or, perhaps,since OD&D if OD&D lacks mechanical alignment) to lack mechanical alignment in this sense.

So I wasn't struck by its inclusion on this list, because I see mechanical alignment as central to the feel and play of pre-4e D&D. But I was struck by its inclusion on the list, because it suggests that 4e is not a version of D&D!

That's OD&D & AD&D were built with the operational-level, campaign model in mind;

<snip>

2nd Edition was presented more like epic high fantasy.

<snip>

But they're virtually the same game, mechanically speaking.

<snip>

you have a history of the same mechanical framework being put to very different uses

As a stalwart disliker of 2nd ed, I really want to gloss this: it is because of what you identified here that 2nd ed was stuck with mechanics so inadequate to produce the play experience that it promised, and therefore had to resort to GM force (aka "the golden rule" by its friends and "railroading" by its enemies) as its overriding action resolution mechanic.

Tunnels & Trolls and OD&D are quite clearly related, and T&T is far more similar to OD&D than 4e is to OD&D.

Tunnels & Trolls *is* D&D.

I'm a dissenter here. I haven't played a lot of Tunnels & Trolls, but both in minutiae and in overall play experience I find it pretty different from D&D. (Of course in a broader sense it's still gamist fantasy RPGing - but I find it as different from D&D as RQ or Rolemaster.)

That said, T&T may resemble OD&D more than 4e does, because 4e (in my view) really has very little in common with classic D&D other than its fantasy themes and some shared mechanical tropes that are very often used for quite different purposes.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Alignment is still a mechanical element in D&D 4. It appears in stat blocks, not flavor text.

I won't argue whether that list is what is "necessary" or "sufficient" for D&D. I'd say that the list contains mechanical elements that will always make me think of D&D. For example, if your game has a "saving throw" (and no matter how it actually works, it could be throwing 32 cards up in the air and counting the cards with the face upwards), it will remind me of D&D.

 

[Keefe the Thief]

I think the list is too long. I've played without Alignment, Gold Coin Standard, and Rolling for Initiative, and it still felt like D&D.

I would say that polyhedral damage dice is part of the D&D experience. It wouldn't feel like D&D to me without those d4 daggers and d8 swords.

... waiting for a guy to say "in early D&D, all weapons did the same damage". Happens in three, two, one... Oh, already happened.

 

[Jhaelen]

I think the list is too long.

Yup, my list would have been shorter. However, as he writes the list is a result of a survey in D&D's R&D. So he probably also listed items that have not been mentioned by everyone.

My list would only include the following:

- Armor Class as the basic representation of a character’s defense.
- Attack rolls made using a d20, with higher rolls better than lower ones.
- Classes as the basic framework for what a character can do.
- Hit dice or level as the basic measure of a monster’s power.
- Hit points as a measure of your ability to absorb punishment, with more powerful characters and creatures gaining more of them.
- Levels and experience points as a measure of power and a mechanic that lets characters become more powerful over time.
- Rolling initiative at the start of a battle to determine who acts first.

And even some of these are arguable.

 

[ExploderWizard]

A laundry list of mechanics is all well and good but the D&D experience that all early editions shared (yes even AD&D) was the sense of incompleteness that invited the players to make the game what they wanted it to be.
AD&D was supposed to be some kind of standardized platform for tournament play but in home campaigns, the variety of house rules in use was just as broad as that of the other editions still being played.

Building a campaign from the basic rules with bits and pieces from The Dragon, other games, and the twisted imaginations of you and your friends is what made the game different from all the others and the reason it provided the kind of unpredictable fun that a standard board game could not.

A more exhaustive tighter knit rules set may be more readily playable out of the box but then again so is monopoly. The most engaging and rewarding activities are not always the smoothest and easiest to participate in.

Point to any item on that list and the odds are that someone, somewhere has changed or tweaked that facet of the mechanics in a home campaign at some time yet the game would most certainly feel like D&D to that group.

So to me at least, the core of D&D involves the distinct lack of a prepackaged experience.

 

[wingsandsword]

Is it just me, or does alignment seem out of place in that list, in a "one of these things is not like the others" way?

I can see it on a list of elements of D&D, but on a specifically mechanical list, I don't get it.

No, it belongs. Alignment may be more mechanical in some editions or just flavor in others, but it's always there.

Usually in two-axis version, sometimes just law-chaos, and 4e has an odd 1 axis version.

 

[mmadsen]

If you sally forth from the Keep on the Borderlands in search of fabulous treasure guarded by monsters in the Caves of Chaos, you're playing D&D -- in essence. AC and hit points have very little to do with it.

If you mean those places IN PARTICULAR, yeah, because they're from published D&D sources. If you're making a generalization and just happened to use those names, though, no, I can't agree.

If, in the early 1980s, someone had handed me a character sheet that looked like a TSR product, with the D&D logo on it, but with stats for MERP or Rolemaster -- or some other D&D-esque game -- and told me it was the new version of D&D, and we then went on a classic D&D-style adventure, I would have said, of course this is D&D.

Not all fantasy games are D&D though, I definitely agree. I would probably have accepted Runequest combat rules as a newer, better version of D&D at the time, but the setting wouldn't have been D&D at all, and the magic rules wouldn't have been D&D at all.

It's not a bright line separating D&D from other fantasy RPGs, but it's there -- and I don't think it depends much on AC and hp so much as on a swords & sorcery setting combining Tolkien and Howard, with lots of randomness and DM adjudication.