hawkeyefan
Legend
No, I was referring to exactly that. DnD doesn't rely on that, it just includes it as the "easiest way to play". To me, reliance on something means that the thing in question cannot be done without the thing supposedly relied upon. I've run DnD with 3 players and no DM, creating the world as we played. I've done it in a very freeform manner, simply improvising the world based on how we built our characters and then on how we played them and what we needed the world to be in order to do the thing we are trying to do or establish the thing about our character we are trying to establish. I've a friend who does it by borrowing from AW and BiTD, but I haven't played in that game.
We used the "This Is Your Life" chapter of Xanathar's, hacked somewhat using Heroes of The Feywild from 4e, to create characters, and used those prompts to create what turned into a small island kingdom in which we were starting out, simply going turn by turn to keep things simple until we had characters with all the bits filled in, and each had at least 2 contacts within the world, one chosen by the player and one chosen by the other two players.
Then we played dnd. Random hook generators are easy to find, but our first adventure was just me saying, "There's a festival of lights and masks going all week, so the capital is crowded with celebrants and people trying to make money off them" and then the next person said, "And we're here to stage an event that will upset people and direct that upset at the foreign governor" because that tied it into her backstory and a shared love of the book Tigana, and we went from there.
Thing is, "is there a chance of failure and consequences for failure?" is 99% of the time quite obvious to everyone at the table. The DMG has suggested DCs. Fail forward, yes and, success with complication, all allow for less need to even think about arguing with adjudication. Whoever isn't acting can determine how hard something is, and even CR is just a guideline, not an actual rule. Just make it up. We had a chart for what HP range, to-hit range, and average damage, a creature should have when coming up against us at a given level, and just used that to quick-and-dirty sketch enemies and other NPCs.
I'm not saying it's not something that could use fleshing out and possibly a chapter or two in a book to really work well for new players, but we didn't have to change any of DnD's rules to do it.
That sounds pretty cool, and I have no doubt it can be done as you say and be a fun experience.
But that's not what anyone new to D&D would arrive at from the books. You may not have had to change rules, but you're definitely changing the processes of play. I'd say so fundamentally that I don't know if we can attribute this as an example of flexibility of D&D as a game, really. Like, it's D&D, but it's D&D being played in a way that's significantly different from the processes described in the books.
It's more about how you and your group are flexible with the process of play, and how you can incorporate other elements (random generators, charts, etc.) to support the changes you've made.
I don't say this to dismiss or argue, but I do think this is a severe departure from the standard D&D gameplay.