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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Greg K" data-source="post: 5485074" data-attributes="member: 5038">Well,  it is all experience and opinon. In my opionin,  it has not lost much of its meaning.  There was never single way to play D&D (except when Gary was trying to build the RPGA or define for  tournament). There was also never a real consensus as to what D&D isIn terms of mechanics,   house rules were just as much a part as the rulebooks among the people I know or met. Hell, the designers, themselves, never seemed to play by the book or were always ignoring rules or making changes for their homebrew campaigns. The only mechanics that defined it for the people I knew were1. 6 attributes2. Classes and levels3. Hit points (many would be happy to see this go or just have a set amount)4. Armor Class (most I met would be happy to see this go)5. Saving Throws (the use of and not the number of categories)6. Use of polyhedral dice with a d20 to hit7. Vancian Magic (until Dragon and 2e introduced alternative mechanics)Beyond those 7 things, it was  simply a fantasy game whose identity was based upon the IP (e.g., Demogorgon, Drow, beholders) (whether used or not), the settings, and the brand name on the products.And, then to what D&D is thematically?  There were people claiming that Darksun, Ravenloft, Al Quadim, etc were not D&D, because they were not pseudo medieval settings ignoring that the S3 module introduced robots, spaceships, and ray guns.  For other people, the game is either killing things and taking their stuff or fantasy "<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />ing" Vietnam while others assume you have to have a party of fighter, cleric, magic-user, thiefs despite discussion of single class campaigns going back at least to AD&D 2e.Given the above, I disagree that a long list of house rules meant that  they did not want to play D&D and were, necessarily, playing a different game.  Outside of  tournament play or organized play, the game was about making it your own and house rules were/are the way to do it.  Much of what D&D is/was was determined by whom you played with. Of course, this is just my experience and those of yourself and others may differ.</blockquote>

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