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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Father of Dragons" data-source="post: 3730073" data-attributes="member: 52294">Except the setting material is already in there, it's just that the setting is D&D, which is widely admitted to be its own genre of fantasy.  Look at any of the books that adapt an existing fantasy universe to D20, such as <a href="http://www.greenronin.com/catalog/grr1409" target="_blank">The Black Company Campaign Setting</a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Wheel-Time-Roleplaying-Game-Fantasy/dp/0786919965" target="_blank">The Wheel of Time Roleplaying Game</a> or <a href="http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/11/11866.phtml" target="_blank">A Game of Thrones - D20 based Open Gaming RPG</a> -- they've all had to spend considerable amount of time rewriting most aspects of the system to get anywhere near the flavor they need.  That's because there is already simply enormous amounts of setting material embedded in D&D as written.  I didn't really see this myself until I watched my daughter try to port a <a href="http://home.att.net/~pbaronson/TheWorldofNinazu.html" target="_blank">setting I had written</a> to D&D 3.5 rules, and we realized that she'd have to throw out about 75% to 90% of D&D 3.5 to make it work (we ended up using True20).Or compare D&D 3.5 to an actual generic system like GURPS or a mostly generic system like True20 -- the difference is large.What D&D up until now has really had is a hidden setting where the rules dictate an enormous amount of how the setting works, but not how it is presented (and often, the presentation is strongly at odds with the how things work, which is why you get settings that combine high level characters, powerful magic and tons of intelligent monsters with castles and classic feudalism -- but that's another subject).  What I think the OP was arguing is that since so much setting material is embedded in the system anyway, you might as well an optional setting presentation (which would be entirely fluff, since the rules are already really setting specific) so the the game is usable right out of the box without needing additional setting material or writing.  (Mind you, I have seen games that have spent so little effort on setting presentation that they are very close to doing that now.)</blockquote>

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