D&D - Thinking outside of the box

[MoogleEmpMog]

If I modified the core rules so that I could succesfully emulate the Wheel of Time setting it wouldn't be D&D anymore? I suppose that's true.

Possibly; I'm not familiar enough with that setting to say for sure.

If you were modifying them to emulate, say, A Game of Thrones, it certainly wouldn't be D&D anymore; you'd have to scrap the all the races but human, pretty much all the classes except fighter and rogue (if not those), the entire magic system, the entire monster manual, arguably aspects of the combat system, and then make a major thematic shift on top of it. The recent A Game of Thrones RPG neatly displays how far a game with the same basic rules can go when it's shifting genre.

What about if I modify the core rules but not with the specific goal of emulating some other setting? Then what happens?

How much modification can you make before the game system would cease to be D&D and become something else?

Hard to say when you don't specify what you're changing.

Monte Cook's Arcana Evolved dumps the races and classes and magic system and alignment - but it's still pretty close. It's still high magic, multiple races, power through adventuring, monsters and epic quests stuff. It falls to the individual observer to say whether it's still 'in' or not. IMO, it's clearly High Fantasy rather than Epic Fantasy, like Tolkien, or Sword and Sorcery, like Howard, and High Fantasy is the genre D&D pretty much created - primarily by blending those two, with generous dollops of superheroes and space opera.

The Iron Kingdoms keeps the classes and most of the races, including the iconic elves and dwarves; it puts a different spin on each, to one extent or another, but nothing that steps outside the realm of High Fantasy. It adds firearms and mechs, but powers them partly with magic and plays down the latter in the roleplaying rules. Thematically, however, it's very different, having much more in common with Cyberpunk (by way of Steampunk, which is thematically almost the same, anyway), Epic Fantasy and Dark Fantasy. I consider the IK further afield than AE/AU, even though it's much closer in rules.

Just changing the rules won't do it - that will just make D&D *bad* at doing D&D without actually targeting it toward something else. Rules should be targeted to achieve an end result (aside from fun; hopefully that's always in there ), and D&D's are targeted toward the result it achieves. Whether they were when Gary Gygax first put it together or a clearer understanding of what D&D did best developed over time, I can't say. Certainly AD&D 1e and D&D 3e are both aiming for the same target, although they get there in different ways. AD&D 2e arguably aimed for a different target but used the same tools, which is probably why it's generally the least well thought-of.