Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Henry" data-source="post: 1850075" data-attributes="member: 158">This has been the contention of many gamers over the past 20 years, and the reason why such a gap existed between "real roleplayers" and "those who played D&D" for most of the 1990's. D&D's play involved originally story plus survivalistic elements that made it grittier. In examples from people like Gygax and Arneson, you mostly didn't play Arthur and Lancelot; you played Conan and Fafhrd and the Mouser - a more "mercenary" style that took advantage of every dirty trick and cunning ploy that you could come up with. You didn't just slay the dragon and open the treasure vault (though many did play that way) - you had to check coins for numismatic value, you tore apart table for hidden compartments, you summoned monsters not for combat value, but to drop on someone's head. <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=":)" />The problem is that many folks take the whole body of work, both 3rd party and official, when looking at D&D, and assuming it's "the whole thing." the reason D&D/d20 has surpassed rolemaster in pages of rules is because TWENTY times more companies are producing material legally. Before, house rules circulated by fans and on message boards; now, anyone with an idea and some willpower can produce their own legal D&D compatible product. The truth is that D&D officially still has room to grow; the number of topics 3rd parties have covered dwarf those WotC has; the same thing would happen to other games, HARP, Rolemaster, Storyteller, etc. if it were more popular and people were allowed to produce OGL material for it, because for every one who has a good system, there's a small flood of tinkers out there who can "do it better."It stopped being this somewhere between 1974 and 1980, IMO. I've seen people claim they play Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms with White Wolf's Storyteller system, and who play D&D with Exalted, etc. As early as the 1970's, Gygax was having to fight for D&D's uniqueness among imitators who came up with rules to play the exact same way they played under D&D - it's just that they liked their rulesset better than what TSR came up with.</blockquote>

Verification