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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Turjan" data-source="post: 1850667" data-attributes="member: 3477">D&D has been much more than "just a set of rules for a game" for quite some time by now. D&D is a specific combination of several more or less related sets of rules and a sub-genre of fantasy. I agree that the set of fantasy tropes connected to D&D (races like elves and dwarves, classes like wizards and rogues/thieves) is more important to the perception of what D&D comprises than the exact set of game rules. For example, I think everybody would know exactly what I'd be up to if I announced that I wanted to play a session of D&D with HeroQuest rules during the next meeting. All questions I'd expect to get would be related to character generation, I'd suppose. However, this example is only valid to stress that the sub-genre of fantasy bears more weight in brand recognition than the set of rules. A D&D session following HeroQuest rules would not be D&D, even though we'd still use a d20 <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />.As far as your other point goes, style of play, I don't agree. Even if the D&D rules cater more to kill'n'cash-like games, it's perfectly viable for story-driven games. This means that I would not see a specific style of play part of the D&D brand.d20 as a trademark is just that: a brand name. You can alter you d20 game as far as you want from D&D, as long as you use the PHB's character generation. The d20 game itself does not necessarily have any resemblance to D&D. However, I suppose the use of a 20-sided die is somehow connected to the image of D&D, though many other games use d20's, too, like HeroQuest or Talislanta.As far as HARP goes, the recognition or HARP with D&D is pretty easily explained. This has historical reasons (we know where it comes from), and the effect of opening the HARP rulebook and immediately recognizing all the usual races, classes, skills and feats does the rest. Anyway, a look at the details reveals that it is not D&D. Of course, it serves the purpose of playing in a recognizable D&D environment with a different ruleset just well, without much tinkering with your mental images.Anyway, this is just semantics. The point is that D&D is a brand that evokes more or less accurate images even in people outside the RPG world, because of brand recognition. I doubt that this is equally true for Rolemaster, let alone  HARP. Maybe you should call Jack Chick for some free promotion <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />.</blockquote>

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