Experts on other systems, why aren't they d&d?

[Dragonblade]

What is D&D?

Baby don't crit me. Don't crit me. No more.

I have this image of Will Ferrell nodding his head to the technobeat of that song....

 

[Dragonblade]

ALL versions of D&D are still D&D. Period.

The fundamentals are the same in all editions.

A party of adventurers in a fantasy world descending into a trap and monster filled ruin to acquire magic and treasure while gaining XP which allow them to level up and face tougher monsters and earn bigger treasures while facing ever greater dangers.

This is the core essence of D&D. Everything else is just semantics.

 

[Scribble]

Which means that, if I bought the IP and stripped it of the name, Mr. Gygax's work (and WotC's work) somehow ceases to be D&D.

Blech.

Kind of. Not entirely though.

Sure it would be D&D rpg. You don't need rules to role-play. Every time someone complains about the lack of roleplaying focus in any edition, that's the first, second, third, etc., line to be trotted out. It is as true for Candyland as it is for 4e, 3e, 2e, 1e, or OD&D.

I think we're talking about two different things here, but if that's where you want to go, then sure. If Candyland gets the D&D RPG name on it, then like it or not, that's the D&D RPG. It might not be YOUR preffered edition of the D&D RPG but it's still The D&D RPG.

What I'm saying doesn't have to do with the rules. It's just how the object is presented. It doesn't matter how many or how little "role playing" rules are in the object- If it's presented as The Dungeons and Dragons Role Playing Game then it is The D&D RPG.


[/quote]"Identity is determined by those with the wealth to make that determination" is not something I endorse, thank you very much.


RC[/QUOTE]


It doesn't have anything to do with wealth, so please don't misquote me, as that's not what I said.

 

[Betote]

To me, D&D is a roleplaying game about exploring dungeons and fighting dragons. If it has all those elements, I'll say "I'm playing Dungeons and Dragons".

Then, there are trappings which can make a game "more D&D-like". The 6 attributes, d20 to attack, Vancian magic, classes, races, levels, alignment and bizarre monsters (owlbears, mindflayers, beholders, gelatinous cubes and such) do definitely count for D&Dness, but as long as there are dungeons to explore and dragons to fight, it'll be D&D to me . And it will be awesome

 

[Aberzanzorax]

ALL versions of D&D are still D&D. Period.

The fundamentals are the same in all editions.

A party of adventurers in a fantasy world descending into a trap and monster filled ruin to acquire magic and treasure while gaining XP which allow them to level up and face tougher monsters and earn bigger treasures while facing ever greater dangers.

This is the core essence of D&D. Everything else is just semantics.

Ah, but this is exactly the point of my original post. I've seen many descriptions of D&D as what you've said. I've also seen "as long as I'm rolling a d20, it's D&D".

My point is, though, that your description is a great definition of D&D...except it is far too broad. It encompasses much more than just D&D.



It seems that any definition at this point that defines D&D is either so broad as to encompass additional game systems that are clearly not D&D or so narrow as to exclude at least one edition (maybe 4th or third, or maybe even first, as we have seen).

So, the conclusion I've drawn from the posts in this thread is that D&D is fundamentally defined by brand name at this point, and not by its characteristics per se.


I don't know yet if that bothers me or not. I have to think on that.


In my opinion, though, each edition of D&D is so different (well maybe not 1st versus 2nd), that calling it "D&D" is more fiction than fact. If I say "We have a D&D game going, want to join?" to someone in the know about the different editions, I'd be SHOCKED if the very next words out of their mouth wasn't "What edition?". (Not even because they favored one versus another, but because they are so different, and a person wants to know what kind of game they are about to play.)

This thread has helped me to really understand the edition wars. There are many games out there, and while our conceptions of what "D&D is" are disparate, one thing is clear. There are tons of great choices as to which game we play. 4e, 3e, 2e, and OD&D are different games. In some cases they are more different from one another than they are from other games which are not even D&D (castles and crusades, tunnels and trolls, runequest, etc.)

No wonder people had edition wars.

There has been use of hyperbole in which people queried "what if, for 5th edition, they slapped the D&D name on Monopoly?" What indeed? Some people really like Monopoly. Those people would welcome the "change". Lovers of 4th, 3rd, and the other versions would see it as blasphemy.

Any edition of any roleplaying game that is more of a "re-invention" or "re-imagining" than a refinement is bound to have these same issues...you change it enough, and it's no longer the same animal. It will be different...and better to some while worse to others.

 

[Doug McCrae]

There's a practical issue here. If 3e or 4e aren't D&D, then what do you call them? How can you refer to these rpgs without confusing people? They are D&D because that's what they're called. Not just by WotC but by the wider community of roleplayers.

The red panda and the giant panda are both called pandas even though they are only very distantly related. The former is in the same family as the racoon. But if you start calling the red panda a bear cat or a fire fox, hardly anyone will know what you're talking about.

 

[Aberzanzorax]

Very true. Even if they are the same in name alone, their name DOES matter.

 

[Obryn]

In my opinion, though, each edition of D&D is so different (well maybe not 1st versus 2nd), that calling it "D&D" is more fiction than fact. If I say "We have a D&D game going, want to join?" to someone in the know about the different editions, I'd be SHOCKED if the very next words out of their mouth wasn't "What edition?". (Not even because they favored one versus another, but because they are so different, and a person wants to know what kind of game they are about to play.)

Yep, I'd agree 100%. Each edition is basically a completely different game, with threads of commonality to other editions. Some people value certain continuities over other, which is why people argue about what is or isn't D&D. IMHO, they're silly Platonic arguments which don't do anyone any good, in the end.

D&D is a family of games, with several common features shared from game to game, one of which is the fact that all are called D&D both by the company producing them and the players playing them.

-O

 

[pawsplay]

On Pawsplay's points:

Greg Stafford's Pendragon (1985) and Prince Valiant (1989), as well as Ars Magica (1987) by Jonathan Tweet and Mark Rein•Hagen seem to me to undermine the "quantum leap" claim regarding Vampire: The Masquerade (1991). Prince Valiant in particular actually stripped down the conventional mechanics (almost all the way back to the simplicity of the original D&D set ) and employed devices designed especially for a story-telling game.

Prince Valiant is roughly contemperous with Vampire and did not make the same splash, to put it mildly. But moving past that, there is very little that differentiates Prince Valiant from traditional fantasy wargames, and in fact uses the same basic tropes (encounters, tests, XP/Fame, etc). It uses storytelling tools to good effect, from my understanding (never played) but does very little to distinguish in style from a stripped down OD&D game.

Vampire shifted things in so many ways. GM fiat was encouraged, even as players were encouraged to take on a narrative role. The setting became highly player-driven as the PCs were a good proportion of the vamps in any given setting. Willpower and humanity were long-term "hit points" that were carried over from session to session. Most importantly, the game did not encourage a series of tests (a la the dungeon crawl or a joust or an escape from Arkham) but rather an ongoing set of conflicts in which the participants often remained the same until climactic events occured.

Ars Magica had a lot of these traits, but did not succeed in transforming gaming in the same fashion. Other games had elements that anticipated Vampire (Call of Cthulhu and its sanity rules, for instance). But Vampire was the game that crystallized the shift. Storytelling games became a sub-genre of RPGs unto themselves, neighboring the fantasy wargaming tradition.

That is not to say the Vampire did anything impossible in D&D or vice versa; it is in the nature of a roleplaying game to be configurable. My point is that Vampire changed the assumptions underpinning the game.

 

[Dragonblade]

Each edition is basically a completely different game, with threads of commonality to other editions. Some people value certain continuities over other, which is why people argue about what is or isn't D&D. IMHO, they're silly Platonic arguments which don't do anyone any good, in the end.

I generally agree with this.

A former justice of the US Supreme Court once said, "I shall not attempt to further define [pornography],....but I know it when I see it."

D&D is the same way. I can't necessarily "define" D&D, but I know it when I see it.