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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Whizbang Dustyboots" data-source="post: 5754914" data-attributes="member: 11760">A lot of us have. <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=";)" />Uh, what? The LBBs are not D&D?Other than combat running on too long -- a criticism that's also leveled at high-level 3E, incidentally, but 3E remains D&D for all but the most hardcore OSR types -- I'd still love to hear what about 4E makes it "not recognizable as D&D." So far, there's been some nebulous stuff about "the feel."If anything, I think the arguments during the 4E transition about the fluff being so radically different have more merit -- at least, they were actually enumerated and detailed. But you could run Runequest in the Forgotten Realms using the Great Wheel cosmology and it still wouldn't be D&D. The Dungeon! board game from the late 1970s/early 1980s explicitly used the then-current D&D fluff but was clearly not Dungeons & Dragons, either.So what makes something D&D? The "feel" can be explained, and it's a lot more productive to pin it down than to say "nuh uh, not THAT."Because, when you're describing D&D to someone who's never played it, but plays other RPGs, you'd say it's a class-based, level-based, fantasy-race based game that uses hit points, armor class, relatively abstract combat, and some characters possess rigidly defined supernatural powers. That's been true of every edition of D&D and isn't completely true of all its competitors (it's not true of Runequest or Advanced Fighting Fantasy, for instance). What additional definable qualities are required to make something D&D, especially ones that 4E fails to possess? I'd genuinely like to hear it, because, honestly, it doesn't sound like there's an argument beyond "I know D&D when I see it," which is a pretty weak one.</blockquote>

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