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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Set" data-source="post: 4561470" data-attributes="member: 41584">I don't think that D&D was created as a toolkit, so much as a set of rules to work for a very specific group of people in their home game, that every single purchaser ended up playing differently than those creators did. Regardless of it's intended function, it *became* a toolkit the second someone outside of Gary Gygax's kitchen got their hands on it. Books like Unearthed Arcana (3E) or the Player's Option books (2E) pretty much ran with that 'toolkit' idea, introducing variant magic systems, etc. and many of the settings (or even planes) introduced all sorts of different assumptions, such as Al-Qadim, Ravenloft or Spelljammer, lending themselves to storylines that looked *nothing* like the average 1st edition adventure (enter dark place, kill monsters, take loot). Once a purchaser lays their money down, the books become their property, and they can start house-ruling and tweaking to suit whatever campaign they want to run.  If your points of light setting includes a mountain fortress full of dwarves who hold the line against the humanoid hordes through the use of smokepowder weapons, nobody can come and tell you that you can't do that. D&D's totally a toolkit, and has been since it left the printers and fell into the hands of someone other than it's writer.</blockquote>