NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Shaman" data-source="post: 2906178" data-attributes="member: 26473">From the snippets I've read, this sounds like the premise of Exalted.(Emphasis added by this poster.)This is really interesting. I believe it extends beyond just D&D, which to my mind is a fantasy subgenre all its own, to much of the fantasy genre as a whole: building a society from the floor up with magic as a fundamental technology, rather than tacking it on like a pink flamingo on the lawn. This approach to D&D settings reflects a larger trend in fantasy, one shaped in no small part by the thirty-plus year influence of the game and gamers on the genre.Another trend in fantasy that's made its way into Dungeons and Dragons is a tendency for heroes to become more like superheroes in terms of their abilities. A 12th level fighter in 1e AD&D was a powerful dude, far better than most of the opponents he was likely to face, usually packing a potent magic weapon and magic armor, a couple of potions in a pouch and maybe a magic ring or amulet or other beneficial doo-dad - the same 12th level fighter in 3e could be wielding a fire giant's Huge magical flaming keen axe (thanks, Monkey Grip!) or shooting a slew of arrows at a target with one pull of the bow (thanks, Manyshot!) and is, if keeping to the appropriate wealth-by-level guidelines, decked out with an impressive array of magic items fitted into various 'slots,' and facing an collection of critters and baddies (or goodies, if you're into that sort of game) specifically designed to challenge him at that level. (Before anyone gets into a white lather, I'm not suggesting that one is better than the other, merely that the character examples are different in terms of what they can and can't do and how the game was structured to chellenge them.)Now a magitech (defined here not as "steampunk" or the like, but rather magic as a fundamental force in the universe integrated into the lives of the members of society) and superheroes game-world and gaming experience doesn't appeal to everyone, so for these players there is a fundamental disconnect that occurs when the World's Most Popular Roleplaying Game comes to reflect this larger trend.It's possible to run a D&D game without those conceits, but it does take some tweaking the system to get to that point. Me, I choose to play different systems instead, systems that hit my sweet spot out of the box rather than requiring retconning of features that I don't care for. I've been re-reading The Fantasy Trip after many, many years, and remembering why I thought it was such a cool system in the first place. It is much closer to my sweet spot as a gamer than D&D ever was, and years of refining my own gaming tastes make it even more appealing now than it was in the early Eighties when I was introduced to it. Its genre conceits and its mechanics reflect the sort of fantasy games I like to run better than those of D&D, and without requiring patches over sections of the system that don't fit my concept of the setting or the characters' place in it.So to answer the OP, no, you're not alone, and yes, D&D is too "D&Dish" for my tastes.</blockquote>

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