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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Badapple" data-source="post: 5979138" data-attributes="member: 71811">Warning, long, somewhat hyperbolic, tongue in cheek rant ahead:  Throw away comments like “This isn’t D&D” have a place in a Chick Fil-A boardroom perhaps, but not on a D&D message board.  It’s insulting to read this when gamers go to a premium message board like EN World, especially on a thread that the original poster specifically asks to keep away from edition wars and simply state what they want to see out of the new edition.  Following the intent of the thread, I posted my opinion of what *I* would like to see.  You are free to post your own opinion of what kind of game you want or you are free to civilly point out disagreements you have in a rational manner, but you are not free to post stand-alone ignorant statements like “this isn’t D&D” to another poster’s opinion.  Comments like that increase the signal to noise ratio of a thread, heavily in favor of the “noise” portion.  It’s also specifically the kind of thing the moderators have repeatedly warned users not to engage in. For the record, EN World moderators have made it crystal clear that OD&D, 3E, and 4E are all resoundingly D&D and that on this message board any comments to the contrary are unproductive, edition warring, and disallowed. As a side note, did I seriously equate a comment like “this isn’t D&D” to a Chick Fil-A executive?  Yes.  Yes, I did.  For the exact same reason that ignorant comments like “that’s not marriage” are hurled about in editorials when two homosexuals marry legally in Massachusetts, comments like “that’s not D&D” are hurled about on message boards when one poster expresses an opinion about the game that another poster disagrees with.  In both cases, they are cheap, insulting, made by an emotional portion of the population in the place of a rational argument and are flat out wrong.  Like it or not “save vs. petrification”, “thaco”, “BAB”, “Healing Surges”, and “Drizz’t” are D&D, whether they exist in a given edition or not.  Whether you dig them or not is up to you.  Whatever TSR and Wizards of the Coast put between two hardcovers is then, now, and in the future, D&D.  When gamers get together to be social, have some snacks, and roll weird dice while they save imaginary kingdoms from dragons… it is D&D.  Everything else is subjective. Last night, the opening ceremonies of the Olympics, a truly majestic event, was somewhat tarnished by Ryan Seacrest’s pretaped interviews where he asks uncomfortable female US athletes “what they think  of Justin Bieber”.  What does that have to do with the Olympics?  Nothing.  What does a comment like “that’s not D&D” have to do with one poster’s idea of what they would like to see in an upcoming Dungeons and Dragons game?  Nothing.  Therefore comments like “that’s not D&D” are the Ryan Seacrest / Justin Bieber equivalents of an internet discussion.  Can we keep them out?  If you are a traditionalist and want to keep the old school feel going and disagree with my post that D&D should put in some new features and change things up, then fine, put a post out there giving your opinion why that is a good thing (such as Danny Alcatraz's post about how Fender shouldn't alter its guitar, but merely tweak it).  That's an example of a reasonable argument. There’s a message board meme that as soon as one poster mentions “Hitler” or “Nazis” that the discussion is immediately over and the other side has won.  Can we get a similar meme going here at EN World? Proposed EN World meme:  As soon as one person says “that’s not D&D” in response to someone else’s post, we pelt him with 20 sided dice until he apologizes and buys a pizza and a case of Mountain Dew?Mod Note:  Please see my note a couple of posts down.  ~Umbran</blockquote>

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