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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8690779" data-attributes="member: 4937">Pretty far.  To make it not D&D you'd have to kill a sacred cow that defined for me D&D in a way that I couldn't just cast 'raise dead' on the mechanic.So to make it not D&D you'd need to:a) Kill the hit point: This is the most defining aspect of D&D for me.  Hit points go a long way to creating the D&D experience.  You can have a little or a lot of them but the point is that you have them and they increase with level and there existence makes combat somewhat predictable.  As a DM you have a good idea how many of them you could take away before there would start to be problems and so you can easily estimate what a challenge is.  Moreover, you can abrade them and put the PC's in jeopardy without harming their fun because there is no death spiral.  You don't effectively take a PC out of the game just by injury.  b) Kill the zero to hero class mechanics: In D&D you have a class that forces on you a broad not easily customizable range of abilities.  You certainly can do some customization but you can't get rid of 'useless' abilities to become a Johnny One Trick as in point buy system.  Knowing only level, the DM has a pretty good idea of the capabilities of the PC's.  (Ergo, you can kill D&D for me as 3.5 did by eventually making classes so imbalanced that level tells you nothing.)c) Kill Casual Realism: To me this is probably the second biggest defining aspect of D&D, is that it is committed to making an internally coherent game where the mechanics are explained by the physics of the world and are in fact the physics of the world.  This is the reason D&D is always a bit fiddly because there is always some amount of "Shouldn't it matter that..." that goes into ruling how something works in the game, and which informs any well written D&D mechanic.  A very simple example is that if you want to push or move something in D&D, well it matters how big that thing is even if it would be less fiddly if it didn't.  One of the things I like about D&D as a GM is that I find it really easy to narrate because there are straight forward ways to equate the mechanics to the game world.  Even abstract things like hit points that are some of the least simulationist compromises in the rules do have a simulationist approach to the narration that you can take.  This casual realism means that in theory the players can interact solely with the game world and largely not with the rules because all the rules have something to do with the game environment.  Thus you have fiddly encumbrance, for example, and not a less fiddly and simpler slot system that says 'you have these X things you can carry' so that player characters can pick up and carry things based on casual realism - that is, how heavy is the thing, how bulky is the thing, do you have a place to put it - rather than an arbitrary lack of slots.  Any attempt to get to far away from this casual realism no matter what the good intention and valid justifications might be eventually for me makes it not D&D.   For example, for me Pathfinder verged on being not D&D for what might sound like a strange reason - you could cast unlimited cantrips per day.  But unlimited cantrips turned out to be something for me that destroyed casual realism.  Likewise, the hit point for me doesn't kill casual realism, but you can kill it by playing around too much with how characters heal.d) Kill Vancian Magic: Unlimited magic missiles per day isn't really a problem.  On some level, I don't really have a problem with 5e going ahead and allowing wizards a magical attack at will.  It is balanced and doesn't in and of itself create a problem.  But it does start attacking casual realism. If you can do simple magic as often as you like, why just offensive magic?  Why not other sorts of magic all the time?  And then things quickly turn out to get out of hand, because you have the Decanter of Endless Water problem all over the place.  I don't think you necessarily have to have X spell slots per level to be D&D, but I do think you need limited resources to buy well defined little packets of narrative force that describe how you are altering the game fiction in ways that go beyond what is the ordinary ability to alter the game fiction (with a crowbar or an axe for example).  And this is a problem I've had with a lot of modern D&D - 3e, 4e, and 5e are all still D&D but all guilty in their own ways of this problem, it's just how difficult I've found to house rule the problem away.  For 3e for example it wasn't much harder than saying that there are no divine magic wands, repricing a few magic items, and keeping my 1e flavor about how easy it is to buy magic items.</blockquote>

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