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Message: <blockquote data-quote="woodelf" data-source="post: 1995415" data-attributes="member: 10201">How are wise noble giants any more setting-specific than orc-hating elves or giant-fighting dwarves? How are ceremonial feats any more setting-specific than clerics that turn undead or rangers that dual-wield, have animal buddies, and cast spells?I see all the stuff you're talking about, but i think it's merely different than what's in D&D3E, not any more prevalent or more-strongly integrated. It's just that you're used to D&D tropes. Give both rulebooks to someone who's never played any RPG, and has no familiarity with them, but has read lots of [non-TSR/WotC] fantasy fiction, and i'm willing to bet that they'd both be seen to have a lot of bizarrely-arbitrary tropes. If anything, i'd expect AU to be seen as less alien. Or, to put it another way, here's a brief list of stuff that is D&D-specific:clerics that cast "divine" spellsclerics that turn undeadclerics that are highly-skilled warriorsrogues that sneak-attack, regardless of their sort of roguishnessrangers that are magicalrangers that are animal-friendsdruids that shapechangelack of animist spiritspresence of discernable godselves that're basically long-lived nature-loving humans (but not "better" than humans)D&D-style gnomesD&D-style halflingsdwarves that get bonuses to fight giantswizards  that're wussesbards that have magical ability distinct from their musical abilityhalf-orcspaladins as divine warriorsthe spelllist is full of setting assumptions--*way* too many to bother listing anywheredragons that're intelligent and spell-casting (and color-coded)That's just a few of the more-obvious examples, off the top of my head. Yes, it's true that a lot of those are not unique to Greyhawk--but they are, nonetheless, almost never found outside of D&D (and certainly not all of them, together). They give any setting that uses the rules, unaltered, a very distinct feel. Just as AU does. As for baggage: I'm running an Al Qadim campaign right now. The old AD&D2 rules had a *lot* of baggage to excise to fit the setting. Frex, all the race relations had to be dumped.  Starting from D&D3E would require about the same amount of change. Starting with AU, i had to make exactly 2 changes, fairly minor IMHO: dump one flavor of witch (winter) and one flavor of champion (magic). Oh, and one major change: introduce yak-men instead of harridans as the major creepy badguys--but they're not there in D&D3E, either. That was it. And a lot of the concepts in AU that are different from D&D3E were a perfect fit for the setting, and thus obviated the need to create a new chunk of mechanics (as would've been necessary with core D&D3E). Frex, AU already has a hero point system, which is a natural fit for the "calling on fate" concept in Al Qadim. Similarly, the races fit better into a pseudo-arabic setting than the D&D3e races do. That's just one example of taking a common fantasy setting from somewhere else, and AU is a better fit, "out of the box", than D&D3E.</blockquote>

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