Is D&D a setting or a toolbox?

[JamesonCourage]

Toolbox. I don't care about any setting history, pre-made NPCs or their history, pre-made locations or their history, etc. I'm always going to use the mechanics to make a fun game, and ignore whatever setting stuff they have; I like my stuff more. As always, play what you like

 

[amerigoV]

Its not part setting, its part genre. It does not have the enough specifics to be a setting. The PHB is not the PHB for Greyhawk, Eberron, FR, or any other setting (although Greyhawk probably has the least amount of additions or changes to any core PHB).

But D&D is its own style of fantasy - its own genre. Other games can do fantasy. For example, I play/run Savage Worlds and it does fantasy fine. But nothing does D&D like D&D. All the other settings and editions are aspects/angles of that genre. Any like any genre, there is some stuff you like and some you do not (some people love FR, others hate it. Same with various editions and clones).

D&D is an excellent tool-set for D&D games, but its a lot of work to get it to do non-D&D things. While D&D takes its inspiration from many sources, it does not replicate those sources very well without heavy customization. For example, Lankhmar, Conan or LoTR may be inspirations to the game but D&D has never done Lankhmar, Conan or LoTR well without major changes - and it still did not "feel" right. D20 tried to be all-things to all people during the 3.x era, but in the end outside of d20+mods vs. target number you had pretty much a new system. Everything had different classes with a bunch of new feats and modifications to make HP (wound/vitality) work.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

D&D is a toolbox, but most of the settings you build with it will have common elements since they are built with common tools.

 

[Derren]

A toolbox, but a very basic one. One screw and 5 different hammers.

 

[SkidAce]

D&D is one of very few games I own that doesn't have a built-in setting. I think that's a good thing.

Yup.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

It's primarily a setting. Once you know the world has magic-users, fighters, paladins, orcs, red dragons, figurines of wondrous power, fireball & wish spells, cure light wounds, +2 swords, etc etc, the setting is 80% defined.

The reason it's not always obvious that it's a setting is that D&D assumptions have become the baseline assumptions for many gamers. We think of it as "generic fantasy" rather than "D&D-as-a-setting," which is what it actually is.

 

[teitan]

One of the fundamental flaws of second edition was the attempt to make d&d a toolbox and it wasn't very good at doing that. Some settings felt hammered into the rules like square pegs into round holes. As much as I loved Planescape, the rules of second edition kind of hampered it because even with the setting adjustment to the rules it didn't quite fit even if you could run some great stories with the system and setting. It would have been better served with its own rules that were a heavily modified d&d. Heavily modified. The same goes for Birthright & Dark SUn.

The implementation of d&d towards the tool box approach was also half-baked because largely it was in the hands of the priest classes. The presentation of the toolbox for priests was poorly implemented without real examples beyond the druid of how to build a priest of a specific mythos because the druid was built primarily to function as its own class. The implementation of kits in the PHBR series went just short of increasing the toolbox capabilities of second edition in customizing classes for a unique fantasy world.

Third edition went to great lengths to emphasize d&d as genre and the d20 system on its own proved that point as moving the system into other genres and types of fantasy resulted in sometimes different games ala Mongoose's Conan game. The default magic assumptions broke other types of fantasy settings like an egg into a skillet. If you approached d&d as a setting in itself with certain assumptions baked in it worked wonderfully but required heavy tinkering but the lore of the MM wasn't required. It was the default assumptions of the system with the classes and access to magic as well as the math. As much as some grognards railed against third as "not d&d" this shows how much it was d&d as any earlier edition.

But this doesn't make it a setting any more than it made d&d a toolbox. It was a toolbox for d&d style fantasy and it did d&d style settings hellagreat. The Forgotten Realms was probably the best and most accessible it'd been out of the box since first edition because the domain system and prestige classes handled specialist priests better and simpler than second edition handled the same matters. Taking Mystra as your patron at first level made you feel different than being a priest of Tyr or Bane and hen the individual prestige classes for each deity ensured you didn't over power the other players early on and this system also didn't keep you from becoming a burden to the party because of you made the wrong choice in second ed for your patron you might have gotten very weak spell choices and proficiencies and restrictions. I digress.

What I am getting at is that once they got rid of the idea of d&d as a toolbox and accepted it as genre, the game improved in its presentation and implementation of settings. The realms were built as a d&d setting with the default assumptions of d&d as the standard. Eberron amped those setting expectations to 11 and showed what a setting for d&d with the default assumptions in play could logically lead to and it was an amazing thing.

Now Fourth edition is a different critter. It is a whole new game but also it is d&d but the expectations of d&d as a genre are further baked into the rules right down to party roles and genre emulation. Modification to do other fantasy genres requires heavy modification of the system as seen in Gamma World and that WOTC was going to do Ravenloft as an rpg in a box as opposed to a series of setting books ala Everton, FR and Dark Sun including rules and its own class system. Ravenloft is the prime example actually of how d&d as a toolbox doesn't work and how the default assumptions are difficult to port to other genres. Ravenloft the setting does work with the idea of it being its own game, especially Masque of the Red Death, but the default assumption of medieval fantasy in the core hurt the overall experience. I think this is why WOTC were developing it as its own game as opposed to a setting. As an adventure it work wonderfully for a one off or couple nights, but as a world to explore it failed from the default assumption of the rules. Great setting, bad rules implementation.

I think d&d is able to do partial emulation of some genres when you use the default assumptions. Like the pulp elements of Eberron but pulp on its own... not so much. Superheroes? Fuggetaboutit.

So it is not a setting or a toolbox, it is a setting and a toolbox... for a very specific style of fantasy.

 

[Hussar]

I look at D&D as a specialized toolbox. It's nowhere near as generic as, say, Savage Worlds or the Fate system, but, by and large, because it's a toolbox, you can do a lot of different things with it. But, because it is a specialized toolbox, it's not going to be terribly useful outside of a certain set of jobs.

Urgh, I think I just touched that metaphor in many bad ways.

My point is, there's nothing wrong with suggestions within the rules for how something might look or work. That's fine. Where I have a problem is when those suggestions take on the weight of canon and must never be changed. We cannot do X because of some established bit of text from fifteen or twenty or thirty years ago.

At one time, racial tensions were baked directly into the rules. You had a chart in the 1e PHB that told you, specifically, how various races viewed each other. To me, that's too much. That's setting material. I'd much rather start with baseline descriptions of the various player races and let the players figure out how different races feel about each other. If one DM wants elves and dwarves to get along, that should be fine. If kobolds marry gnomes in my world, that should be fine.

Telling me that race X is some way, and then enforcing that in all subsequent publications, and refusing to accept any revision or re-visitation is not fine. IMO.

 

[Umbran]

At one time, racial tensions were baked directly into the rules. You had a chart in the 1e PHB that told you, specifically, how various races viewed each other. To me, that's too much. That's setting material. I'd much rather start with baseline descriptions of the various player races and let the players figure out how different races feel about each other. If one DM wants elves and dwarves to get along, that should be fine. If kobolds marry gnomes in my world, that should be fine.

On the other hand, one table that you can ignore and have no other impact upon the game hardly seems "baked in" to me. That sounds more "tacked on". YMMV.

 

[n00bdragon]

D&D is not a toolbox game by any definition. It has a variety of settings it can be applied to but each version of D&D has a very concrete assumptions of how the world works built into it hard. There has always been an assumption that (and I don't mean to imply that all future editions will or even should assume these things, just that they have always assumed them thus far):
- Magic exists and it's easily manipulated through "spells" that can be cast by mortals.
- Wizards gain power through scholarly knowledge and can do things like shoot fireballs and stop time, they are also presumed to be physically unimposing characters.
- Clerics and priests are "spellcasters" just like wizards are, in fact their game rules for casting spells always mirror those for wizards closely. Their spells tend to more focused on protection, healing, and "buffs" though, seemingly irregardless of what their god might be into. They are always depicted as being more physically imposing than wizards.
- Paladins exist and they are what paladins are. D&D invented the modern perception of the word "paladin" out of whole cloth.
- Monks exist and are what monks are. D&D invented the monk based on an amalgamation of martial arts movies, but the assumption that wuxia martial artists are an expected part of the otherwise Tolkienesque game is a pure D&D-ism.
- The game shall involve not just humans, but also elves, dwarves, halflings, and other races pulled from Tolkien. The near universal presence of these races is assumed and implied in every edition of D&D for no particular reason other than "that's just how D&D rolls".

I could go on and on but the fact is that there is an implicit "how the world is organized" in D&D. Whether your game is about pirates or castles or a bizarre puzzle world it's very often assumed that all of the above is there regardless. Compare that to a game like Mutants and Masterminds which has NO implied setting (it has a sample setting but there's a severe difference), only the assumption that your characters are super-powered somethings. I'm not going to suggest that an implied setting is bad though because I can tell you from experience; picking up M&M can be daunting because you have to invent all those world assumptions from whole cloth. Are super heroes common, how do they get their powers, what options should be available to the players. You cannot hand the book to a player and say "Make a 150 point character and show up for the game on Friday."

But D&D is not a toolbox. Not by any means.