D&D General Sacred Hamburger - What classic elements of D&D do you disregard?

[Clint_L]

Nha, that more a meme than anything else.

You had class, you had races with 6 ability scores, rolled a d20 and some other weird shaped dice. Just because power progression and such worked differently, it was still pretty much D&D. Its like saying 3.5 wasnt really D&D because it was such a departure from 2e.

I disagree. 3/3.5 felt like a logical extension of 2e, just made more consistent, in line with the Role20 system. I think most of us felt like the changes made sense. 4e played very differently from other editions and felt like what it was: an attempt to capitalize on a trend and make D&D play more like World of Warcraft.

There's a reason why Pathfinder, which was essentially 3.5 continued, outsold D&D 4e, and why WotC quickly changed gears and abandoned 4e.

 

[Oofta]

Wait dragons are supposed to have specific head types? This is news to me.

This! As they say.

@Oofta It's funny to me because we argue a bit but when you describe your games it usually sounds a lot like my games!

Another good selection. I haven't entirely got rid of some of those, but I'm certainly at least reducing all of those. Gary Gygax accidentally guaranteed I would forever oppose adversarial DMing with his book "Role-playing Mastery", which basically is an instruction manual on how to be an adversarial DM, and made me realize when I read it (at like 11 or 12) that I hated literally everything it stood for!

For what it's worth, as much as this site can be contentious I suspect most of us would enjoy a game if we sat down at a table together to play a game. Forums tend to make mountains out of molehills.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I disagree. 3/3.5 felt like a logical extension of 2e, just made more consistent, in line with the Role20 system. I think most of us felt like the changes made sense. 4e played very differently from other editions and felt like what it was: an attempt to capitalize on a trend and make D&D play more like World of Warcraft.

There's a reason why Pathfinder, which was essentially 3.5 continued, outsold D&D 4e, and why WotC quickly changed gears and abandoned 4e.

You should know that not only are all of these statements highly controversial, they are considered directly inflammatory by many 4e fans. As an off-topic opening salvo, this is...unlikely to win you many friends.

 

[Fifinjir]

I'm seeing a lot of people have abandoned the original planar structure these days. In the past, it seemed like few had moved as far away from it as I have. It would be interesting for people to share their changes and see if there are trends that have developed.

I like some parts of the Outer Planes, but overall they feel to, well, physical to be the underlying spiritual reality. I practice, how different are they really from the Material Plane?

I have the “Divine Realm”, which anyone who visits can barely describe. They’re equal parts Outer Planes and Far Realms, though despite the later part there are still a fair share of benevolent entities. Sighing the Divine Realm is the Void, which is like a mix of the Lower Planes, Shadowfell, and Negative Energy Plane. Outsiders only take tangible forms when visiting the Material or a Material-adjacent place, and they can diffuse their essence into multiple bodies if they’re powerful enough. (Turns out that manes you killed was a metaphysical “fingernail” of a balor, sleep tight.)

Related, the “loose pantheon” of humanlike gods with bespoke domains and exactly three commandments is gone. People know that Divine Beings exist, but their nature is wildly debated and plenty of mutually contrasting religions have sprouted up around the question.

I might be misusing the term, but I think “Gygaxian Naturalism” is one of my sacrificed cows. Dungeons are not natural, and the entities that come out of them do not belong in this realm. They’re completely opposed to any sort of ecology they might find.

A more minor one, but devils making deals. It’s not that they never do it, but they prefer to corrupt and even “possess” societies rather than individuals. This will help me explain my next point.

I think my world has less of the “rugged individualism” usually implied by D&D worlds. I’m definitely not saying that people should subsume their identity into a group, in fact a point of my setting is how dangerous that is exactly because of the previous point about the devils. But people still do it, and because of the pseudo-spiritual nature of my setting, the resulting zeitgeist can gain a life of its own and “animate” the group of people under it. It’s why I still think it has a place for Alignment, because Alignment is contagious.