NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 5473149" data-attributes="member: 22779">With apologies, but, could I change that last bit from "nakedly obvious mechanics first" to simply transparent and unapologetic? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Because, honestly, I think that's a major sticking point with some people.  It's not so much that it's radically different than what came before, but rather it's very, very in your face about it.  There's no attempt to dress up the mechanics at all.  We know that monster X looks the way it does because of the mechanics.  I would argue that earlier editions try to gloss over a lot of this by dressing it up as fiction first but not really making major substantive decisions based on narrative rather than mechanics.In the cases where narrative first was the design decision, it largely failed - broken mechanics, restrictions that were largely ignored (time based training for entry into PrC's and the like are a prime example here - either the PrC was ignored, or the restriction was), that sort of thing.That might just be my personal biases intruding though.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />This I think is spot on.  100% true and well put.I think that trying to find a definition that includes D&D and only D&D is doomed to failure.  Considering how much D&D has influenced so many other games, in particular anything published pre-1990, it's innevitable that many of the elements one finds in D&D are also going to be found in other RPG's.I think it's very telling that you name a number of games that share a similar time frame to D&D for their first entrance into the hobby.  D&D set the stage for RPG's and for a very long time, a game could be judged by how much it was like D&D or how much it tried to be different from D&D.</blockquote>

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