Dungeons & Dragons *is* "four-color" adventure; trying to make it something else results in metaphysical absurdity when discussing a cosmology designed to generate monsters to kill with swords.
I gotta say that puritanical genre-policing like this makes me sad and a little irate.
It's a simple attempt to de-legitimize a style of game, badwrongfun in a more condescending garb. "Oh, that's all well and good, but it's not
real D&D!" is utterly pointless border-patroling and more than that it is absolutely and empirically
wrong on every conceivable level.
Because D&D is four-color adventure, and it is also moral ambiguity and it is slaying Thor and turncoat Drow and Balance Above All and cheap LotR rip-offs featuring monsters from Greek myth and Gygaxian dungeon crawls and Gothic horror and slightly homoerotic '80's style leather daddy environmentalism metaphor and swashbuckling 70's sci-fi and countless and infinite other stops in between and beyond. D&D is not limited, it is whatever any table says it is, and sometimes, at my tables, D&D absolutely
is this narrative of ideological warfare.
D&D has been all this, it will continue to be all this and more, and while your tables might be limited to one of your favorite styles, you don't have the authority or the ability to impose your view on the
game itself. Not even the designers have that authority (see 4e's sacred cow bar-b-que). No one who wants to run a morally ambiguous game needs to run their plan by anyone other than their own group for approval, and if they gather together and play that game and call it D&D, guess what?
That is D&D, even if it's not your kind of game.
That diversity is a strength - it's part of the fun of D&D that it is whatever you turn it into in your group. And telling people that their games aren't "
real D&D" violates that strength.
Hussar said:
I have to admit, I'd play Planescape, but, not with the D&D system. There are all sorts of systems out there that deal with metaphysical ethics and morality much, MUCH better than D&D. Paramandur might be a bit facile in his description, but, I don't think he's wrong. Saying that D&D is four-color fantasy isn't a huge leap here, is it?
It is, because it's pretending that D&D is some monolithic single-purpose input-output device that can only do one thing. That has never, ever,
ever been true of D&D, and the fact that this has never been true of D&D is part and parcel of why D&D is so much more fun and enjoyable than most other things you can do with your time - because it is what you make of it.
And making of it a campaign setting that is a battleground of ideologies amongst the heavens and the hells is one of the
less radical things you can do with it - certainly TSR circa 1990 thought it was totally within the D&D wheelhouse.
As an aside, it's worth noting that PS is very much a product of its times - one of the reasons it futzes with the alginment concept is one of the same reasons it futzes with traditional fantasy races or with traditional overland journeys. PS is to a large degree a reaction within D&D to the prevalence of traditional Tolkeinish fantasy. One of it's goals is to be non-traditional. Alignment-busting by saying that alignments are really just based on a sort of consensus is one way it does that.
