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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6246047" data-attributes="member: 2067">I think it's a mistake to say that stuff that is in Greyhawk and FR is what defines D&D. It's a reasonable starting point perhaps but this is 2014 and it's incandescently transparent that Greyhawk and FR are NOT equivalent with D&D. They're particular flavors of D&D -- the first, the most popular -- but not all of the thing. But they're not OA or Dark Sun, so they are obviously not D&D. D&D exists independent of those elements. D&D doesn't require those elements. A D&D edition being designed today would be kind of narmed to assume that the games played with it include those elements. But an FR setting being designed today could safely include those elements, since they are part of FR. Yeah, all that, by what 1e said, was pretty much descriptions of how things were in Greyhawk. When FR came along, they were also often how things were in FR. But by the time we're seeing 2e's alternate settings and 3e's alternate cosmologies (not to mention the galaxy that the OGL opened up), D&D > Greyhawk, or Greyhawk + FR. Now, when you talk about D&D, you need to make a distinction: sometimes it's Greyhawk. Sometimes, it's about FR. Sometimes, it's something else. That something else may make use of Greyhawk elements if it wants (as FR often does). This is D&D, after all: stealing what works is how this game was born. But I don't think we should loose sight of the idea that these things are particular and local (even if they're early and popular). When you take the Warforged, you're taking a part of Eberron. When you grab a Red Dragon, you're grabbing a part of FR or GH or DL. You can't just wedge a chromatic dragon into anything the D&D logo and call it good (it wouldn't really fit in Dark Sun, for instance). You can't just put demons from the Abyss in any D&D game and presume that it'll be a welcome addition. D&D is the platform more than any setting. But it's a platform with rich and interesting settings that examples and ideas can come from. And if it's in FR and GH and DL and Eberron, there's a good reason to put it in the MM! But there's also a good reason to maybe describe how it's different in different worlds, without presuming that any one description speaks for D&D as a whole.</blockquote>

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