What do you like about D&D?

[Quasqueton]

What do you like about D&D compared to other RPGs?

[I don’t mean what you love about role-playing games, or gaming in general. Like, “I like getting together with my friends.”]


Levels – I like the marked advancement.

Hit Points – I like “seeing” the “battle damage”. I like the whittling down effect of fighting a big monster.

AC – I like the abstract method of hitting for damage.

Classes – I like the archtypes and specialization that requires a party with diverse abilities working together.

Ability scores from 3-18 – I like the bell curve, and the easy comparison. The range is large enough for plenty of variance, yet small enough to not go into minutia.

Alignments – I like the two-word, “thumbnail” description of a character or monster. I like that there are Universal Powers of Good, Evil, Law, and Chaos.

Dungeons – I love dungeon delving.


There’s more I like, and I could go into more detail about the above. But I think this can get the ball rolling.

Quasqueton

 

[Philotomy Jurament]

I like everything you listed, plus Vancian magic.

 

[Psion]

My growing list:

1. Classes - instrumental in making the team based play work and shaping the metasetting.
2. Prestige classes - extend and add shticks to the exiting classes without breaking the role-based balance.
3. Feats - allow you to customize your character without creating whole new classes.
4. Alignment - a tangible moral reality is a solid underpinning of the wide eyed high fantasy experience I expect out of D&D.
5. Vancian magic - simple to use, simple to GM, does a good job of limiting wizards while letting them show off.
6. Classed creatures and templates - a 3e innovation (sorta...), makes adventures extensible and ensures that players never know quite what to expect.
7. Skills systems - facilitate non combat challenge.
8. D20 base system - stops the plethora of mini mechanics by inserting a flexible central mechanic.
9. Support - the amount of WotC and third party support for D&D makes it trivial to drink new things into your game.

 

[Celebrim]

1) Everyone knows how to play.
2) Compared to other RPG's, the amount of set up time as a player or a DM is pretty small (this is less true of 3rd than it was of 1st but its still true). Simply put, a DM can put less work into a D20 adventure of a certain complexity than he puts into a GURP/MERPS/RM adventure of the same complexity. This is alot of the reason I switched from GURPS back to D&D.
3) The game tends to play faster, which each player's turn coming hard upon the other players rather than long delays as actions are resolved. Forcing players to wait around is just bad for the game, as I find your average RPG player only has about a 20 sec attention span.
4) Compared to point buy games, its much easier to balance the game and create appropriate challenges for a party (this is less true if you allow alot of PrC's and feats into the game but still true).
5) Better adventure and campaign support than any other game out there which means a good game is always available to you with almost no startup time.
6) For the most part, the D20 rules are extremely solid.

 

[irdeggman]

Agree with most everything so far.

Alignments are tough because it really comes down to the "setting" and the DM. Some settings (like Dark Sun) don't really have black and white alignments. But as long as everyone in the game has the same "understanding" up front it all works out well.

Magic, I generally like the Vancian magic system, but a system with augmentations (like psionics have) would probably work out much smoother, IMO.

 

[crazy_cat]

Levels
Classes (and Prestige Classes)
AC and HP's
D20 Mechanics in general
Feats and Skills (although I prefer Iron Heroes skill groups)

EDIT: I don't particularly like Alignments, but I can live with 'em.

 

[el-remmen]

Basically everything Quasqueton mentioned, plus

The universality of it.

I like being able to say to a potential player, "I run D&D. There are a bunch of house rules, but basically it is D&D" and they would be able to know what I basically mean.

 

[hexgrid]

The vast sea of pre-written adventures. I'm an adventure junkie, and no game comes even close to D&D when it comes to the number of available modules.

 

[Crothian]

The depth and support it gets. EN World.

 

[Shroomy]

Everything that has been mentioned so far, and what I regard as the most important...the support, either from WoTC, Paizo, or a d20 publisher cannot be matched by another game.