What is the essence of D&D

[Mistwell]

 

[dave2008]

Theater of the mind.
You don’t have your rule books, nor your character sheet.
You have a single pen and a small sheet of paper,
If you rely on theater of the mind, you can play.

But is that essential to D&D? You can play D&D without a reliance on TotM so I would think that is not core.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

But is that essential to D&D? You can play D&D without a reliance on TotM so I would think that is not core.

No individual element is absolutely essential. For any given element, you could change that one thing, and the remaining entity would still be D&D.

(The ability to house-rule the game is a core element of D&D, which the game can nevertheless survive without.)

 

[robus]

You only need to thank one person. The one, the only, Sir McStabsalot.

View attachment 113318

Is he farting while dual wielding? I didn’t know paladins got a sneak attack?!

 

[Hussar]

I’d agree with the “shared tropes” definition. No single element defines the game but reach a certain critical mass of tropes and you’ll get people agreeing that X is dnd.

What that critical mass is varies from person to person.

It’s no different than the perennial “Is Star Wars SF or fantasty” genre wank. For folks Star Wars has enough tropes to qualify as one or the other. Since dnd lacks specific themes, all we are left with is trope.

Many of which originated within the game itself.

 

[Raith5]

I play games other than D&D and I am always struck with D&D is the way progression of your character is so dramatic and addictive. In marvel heroic, pendragon and traveller, progression is pretty minor. The zero to hero progression in D&D is so dramatic, and sometimes runs against sensible story telling, but is central to what makes D&D tick.

 

[Sacrosanct]

D&D is having a housecat be a potential fatal opponent at 1st level while shrugging off dragon’s breath at 10th level.

 

[Deleted member 7015506]

The feeling of rolling a 1, or a 20. No other game I've ever played had such an impact for a single result on a d20. D20 = D&D

That reminds me of a session, when we played the german "The Dark Eye" back in the days. The game just received a new rules companion "introducing" critical hit tables. Before that the rule was, that if you rolled a 1 or 2 (lower is better here), no parry roll allowed and your damage bypasses armor protection (= no points deducted from the damage roll due to the armor of the enemy (natural and worn alike)). Now there was this fantastic table, that you rolled on after you had that critical.
So during the session, the party encounters this big Hydra. Things go wrong and one of our fighters only had his dagger left. and since he was more or less out (being dragged to the back of the battle with like 2 or 3 HP left), he decides to throw that dagger - To-Hit roll turns a 1 Critical! Now he rolls another d20 - comes up a 20- again - maximum result on the crit table. And now you are allowed to make a third d20 roll to see what exactly happens.And voila another 20 resulting in the immediate death of the beast and party saved. One of the most memorable and cinematic moments in my player "career".

 

[Islayre d'Argolh]

A class system.

Levels.

Hit points.

Saving throws.

The six ability scores. Whether it's the right way (SIWDConCha) or the wrong way (heh, SDCIWC), you should have six abilities. No more. No less.

Isn't Searchers of the Unknown D&D ?
No class system, no abilities.

 

[Deleted member 7015506]

"AC, HD, class, level, combat and magic mechanics, saving throws etc. etc. And those are easily to understand even by new players"

Not actually so. Having run for a lot of new players, D&D is not more obvious than Fate, Big Eyes Small Mouth, GUMSHOE, or, I am guessing, many others.

D&D's core advantage is simply that a lot of experienced players can sit down and play it together with little hassle. Not just because it's popular, but also because generic fantasy is both very understood and easy to play a wide variety of play styles in.

D&D's complete failure to make inroads into other genres shows that it is intimately tied to the genre. A reasonable was might be made that the essence of D&D is simply "being the most popular game for the fantasy genre".

If BRP or Runequest was dominating the genre, I don't imagine we'd have much of a different climate for RPGS. I don't think it's anything special about D&D, honestly

I have to counter that. I DMed many sessions, either with totally new people to RPGing or few experience with other systems. The basic concept of RPGing (dialogue, explaining your actions during the game) is explained easily, no matter what the system is you are playing. The game mechanics are not that complicated (combat f.e.: roll a d20, add or subtract a modifier and see if that result is equal or higher than a target number (=AC)) and are understood after the first couple of combat rounds. And for that no expereince with RPGs is necessary.

Now I agree on the basic concepts of fantasy (dragons, dwarves, elves, etc.). Basically everybody knows what that is and how it looks (thanks Mr. Jackson for making those great movies).

One thing though, that makes D&D so easy to transport to the table is, that no matter what edition or clone you play (some exceptions exist), veteran players, even when total strangers to each other, can easily adapt to the presented system/edition (normally) and play together. The reason is, that D&D throughout all of its editions remained the same to the core mechanics and provided therefore a kind of unified "language" amongst people playing D&D. Now that might hold true for other games also (Runequest and its cousins for example), but it is (for me) most obvious in D&D.

Now for the "complete failure" to adapt into other genres I agree to a certain point. There were attempts in the past "Mask of the Red Death" for example), but IMHO they never clicked, because the support was not so large as for AD&D (2e) at that time and TSR made the big mistake in competing with itself by publishing too many settings so their customer base was split amongst itself. And this resulted in neglecting and finally abandoning those attempts.