What is the essence of D&D

[Doug McCrae]

In my view D&D is fairly limited in the style of play it supports. Yes you can use it for political intrigue or investigation but the system works against both of these due to the various mind reading spells.

Dungeon cracking is most strongly supported, followed by wilderness exploration.

 

[Oofta]

In my view D&D is fairly limited in the style of play it supports. Yes you can use it for political intrigue or investigation but the system works against both of these due to the various mind reading spells.

Dungeon cracking is most strongly supported, followed by wilderness exploration.

I'll have to remember that the next time I run a political/intrigue heavy campaign. Oh wait. I am running one now. On the other hand I don't remember the last time I ran a traditional dungeons, they feel far too artificial for my taste.

 

[Doug McCrae]

I'll have to remember that the next time I run a political/intrigue heavy campaign. Oh wait. I am running one now.

Yes you can use it for political intrigue or investigation

 

[Hussar]

/snip
I think 4E (again, a game I really, really did try to enjoy) is the exception that proves the rule. There was just something ... missing. Some special sauce that I and others have alluded to. A fairly simple set of base rules that can express a nearly endless number of worlds and styles. As long as you stay within the broad outlines of it's implementation of fantasy rules, you can have an amazing variety. If you're playing a Cthulhu, Star Wars or Vampire game, you know basically what kind of game you'll be playing. Madness? Jedi? Gothic punk? I'm over-simplifying a bit, but not by much in my experience.
/snip

Frankly, I think this gets back to the "bag of tropes" that I alluded too. 4e didn't include the tropes to make it feel like D&D to you. Totally fair. I get that. 4e did shift a lot of things. The fact that 5e does "feel like D&D", to me, just means that they managed to hit the right number of tropes. For me, both games feel like D&D and I really don't have a strong feeling why other people wouldn't feel the same, but, hey, to each their own. It didn't have just that right trope or collection of tropes.

Or, to put it another way, the essence of D&D is in the presentation.

 

[Harzel]

So I agree pretty much with the items listed in the OP. I also think there is significant truth to @Umbran's notion that you may just need a substantial subset of those to make it feel like D&D, although I don't think you can take away very many before it would begin to feel 'off'. Further, some of them I'm hesitant to say you can remove at all. If you are missing in particular HP, AC, classes, or leveling, the game may be recognizably D&D-like, but I'm not sure it's D&D.

To the list of things that contribute to D&D-ness and you need most but not all of, I would add the familiar quartet of particular classes - fighter, magic-user, cleric, thief (rogue, whatever) - and some particular playable races - human, elf, dwarf, halfling. Probably half-elf should be in there, too, but they've always seemed to me kind of forgettable.

I'm sort of on the fence about murderhoboing and its cousin kill-the-monsters-and-take-their-stuff. Those are certainly play patterns that AFAIK originated with D&D and evoke D&D, but I'm not sure I think their lack in any way makes a game seem less like D&D to me.

Finally, I would add to the list one thing that is a sort of rule 'theme' and perhaps a generalization of the nature of D&D spells that @TwoSix mentioned. D&D rules have always been, to a greater or lesser extent, idiosyncratic, irregular, asymmetric, and even inconsistent - lacking (or perhaps having a surfeit of) underlying patterns and principles, full of special cases, and greatly prone to corner cases emerging when rules collide. Going too far in that direction, of course, leaves you with a hot mess, but if you have just a modest tendency, IMO it lends an air of warm, fuzzy, hominess - kind of like a flannel shirt vs. a starched, white linen button-down. And while I never played 4e, the descriptions and commentary I see sound like it tamped down significantly on irregularity and asymmetry; if that's accurate, I can see that that might have made it feel less like D&D.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

It’s funny how much of the first dozen or so replies have elements of the game that I would say aren’t even particularly important to what dnd is or what makes it a big tent game.

The first two posts have:

*Zero to hero - Eh, I rarely ever start at level 1, would never bother with level 0 type rules, and have only a couple times played a “farm boy” trope character, and my experience isn’t rare at all in the larger dnd community.

*killing monsters and taking their stuff - common, sure, but vital to what dnd is? Not for any of my groups. We are more likely to have to find ways to fund our adventures than to make a profit from them, because we rarely play characters who are out there fighting ochre jellies and whatever else for money.

Usually, we are trying to help/save people, in a world where most regular folk can’t do jack against trolls or winter wolves, much less cults of the drowned king and their kraken-lich.

*Fighting fantastical creatures - It isn’t less DnD when your enemies are primarily humanoids.

 

[Zardnaar]

Gnomes, Gnomes in the phb. No Gnomes no deal. Rapiers and paladin's.

And Gnomes.

 

[DND_Reborn]

The essence of D&D is escapism, like all games (in one way or another), books, movies, etc.

That is why once many people experience it, they are hooked, often for life. When we don't get to play, we miss it. It gives us all a chance to be someone else, do amazing things that will never happen in real life, and discover a hidden bit of ourselves we never knew or understood before. And, we get to do all this while making new friends or cementing the friendships we have in grand adventures we will be talking about for years to come.

This is what keeps us coming back and wanting more.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Whatever it was that was quintisential to D&D, beside the trademark, 4E lacked.

I believe the missing trope was the difference in combat abilities, and the lack of similarlity of the classes to prior editions' roles for those classes.

It had KTAATTS play.
It had class and level
It had d20 for combat relevant rolls.
It had single location hit points.
It had the use of alignment.
It had the standard PHB classes and races, and then some.
It had the late AD&D1E and BECMI addition of non-combat skills.

It lacked the so-called "Vancian" magic...
It lacked disparities of combat power of 3E, AD&D, and BECMI classes



TOTM is very much NOT part of the way many played D&D in the 80's...
And yet it was part of D&D as experienced.

Simple mechanics? Someone's not widely read... D&D 3 is medium-high on crunch... there are MUCH simpler games that cover the same space without being anywhere near as much mechanical complexity. Arrowflight, Barbarians of Lemuria...

And 3.X was simpler than AD&D - not a lot, but a bit... and it did so in key was that made play much simpler for the players. But even before 3E, simplified games in the same space existed.

• Palladium Fantasy, for example (1st or 1st revised)... still a two key mechanic system - attack rolls vs AC, but at least it's linear... and the class skills are all consistently d%. roll low for skills.
• The Arcanum likewise had d20 roll high for combat, and d% roll low for skills.
• Despite it's tables, Rolemaster is actually a simpler game than AD&D. Half the pagecount for the core. more consistent throughout... albeit at the cost of almost half the pagecount being tables.

To be fair, since the early 1980s, there have been games more complex than AD&D, too... Phoenix Command comes to mind.

4e was more dnd for me than 3.5.

 

[aramis erak]

4e was more dnd for me than 3.5.

I found it a good game, but not a game that felt like D&D, nor a game I terribly much wanted to play. It lost the medieval super heroes feel that is what I actually like of AD&D and Cyclopedia...
3.X felt very much like late AD&D 2E to me, but that's because I had and used PO:Combat & Tactics; the AD&D descent of 3E combat is very obvious when one has used that book extensively, but not readily apparent to those who never met it...

At the time 3.0 came out, I'd have preferred something closer to 2E (I always felt AD&D 1E was clunky, even when I was running it, and 2E a good bit less so, but still so)... for example, ascending AC and converting from THAC0 to Attack bonus. I'm sore tempted to do that to the Dark Dungeons text.