What is the feel of D&D anyway?

[Neonchameleon]

Because it's different to different people. My first major RPG was not D&D but the much grittier and more versatile GURPS - followed by the equally gritty WHFRP. Therefore what I read peoples impressions of D&D to be doesn't match mine. How I consider D&D:

1: You have magically protected, larger than life heroes. I started on GURPS. You hit a GURPS character in the chest with a crossbow bolt and he's unlikely to get back up unless wearing plate armour (even then it's unlikely). You hit a 1st level D&D fighter in the chest with a crossbow bolt and he has a good chance to keep going with no significant penalty.

2: The game is very role oriented. It's the game that brought us meatshields/fighters. It's the game where there was a major class focussed on non-combat. For that matter it's a class-based game.

3: It's fiddly. Random subsystems. THAC0 or, worse yet, a lookup table just for rolling to hit - GURPS and Rolemaster are IMO less fiddly (and Rolemaster at least gets serious use out of its to hit tables). Fortunately we've got over it.

4: The progression is from hero to super-hero. You are never a zero (exception: 3e). Even a first level fighter is explicitely a "Veteran" and can scythe down 0th level characters like wheat.

5: It's very closely related to a tactical wargame. Why the hell are distances measured in inches if you're not meant to play as a tactical wargame?

6: It's high magic. Very high magic. The first level wizard can cast a game changing spell every day - that's orders of magnitude faster than either Gandalf or Merlin. And the backlash risks are negligable - for instance wizards don't even have to roll to successfully cast spells. You also expect a lot of magic in the party.

7: It's about combat. Combat is both a big chunk of the rulebook and how you gain XP. Which makes it different from most other games I was playing.

This isn't meant to be an edition war. I can apply all the above to every edition of D&D I've ever played (and I'm both running and playing 4e now - as well as running WHFRP). It's simply that I get confused by a lot of statements about what D&D is about.

 

[Vegepygmy]

With apologies to the late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart:

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description, "D&D," and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.

Because it's different to different people. My first major RPG was not D&D but the much grittier and more versatile GURPS - followed by the equally gritty WHFRP. Therefore what I read peoples impressions of D&D to be doesn't match mine.

Yeah, mine doesn't seem to match yours very closely.

How I consider D&D:

1: You have magically protected, larger than life heroes.

Magically protected? Not necessarily (but likely). Larger than life? Again, not necessarily (but likely).

I started on GURPS. You hit a GURPS character in the chest with a crossbow bolt and he's unlikely to get back up unless wearing plate armour (even then it's unlikely). You hit a 1st level D&D fighter in the chest with a crossbow bolt and he has a good chance to keep going with no significant penalty.

You don't hit D&D characters in the chest at all; D&D doesn't use hit locations. If you hit a 1st level D&D fighter with a crossbow bolt and don't drop him, it's because you didn't hit him in the chest; you nailed him in the shoulder, or maybe grazed his thigh. The system doesn't ask, because it doesn't care.

2: The game is very role oriented. It's the game that brought us meatshields/fighters. It's the game where there was a major class focussed on non-combat. For that matter it's a class-based game.

It is a role-oriented game, but not necessarily in the way that "roles" have come to be understood. It's definitely a class-based game.

3: It's fiddly. Random subsystems. THAC0 or, worse yet, a lookup table just for rolling to hit - GURPS and Rolemaster are IMO less fiddly (and Rolemaster at least gets serious use out of its to hit tables). Fortunately we've got over it.

Huh? Rolemaster uses less lookup tables than (any edition of) D&D? Or did you mean to separate "fiddly" from lookup tables? Anyway, fiddliness and random subsystems are not part of the "feel of D&D" to me; 3rd edition did away with almost all of that junk, and feels very much like D&D to me.

4: The progression is from hero to super-hero. You are never a zero (exception: 3e). Even a first level fighter is explicitely a "Veteran" and can scythe down 0th level characters like wheat.

It's strange that you recognize 3E as the exception, but apparently overlook 1E/2E, where that was even more true. Anyway, for me, no...the "feel of D&D" requires a progression from zero to hero (and then perhaps super-hero). Starting from day one as a hero is not-D&D to me.

5: It's very closely related to a tactical wargame. Why the hell are distances measured in inches if you're not meant to play as a tactical wargame?

It's closely related to a tactical wargame. That doesn't mean you're meant to play it as a tactical wargame. Important distinction, there. (And distances haven't been measure in inches since 1E, have they?)

6: It's high magic. Very high magic. The first level wizard can cast a game changing spell every day - that's orders of magnitude faster than either Gandalf or Merlin. And the backlash risks are negligable - for instance wizards don't even have to roll to successfully cast spells. You also expect a lot of magic in the party.

I'd agree that it is relatively "high magic." Not by the "orders of magnitude" you seem to think, but it certainly isn't "low magic."

7: It's about combat. Combat is both a big chunk of the rulebook and how you gain XP. Which makes it different from most other games I was playing.

It isn't about combat, though most games feature a lot of it. And combat hasn't always been the primary way you gain XP; in 1E, you got more XP from finding treasure than you did from killing monsters. Even in 3E, you were supposed to gain XP for "overcoming" challenges, which didn't necessarily involve combat at all. That feels more like D&D to me than hacking your way to power.

But like I said, trying to define what makes D&D feel like D&D is an exercise in futility. It really is a lot like hard-core pornography in that sense: people will disagree about exactly where the lines should be drawn, but most of us can look at a particular example and agree whether it is or isn't.

 

[Ratinyourwalls]

Eternal warfare between hostile groups of similar people all at the behest of greedy corporations.

 

[Mark CMG]

What is the feel of D&D anyway?

IMO, There's no fair way to answer that question universally because the brand, D&D, has been attached to any number of very different rulesets complicated by each ruleset feeling very different when layered by the various settings. Compound that problem further by the number of games run with homebrew settings and there's an infinite number of answers to the question.

 

[Daven]

In italian we have a humorous acronym to describe D&D kind of game, EUMATE: "Entra, Uccidi Mostro, Arraffa Tesoro, Esci", literally translated into: "Enter, Kill Monster, Get Treasure, Exit".
Obviously you can play D&D in a more story-based way. But even if reductive, I think that "EUMATE" is a good description of PART of the feel of D&D.

 

[Melkor]

I think it totally depends on the way you were introduced to the game and who you played with. I started playing around the time I started listening to certain bands in the early 80s, so a lot of the "feel" of D&D to me is tied up in certain music.

Even though it didn't come out until much more recent than the above, when I hear The Sword's song Freya, for whatever reason, it reminds me a lot of my early D&D experiences.

 

[Savage Wombat]

The most defining elements of D&D seems to be class based abilities and level progression. Most players polled seem to agree that when you get rid of those elements you start losing the D&D feel.

I suspect that, when you get too open in your character building choices, you run into the paradox of choice. Playing D&D is therefore more like shopping in a catalog, looking at all the neat clothes.

 

[Charwoman Gene]

In italian we have a humorous acronym to describe D&D kind of game, EUMATE: "Entra, Uccidi Mostro, Arraffa Tesoro, Esci", literally translated into: "Enter, Kill Monster, Get Treasure, Exit".
Obviously you can play D&D in a more story-based way. But even if reductive, I think that "EUMATE" is a good description of PART of the feel of D&D.

The traditional English equivalent is "Kick down the door. Kill Things. Take their stuff."

 

[mach1.9pants]

1: You have magically protected, larger than life heroes. I started on GURPS. You hit a GURPS character in the chest with a crossbow bolt and he's unlikely to get back up unless wearing plate armour (even then it's unlikely). You hit a 1st level D&D fighter in the chest with a crossbow bolt and he has a good chance to keep going with no significant penalty.

Just LOL, you have obviously not played a 'Magic User'!

 

[JohnSnow]

The traditional English equivalent is "Kick down the door. Kill Things. Take their stuff."

And "Kill things and take their stuff" is a system that worked so well that it spawned dozens of imitators. In fact, it was so successful that if an RPG didn't lay out a specifically different style of play, it defaulted to "D&D in X setting."

There's something very satisfying and visceral about the D&D style of play.