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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Vegepygmy" data-source="post: 5825459" data-attributes="member: 40109">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. Yeah, mine doesn't seem to match yours very closely. Magically protected? Not necessarily (but likely). Larger than life? Again, not necessarily (but likely). 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. 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. 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. 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. 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?) 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." 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.</blockquote>

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