What makes D&D, D&D?

[jgsugden]

Trademarks and copyrights.

 

[pemerton]

I don't use alignment in my campaign.

<snip>

Have characters (PCs and NPCs) say and do stuff. The audience at the table can get the measure of them from that, just like in any other form of fiction.

For me, what alignment adds to D&D is a sense of the world as a battlefield. Minor conflicts are cast in terms of epic struggles between extraplanar forces, without which, I feel, the transcript of play, especially on the scale of the campaign as a whole, is perhaps less likely to result in an actual story.

On this I tend to agree with Grainger. Of my two active D&D campaigns, the default 4e one has PCs with alignments because that's what the rules called for, but they don't do much work (all but one is Unaligned, and the Good one is a (multi-class) cleric of Moradin which I think, by the rules, would require him to be LG); and if the PCs in the 4e Dark Sun game have alignments I don't remember what they are.

I agree with Hriston about the role of cosmology in default D&D, but I think that can be achieved (and better achieved) without mediation via alignments. All the PCs in my default 4e game are aligned in more or less complex ways to one or more gods or other cosmic entities, and from the lowest levels their struggles have been a playing out of these cosmic conflicts. I just don't find alignment a very powerful way to do this, for reasons I'm happy to elaborate on if it's interesting.

Because Dark Sun is not a cosmological game in the way default D&D is, I think alignments have even less work to do.

I should add: all the above is about the player-side. On the GM-side I treat alignments as rough behaviour descriptors. And for that purpose the 4e alignment spectrum for monsters/antagonists (Unaligned, Evil, Chaotic Evil) is sufficient.

And unrelated to alignment at all: I take PF, OSRIC and other clones to be obviously D&D - just without the branding. They're no different from the Mayfair Games Role Aids from the 80s.

A different way into D&D is not through the mechanics but through the world conceits - when I GMed Rolemaster campaigns for nearly 20 years using large amounts of D&D setting material and (mechanically adapated) modules I wasn't exactly "playing D&D", but I certainly felt part of the D&D community.

 

[Harzel]

As an aside...and I'm sure this will be a bit controversial to some

Yup.

...I also believe that the idea of "DM as Adversary" is a D&D thing. A DM, IMHO, is someone who provides challenges in his world that the players PC's can/will face. A DM is *not* someone who provides fun in his world as defined as "situations where the PC's can be heroes and win". Somewhere along the line (mid through 2e if I had to guess) the game's idea that a DM was supposed to provide "challenges that the PC's should be able to overcome" became the mantra. This mutated into the abomination that is now "The DM is there to help the players have fun". There is a difference between the two ideas. The first, the more "old skool" idea of the DM providing challenges is that overcoming said challenges is FUN. The second, the more "new skool" idea of the DM providing "fun" is that unless the PC's overcome those challenges, the game is somehow "not fun".

Although I did not know any of them personally, it seems a good guess that for the people who invented D&D, challenge was a very important form of engagement with the game. Perhaps supporting a game that provided challenge was even their main intent. However, it has since been noted that 1) the D&D ruleset can be used to create games that provide a variety of modes of engagement*, though any particular game will emphasize some and downplay others; and 2) different people value the various modes differently.

Were "The DM is there to help the players have fun" interpreted as you suggest, that would be in its own way just as narrow and limiting as your description of the "old skool" ideal. However, my interpretation (which I think is fairly widely shared nowadays) of "The DM is there to help the players have fun" is that the DM is there to provide (the basis for) a game that emphasizes the modes of engagement most desired by the players. Of course, that may be shaped by the DM's abilities and, perhaps, constrained by the DM's own preferences. In any case, "The DM is there to help the players have fun" is a (IMO) highly desirable expansion of the DM's charter that covers your "old skool" ideal as a (perfectly acceptable) special case.

So, no, I disagree that "DM as Adversary", if viewed as the sole or superior option, is a thing that makes D&D D&D. However, that D&D can provide a variety of modes of engagement, "DM as Adversary" (to use your shorthand) among them, is one of the things that makes D&D D&D.


* One parsing of different modes of engaging D&D is here.