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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 1871243" data-attributes="member: 2205">I've actually already posted my opinion on that question; in fact, it's right there in the portion of my post that you quoted.  I think the analogy of D&D to a classic work of art, if you'll forgive my saying so, is a bit pretentious.  Something like the Mona Lisa; it's been what it is for hundreds of years, and it's so recognizable in Western civilization that any deviance from it is clearly a copy, parody or homage; not the thing itself.D&D has no such attributes.  In 30 years, it's gone through more than half a dozen significant revisions -- OD&D, 1e, 2e, 3e, 3.5, Rules Cyclopedia, extreme variants (Planescape, DarkSun, etc.) and more.  Furthermore, it's not the work of a single artist, as much as Gary Gygax may have made that implication in the early days of the game.  It's a game and as such, it belongs to the players, not the creator.  I've never yet been in a group that didn't have a house rule or two (or two dozen) and despite the "default" playstyle that many believe is intrinsic to the game itself, I've seen it played many, many different ways, and have done so since the early days.So what makes D&D D&D?  A few things have to happen, but in my opinion they will continue to happen regardless of what the rules actually are, or the content of the game actually is.  1.)  The owners of the IP have to put something out to market and say, "this is D&D now," and 2.)  the market has to react positively to such a statement and say, "yep, this is D&D."  That's happened before with the change from OD&D to the Basic sets, with the significantly different AD&D versions, with the change to 2e, the even more significant change to 3e and even, for the most part, the newer change to 3.5.  It'll likely, in my opinion, still happen with the future changes to 4e, 5e, 6e, or whatever other future versions you want to speculate to see in your lifetime.  And even if one of those distant versions does away with everything we associate with D&D now; hit points, levels, classes, dungeons, elves, Vancian magic, whathaveyou...  if the two conditions I spelled out above remain true, it'll still be D&D.</blockquote>

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