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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 1871553" data-attributes="member: 2205">No, not offended.  I don't want to argue either.  I was perhaps misunderstanding you; I thought you were asking me a question that I had thought I had already answered.Essentially, yes.  I mean, if you went back in time ten or fifteen years, or even more, and shown someone the third edition rulebook and said, "this is D&D" I very much doubt anyone would have agreed with you.  Yet now, clearly, that is D&D and I think --with the exception of a very few-- nobody would argue that Third Edition is D&D.I anticipate that further changes will continue to take place; it's concievable that things like levels, classes, hit points, experience points, or even more radical changes could all gradually creep into the rules, and people would still accept it as D&D.For a couple of reasons: 1, D&D isn't a form of art comparable to, say, the Mona Lisa.  The Mona Lisa is what it is; if you do the Mona Lisa with a cow head (as the Far Side did for the cover of their third anthology, by the way) it's not the Mona Lisa, it's a parody/homage of the Mona Lisa.  D&D on the other hand, is a fluid product.  It's not a work of art, it's a framework.  If there is any art to roleplaying, which I vacilate somewhat on (some days I think it's pretentious to say so, some days I think its a great explanation of RPGs) then it's in the product of the play sessions; the "acting" of the characters, the stories told by the groups and whatnot, not the books themselves that you buy at the games store.  2, it's possible that indeed you could take a book and change several chapters and still have it accepted as "that book."  Tolkien did exactly that to the Hobbit.  Lucas did exactly that to the original Star Wars trilogy.  Film or stage versions of books are still considered to be "the same thing" even though there's obviously some very apparent differences in presentation and medium.Well, like I said, I don't believe D&D to be a work of art.  It contains works of art --notably the artwork <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />-- and the product of a really good game session with a really good group can arguably be called comparable to a work of art, but D&D by itself is not, IMO.And another thing missing from your analysis; why is D&D 3e D&D but Hackmaster is not, when Hackmaster is literally the same rules as AD&D 1e?  That goes back to my original stated position; what D&D is is a compact, of sorts, between the producers and the consumers.  They jointly decide what is acceptable as D&D, which is why vastly different rules from older editions, such as 3e, are D&D while almost exactly the same rules, as the case with Hackmaster, are not.</blockquote>

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