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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Willie the Duck" data-source="post: 9354434" data-attributes="member: 6799660">Kind of the counter to the line "Don't call it a comeback, I been here for years," my response to the OP question would be something like 'don't call it leaving, I was never beholden to begin with' (or maybe 'I'm not leaving you, we were never a couple' but I don't like that imagery).D&D is my first TTRPG*, and I've played it on-and-off ever since. However, excepting that 3-4 year period before I could readily bike to the FLGS and thus became aware of other RPG options, I/my main groups (with one exception) haven't really felt obligated to play using a D&D system. D&D hits a specific sweet spot of seriousness, complexity, and recklessness that works well for specific play experiences, but not others. I have one group I joined maybe 17 years ago that only plays current-version D&D. For all others, we only play D&D when we want that specific play experience.*first played a Holmes/BX/AD&D hybrid that some older kids played, the '82-3 school year, then in summer '83 got a first printing Mentzer basic box set of my own.Heh. There's a pocket of 90s Army SIGINT retirees over in the East metro who are part of my 'not necessarily D&D' gaming. Good guys.Ugh. Always on both sides with definitive how-it-really-is (to something inherently mixed and subjective). Look, Dungeons & Dragons was this fun little doors-traps-chests-monsters treasure-hunting* game that Gary and Dave found people really liked to do (to the point of ignoring the town siege of the intended Braunstein/Chainmail** main game). No argument, the fantasy part serves the game part.*And, honestly, despite the Dungeon part in the title, the dungeon in Dungeons and Dragons only serves the greater purpose of at-risk-treasure-hunting.    **Chainmail itself being such that the fantasy element was half superficial overlay (turning cannons into wizards), and half new mechanics to enforce the fantasy theme (spells and monster rules).However, many to most of it was present in the fantasy literature. Not just the Conan stories and their constant treasure hunts and traps and corridors and so forth*, but the Hobbit as well*. And Fafhrd/Grey Mouser, and parts of the Dreaming City, and definitely huge swaths of the Pulp/Cliffhanger genre from which Raiders of the Lost Ark took its inspiration [edit: also mythology]. Of course not all fantasy literature included dungeon crawling, and it's easier to replicated The Hobbit in D&D than Lord of the Rings. However, it seems unnecessarily hairsplitting to say that D&D didn't resemble fantasy because it hewed closer to one aspect of fantasy than another, or that it made some concessions to making the thing into a working game**.*Honestly, the part TSR-era D&D gets wrong for Conan is no rules for being conked over the head and waking up in chains (plus seducing the evil warlord/sorcerer's beautiful assistant).   **Which seems like one of the most D&D stories of all of Appendix N.    ***honestly something a bunch other RPGs and licensed video games of the same era should have tried harder to do. Either way, Gary stating that only a minute trace of Tolkien can be found in D&D was either a legal dodge or a self-facing lie on his part. If it was a bait and switch on his part, it was an unsuccessful one. A story of an adventuring party (one <s>hobbit</s>halfling <s>burgler</s>thief, a dozen dwarven fighting men, and a low-level wizard*) hitting up a goblin camp, going to face a red dragon, and then squabbling over the loot, works almost perfectly in oD&D post supplement I, hampered only by the removal of Chainmail's rule for Hero units being able to shoot dragons out of the air, making Bard downing Smaug with a single arrow impossible. Is it all of Tolkien (much less all of fantasy)? Absolutely not. Is it a bait and switch from anyone who thought they were getting Tolkien in the mix? As I said, inherently subjective, but man can I think of worse examples.*yes, yes, Maia. Don't care. </blockquote>

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