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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Olgar Shiverstone" data-source="post: 3798750" data-attributes="member: 5868">So when is D&D no longer D&D, but another game?  What combinations of changes of mechanics and fluff take it from being D&D to being something else?  (I'm working from a base assumption that 3E D&D is still D&D, so the pat diaglo answer of "it stopped being D&D when they published Greyhawk" need not apply).Disclaimer: I'm a D&D grognard, and fear change.  And we haven't seen that much, really, of 4E -- and what we've seen seems to emphasize the things that change, rather than the things that remain the same, so it's really hard to judge what the new version of the game will be.I'm OK with mechanical changes, particularly given the stated goals of the 4E design team.  The changes to the "fluff" of the game bother me, though -- not because I can't use different fluff, but just because the changes seem arbitrary.  If you're trying to streamline mechanics, why change fluff -- particularly fluff that may link this version of the game to prior versions?  With the combination of mechanical and fluff changes, 4E looks to be the most significant change to the game to date -- more so even than the change to 3E, which massively revised the mechanical system but took most of its flavor back to 1st edition.  We've been told the d20 system will remain, but what does that really mean?  It could mean only that most mechanics are resolved by rolling a d20 plus modifiers, which is all the "d20 system" really amounts to if you're e-writing the mecahnics of the SRD.  Ceratinly many flavor tropes are being overhauls, from the cosmology to the definitions of creatures to even the fantasy world population (as evidenced by tiefling and eladrin as core races in the PHB).Let's face it: if you tilt your head and squint a bit, Das Schwarze Auge, Rolemaster, Tunnels & Trolls, etc all look like D&D, and vice-versa.  So when is creating a new edition no longer revising what exists, but is instead slapping a "Dungeons & Dragons" label on something completely different?</blockquote>

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