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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MoogleEmpMog" data-source="post: 3798830" data-attributes="member: 22882">I can't disagree strongly enough that Rolemaster is 'basically D&D,' even if you tilt your head and squint.  Still less Vampire, RuneQuest, Exalted, Wushu, Spirit of the Century, Traveler, HERO, GURPS, All Flesh Must Be Eaten or even Star Wars Saga Edition or Mutants and Masterminds.I'm not familiar enough with T&T and DSA to say about them.  Certainly in the 70s and 80s there were games that amounted to direct ports of D&D with the serial numbers filed off.  This phenomena is basically over today, however, courtesy of the d20 and OGL licenses.Every edition of D&D to date has been more similar to all the other versions of D&D than they have been to any other RPG that didn't amount to a direct port with the serial numbers filed off.  3e is closer to 1e than 2e in style, 2e is closer to 1e than 3e mechanically, BECMI is both stylistically and mechanically distinct from its cousins; all of the above are closer in style and mechanics than, say, AD&D 1e and RuneQuest, or AD&D 3e and Exalted.The Great Wheel is not D&D to me.  It's Planescape.  BECMI didn't have alignment-based planes wheeling around the Prime Material, in no small part because it had a simpler and much less defining alignment system (one of its many awesome qualities).  Eberron and 3e Forgotten Realms don't have the Great Wheel, either; it's already dead except in the nearly flavorless 'core' that was cored out of Greyhawk.The racial mix is not D&D to me.  Dark Sun and BECMI didn't have gnomes.  Dragonlance didn't have halflings or even orcs (and hence, no half-orcs), but did have kender, draconians and intelligent minotaurs.  Planescape had tieflings and aasimar, Eberron had warforged, changelings, shifters and kalashtar.  The likes of tieflings and warforged have a better claim on being "D&D" than Tolkien derivatives Gary Gygax felt compelled to throw in due to the books' popularity.Of couse, AD&D is not D&D to me.  BECMI was, in my opinion, a vastly better game with a far more compelling core setting.  Airships, lupins and thouls, conflicts of law and chaos rather than good and evil, ascended immortals rather than primordial gods, unorganized and mysterious rather than ordered and aligned outer planes - that's all D&D to me, at least as much as the detritus of decades of AD&D leftovers.To me, D&D is classes (probably this has to include the roles of the fighter, rogue/thief, wizard/magic-user and cleric, though the names can and have changed), levels, mind flayers and beholders.  Dungeons and dragons have to exist somewhere in the world - hence the name.And above all, the kitchen sink has to be thrown in, the serial-numbers-filed-off amalgam of the best, and often the worst, that fantasy has produced to date; jotuns and trolls living down the lane from titans and centaurs, with kirin and hopping vampires their neighbors in the next celestial county; not Conan OR Gandalf OR Hercules OR Cloud Strife, but the four of them teaming up to kick ass and chew bubblegum, possibly with Batman's help.  Crashed spaceships give our heroes rayguns with which to shoot balrogs (er, balORS), dinosaurs live on lost plateaus overlooking quaint medievalesque villages, worg-riding goblins fight Stygians, and the Argonauts compete with the Knights of the Round Table for the Holy Grail - until the PCs show up and steal it away from both because they need it to kill Cthulhu.Any given campaign may not incorporate even a fraction of these elements (and most are almost certainly better off not doing so <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />), but the game needs room for them.That's the CORE of D&D to me.  Classes, levels and the kitchen sink.</blockquote>

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