Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="billd91" data-source="post: 6215365" data-attributes="member: 3400">An interesting post, but after reading this line (and Kamikaze Midget's post in the thread about what D&D is to me) I want to add my own $1.50 (because $.02 was subject to inflation).I know there are a lot of people who think of D&D as getting together and playing any fantasy RPG (or even any RPG), but I have a hard time accepting that as a good thing. D&D doesn't need to be conceived as too-specific a set of rules, but without some nod to the rules and lore that make up the game, that may form its herd of sacred cattle, then D&D's meaning is so broad that it doesn't really mean much at all. Its meaning, in a business sense, ends up getting reduced to a logo owned by WotC that can get stamped to anything, which I think undermines the sense that, despite changes in edition, we're really all playing the same basic game. And I really do think we saw how that can play out among the players with 4e. While I acknowledge they didn't just stick the brand on something utterly different (like truly putting lipstick on a pig), the game changed so significantly that today we see its current fans saying that the designers didn't even understand what they had created or at least didn't understand it well enough to write adventures for it despite being steeped in previous editions for decades.I think we're better served by D&D meaning something more specific than "fantasy role playing game" or "getting together with buddies for game night". And I see WotC's moves to involve the market in the process of defining and understanding what D&D means as a strong, positive step in building a 5e capable of enhancing and clarifying what D&D means rather than diluting or undermining it. I'm seeing some elements of 5e (I really doubt it will be released as D&D Next when it hits the streets) that blend more of the feel of earlier editions with the mechanical streamlining of newer editions and I think that's a good direction for D&D to be going - blending its historical content and feel with more usable mechanics. That's why I'm hopeful.</blockquote>

Verification