You are playing D&D wrong

[Lonely Tylenol]

Perhaps you didn't catch my next post. My argument is that at some practical level, the game does cease being D&D if too many changes are made to the rules. As I said a few posts back, rule zero (shorthand for the specific declaration that the DM is authorized the change the rules) does not mean that covering your DVD player with coleslaw is playing D&D just because you say it is. At some point, and we're free to debate where that point is, you have stopped playing the game properly -- or at all.

To borrow an example from another thread, take Hackmaster. It's not D&D. It's like D&D. It's based on AD&D. But it's really, undeniably Hackmaster. When you're playing Hackmaster, you're not playing D&D. It's different enough to stand on its own as something that you might be interested in buying in addition to D&D, to increase your repertoire of gaming options. Somewhere inbetween D&D and Hackmaster there is a dividing line. On one side is D&D and its homebrew options. On the other is Hackmaster and its homebrew options. In the middle, there might be a grey area, but at some point you've stopped playing D&D and are playing Hackmaster.

It's a bit less of an extreme than putting coleslaw in places it shouldn't go, but it's the same idea. At some point, you're doing something different enough that it's no longer within what a new player should reasonably be expected to expect from a D&D game. A new player might reasonably expect that his new DM might not want to use certain splatbooks, or psionics, or whatnot, and have a short list of house rules. But if the new DM has made significant changes to the task resolution system, and barred all the spellcasting classes, and barred every race except halflings and goblins, and set it in a world with no iron...that's beyond what a new player would expect to find in terms of changes from the standard game. It's not D&D anymore. A player looking for a D&D game would keep looking.

That's pretty ridiculous. Such a person would have serious mental problems, and needs to get some serious help.

Um, perhaps you have missed the point here. (It's a hypothetical example, not intended to reflect anything that might actually go on in gaming rooms, but rather intended to demonstrate a rhetorical point.) I think what fusangite was trying to get at is that if anything counts as D&D "so long as everyone's having fun," then ANYTHING counts as D&D so long as everyone's having fun, no matter how ridiculous it is. It is perfectly obvious that putting coleslaw on household appliances is not playing D&D, no matter how much fun one might have doing it. Therefore, the premise that "anything is D&D so long as everyone is having fun" is false, demonstrated by his reducio ad absurdum. Which means: there is a point at which what you are doing ceases to be D&D, and starts being something else. It also means: the people who claim that it's all D&D so long as you're having fun are wrong. Which leads to: at what point does it stop being D&D? Can that point be delineated?

Going back to my example above, when does it stop being D&D and start being Hackmaster, or Call of Cthulhu? If we can draw a line there, how much homebrew do you have to have before your game is as different from standard D&D as Hackmaster is? When you reach that point, by similarity, you're no longer playing D&D, but some other, unnamed game.

 

[D+1]

Yes, but then the question is not whether you are playing D&D incorrectly, but whether you are playing D&D at all. There is a difference, slight though it may be.

Well, I don't see this difference beyond terminological hair-splitting. Is there any meaningful operational or practical difference between these two things? If so, what is it?

I did say it was slight, but perhaps I should have explained further at that. Playing GURPS is not the same as playing D&D. Playing Rolemaster or Runequest or any number of other fantasy RPG's are also not the same as playing D&D. If you're mucking about with fundamental aspects of D&D rules enough you WILL kill off those aspects that make it D&D and not some OTHER RPG. But that's not the same as playing D&D ostensibly using the RAW, but nonetheless having botched up using or outright abusing those rules to the point where you might theoretically be playing D&D but playing it in such a freakish manner that to a typical player it's "wrong".

One is perhaps a matter of genuinely, knowingly altering the system beyond its recognizeable limits, the other is more a matter of not knowing or caring what D&D is and by not following its generally accepted "tenets" producing wierd results.