With all the countless debates about editions and RPG theory/wankery, and system hackery... do you all think D&D is more about being it's own genre all by itself? Or is it really about the system?

If I did Greyhawk using Savage World's Fantasy (or whatever hack you wanted) - would it stop being D&D?

Could you create a classless D&D d20 game, purely skill-based, using the standard D&D stats, with Feats and Vancian spellcasting - would it not be D&D to you?

Well, there is a relatively similar example where this has been done--Traveller. You can play GURPS or HERO or D20 Traveller, and the different versions of Traveller are roughly as different as the different versions of D&D. Yet I'd say that they are all Traveller. I think D&D is the same. It is part system, and part thematic elements and tropes.

In college one of my gaming friends became a Fantasy Hero enthusiast and ported the Greyhawk based campaign he was currently running to that system.

To be honest, it felt pretty different from D&D to me. Granted, this was years ago so maybe the Hero system has been refined, but back then it felt like Champions with fantasy trappings.

I think theme and mechanics are sort of entangled when it comes to D&D, at least for a lot of people. Honestly, I have more questions than answers:

Is d20 D&D applied to other themes? Are Stars Without Number and Hulks and Horrors D&D in space? Is something like Monsters & Magic D&D if it uses all the fluff of a D&D setting? How about Dungeon World?

I also wonder, how did AD&D and D&D 3 / Pathfinder keep the D&D feel? To me, the various traditional settings must play a big part on keeping that feeling,  but then again you have the 4E fault line. What parts of the mechanics are what make D&D be D&D?

Given that the game's tried to do at least half a dozen distinct things over its existence, and that you can see recognizable elements of OD&D's rules in every edition, I'm inclined more towards the system side, but with the note that what is broadly referred to as D&D is a broad mixture of rules, tropes and gameplay elements with a solid but minimal 'core' that has been extended in numerous, often contradictory directions.

Quote from: tenbones;887888With all the countless debates about editions and RPG theory/wankery, and system hackery... do you all think D&D is more about being it's own genre all by itself? Or is it really about the system?

It both. OD&D is a pastiche of the fantasy that Gygax found interesting. That got carried over edition by edition to the present. Because OD&D is the foundation of the computer RPGs as well as tabletop, that pastiche is the default for what people consider fantasy to be. That pastiche endures regardless what mechanics are used to run it.

D&D in it's various edition is a distinct set of mechanics involving classes, levels, hit points, armor class, vancian spells, etc. As the recent example of D&D 4e it is possible for a edition to be so divergent that it is considered D&D in name only.

Personally if the edition contains everything that in the Swords & Wizardry Core rule regardless of whatever other options that layered on top of it, then it will likely be recognized as D&D.

Quote from: tenbones;887888If I did Greyhawk using Savage World's Fantasy (or whatever hack you wanted) - would it stop being D&D?

Yes it would stop being D&D but it will still be same Greyhawk you played with D&D if you are doing the conversion faithfully. It will have elves, orcs, drows, dragons, spell books, and the rest just with the Savage World rules.

Quote from: tenbones;887888Could you create a classless D&D d20 game, purely skill-based, using the standard D&D stats, with Feats and Vancian spellcasting - would it not be D&D to you?

It depends could I make a fighter, cleric, thief, or magic-user by picking a specific set of options. And would that feel like the foremention in a earlier edition? For example if you said X points is equivalent to 10th level, could buy various options to make a character with same capabilities as a AD&D 1st Magic-User?

If so then yes, it would be a souped up version of what 2nd edition tried with Skills and Powers, and what 3rd edition was going for with the multiclassing. However because your hypothetical system lacked levels and classes, it material would have reduced utility for a traditional D&D campaign however traditional D&D material may work just fine with the new game.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;887889Well, there is a relatively similar example where this has been done--Traveller. You can play GURPS or HERO or D20 Traveller, and the different versions of Traveller are roughly as different as the different versions of D&D. Yet I'd say that they are all Traveller. I think D&D is the same. It is part system, and part thematic elements and tropes.

Traveller has a weird situation. The various editions of official Traveller have never been welded to the Third Imperium setting. The closest is Mega Traveller and the rebellion only because they had one of the three core books devoted to Third Imperium fluff. The mechanics themselves were setting agnostic.

The simple answer that while the official Traveller rules are setting agnostic, the marketing and supplements been heavily biased to the Third Imperium setting.

Other companies licensed edition of Traveller: GURPS, D20, Hero, etc have been more or less how to run those rules in the Third Imperium. But weirdly enough this means if you built a non-imperium setting with an official edition of Traveller, the Traveller version of the above will quite suitable to run that setting.

Mongoose Traveller is the exception in that it is licensed edition that embrace and more importantly support Traveller as a generic sci-fi RPG and as the Third Imperium RPG.

What are the "official editions of Traveller"?

They are
Classic Traveller (CT)
MegaTraveller (MT)
Traveller New Era (TNE)
Marc Miller's Traveller ( T4)
Traveller 5 (T5)

The licensed editions of Traveller are

GURPS Traveller (GT)
Traveller d20 (T20)
Hero Traveller (?)
Mongoose Traveller (MgT1 and MgT2)

Quote from: Dimitrios;887891Granted, this was years ago so maybe the Hero system has been refined, but back then it felt like Champions with fantasy trappings.

That was a problem if it was 1st edition Fantasy Hero. They fixed it by 4th edition Fantasy Hero and later.

The test is to check what happens when you try to pick up a guy and throw him through a stone wall with a high strength normal character. It was somewhat possible with 1st edition Fantasy Hero because of it's champion's legacy. With later edition they went with the idea that all the games were just variants of the Hero System and made sure normal humans were properly supported.

To me what makes D&D D&D is equal parts game mechanics and fantasy pastiche tropes.

d20 to hit and saving throw rolls
Class and Level
Armour Class
Hit Points
the 6 Attributes
Vancian Magic
Orcs, Elves, Dwarves, Halflings, Gnomes
monsters from Classical mythology, heraldry, folklore, fantasy litterature and the DM's imagination
Polyhedral dice

These are a few of the core elements of the D&D experience.

I don't think the "official" settings are required. We have always played D&D in home rolled worlds. Glorantha could just as easily be played with D&D as Greyhawk with RuneQuest. Actually I think the Glorantha setting is baked in to RuneQuest more than Greyhawk or the Forgotten Realms are baked in to D&D at least for earlier editions of the games.

The game has evolved to the point where much of the game vocabulary of 5e is not recognizable to me as D&D anymore. New classes, races, and mechanics, but much of the core remains there. Certainly many OSR and OGL games are recognizably D&D variants even games like Stars Without Number and Mutant Future which take it into the realms of science fiction have an evident core of D&D.

We're in angels dancing on the head of a pin territory here; that said...

Greyhawk using Savage Worlds isn't D&D.
DavetheLost is on the nose re: required mechanics for it to be D&D vs "a D&D variant". (Yeah, this means that OD&D using Chainmail for all combat isn't D&D but that's an edge case that I can live with.)
But I don't feel that having all the standard races and monsters is necessary. The Mighty Fortress supplement for 2e, or the Last Days of Constantinople module for 3e, are conceptually still D&D IMO.

Theology indeed!

In a way all games are basically D&D, in another way there is no real D&D, except in Gary's home campaign. Ah wait, maybe only Dave Arneson's home campaign was real D&D?

Theology, Arminius nailed it.

The (boring) solution out of this qualitative viscious circle is to create a scoring scheme for closeness to some baseline version of D&D. And setting is one dimension, rules the other. So you have two (+) dimensional scoring. Take the supremum to decide upon who is closer to D&D in that matrix.  

Interestingly, when chosing different baselines, you get different displacement vectors for each and every game. Example: Not using the Outdoor Survival Map(tm) gives you negative impact on setting for some versions of baseline D&D and is irrelevant in others.

My Greyhawk conversion to Earthdawn 4E is going great. It helps the Earthdawn was designed to mirror/"explain" D&D tropes.

D&D the game is a system. Not a genre.
D&D settings may be genres though. Some were pretty blank initially.

Same as Monopoly is not a genre. Its a system. Its theme though may be a genre. Management game for example. Forget what BGG pegs it as.

To me d&d was always a peculiar American take on fantasy, the renaissance fair of rpgs, like it had been put together by a middle aged accountant from the mid-west. Other systems (even from the US) for whatever reason didn't seem as morbidly parochial. I can't separate the system and the settings, or the approach to the setting.

QuoteOriginally Posted by tenbones
Could you create a classless D&D d20 game, purely skill-based, using the standard D&D stats, with Feats and Vancian spellcasting - would it not be D&D to you?

BRP Classic Fantasy did this, or pretty close to it.  I ran it in Greyhawk for a  spell.  The people who liked D&D liked it, and the people who disliked D&D were pretty happy too.  It felt a bit awkward to me as a GM and didn't ever really "click."  We would often finish a session with conversations of "maybe we should just play D&D?" followed by "nah, we should really play Call of Cthulhu."  As we all brought different expectations and baggage, things eventually clashed, the game faded out, and the group went their separate ways. Overall, for us, I would say it was a failed experiment. I'm not sure if that helps.

I later ran Heroes and Other Worlds (TFT, skill based and themed for Moldvay) for the D&D crowd and it really rocked.  It not only felt like D&D, it felt like 1983 again. I ran some classic modules as one shots, and some hardcore D&D enthusiasts became major fans of the system. I think the difference was that people had played BRP (CoC) which invoked a "feel," but they had not played TFT so they left their baggage at the door.