As several previous comments have hinted, there aren't many assumptions that are going to be universally true across all the editions of D&D that have been published, without even taking into account the OSR and all the other D&D derived games out there.

A prime example is the "casters rule, martials drool" attitude mentioned in the OP. AFAICT that attitude didn't start until 3rd edition. In the previous editions, I believe most people regard either fighter or cleric as the strongest class. Even in third edition (and I believe 5th as well), hybrid martial/caster classes (Cleric/Druid in 3rd and Paladin/Bard in 5th) usually top people's power rankings, but that's a little beside the point.

That said, there are a few setting assumptions that can fairly be said to be near-universal across official D&D settings, and the most popular 3rd party settings and retroclones. A few have been mentioned already: Common-enough magic to have magic-users as a base class and plentiful magic items, a divine/arcane magic dynamic,  a high volume of monsters, tombs, dungeons, etc., and adventuring as at least a semi-recognized occupation.

I can add a few others:

-Multiple intelligent humanoid races, some living in relative harmony (usually elves, dwarves and halflings), and some in an antagonistic relationship (orcs, ogres, gnolls).

-D&D Magic, with fast-casting, low cost spells of the kind you get in D&D spell lists, as opposed to settings where magic is ritual-based, summoning-only, "true name"-based, an expression of spiritual power (as in Middle Earth), or other fictional or historical magic types. Often, there's a mechanistic explanation for how people can use magic (like the Weave in Forgotten Realms or the energy draining magic in Dark Sun).

-Gods that directly grant power to their followers (you can easily write your way around this, but very few D&D settings do).

Quote from: Brad on March 26, 2025, 07:39:50 PM

Quote from: jhkim on March 26, 2025, 03:55:14 PM

Quote from: Ruprecht on March 26, 2025, 03:42:36 PMUntil recently an assumption was monsters are monsters, and monsters need killin.

Playing monsters as PCs has been a thing since OD&D.

AD&D cut back on playing monsters at first, but The Orcs of Thar (1989) is a full campaign of playing full-blooded orcs and other humanoids. Council of Wyrms (1994) is a campaign where the PCs are all dragons.

D&D has had a lot of variation since early on.

He said "assumption", which is correct. The notion that you can "play the monsters" subverts the baseline; it's not UNUSUAL, but even in OD&D when EGG was developing it, the assumption was you were a human of some sort....

Even when you do play monsters, it's still assumed there will be other monsters for you to fight and kill. I'm sure someone has run an evil monsters campaign where the PCs set out to destroy civilization and spend the whole campaign fighting traditional "goodly" races. That sounds fun; I'd like to run one of those some day. But it'd be a vanishingly rare type of game.

can't figure out how to make quotes work here

A prime example is the "casters rule, martials drool" attitude mentioned in the OP. AFAICT that attitude didn't start until 3rd edition. In the previous editions, I believe most people regard either fighter or cleric as the strongest class.

Yeah. 3rd edition turned Casters into something that would easily solve most mythological adventures (which, IMO, should be the basis for high level DND due to its scope and themes) by themselves, while martials were stuck as peak humans or so, akin to Batman. I think if Casters get to solve the Ramayana by their own, then Martials should too.

Quote from: FishMeisterSupreme on March 26, 2025, 09:44:57 PMcan't figure out how to make quotes work here

A prime example is the "casters rule, martials drool" attitude mentioned in the OP. AFAICT that attitude didn't start until 3rd edition. In the previous editions, I believe most people regard either fighter or cleric as the strongest class.

Yeah. 3rd edition turned Casters into something that would easily solve most mythological adventures (which, IMO, should be the basis for high level DND due to its scope and themes) by themselves, while martials were stuck as peak humans or so, akin to Batman. I think if Casters get to solve the Ramayana by their own, then Martials should too.

In fairness, the idea of Magic Users being a "late bloomer" class, that starts off weaker than fighters and gets better at high levels, has always been around.

I don't disagree, though. There was a thread about this on here a couple of years ago which I can't find now, but to me the important question is "what does a 20th level fighter actually represent?". I don't think it's unreasonable to say that in a game with that many levels, a max level fighter should represent someone with superhuman levels of martial ability. BECMI may have had the right idea there, with saying that max-level characters are on their way to becoming gods. I haven't looked at the 3.x Epic Level Handbook in ages, so I can't remember if it had anything comparable.

Quote from: ForgottenF on March 26, 2025, 09:34:02 PMEven when you do play monsters, it's still assumed there will be other monsters for you to fight and kill. I'm sure someone has run an evil monsters campaign where the PCs set out to destroy civilization and spend the whole campaign fighting traditional "goodly" races. That sounds fun; I'd like to run one of those some day. But it'd be a vanishingly rare type of game.

I ran a campaign where the PCs were a literal rogues gallery of monsters; the main PC was a goblin thief and I think we had an orc fighter, githyanki bard, ogre fighter, few other weird things. It was fun, lots of mayhem. But always a "side game".

I think there are two layers of assumption for D&D looking across all the settings. (which had varied assumptions about play) You have what I'll call The Primary Assumptions, and then the Tertiary Assumptions.

Primary are basically required, or at least appear baseline in most D&D settings, while the Tertiary may be common or even important, but not essentials.

The Primary Assumptions.

1. The world is ancient and has suffered many civilizational collapses. hence why we see so many lost cities,  dungeons, abandoned temples and strongholds and the like, it allows for the play space.

2. Adventurer is a real profession with incentives and benefits in setting, explaining why people do it, and which is supported (or at least tolerated) by civil authorities.


Tertiary Assumptions

1. what civilization there is, is fragile, and is constantly beset by monsters from without, and often within.

2. The gods are observably real and intercede or are active in affairs of mortals and people.

3. Magic is institutionalized on some level, be that by tradition and mystery cults, or by colleges and academics.


Notes: The one I'm the least easy on is TA-2, basically because D&D has handled religion as an excuse to have a priestly healer archetype and not much more, it neither comports to proper pantheist or henotheism despite the settings suggesting it would, it's more like assortments of bloodless lame monotheisms, but lacking any of the richness of an abrahamic faith either.

1) Normal people are pathetic and powerless creatures.
2) PCs start off with potential well beyond that of normal people, and they can grow to quasi-diety levels of power.

Arneson and Gygax were part of a wargaming community whose main approach to design was to think of something fun to play and then assemble the rules to make it happen. Part of this was born of necessity as there wasn't much in the way of published, ready-to-run wargames especially for miniature wargames.

In the case of D&D that "something fun to play" was bunch of folks pretending to have adventures as characters in the fantasy setting of Blackmoor against a backdrop of a war between Law and Chaos. Keep in mind that at first, both sides, Law and Chaos, were comprised of players.

While running the campaign, Dave Arneson made the Blackmoor Dungeons, which quickly became the most popular thing in his campaign. Just as important it was Dave brought and showed when he went to run a Blackmoor game for Gary Gygax and the Lake Geneva crew.

Inspired Gygax made a set of rules, run a campaign, choosing to set it in a dungeon of his own creation, Castle Greyhawk.

But unlike Dave Megarry and Dungeon! He didn't focus only on the Greyhawk dungeons and ran other types of adventures. Often as sublevels off the main dungeon that opened to other realms like the Isle of the Ape. Or the last room in the deepest level sends the PC to China, then they have to make their way back to Greyhawk.

So while the bulk of OD&D focused on aids and stuff useful for running dungeons it wasn't just about dungeons. However, the virtue of using dungeons was that the concept was straightforward to explain and to illustrate. The concept of a maze with rooms filled with monsters and treasure can be extended to encompass various types of adventures.

OD&D as a printed ruleset saved time and work for folks who wanted to run campaigns where players pretended to be characters having adventures in a fantasy setting. It included support for the popular fantasy tropes of the time, such as Tolkien-style races, dragons, mythological creatures, and Dracula-style vampires, among others.

OD&D as a concept was a loose framework that people extended to cover all kinds of different types of fantasy subgenres and settings. The further away they got from the above the more work they had to do to prepare the campaign.


Subsequent editions took the above and either tweaked or focused on different things.

Holmes D&D, B/X D&D, and BECMI D&D, tweaked the above to be easier to understand and easier to use.

AD&D 1e was a second bite at the same apple for Gygax. He consolidated, edited, and rewrote OD&D and popular add-ons into a more consistent set of rules that define what D&D was.

While possessing good parts that endured in subsequent editions, AD&D 1e fell short in terms of consistency and clarity. Plus, the company felt it needed to address various social criticisms of the time. The result was AD&D 2e. In addition AD&D 2e was designed to be lightly customized to allow the core rules to support a variety of different fantasy settings. Late in its history, that customization aspect morphed into something more substantial.

D&D 3.X, D&D 4e, D&D 5e, and D&D 2024 each layered their own unique focuses and concerns on the foundation of OD&D. Along with third-party efforts like Pathfinder and the OSR.

While not designed as a toolkit like GURPS or Savage Worlds, the core concepts and mechanics of D&D have proven flexible across several editions. So while core rulebooks of any particular edition reflect author design sentiments of the moment layered on top of the core assumption as laid out in OD&D, the fundamental flexibility of the D&D system remains.

The only notable exception is D&D 4e, and that only because its exception based design made changing things far more work than even the most dedicated hobbyist wants to put in. Rather than adding some new classes or tweaking some abilities and subsystems, D&D 4e requires the equivalent of creating an entire Magic: The Gathering release in order to substantially alter its feel.

I'd agree that probably 90% of D&D games in practice are set in something very close to Faerun or Greyhawk, while other settings like Dark Sun, Planescape, Gothic Earth, and Rokugan or subsettings like Kara-Tur and Maztica are rarities not covered by the assumptions.

Based on this, the basic assumptions would be that all the standards of the core books apply as written (PH, MM, DMG). So it's medieval faux-European fantasy with elves and dwarves and dragons. But even more specifically, there are halflings and gnomes and martial-arts monks and a longsword costs 15 gold pieces (which has remained true from AD&D 1E to 5E).

These are the most common assumptions.

I guess to the FishMeisterSupreme - what are you looking to get out of the collection of assumptions?

Quote from: Socratic-DM on March 27, 2025, 01:45:09 AMPrimary are basically required, or at least appear baseline in most D&D settings, while the Tertiary may be common or even important, but not essentials.

The Primary Assumptions.

1. The world is ancient and has suffered many civilizational collapses. hence why we see so many lost cities,  dungeons, abandoned temples and strongholds and the like, it allows for the play space.

2. Adventurer is a real profession with incentives and benefits in setting, explaining why people do it, and which is supported (or at least tolerated) by civil authorities.

These are common, but I don't think they're required any more than elves and dwarves. I had a recent thread on "Adventurers and PC Background" that talked some about alternatives to the adventurer profession.

In my most recent campaign, I kept all the core races and classes and magic - though equipment and treasure was different. I also kept to most of the common action - fighting monsters almost every session, with dungeons being maybe half of sessions. But the PCs were agents of a semi-divine patron, freelance adventurers collecting gold. Also, the world was around two thousand something years old, which is old enough to have past civilizations and ruins, but pretty new compared to the real world or most settings.

So neither #1 nor #2 were true in it. Nothing wrong with having those in worlds, but I think D&D works fine without them.

I guess to the FishMeisterSupreme - what are you looking to get out of the collection of assumptions?


Flip and change them. Not all. Just some. Or most.

Quote from: jhkim on March 27, 2025, 02:07:53 PMwhile other settings like Dark Sun, Planescape, Gothic Earth, and Rokugan or subsettings like Kara-Tur and Maztica are rarities not covered by the assumptions.

I am not familiar with all those specific settings, I will note the first primary assumption still applies to them for the most part.

Quote from: jhkim on March 27, 2025, 02:07:53 PMThese are common, but I don't think they're required any more than elves and dwarves. I had a recent thread on "Adventurers and PC Background" that talked some about alternatives to the adventurer profession.

In my most recent campaign, I kept all the core races and classes and magic - though equipment and treasure was different. I also kept to most of the common action - fighting monsters almost every session, with dungeons being maybe half of sessions. But the PCs were agents of a semi-divine patron, freelance adventurers collecting gold. Also, the world was around two thousand something years old, which is old enough to have past civilizations and ruins, but pretty new compared to the real world or most settings.

So neither #1 nor #2 were true in it. Nothing wrong with having those in worlds, but I think D&D works fine without them.

A lot of this also comes down to the question. "What is playing D&D?" is it playing a system called D&D or based on D&D? or playing by the assumptions and conventions of D&D? I'd say most people of a reasonable mind would fall somewhere between those two camps.

EDIT: As a side note, I don't see a lot of settings go for young earth model. unless it's a game set in a mythic first age type setting. so you've certainly inquired my interesting on a world only two-thousand years old.

Quote from: Socratic-DM on March 27, 2025, 02:38:34 PM

Quote from: jhkim on March 27, 2025, 02:07:53 PMThese are common, but I don't think they're required any more than elves and dwarves. I had a recent thread on "Adventurers and PC Background" that talked some about alternatives to the adventurer profession.

In my most recent campaign, I kept all the core races and classes and magic - though equipment and treasure was different. I also kept to most of the common action - fighting monsters almost every session, with dungeons being maybe half of sessions. But the PCs were agents of a semi-divine patron, freelance adventurers collecting gold. Also, the world was around two thousand something years old, which is old enough to have past civilizations and ruins, but pretty new compared to the real world or most settings.

So neither #1 nor #2 were true in it. Nothing wrong with having those in worlds, but I think D&D works fine without them.

A lot of this also comes down to the question. "What is playing D&D?" is it playing a system called D&D or based on D&D? or playing by the assumptions and conventions of D&D? I'd say most people of a reasonable mind would fall somewhere between those two camps.

EDIT: As a side note, I don't see a lot of settings go for young earth model. unless it's a game set in a mythic first age type setting. so you've certainly inquired my interesting on a world only two-thousand years old.

That last campaign is Incan-inspired fantasy. The real Incan Empire was new and historically short-lived, lasting less than two centuries. Probably as a result, their mythology doesn't emphasize ancient lineage.

So the fantasy world is a sort of First Age type setting in that it has been relatively recent since the great wonders. For example, one of the dungeons that the PCs explored was created before the Sun and the Moon were placed in the sky. There isn't a sense of everything having been done. I like it because the complete history of the world is at once wondrous but also comprehensible.

There isn't a huge laundry list of earlier ages. There are five stages of creation that took place over many centuries, then a period of turmoil before the Solar Empire was founded, then the Solar Empire was founded, which has lasted for about 250 years.

Tolkien's Middle Earth has about 6600 years since the Sun and Moon were put in the sky, which is long, but it's still comprehensible in the split of three ages. D&D fantasy, though, more often takes after the pulp fantasy of H.P. Lovecraft, R.E. Howard, and others like August Derleth - where all of human civilization is only an insignificant speck compared to the dozens of prior ages. This shows its roots in cosmic horror, and can make PCs and their actions feel trivial - which I think contributes to an ethos of "grab what gold you can" rather than the more "save the world" ethos of Tolkien's stories.

In Land of New Horizons, PCs are working to save the one and only true empire that the world has ever seen,  founded by the God of the Sun. It has a more positive, hopeful tone - more like Tolkien or King Arthur than Lovecraft or Howard.

Quote from: estar on March 27, 2025, 10:33:19 AMThe only notable exception is D&D 4e, and that only because its exception based design made changing things far more work than even the most dedicated hobbyist wants to put in. Rather than adding some new classes or tweaking some abilities and subsystems, D&D 4e requires the equivalent of creating an entire Magic: The Gathering release in order to substantially alter its feel.

TBH this is mostly only a problem because 4E was so math-heavy, and has 30 levels. Crunching the level range to 10 (which is what most people play anyway) isn't much heavier than say 3E or 5E. Possibly even lighter in the case of spellcasting classes, which have way fewer powers/abilities to care about than in any other edition.

Quote from: FishMeisterSupreme on March 26, 2025, 08:25:46 AMWhat are the basic assumptions DND assumes for a setting to work with it under the rules of DND? Assumptions like:

- paladins recieve powers
- paladins are seperate from clerics
- casters rule martials drool
- etc...

This again?

1: Paladins AND Rangers get powers from some outside source. Paladins go the celestial route. Rangers go the nature route.
2: Paladins AND Rangers are separate from clerics and fighters. Paladins get a bit more HP and can use all those pointy pointy things Clerics cant. Rangers get spells that fighters do not.
3: False.

4: The current land is whats left after some apocalyptic battle. Theres ruins everywhere. This is especially true in Greyhawk. But the basic terrain gen rules will produce alot of ruins. In FR orcs periodically sweep down from the north to completely devastate as much of civilization as they can. Whole dwarven kingdoms are completely lost, elven nations laid waste, and more. Even Dragonlance is set long after the gods blasted the land and then said fuck this we are hands off till you morons learn. And of course Dark sun.
Mystara is set long after a magitech cataclysm tilts the planet off its axis when Blackmoor detonates.
Red Steel and Birthright are set after a godwar messes up the land. Red Steel in particular.
Eberron has had a series of disasters.
So yeah. Ruins everywhere.

5: Alignment isnt set in stone. Way the fuck too many miss this one. True for PCs, True for monsters.

3: False.


have to disagree here. it's a very common idea that martials should also be allowed to be superhuman like how casters are completely absurd in the context of fantasy stories. a high level caster would completely solve several fantasy plots by themselves (lotr). this was at its worst in 3.5e. personally when martials can do stupid crap like jump to the moon without any sort of magical gear (just being really strong) then the divide is lessening. warblade was a good start.

Quote from: FishMeisterSupreme on March 28, 2025, 04:05:31 AM3: False.


have to disagree here. it's a very common idea that martials should also be allowed to be superhuman like how casters are completely absurd in the context of fantasy stories. a high level caster would completely solve several fantasy plots by themselves (lotr). this was at its worst in 3.5e. personally when martials can do stupid crap like jump to the moon without any sort of magical gear (just being really strong) then the divide is lessening. warblade was a good start.

It's easier and better to just shave off that top level of power for magic users. A couple extra damage dice on a fireball is no big deal, but the higher end utility abilities, particularly the ones that allow players to bypass travel or obstacles or make it too easy to obtain information; those can be campaign-killers. They force DMs to resort to ever more arbitrary and contrived ways of challenging PCs. Giving similar abilities to fighters might make the game more fair, but it only compounds the issue.

Also, no offense, but did you step out of a time warp from 2009?