Forked Thread: D&D: Generic and Specific Both?

[M.L. Martin]

Forked from: Predict the Future: How will what we have today EVOLVE INTO 5th Edition?

YMMV, of course, but I think you're wrong.

D&D has never been "generic" unless by you mean generic you mean "a giant heap of cliches for people to pick through and find the ones that suit them."

The d20 SYSTEM is fairly generic and can accommodate a variety of games, but D&D is distinctly D&D flavored. There are lots of D&Disms we all take for granted; alignment, spell-wielding clergy, vancian/daily spell prep. These things make it great for making kitchen sink fantasy, but poor for specific fantasy. Put another way; D&D is a great system to have halflings in, but not a good system to use for The Hobbit.

Granted, DMs have been picking the choice bits out of the rules and ignoring the rest for time-out-of-mind, but that doesn't make it a generic system, just one that takes well to kitbashing.

Compared to TRUE generic systems (GURPS, True d20) D&D's flavor-modifications become glaringly obvious.

I think you have a point, but I've seen the "D&D as generic fantasy/toolkit" idea around enough, and from people who've worked closely with the game (such as Steven "Stan!" Brown, who was with TSR/WotC during the 90s and early 00s), to think that it also has some merit.

IMO, D&D has long had two strains within it competing for dominance: A Gygaxian/dungeon-crawling fantasy game, and a more general fantasy toolkit. This starts with OD&D, which was very much a toolkit, and shifts somewhat with the continued popularity of OD&D, BD&D (which had D&Dish assumptions but was still loose enough to kitbash) and AD&D 1E (which was very much "Gygax's D&D" but still had that kitbashing side).

I think a look at the kind of stuff going on in DRAGON and the general community during those years may be a good indicator of the game's schizophrenia. If the game was specific, why all the variants and adaptations instead of starting from scratch or a more amenable base? If the game was generic, why the popularity of setting-style details like the Outer Planar articles, and the terrible arguments about whether or not female dwarves had beards?

2E did much to tip the balance mightily towards the 'toolkit' side of things, IMO. From an ad in DRAGON #230 (June 1996):

No RPG offers the expandability of AD&D. Consider the PLAYER'S OPTION and DM OPTION Rulebooks, which give players and DMs hundreds of optional rules to enhance their game. By picking and choosing different rules and options, each gaming group has the opportunity to create a customized game.

Emphasis added. Things like the various settings and their rule variants (Al-Qadim introduced whole new spellcaster systems; Ravenloft almost completely rebuilt character creation with their Requiem rules for building undead PCs) further emphasized this.

3E? We're schizophrenic again. I think they wanted to hold on to that flexibility, and the vast array of character options certainly helped on the character side. However, they also wanted to return to the 'core D&D experience' and standardize the game again, and they maintained this more than 2E did, with fewer settings and with rules options being more extensions of the core rules than alternatives to them. (Plus, there's the whole wiff of "one system/setting/campaign to rule them" I got from some of Dancey's wilder ravings. ) In addition, I think the increase in rigor and interrelation of the rules without an increase in transparency hurt the game's sense of customizability. A looser, more modular system like the pre-3E versions can be a bit more opaque and still be kitbashed--there's more 'give' to it. With 3E, there was the impression that if you didn't know what you were doing, it could blow up in your face--and there were several spots in the rules where they didn't really tell us enough of what was going on. The OGL and d20STL helped with this, true, but it wound up being a victim of its own success, and eventually, almost everyone either wound up keeping to the core or creating their own d20-based games.

4E? Too early to say. The mechanics kept 3E's rigor, but they've increased transparency, so that's a plus in the toolkit direction. The news that they intend to do more settings also swings it that way. However, the books so far have given a very specific 'D&D' feel, a la 1E and 3E, even if it's a different slant on the D&D feel.

 

[justanobody]

2E did much to tip the balance mightily towards the 'toolkit' side of things, IMO.

I don't fing think so.

While 2nd edition had MANY areas to play around in it was still AD&D.

1st edition and Boot Hill were not that far off save about 10 things you needed to convert from one to the other.

That doesn't make either a "toolkit".

You want your toolkit edition you should look solely at 3rd edition and those screwing up trying to play D&D with mixing in other game prior that created the OGL to the extent that you have a Naruto RPG using the D&D rules provided by the SRD.

There is your toolkit.

2nd Edition didn't say: "Mix anything you want in here and bugger it up with too many genres and settings as one thing".

Wait mixing settings with everything being core...smells like 4th edition to me.

You want a toolkit try looking at GURPS...it says so in the name. Generic Universal Role Playin System. There is your "vanilla"/ generic RPG.

Now while 2nd muddied the waters with not enough support for its creations of the settings, you only need look at the current "Director of Roleplaying Design and Development at Wizards of the Coast" that created a stand-alone space game based on D&D to cause the "toolkit" problem with Alternity.

I can honestly say I have never once seen anyone add another game system to playing D&D, nor can I say I have seen anyone try to add D&D settings into another game system.

Every gamer I have seen seems to know they just don't work that way.

Then again most don't like each other either so those playing one PnP are not likely to be around the others lest a feud start worse than Rocky Horror vs Priscilla fans!

"D&D is a generic RPG toolkit"...I spit on the idea.

 

[Fallen Seraph]

I personally have always preferred the concept that D&D is a "focused tool-kit", while it doesn't have the range of options of say GURPS. It certainly is open enough to allow multiple venues of fantasy genres.

 

[Mallus]

"D&D is a generic RPG toolkit"...I spit on the idea.

Stop spitting for a minute at check out the Story Hour section of ENWorld (if you haven't already). You'll find plenty of evidence of people using D&D as a toolkit to create wildly divergent gaming experiences.

 

[Ydars]

Check out WoTCs statements about how the game is played and look at the removal of campaign specific fluff from almost all of their products; they all point to the idea that D&D is used as a toolkit for making homebrews.

Since most people play D&D and nothing else, I would suspect that D&D is more widely used as a toolkit than any other fantasy RPG. We can argue about whether it does that job well or not....................

It is about time the designers realised this.

 

[rounser]

It is about time the designers realised this.

I don't think they're in denial about it, but that it doesn't match their interests in trying to sell stuff to you, and make a good game. It makes the game design harder if you, the not-a-game-designer, start picking and choosing rules and splat, and splits the market if you, the consumer, decide dragonborn suck and don't exist in your worlds, so you won't buy anything heavily featuring them.

But I agree that the attempt to curb the customisation and develop a Kitchen Sink World, let alone make every world Kitchen Sink World with the "everything's core" stuff, is futile. I expect that people will continue to do their own thing anyway, despite the contents of the core books, just like they always have with more recognisable editions of D&D. And it would be good to see an edition that gets on board with this and rolls with it, with better rules than 2E had.

 

[Ydars]

Rounser, I guess you are right. Call me old fashioned, but I feel that if the designers stop trying to design games that will sell us all these add-ons and just make good games then they will make more money in the end, but maybe that is just naive.

I would just really love to see set of rules that totally frees the DM. 4E is a great step in this direction but has some unrelated issues for me.

 

[RFisher]

I think D&D’s not-quite-generic/not-quite-specific hybrid has actually been a big factor in it’s success. It combines some of the best things about both. Other games do the generic toolkit better. Other games do the very specific better. Best for D&D to continue to serve the middle-ground it has staked out.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Real world elements such as swords and jumping and underwater combat are always going to look more generic than the magical parts of the game such as Vancian casting and Moorcockian intelligent weaponry. Some of the real world stuff, for example 3e's Norse berserker barbarians and Celtic druids and bards, is culture specific.

I see the vast majority of D&D's content as specific, not generic. It's a great big bag of specific elements pulled magpie-like from all over, though mostly from fantasy. Very little got changed enough to make it generic. In fact some of the concepts started off generic but got changed to specific in Gary's pudgy hands - the color coded dragons for instance.

If you own enough splats and 3rd party products filled with these specific features I guess you can use this content to create a large number of different 'subset worlds' by a process of paring away. Start off with Forgotten Realms and turn it into Dark Sun by removing everything that isn't deserty, dark and psionic. Or turn the Realms into Ravenloft by removing everything that doesn't appear in a Hammer horror film.

Is that what it means for something to be generic? That it's reached a critical mass of specific elements such that you can make many smaller worlds out of it?

 

[RFisher]

A generic system doesn’t give you information about dragons. It gives you the tools to build your own idea of dragons. (Although a supplement might give you specific examples.)

A specific system would give you, e.g., Pern dragons.

D&D gives you this complex system of chromatic, metallic, and various other dragons that are actually quite specific, but specific to D&D rather than any specific setting. You have something you can either use out-of-the-box, or you can tweak/reskin them or any of a number of other dragon-like monsters to get something close to your own preference.

(OK. Arguably, the chromatic/metallic dragons were Greyhawk dragons that just got appropriated into the other settings.)