D&D General What makes D&D feel like D&D?

[Ralif Redhammer]

My point is that you don't, for example, need to have Fighter, Wizard/Magic-User, Cleric, Rogue/Thief for it to feel like D&D.

Yes but you’re still playing with a specific Class and race choice when you do that. By choosing an all Fighter campaign you are explicitly choosing to Not have spellcasting PCs - thats still a Class based game

Perhaps not, but then you have stuff like the Lankhmar And Empire of the East DCC RPG books that just give you Fighter, Thief, and Wizard classes, only humans, and debatably that's still capable of feeling like D&D.

Hmm. I took the approach of what I would expect to see in a PHB, not an individual campaign. A campaign of human fighters can feel like D&D, but a PHB of only human fighters doesn't.

 

[hopeless]

Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't believe @Blue was upset about anything or anyone, but simply wondering what, in your view, makes a story a D&D story rather than a story than can be applied to any other RPG.

I don't believe your claim is being disputed. I believe it was meant as a genuine curiosity question. It certainly is an interesting angle.

Apologies then, but the story has always been more important to me.
Why I'm adventuring is as important as where my character has come from and where that character is going.
For example when I learned about the game my DM was running I had a Ranger I'd been wanting to play but got asked to convert her into a cleric.
So I got wondering why as the original idea was a Horizon Walker since the character was trying to get home as she was always going to have been born in the Feywild.
Since he used star trek characters as deities the last time he ran that campaign, I developed a new deity based around Deanna Troi's deceased sister and thought she'd be the representation of Sehanine Moonbow.
Then my DM revealed the first of various changes he was planning.
He was using the Dawn War Pantheon which wasn't mentioned before and tried to turn my cleric into a follower of Ioun.
And also demonstrated he really didn't understand if you're going to involve a character's back story in an introductory adventure telling them afterwards it wasn't important is a really dumb thing to do.
I assumed that was an honest mistake (which in retrospect I don't think it was) and altered my character so she had been suffering from amnesia from being banished so now was still trying to find a way home this time to check on her surviving family.
And also revealed my character's patron deity is a celestial archon in service to Sehanine Moonbow and as a celestial archon is a member of the Celestial Bureaucracy and thus a Knowledge domain deity.
What broke the camel's back was that I ran a game set in Exandria to explain that altered back story and my DM decided he wanted his setting located there too despite the repeated times he said it wasn't.
So no matter how much I think the story is important it can't survive a DM whose railroad had clearly run out of tracks!

 

[CleverNickName]

Also, graph paper.
Lots of it.

 

[Laurefindel]

Apologies then, but the story has always been more important to me.
Why I'm adventuring is as important as where my character has come from and where that character is going.
For example when I learned about the game my DM was running I had a Ranger I'd been wanting to play but got asked to convert her into a cleric.
So I got wondering why as the original idea was a Horizon Walker since the character was trying to get home as she was always going to have been born in the Feywild.
Since he used star trek characters as deities the last time he ran that campaign, I developed a new deity based around Deanna Troi's deceased sister and thought she'd be the representation of Sehanine Moonbow.
Then my DM revealed the first of various changes he was planning.
He was using the Dawn War Pantheon which wasn't mentioned before and tried to turn my cleric into a follower of Ioun.
And also demonstrated he really didn't understand if you're going to involve a character's back story in an introductory adventure telling them afterwards it wasn't important is a really dumb thing to do.
I assumed that was an honest mistake (which in retrospect I don't think it was) and altered my character so she had been suffering from amnesia from being banished so now was still trying to find a way home this time to check on her surviving family.
And also revealed my character's patron deity is a celestial archon in service to Sehanine Moonbow and as a celestial archon is a member of the Celestial Bureaucracy and thus a Knowledge domain deity.
What broke the camel's back was that I ran a game set in Exandria to explain that altered back story and my DM decided he wanted his setting located there too despite the repeated times he said it wasn't.
So no matter how much I think the story is important it can't survive a DM whose railroad had clearly run out of tracks!

Ok, indeed I can see how signature names/concepts of D&D can become fundamental building blocks for stories, making them D&D stories.

 

[Blue]

So you'd rather I just apply this to JUST D&D or are you upset about my view on this poll?

Sorry, wasn't criticizing. My apologies if it came across like that. The poll was asking about what makes D&D feel like D&D, so what about the stories are D&D-like? I'm sure that talking about a session in D&D and talking about a session in another RPG will differ. If I'm talking about beholders, or the style of adventure, or description of an awesome combat while almost out of spells - all of those scream D&D to me and not some other RPG. What makes it a D&D story for you?

 

[DammitVictor]

The Classic Six ability scores.
Class and Level and Race, though either Race-and-Class or Race-as-Class is acceptable.
Multiclassing.
Feats -- though pre-WotC proficiency systems count
Armor Class and Hit Points

Other: Powers. The level title for an 8th level Fighter in AD&D was superhero. In 3.X D&D, an utterly "nonmagical"-- this word does not apply to anything in a coherent fantasy world and I hate it-- human character with good STR and CON scores who maxes out their Climb, Jump, and Swim skill ranks and only takes "athletic" feats, like a real human athlete might, starts breaking modern world records by 4th or 5th level. This is what I want.

Other: Weirdness. As much as I bitch that a lot of D&D world design is unforgivable jank, there's a lot of jank that it just isn't D&D without: having way too many different sapient species in too-small landmasses, universally accepted metric system currency, the dichotomy between arcane and divine (and primal and psychic, please) magic, dragons whose motives and powers are color-coded for your convenience, the assumption of a massively overwrought and easily accessible cosmology. None of these specific, individual points is necessary but a game has to be built out of layer upon layer of these very specific and unintuitive design assumptions to feel like D&D.

To the point that, nowadays, most people are incapable of recognizing how specific and unintuitive they are, even outside of D&D.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

While I applaud the concept of the thread, personally I would have limited the choices to maybe 5-7 top picks because I ended up choosing a lot of different things.

Tbh I think that is accurate to what makes D&D feel like D&D.

 

[cbwjm]

I went with ability scores, distinct races and classes, multiclassing, and levels. These are a large part of why games like pathfinder still feel like DnD but savage worlds does not.

I thought of adding some others like the cosmology or proficiencies or feats but feats weren't in use until 3e (though some proficiencies in 2e were essentially like 3e feats) and you could play without proficiencies, or at least distinct proficiencies and the cosmology was whichever you chose for your game especially for homebrew, it's why I like the world axis, it was an interesting take on the cosmology. I also liked the great wheel or even the 9 worlds from norse mythology. There are probably a few more where I thought about choosing them then realised that often they aren't used/needed.

 

[Benjamin Olson]

I would consider the specific 6 ability scores, alignment, and some facsimile of vancian magic to be the most iconically D&D specific elements. There are other things like levels, character classes, and having ability scores in any form that I'd consider really more important to the feel of D&D, but which are too ubiquitous to gaming in general to specifically associate with D&D the same way.

 

[Ganders]

How did Creature Types get such a low vote count? It's the only item on the list that's actually in the name. (One of those Ds stands for Dragons)