Desdan_Mervolam wrote:Add all of this stuff together and you have a bland, barely-defined setting where the GM is still doing most of the heavy lifting in defining the game world, but it still does so by taking decisions out of the hands of the GM.
D&D is a system, not a setting.
Adam Savage wrote:There's your problem!
no decision is taken out of the hands of the DM by the books. read them some time. It is taken out of the hands of the DM by the narcissistic players that think each one of them is a special snowflake that must have his perfect game.
Are you really trying to tell me you cannot take ANY edition of BD&D and make it work for any idea you have with what little is presented in the 2 red books?
Are you trying to declare that NOBODY can do it?
The problem is not that D&D is a bland setting, jsut that incluiding these defined setting elements that WotC loves to add, is NOT what D&D is about. That is what the settings are explicitly for. The settings themselves show how the core can be rearranged, morphed, twisted, mutated, to make the kind of game YOU want.
D&D is NOT: Athas, Krynn, Toril, Oerth.
Athas, Krynn, Toril, Oerth is NOT: D&D; they just use it as common ground.
This is why Dragonlance was able to become that stupid Saga edition for the 5th Age, which gave things to (I think) Star Wars Saga system, which came back as D&D 4th edition.
The problem is the cosmology, one person view of religion, etc taking up space in the books that should tell the basics of the game. how to attack, what the dice are for, etc.
Put your hands on the red books and read them. Holmes blue or Mentzer Red; I havent seen a Moldvay in ages to be able to talk to you about it.
Again, people must realize D&D was not the only game TSR was going to make. Boot Hill a sixguns and sorcery game came before AD&D and even included conversion to and from them and their different systems.
This is why Wyatt, and all the others trying to DEFINE D&D are having problems, because it was NEVER meant to be defined like WoD, Shadowrun, etc. D&D is the toolbox, not the blueprint It only allows you to have common ground to use whatever theme you want from Tolkein to Norse, to Ninjas, to space robots.. whatever you can imagine to add to it.
when you start adding ANY religion or setting elements to the "core" you remove 80% of the function of D&D.