Not your father's D&D

[Blue Jogger]

And it's amazing to think of how many little ideas we've picked up from D&D. It's hard to root them all out because they've become so ingrained we don't even think of them. Here's a few that I've been thinking about lately:

 

1) The idea that everyone is one of the four basic "classes": Fighter, Thief, Cleric, Wizard. Sure, there are Rangers and Barbarians, but those are just variants of fighters. Sure, there are Druid, but those are just clerics. etc.

 

2) The assumption that there's a neat dividing line between "divine" magic and "arcane" magic.

 

3) The perfect compartmentalization of the gods, and the perfect information about them: They're all completely statted out like PCs and they all have specific and fixed attributes. They each have one name, one specific symbol (usually detailed to a ridiculous degree), a favorite weapon that they want you to use, specific "domains" of spells that they grant to their clerics, etc.

 

4) The extreme proliferation of races and sub-races. That every race needs a "half-demon" version. That any two races can mate and produce a viable offspring, which then needs a whole new race package (the Star Trek School of Reproductive Biology). Seriously, how many half-elves should there actually be? A whole "race" worth?

 

5) The idea that each race has their own gods. There's a "god of elves" and a "god of dwarves," but never a "god of humans."

 

6) That certain abilities must be prerequisites for other abilities which are not necessarily directly related.

 

7) The assumption that large amounts of metal disrupts certain types of magic.

 

8) That magic always comes in individual, discrete spells. And there's a specific number of them, and each one is precisely defined.

 

9) That the function of a wizard is to be a walking artillary platform.

 

10) The assumption that the game needs thousands of different monsters to remain interesting. And in case that's not enough, there's dozens, if not hundreds, or "templates" that can be applied to monsters to create new variants. "An abyssal, undead, aquatic, blue-dragon-blooded, greater fire giant with 6 levels of Totemist? Didn't we already fight one of those?"

 

Maybe someone (me?) should start a new thread: "Ideas about FRPGs that we get from D&D that don't necessarily have to be so." I'll try to think of a shorter title. If someone else wants to start such a thread before I get a round tuitt, go ahead.

 

The premise for mine was roughly 60 years ago (before the campaign started), the world was a perfect high-fantasy world complete with a large castle in the clouds, numerous dragons, pegasi, it had it all.

 

Then it all came to a crashing end, literally, in the case of the castle in the clouds. Magic simply stopped working, the races that depended on magic all died out. Humans were plunged from their magical utopia back to the middle ages.

 

Thirty years later, magic came back, but it was much different than before, a lot less stable, much less powerful, but it came back. The magical races that came back were nothing that the legends remembered.

 

(I did, however, come up for keeping half-orcs and half-elves who had enough human blood to surrive. "Elven wannabees" who are humans that use magic to look and become more elven (this explains the new half-elf race even though only a few true half-elves surrive). Orcs that were close to human surrived without magic, but tended to reproduce early (Orcs can mature as early as 9) and more often than compared to humans.)

[BoneDaddy]

Re: Not your father's D&D

 

Since I grew up on D&D, I have a hard time imagining a fantasy adventure system that did not involve, at some level, mugging ugly people and taking their stuff. It's a fairly ingrained meme in the medium, and an unecessary one. I can conceive of a number of campaigns that didn't work that way to begin with.

[Kristopher]

Re: Not your father's D&D

 

I've lost count of how many times I've run into some of those presumptions when running non-D&D fantasy campaigns.

 

Hell, look at any fantasy MMORPG, they all feature the basic setting and system premises of D&D.

[MorpheousXO]

Re: Not your father's D&D

 

been pondering that whole Arcane Divine division myself, lately. Just need a better name for arcane, I suppose....

[steph]

Re: Not your father's D&D

 

i dont think what you said is totally true in a certain perperctive: i think dnd are globally inspired from a big concept call fantasy and the fact is dnd are the more popular of the roleplaying game so when you said good or evil, elves, god of dwarfs. thief, warrior and wizard all this think are very much older then dnd and when we use it as a hero gamers we use fantasy and history stuff not dnd stuff

hope i am clear

english not my first language

steph

[steph]

Re: Not your father's D&D

 

sorry little correction of my last message:

what you said is NOT totally true.................and all this Things are

sorry for the error

stef

[Outsider]

Re: Not your father's D&D

 

Gah... You just made me do the math... I am now older than my father was when he first started playing DnD (my dad introduced me to RPGs)

[Thia Halmades]

Re: Not your father's D&D

 

What are we talking about again?

 

And I'm older than I was when I first started playing D&D... wow, if I could see me now...

[Blue Jogger]

Re: Not your father's D&D

 

"Divine" vs "Arcane"

 

Since there was a thirty year hiatus on magic, divine magic tends to be less direct and more mysterious than your classic D&D spells. As a result, clerics tend to learn the new ways of learned magic, some of these spells seem to be influenced by the caster's faith, then again it might be the luck of the dice.

 

Some of the "New Gods" will make deals or contracts to gain followers.

 

Magic is not clearly defined into spells and is usually worked into a personal fetish which holds a certain number of charges. The system is more chart based (lending itself from aspects of D&D, Ars Magica) and is full of surprises. Because of this, players did not had to pay for their VPP.

 

Everybody can cast magic, just like everyone can sing. However, just as American Idol proved, just because you can do something does not mean one should.

[Blue Jogger]

Re: Not your father's D&D

 

Mugging people

 

Yeah, although we have had several adventures that were legimate jobs, some of the players want more lootable monsters. So, I'm writing up low-power stuff to introduce into the party.

 

One of the more interesting jokes is that the most useless coin is the realms is the "Ol' Yellers" or fake gold coin. When magic went away, over 99% of the world's gold coins proved to be counterfeited with illusionary magic. Ol' Yellers are worth roughly a quarter.