Quote Originally Posted by Fatebreaker View Post
When "design and create your own fantasy world!" is a major draw for your game, having shadowy half-rules which impede your ability to truly design and create your own fantasy worlds is a Bad Thing.
Sorry, but when was that a major draw? At the beginning? Along the way? For 5E?

The way I see it*, D&D is an awful system for worldbuilding. There's so much fluff in the crunch, that without extensive homebrewing and houseruling, you can only produce variants of the generic setting (even if they have an "exotic" feel). Not something new, though.

There are exactly two non setting-specific classes in core: fighters and rogues. Use the rest as written, and you immediately assume a whole lot of things about the setting, the culture, magic, and religion. Use alignment as written, and you assume a whole lot of things about the planes, the gods, the very laws of the universe. Use core races (and monster races) as written, and you assume a whole lot of things about the population, the culture, the mindset. Use NPC classes as written, and you assume a very specific caste system.

Now, don't get me wrong, it's entirely possible to adapt D&D (any edition) to your needs. Infinite worlds, infinite possibilities, imagination runs wild and all that jazz. But you can't do it out of the box. If you want to shift radically from the "generic" setting, you must bend the rules beyond recognition.

Otherwise, your setting may turn out awesome (and distinct and original and very fun to play, I'm not denying any of these), but it won't be far off the vanilla D&D setting, not really.

*Disclaimer: Perhaps I only see it that way because my personal taste in settings somehow, ALWAYS, clashes with the rules. I expect that people who don't get regularly annoyed, frustrated and angered by this whole "fluff in the crunch" thingy will have no problem whatsoever with worldbuilding options in D&D, and won't feel restricted by the rules. It's just a matter of preference.

Quote Originally Posted by Fatebreaker View Post
In a game like D&D, the rules they put forward aren't connected to any specific setting. As such, connecting fluff to mechanics works in opposition to the idea that you can create your own world, and only gets worse the more you blur the line between fluff and rules.
In the ideal D&D in my mind, that's certainly how it would work. I'm with you 100%! But the rules have always been (inadvertedly) connected to a specific setting. Ever since Clerics got Turn Undead.

Think about it for a moment, and tell me why that should be the case in ALL fantasy settings, including, say, animistic ones, where the resident undead are your own ancenstral spirits. (Spirit Shaman in a great class, and also not the point. ) Or in a specific mythology setting, any of them. Or in a setting where undead don't even exist. Or in a setting where you want undead to recoil from some specific symbol, no matter who or what is holding it, and balk at nothing else.

Here's why: In The Beginning, there was Gygax, and he was once running a team Vs team game. One team had a Vampire. To even the odds, Gygax gave the other team a Van Helsing. At the time, they were also debating to incude in the rules divine magic and healing units. So Gygax combined these, and behold: The Cleric Who Turns Undead. And now we take it for granted, as if it's the only possible way to handle Fantasy, while in fact it came about by chance, for specific needs which arose during a specific game.

I find this story fascinating. It's just an example, but it's very telling of how fluff got in the crunch, and stayed there, and got established, and ended up defining the game, if not the genre. And now we can't get rid of the damn thing without changing half the rules.

Do I like it? Hey, I love D&D! But is it a worldbuilding-friendly system? Not at all. Unless our only concerns are where to place the elven kingdom on the map, and how to subvert this or that trope - without really going beyond it, and without building something really new. IMO.