Catalog of classic adventure discussions
Olgar Shiverstone said:
Well, rock music that's almost twenty years old (such as Guns N' Roses' Appetite for Destruction) is considered "classic rock", is it not? 1989 is almost twenty years ago. It isn't that much of a stretch.
I'm not exactly a kid anymore (turning thirty shortly), and my D&D experience began at a very young age, around eight, with the Mentzer Red Box and the 98th printing of X1 and so on. Heck, I had never even seen the "old" TSR module cover style (you know, the ones co-opted by the Goodman DCC mods) until after the fact.
My "golden age" was from when I discovered 2e (1989) to about '95. Around '89 I put away my Mentzer and was ready for the Big Boy Game. I realize that historical canon says that everything from this time sucked because Zeb Cook destroyed AD&D or something like that, but surely there are other gamers around my age that have some great stories to tell. (And I say this while having the utmost respect for the Gygax era, etc. I even read all twelve Q&A threads!)
As I said, I have regretfully few of my own because economics dictated I use the much-cheaper Dungeon magazine (one issue being around a third of the price of a full module), but surely some Gen-Xer parents were more generous than mine, eh?
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drscott46 said:
I think it depends upon whether you buy into it. It's when you don't want to go where the rails are leading when it becomes a problem. Or when the party's actions--even when following the script--don't seem to actually contribute to events. You want at least a veneer of being more than a spectator.
I've come to believe that a limited amount of railroading can be good. At least for me & my group. & there are some players that really want the DM to provide a degree of direction.
A really good DM can railroad the characters without the players realizing it.
Personally, I find DL1 to not be too much of a railroad. & it is possible to make it even less of one. But, I swore I would never say anything good about Dragonlance since I read the you-must-railroad-them advice in DL2.
RFisher said:
Perhaps it was just my players in the primary multi-year campaign I DMed (I'm just a player at the moment, although I'm hoping that might change here eventually when my current group wraps up its existing campaign), but they were not exactly the most skilled players of all time. I usually had to railroad at least a little bit to make sure they picked things up. They generally always followed the adventure hooks as provided and rarely ever fought between them.
Of course, I probably should have been a tad bit more adversarial in my style, but I figured that these guys were my close friends and as long as I didn't Monty Haul things (my primary worry at the time), it was generally okay for the PCs to solve most every adventure. Perhaps that's the age of the Cheat Code speaking.
I only killed two PCs in my entire career DMing, and they were both played by a guy we had to kick out of the group for being annoying.
So what I'm taking too long to say is this: perhaps that late-eighties-to-mid-nineties middle generation of players (the forgotten group between the old school and the 3e/MMORPG-friendly age of character-focused powergaming), thanks to the proliferation of TSR novels like Dragonlance, was quite used to and comfortable with the typical campaign being something of a guided tour or novel provided they at least felt like they were active participants with some local ability to self-determine (even if the storyline continued heedless).
I guess I personally find instant-death traps and killer dungeons and the like (hallmarks of "classic" adventures) far less "fair" than a railroaded plot. I'm comfortable with that as well as the opposite view.
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Mark Hope
Adventurer
This is a great point, and one that I have been ruminating over for some time. I've not quite been able to put it into words, but the above quote is very succinct. It probably has something to do with the Enworld demographic, but I have had the feeling on more than one occasion that there is a "forgotten group" or "lost generation" of gamers who were quite at home with late 1e and 2e style. Is this group well-represented at somewhere like Dragonsfoot? I'm not there very often, so I wouldn't know.drscott46 said:
I started with the Erol Otus box (although my first games were with a DM who ran OD&D instead) and played and loved 1e for several years. But I also had lots of fun with 2e (my longest running games were 2e games, and I'm a huge DS fan). I'm equally enjoying 3e, but see more discussion of the earlier and later periods on Enworld, and less of the middle years.
Interesting. I think I'll open a thread about discussions of adventures from those eras and see where it goes...
Mark Hope said:
The other thing that jumped out at me when I was learning 3.5 fairly recently after being away from D&D and tabletop RPGs (for almost a decade) since the 2e times was how much more focused on combat everything is. For me, the actual mechanics of combat are probably one of the least interesting parts of the game. Yeah, it's always fun to roll the dice and all that, but some of these two-hour epic combats in my 3.5 campaign leave me with a headache. Virtually all the 3e/3.5 adventures I've read are combat/tactics/monsters first, story and discovery second. And this bothers me even though the actual combat rules and balance in 3.5 are clearly objectively superior to the 1e/2e versions- both in terms of completeness and clarity. Yet 3e/3.5 feels like a simpler, less colorful game as a whole. Obviously gone are the days when the Mentzer Red Box got to proclaim right on its packaging that the game needed no board because you're supposed to use your imagination. (As a kid who grew up with a giant closet full of boardgames, I was intrigued and challenged by this perception of D&D as some higher evolution of gaming. Even at nine years old.)
And as cute as miniatures are and everything, I'm also bothered by how the game wants you to use them for everything- combat is one thing, but to explore the dungeon? Gee, why don't you tell the players where all the secret doors are ahead of time? The focus on minis is pushing the game away from storytelling and discovery and towards hack 'n slash.
Perhaps this is one of those cases like with the two groups of Star Wars films- where people decide the new trilogy sucked because they're looking at kids' movies through the eyes of a full-grown adult whereas they saw the originals as kids and had a much different experience. Which films are better isn't the point; it's the difference in perception due to time making your personal evaluation a foregone conclusion.
Yeah, that's got to be it. I love D&D no matter what version it is, but I have realized that times have changed and not always (in my mind) for the better. It has made more sense for me personally to play ball and not be some version of a dinosaur, but seeing how much the game has changed makes me philosophical.
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