Olgar Shiverstone said:I personally don't consider that period "classic" (certainly not after 1989, anyway). Good adventures from then? Of course! Night Below ...
Good railroad adventures? None I can think of, but perhaps someone can help out.
drscott46 said:I understand that the term "railroad" is considered a criticism these days, but surely a railroad module can be well-written enough to be enjoyable. That's not necessarily a defense of anything in particular. Bad/boring is bad/boring no matter the style.
RFisher 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.
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: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).
Mark Hope said: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.
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...