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Matt Colville on adventure length
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<blockquote data-quote="Gus L" data-source="post: 9324236" data-attributes="member: 7045072"><p>I agree to an extent with the observations - not however with all the conclusions. </p><p></p><p>In my personal experience 5E dungeon crawls <u>were</u> boring and I also note they are not popular with the culture of play around the game. But I think this is because they aren't supported by the products, design, culture, or mechanics of 5e. </p><p></p><p>As an alternative, I find my OD&D (1974) house-ruled game has worked quite well for exciting dungeon crawl games ... </p><p></p><p>In general - and again I would argue this as an example of how the mechanics of 5E militates against the dungeon crawl, and so also the location based and sandbox style - it's precisely the sort of "roll to find it" and "roll to get clues" mechanics of perception etc, rather then the question and answer format of the older style of play (or more likely the Post 2011 OSR style of play that is often called older - it's hard to pin actual 1970's play culture down) makes exploration and unpuzzling the fantastical environment the primary locus of play. </p><p></p><p>My experience playing and reading 5E adventures suggests that it works best with scene (or perhaps to avoid confusion - encounter) based design built around set piece that are encounters placed within a branching (but ideally well pruned) pre-defined grand narrative. </p><p></p><p>I don't think this distinction or these limitations/styles take away from 5E as a system (or OD&D for that matter), and I am not trying to suggests that 5E fans should play dungeon crawls, even using X or Y rules or systems. However, I do think that one of the places we suffer as a hobby is trying to claim that a games can be all things at once, rather then acknowledging that different rule sets and play cultures aim at different things. </p><p></p><p>Again the questions I find compelling are:</p><p></p><p><strong>What form of adventure design best supports the particular system of 5E (or 5E clones/alikes) and its preferred play style?</strong></p><p> </p><p><strong>Why wouldn't this be the WotC style "epic"?</strong></p><p><strong></strong></p><p><strong>Why would it instead be something akin to the 1980's TSR module system of drop in location based adventures (or even mini-portal realm adventures like Castle Amber...)?</strong></p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Gus L, post: 9324236, member: 7045072"] I agree to an extent with the observations - not however with all the conclusions. In my personal experience 5E dungeon crawls [U]were[/U] boring and I also note they are not popular with the culture of play around the game. But I think this is because they aren't supported by the products, design, culture, or mechanics of 5e. As an alternative, I find my OD&D (1974) house-ruled game has worked quite well for exciting dungeon crawl games ... In general - and again I would argue this as an example of how the mechanics of 5E militates against the dungeon crawl, and so also the location based and sandbox style - it's precisely the sort of "roll to find it" and "roll to get clues" mechanics of perception etc, rather then the question and answer format of the older style of play (or more likely the Post 2011 OSR style of play that is often called older - it's hard to pin actual 1970's play culture down) makes exploration and unpuzzling the fantastical environment the primary locus of play. My experience playing and reading 5E adventures suggests that it works best with scene (or perhaps to avoid confusion - encounter) based design built around set piece that are encounters placed within a branching (but ideally well pruned) pre-defined grand narrative. I don't think this distinction or these limitations/styles take away from 5E as a system (or OD&D for that matter), and I am not trying to suggests that 5E fans should play dungeon crawls, even using X or Y rules or systems. However, I do think that one of the places we suffer as a hobby is trying to claim that a games can be all things at once, rather then acknowledging that different rule sets and play cultures aim at different things. Again the questions I find compelling are: [B]What form of adventure design best supports the particular system of 5E (or 5E clones/alikes) and its preferred play style?[/B] [B]Why wouldn't this be the WotC style "epic"? Why would it instead be something akin to the 1980's TSR module system of drop in location based adventures (or even mini-portal realm adventures like Castle Amber...)?[/B] [/QUOTE]
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