Dragonlance Did you play Dragonlance using the pregens?

[Ancalagon]

I remember seeing them when I was a teenager. I already had read the books. My impression was "so this module has to go this way, so that it fits with the books story? Screw that noise!" I also realized that this explained the weird gaps in the book, and I felt "why wasn't this just part of the novel?!?" Teenage me was not impressed, at all.

Of course, I was young and inexperienced back then. But now, with 30 years of gaming below my belt, I can confidently say that my impression was correct.

I think you can tell a story through D&D @Snarf Zagyg , but not a pre-determined one. At least not well.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

I think you can tell a story through D&D @Snarf Zagyg , but not a pre-determined one. At least not well.

I don't think we are disagreeing!

I meant that the more someone (module writer, DM) tries to tell a specific story, the worse the D&D experience becomes. D&D is great at stories! Emergent stories, the type that happen when players are given freedom.

I am sure that there are people who enjoyed acting out what was in the books. But that's not why I run games or play. The funny thing is when I read the module, I didn't get it. But running it ... yeah.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

You can't tell a story through D&D.

You absolutely can. D&D is a very flexible tool, and story-telling is one of the oldest human activities. You can use D&D it increase engagement in story-telling. It does, of course, require that the audience buy into the story telling activity, and are not expecting something else.

And, of course, D&D CRPGs like Baldur's Gate do this all the time.

As for the DL modules, I agree that they read better than they play. However, with the forty years of DM skills I have now I could run them without forcing the players down the pre-set plot, creating additional material as needed. I would imagine the story would end up looking pretty similar to the original though, even though it didn't have to. Stories are powerful, and tend to form their own shapes, especially when you are dealing with the monomyth.

 

[Voadam]

I know I played a straight up Dragonlance adventure with mid-level characters we made (I vaguely remember a minotaur fighter and a cavalier). I think the adventure might have been part of one of the modules. It only lasted one session though and I remember it ended poorly with a vampire rose thing. I also vaguely remember looking over the pregens in some of the adventures, though I don't think we ever played them.

For the longest time I had the 1e Dragonlance Adventures and DL 10 Dragons of War but never ran it. Planning on leaving DL for if the guy who had the early modules wanted to run it. We all read the books when they came out and had been playing for a while. I think the guy who had the first couple of DL modules did not want to run them because everybody had read the novels and knew the plot twists.

I also remember playing a one shot of the Dragon Magazine module for the Test, which was a bunch of weirdness with not using magic.

In 2e I got the DL anthology adventures book and read my roommate's Time of the Dragon Boxed Set and used some of the anthology adventures in a game. Later I picked up but never ran the 2e/Saga complete DL anniversary adventures compilation and update book just so I could read it. Eventually I got the 3e ones in PDF too. My understanding is that each iteration of the core adventures refined the plotline for better game play at the table and more open ended options.

I voted for our own characters in the module, but its possible it was just a made up DL adventure and not part of the modules.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

I played in 2 or 3 campaigns all 2e and so all high school/ college age kids for the most part. We also played a HEAVLY inspired homebrew of the world were we were the dragons...

 

[amethal]

I remember buying DL1. I remember reading DL1. I remember thinking about how cool DL1 would be to run.

I remember running DL1 with my friends using pregens. I remember that it sucked. No one had a good time. The things that worked when I was reading it ... didn't work in play.

I bought DL2. I read it, saw the same issues, and didn't buy another DL module.

Fundamentally, the modules don't work, because they are antithetical to the idea of D&D (at least, for me and the people I was playing with at the time). You can't tell a story through D&D.

The Dragonlance modules also require you to split the party into two groups part of the way through, with each group having separate adventures and then meeting up again at the end.

As I understand it, each player has to run two characters, one in each group. (The players get to choose which characters they play in the finale; the rest of the characters sit it out.)

That's really not how I like to play D&D, and I don't know of any other campaign that does this. Although I do have some campaigns where you might briefly play different characters to get a different perspective on things.