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Not even that is solved, as it's been done in a way that takes far too long to resolve, meaning that a campaign with the scope of say, Becmi is no longer possible, because people don't have that kind of time. So killing monsters is still a problem unless this is DDM or Warhammer Quest campaign...

Look, I agree with you, and don't want to ditch genuine innovation to hold onto tradition for it's own sake (e.g. I think the D&Dism of cleric is long overdue for a renaming and reconceptualisation, as it isn't really an archetype beyond "kind of a priest"), but I think the design culture of D&D...

I think this gets to the crux of where things have gone so wrong; applying too much logic to as ornery a beast as D&D. Logic suggests that simpler rules are better, and this is the error you're making here - if that were true we'd all ditch D&D for FUDGE. Logic also suggests that twelve year...

Not "ever so slightly", IMO, that would be 3.5. No, some degree of change of the order of 2e -> 3e. 4e is more of a brand new fantasy heartbreaker which borrows from D&D IP to me, and several bridges too far.

But that's what we've got _now_. A shoe labelled "D&D" that doesn't fit a lot of people who it once did. Would they have alienated less existing players and drawn more new players if they'd tried something more like a fix of 3E and the AD&Ds (as say 3e was to 2e, but with faster combats and...

There are also many paths through the mountain valley maze of that dragonlance module, and you could backtrack, too. Yet it's still considered a railroad. Try again.

Riddle me this then, Batman; if DL1 is a railroad because the passes need to be blocked by deus ex machina guards, then how is a dungeon that has solid stone in place of guards not a railroad? Right, only thinking makes it so. Just overcome the distinction between active and awkward and passive...

I disagree. PCs can abandon an adventure hook or plot in progress, just as they can abandon a dungeon. Dungeons make good settings for D&D because they limit options, and "force narrative" to a choice between room A and room B. IMO walls do railroad PCs passively, and implicitly. Just...

Yuppers. By definition, unless the PCs have burrowing equipment, any dungeon with walls is going to involve railroading. My definition of sandboxes definitely includes dungeons, so... ...as you say, the meaningful player choice that a sandbox must include in order to be considered a sandbox...

That's all well and good, and that's a sandbox too. But a series of adventure hooks that lead to railroads that you can choose from is also a sandbox, for any reasonable definition of the term, IMO. Sandbox doesn't have to mean "must wander round the map wherever I choose to go at this moment"...

And a railroad is? A sandbox can be as simple as a choice between two or three railroad threads, instead of just being railroaded into one. Sandboxes, to me, are a superset of railroads, and therefore everything a railroad can do can also be done by a sandbox, because good sandboxes contain...

Poor choice of analogy, that "flatworlder" comment, because you're the guys suggesting that we're better off with less dimensions in the game. (i.e. Serious campaigns and good characters to infinity and beyond!)

I'm simply trying to show that the culture of D&D has changed, and the scope of the game has changed, and not necessarily for the better as the masses assume (and I consider myself part of that movement of assumption, until the penny dropped recently). There seems to be an implicit assumption...

Baldurs Gate 2 has an "evil path". There you go. It's not TSR, and not a module, but it is 2E. And Bioware >>> than TSR when it comes to adventures... I'd also argue that a lot of 1E adventures were "morally neutral". Here's the Tomb of Horrors. Neutral Evil or Chaotic Good, you all want...

Oh come on, enough with the cheap shot, "you're low brow", psychobabble name-calling snootiness. If we were interested in exploring "sociopathy" we'd be playing something like V:tM (and that's not being fair to V:tM players, I object to your use of such terms when applied to your opponent in an...

I think that this argument is a bit of a furphy, as far as RPG tables in general are concerned, but it may be fine for your particular group. If the rules and setting provide props, not necessarily for humour but for roleplaying of any sort, then more of that will happen. It's just the way...

I agree with this (and am hacking out some software utilities for personal use in order to alleviate the workload). You may want to kill it and take it's stuff in some respects, though, because they've done some things that at least the first of which 2E probably should have done: 3 first...

I think that was tried, and it's name was Eberron. Mysteriously, the plagued Realms look more than passingly like Eberron than what went before, which is a bit of a pity if you liked FR and not Eberron.

You think you've got a political correctness trump card there. The badwrongfun card failed, so now you're trying playing the edition wars card. It won't make your argument for you, the scope of the game has changed, and arguably for the worse. Next time make your point without the labels and...

I'd argue that D&D used to contain and actively support this scope, but that it no longer does. That it used to be a broad church, and now isn't. That it used to have something that it no longer has, and that many don't even notice what they've lost. That the baby has been thrown out with the...