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<blockquote data-quote="Aenghus" data-source="post: 6682125" data-attributes="member: 2656">2e adventures like the Dragonlance modules and Ravenloft modules, which were often highly railroaded, and also often featured tie-ins to novels. They were to some extent written to appeal to readers who might never actually use them in a D&amp;D game, which was one of the factors contributing to White Wolf's sales, so TSR tried getting on the same bandwagon.And the same attitude is perhaps visible in the Avatar Crisis adventure modules that transition&nbsp; the Forgotten Realms from 1e to 2e, which are also horribly railroaded and arbitrary, and tie into novels.This style of adventure writing leaked across into conventional modules IMO as 2e continued. Connected series of adventure modules require certain railroading assumptions for continuity, and the easiest way to ensure this is to prevent players from interfering with the main metaplot at all. The dangers of this is that to players the glass ceiling can become obvious and onerous, some modules didn't give anything for the party to proactively do beside watch the &quot;metaplot and/or awesome npcs&quot; do their thing, and some players developed an extreme aversion to this sort of module and started running in the opposite direction the instant they sniffed the merest hint of a railroad or plot.I do think all this railroading went too far for some players who wanted more agency, and this attitude led to some of the design criteria for 3e which is in many ways the &quot;Player Empowerment Edition&quot;.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Aenghus, post: 6682125, member: 2656"] 2e adventures like the Dragonlance modules and Ravenloft modules, which were often highly railroaded, and also often featured tie-ins to novels. They were to some extent written to appeal to readers who might never actually use them in a D&D game, which was one of the factors contributing to White Wolf's sales, so TSR tried getting on the same bandwagon. And the same attitude is perhaps visible in the Avatar Crisis adventure modules that transition the Forgotten Realms from 1e to 2e, which are also horribly railroaded and arbitrary, and tie into novels. This style of adventure writing leaked across into conventional modules IMO as 2e continued. Connected series of adventure modules require certain railroading assumptions for continuity, and the easiest way to ensure this is to prevent players from interfering with the main metaplot at all. The dangers of this is that to players the glass ceiling can become obvious and onerous, some modules didn't give anything for the party to proactively do beside watch the "metaplot and/or awesome npcs" do their thing, and some players developed an extreme aversion to this sort of module and started running in the opposite direction the instant they sniffed the merest hint of a railroad or plot. I do think all this railroading went too far for some players who wanted more agency, and this attitude led to some of the design criteria for 3e which is in many ways the "Player Empowerment Edition". [/QUOTE]

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