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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 8133649"><p>Something worth keeping in mind is 2E evolved a lot, had tons of products, and not all of those products were consistent. I think overall, the 90s were saturated with an idea of the GM using power to ensure story unfolded. With 2E, my impression and memory, are this increased the more popular games like vampire got (I could be wrong as I haven't sat down and compared texts from the time, but that is my memory). However I did run a number of 2E campaigns not so long ago. I did so using the Ravenloft line, which was pretty much what I ran all through the 90s. This meant revisiting a lot of old books I hadn't read in years. If you begin with a module like Feast of Goblyns, it actually has a lot more interest in player agency than later Ravenloft modules (it is still a product of the time, but it emphasizes running the adventure as a 'living adventure' where the NPCs react to the players. There is an assumed course of events, in a way,  but it is a very easy module to run in more of a sandbox mode. However, toward the mid-90s you really see story start to become more important (to the point that 'scenes' and 'acts' are sometimes used as headers). But all that said, take a look at the Van Richten books. Those are all about monster hunts and the party chasing after individual variations of lycanthrope, vampire, golem, etc. Those books were foundational to my running of Ravenloft back in the day and it is really hard to use the tools in them without allowing for tremendous player agency (because they are all about having a threat, who is essentially a mystery to solve----i..e. you need to learn about this particular vampire or golem in order to discover how to kill them). And that doesn't work as well if you are organizing the adventure around story beats. It works much better if you just drop the players into a situation where that monster is on the lose and they freely roam about figuring out how to contend with it. I think one of the bad things about 2E was the DMG. It was only partial really. You needed the blue book campaign guide to truly round out the GM advice (and many people I knew still used the 1E DMG while running 2E).  I guess my point is there was a trajectory with 2E where story got emphasized more over time, but I think that was really more a product of what was becoming fashionable (and much of it had the appearance of D&D playing catch up with some of its hipper competition----the 90s is when I started to see advice like 'only kill player characters if they do something really stupid' become ubiquitous).</p></blockquote><p></p>

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