Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thorin Stoutfoot" data-source="post: 303257" data-attributes="member: 1887">D&D left the dungeon when TSR's adventures (among other materials) did away with site based adventures (such as White Plume Mountain, Against the Giants, and the Village of Hommlet) and towards plot based adventures. Read the Dragonlance series of modules to see what I mean. I left before this period totally took over, but the horror stories I hear about are Forgotten Realms modules where high level NPCs showed up to save the day and issue PC adventure orders.That style of play left players with no real impact on the story, no meaningful method of resolving the plot other than what the DM/adventure defined, and in general, took decisions away from the players.To my mind "Back to the Dungeon" is a return to the gaming roots of D&D. What was important was giving players choices, decisions, and trade-offs. Everything in 3E D&D was geared towards promoting this sort of trade-off. Hence, for instance, the game designers spend a lot of time talking about resource management. Another example of this philosophy in action is the rule that no character trait advantage could be balanced by a role-playing disadvantage.Anyway, I think those who wish that D&D was more like GURPS should give up and play GURPS instead. If WoTC were to publish a D&D 4 that promoted point-based experience leveling, higher lethality (by introducing some sort of lethal hit point system), and eliminating classes, I predict that gamers will once again abandon D&D in droves just as players left D&D during the D&D 2E fiasco. (In particular, note that the player options skills and powers books did nothing to bring players back to D&D's moribound 2E systems --- to my mind this experiment has already been tried and failed miserably)Now that the OGL is out, there would be nothing to stop Necromancer Games or Sword and Sorcery studio to republish 3E rules and capture market share from the kind of 4E that Joshua Dyal and others are proposing. While this could possibly fragment the market between WoTC loyalists and old school 3E types, my suspicion is that the market center of gravity would fall with the installed base. Remember: whatever 4E is would have to be better than 3E the same way 3E was better than 2E and 1E to be able to trigger the same massive upgrade activity we saw in 2000/2001.</blockquote>

Verification