I loved the old 1st Ed adventures when we were playing them. We were in high school and didn't care about ecologies or consistency. We even would take turns making dungeons on graph paper, putting monsters in the rooms and then going for it. No Story Necessary.
But as I got older, my preferences for style of play changed. I won't say they evolved, since a story driven plot, mystery and intrigue are not any more evolved than dungeon hacking, but I am more satisfied now by a challenging story, layered NPCs, and overarching purpose for my players and my PCs.
Second, one of the reasons that extreme detail was not given in the earlier products is because you were expected to make it up! Why is this "Dark Knight" character here? I don't you... you tell me. Maybe he's under a curse. Maybe he's trapped. Maybe he's running from the authorities of the Realm. Maybe he's running from the Furies, and they can't find him while he's in the Underworld. Maybe he has amnesia. Maybe he's just a weirdo. But unless it's relevant, we don't really need to know where he poops or how his mother treated him as a child. We need just enough for him to be an interesting and cool challenge to throw in the way of the players. Also, old school games often operated under the assumption that you were going to be rolling for NPC Reactions. Maybe the Dark Knight doesn't want to fight. Maybe he wants to challenge somebody to let them pass. Maybe he will give up his magic shield if they win (maybe he's got a lot of shields already on his wall). Maybe he will join the party... and maybe he will betray them later.
The DM can make up all that kind of stuff. He can tailor it to fit his campaign and his group. If you're all engineering students, maybe the "Dark Knight" needs help repairing a Dwarven mining device (break out the slide rules, boys).
Part of the "old school way" is to give the player or DM something partial and see what they make out of it. Look at how characters are made: you roll randomly for your attributes. What if you roll high Strength and low Constitution? Maybe he's a wiry character, or maybe he's big and strong but has a weak immune system. That's part of the challenge: take these raw numbers and make them into something imaginative and fun.
Now, see this is another reason why the older adventures don't work well for me as a DM. I don't have TIME to do all this making stuff up. I need to use published adventures. Though I will always add my personal touch, I don't have time to add all the why's and how's.
When I find published adventures that can be fit into any campaign, are well fleshed out, and offer a story thread that I can attach to my campaign arc, then this is all win for me.
knightofround said:
Thats why the adventures I've picked are more focused on having great plot (drow war) awesome dungeon ecology (banewarrens and RttToEE), and settings with a lot of depth to them (ravenloft).
I am glad someone else is getting some good gaming out of the Drow War series. I think this is one of the better plotted APs out there, even if the production values were lacking. The first book (lvl 1-10) was a huge race across an island, mini-plots everywhere, and finally save a city (or not!) before starting out on Book 2.
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