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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jhaelen" data-source="post: 4405406" data-attributes="member: 46713">Umm. Would you allow for the possibility of someone not liking 'the old classics' despite fully understanding their design philosophy? The often praised 'openness' and 'number of choices' in many old adventures don't create excitement in everyone when they basically consist of random encounters in a randomly generated dungeon.An adventure isn't inherently better because it offers more paths to get from A to B or because the entry room has doors leading to twenty other locations.I typically enjoy 'basically linear' adventures with a good story more than a sprawling complex that is completely illogical.To me it's like the difference between Doom and Half-Life. Obviously I prefer the latter.I also enjoy playing Hack/Rogue from time to time, but ultimately it's just killing time, nothing to get excited about.This isn't entirely black or white either. If an adventure is nothing but a railroad that doesn't offer any choices at all, it cannot be more than mindless fun even if the story is absolutely exceptional.Back in the days I had an eye-opening experience when I read my first MERP adventure. It was a dynamic, a 'living dungeon'. It was neatly divided into a description of the static elements (rooms) and a list of inhabitants, their typical time-schedule, tactics, etc.It didn't have any pre-planned encounters or set-pieces like all the D&D adventures I had read before. I.e. it offered a completely different kind of freedom. _Meaningful_ choices rather than 'door A' or 'door B'.As a final disclaimer: Not all old D&D adventures were bad, imho. Some of them also included elements of a dynamic, living dungeon and some actually did a good job of telling an interesting story along the way. I just can't remember the title of any of them... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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