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Message: <blockquote data-quote="D+1" data-source="post: 2045632" data-attributes="member: 13654">But THAT... that thing you're talking about right there.  Rewriting the module and making it what YOU want.  THAT is 1E and it is why 1E modules DON'T really concern themselves with plausibility.  If you want more plausibility it's up to you to provide it.  Every campaign, every DM, every group is different.  Rather than spell it all out carefully 1E gives you the sound and let's you decide how to spell it.1E gives you basic information about the contents of a room.  "There is a desk and chair, torture devices in the corner, and a locked chest with 90 gp in it."  Nowadays you get description. "There is a desk and chair made of dark Fruzlewood, an almost entirely melted candle and ledger on the desk written in Draconic that details expenditures for 'entertainment' costs, an iron maiden with the skeleton of a dwarf still covered in tattered rags that once were clothes, and a chest locked with a DC 35 lock and a broken needle trap containing 90 gp in a soft leather bag embossed with a flower."  The 1E "description" sort of assumes that if you CARE in the first place what the furniture is made of you'll throw that in there, that if you want something like a ledger to be on the desk to provide a clue to another adventure that you know better than a module's author what should be in it, and that if your crew is the kick-in-the-door-kill-then-loot-and-move-on type you don't need illuminating description, and if your players live for long, lovingly crafted description and detail to set moods and provide evocative mental scenery you're gonna embellish things whether it's 1 sentence or several paragraphs.   So why not go with 1 sentence and let people make of it what they want?People's fondness for 1E *is* heavily based in nostalgia.  But it's a nostalgia that's borne of having been required to be MUCH more actively imaginative with bare-bones material, with constant revision and adaptation.  Back in the days of 1E the DM provided 90% of the material himself and bought maybe 10%.  Now I think the perception is that those percentages are reversed - 90% of adventure, setting, and rules is purchased and only 10% is of the DM's own imagination.  It may not be true - but that's the perception and that's what accounts for the lack of 1E feel.  The entire hobby, the rules and resources we have available to us are all VASTLY more plentiful and advanced.We don't play "Duane's Campaign" which happens to use the Greyhawk setting - we play the Forgotten Realms setting wherein lies Duane's Campaign.  Even back when Greyhawk pretty much was the ONLY setting that was available we always, ALWAYS, were drawing our own maps, naming our own towns, inventing our own nations and NPC's, and we used the purchased materials as a resource to fill in occasional parts.  Now we seem to use purchased materials foremost and fill in only occasional parts with our own, much smaller, less consequential bits of invention.That's the 1E feel for me.</blockquote>

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