Did Dragonlance kill D&D and take its stuff? (And a Question of the Way Forward)

[Mercurius]

Can 5E have both more traditional exploration type adventures loosely tied to a campaign setting and more story oriented adventures more closely tied to a setting, maybe even with "meta-plot"? (and all sorts of other variants?)

Yes. Certainly more easily then 1E or probably 2E.

I hope so.

 

[Baron Greystone]

[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Tahoma, Calibri, Geneva, sans-serif]Asis my usual habit, when I see a topic with this many pages ofresponses, I'll just post without reading all the pages ofreminiscences and streams of consciousness. I started playing D&Din the 70's, in high school, but not 'really' until college. Thegolden age doesn't have to be twelve, it's whenever you first getthe ball and start to run with it.[/FONT]


[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Tahoma, Calibri, Geneva, sans-serif]Ithink we all evolved, along with the hobby. In the beginning, we hadthe dungeon. But 'They' had already had the battlefield ofminiatures, and Avalon Hill's Outdoor Survival for wildernessactivity. 'They' had had ongoing characters that were alreadylegendary, and we heard about their adventures. These were '[/FONT][FONT=Verdana, Arial, Tahoma, Calibri, Geneva, sans-serif]stories'[/FONT][FONT=Verdana, Arial, Tahoma, Calibri, Geneva, sans-serif]as much as any 'storyteller' 'metagame' campaign arc that came later,but they evolved in a group effort. Yes, MAR Barker worked out inadvance the things he wanted to happen as he ran his nascent groupthrough Tekumel, and yes, he improvised when players attempted thingshe hadn't expected. So what? What's actually different?[/FONT]


[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Tahoma, Calibri, Geneva, sans-serif]Andthe longer we played, and the longer the hobby existed, the morepossibilities we wanted to explore. My opinion is that 'beginningplayers' are more likely to play simple dungeons, while 'experiencedplayers' are more likely to try more advanced plots and story. Then,after having learned and experienced it all, players will groupthemselves into preferred styles of play. Some will go down the roadof shared narrative, others will be simulationists, there will be themin-maxers looking at odds and builds, and still others will staywith rip-roariing dice-fests facing endless challenges a la old pulp.[/FONT]


[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Tahoma, Calibri, Geneva, sans-serif]Sowhat?[/FONT]


[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Tahoma, Calibri, Geneva, sans-serif]Iremember when JM wrote that piece, and I still feel the same. Sureit's funny to say that Dragonlance had some sort of effect on theindustry, but rather, I say that Dragonlance was just a steppingstone, a product line that resulted from the natural evolution of adeveloping industry.[/FONT]


[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Tahoma, Calibri, Geneva, sans-serif]Compareand contrast with television and the movie industry. Big money goeswith repeating a successful formula. Little guys want to do somethingdifferent.[/FONT]


[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Tahoma, Calibri, Geneva, sans-serif]Andso what. Play the way you want to. Support the guys that produceproducts that you want to spend money on.[/FONT]


[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Tahoma, Calibri, Geneva, sans-serif]DoI care what happens with 5E? A little, in that there will be ageneration of gamers that will cut their teeth on it, and they maynot be compatible with my style. But then again, how many of them amI likely to play with, anyway? If the hobby goes on, it will outliveme, and the players will play what they like.[/FONT]

 

[Stormonu]

No, Spelljammer with its anthropomorphic hippopotamuses (-mus? -mi?) and giant space hamsters was where D&D jumped the shark and landed in the pool.

Try farther back, like with Barrier Peaks, or perhaps the Gamma World tables in the 1E DMG.

 

[delericho]

I don't think Dragonlance can be blamed for anything. Instead, I think it was probably just another step on an inevitable path.

I'm going to need to take your points in a different order for this to make sense...

3) By becoming a multimedia juggernaut that relied on novel sales as the driving force, Dragonlance reversed D&D's tried and true formula, as a hobby created by hobbyists, of "fun games first, profit second" (this, I think, was compounded by the takeover by Lorraine Williams in the mid-80s).

Problem is, this had already started. TSR had already published some novels previously, and we can assume they would have done so in the future. They had already done the cartoon.

If Dragonlance hadn't been done, then it's very likely there would have been something else. And now we'd be arguing "Did Flumphglaive kill D&D", or something like that.

Or, perhaps, there wouldn't have been anything, and then TSR would been in big trouble. Bear in mind that, even with the huge revenues from Dragonlance coming in, TSR were still about to run into major problems. How much worse would they have been without those profits? So, perhaps D&D would have survived, but it would probably be a much smaller thing than it is now.

1) It set in motion an uroboric process whereby later FRPG design was inspired by and based upon earlier FRPG design, which led to a kind of regurgitative diminishing of creativity, un-rooted in tradition and often unwilling to foster new ideas (he compares this to the Shannara books, which had a similar impact in fantasy literature).

Again, I suspect this is inevitable. It's difficult to know how much the video game industry is truly the descendant of D&D. Had Dragonlance not made D&D a mainstream success, what would the impact have been?

My suspicion is that we would still have had a huge video games industry, largely driven by advances in movie SFX. It might not have been quite the same thing (perhaps tending more towards much more linear movie-style plots), but it would still have existed. And, in that case, it's likely that D&D, if it had survived the mid-80's contraction, would have been influenced by that industry anyway.

2) Dragonlance would embrace an approach to gaming with little freedom for the PCs, the epitome of the infamous "railroading,"

Again, I think that's inevitable. I forget where I saw it, but I once saw a comparison between level design in an early first person shooter (Quake, I think) and a much more recent one. Basically, the older design had many more paths through the level, while the latter was basically "encounter... cut scene... encounter... cut scene..." and so on.

That itself is probably an inevitable result of games becoming more and more intricate - it costs a huge amount to produce material, and every "path not taken" is therefore material that is wasted. So, you cut the unused paths to a minimum... and end up with a railroad.

We see much the same in the "Delve Format" adventures for 3e and 4e - each encounter requires a one- or two-page spread, page count is tightly limited, and so to maximise the bang for the buck the designers want to make sure you hit as many encounters as possible. And the easiest way to do that is a railroad.

(But that tendency isn't limited to the "Delve Format". Every adventure has a limit on page count, or on the number of hours a designer can be allowed to work on it. And since they're low-profit items, those constraints are going to be tight.)

I'm also not 100% sure I can really decry the tendency to railroading in published adventures. If I'm playing a module where I have to pass through 5 encounters to get to the BBEG, it doesn't matter if the full adventure has 32 encounters (and an "optimal path" of 5) or if it has only 5 encounters and I've hit them all. From the player's side of the screen, it's pretty much transparent. It's really hard to justify the extra expense on the 32-encounter module, if I'm unlikely to see 84% of it!

I've rambled too long. Bottom line: I think the Dragonlance adventures are flawed in their own right. And I think that adventure designers too often learn the wrong lessons from adventures of that sort (and, especially, the excellent "Ravenloft", which is part of the same trend). But I don't think that Dragonlance is really to blame for what came after, because that was largely inevitable anyway. And, besides, I don't think we're actually in too bad a place anyway, so "blame" is not really the right word anyway!

 

[TwoSix]

No, Spelljammer with its anthropomorphic hippopotamuses (-mus? -mi?) and giant space hamsters was where D&D jumped the shark and landed in the pool.

Giff are awesome, and I'll have no truck with an argument that says otherwise.

 

[Mercurius]

[MENTION=41997]Baron Greystone[/MENTION], no offense but I for one won't bother highlighting your grey text so that it can be read. I aimgine many feel the same - you might want to change your settings.

If Dragonlance hadn't been done, then it's very likely there would have been something else. And now we'd be arguing "Did Flumphglaive kill D&D", or something like that.

Yes, and I think JM would agree with you, at least based upon that blog entry - which he pretty much said.

Or, perhaps, there wouldn't have been anything, and then TSR would been in big trouble. Bear in mind that, even with the huge revenues from Dragonlance coming in, TSR were still about to run into major problems. How much worse would they have been without those profits? So, perhaps D&D would have survived, but it would probably be a much smaller thing than it is now.

Not to derail the main topic, but do we know why they were in financial trouble? Could it be that they thought the enormous popularity--the bubble--of the early 80s was sustainable and they, so to speak, took out a mortgage beyond their means?

Again, I think that's inevitable. I forget where I saw it, but I once saw a comparison between level design in an early first person shooter (Quake, I think) and a much more recent one. Basically, the older design had many more paths through the level, while the latter was basically "encounter... cut scene... encounter... cut scene..." and so on.

This is one of a few reasons why I don't like or play video games. Even when they involve "many more paths," they're still designed around pre-determined options. And even if they have some degree of open-ended randomness involved, its still based upon a formula, an algorithm.

Human imagination is not a formula, not an algorithm. And this is whether I strongly empathize with JM--if not agree with a lot of his specifics: the road traveled from Dragonlance onward was geared more towards formula than it was towards inspiring imagination. This is why we see a transition from 200-page fantasy novels in the 60s and 70s to thousand-page tomes in the 90s and 00s packed to the brim with dense description. Even 3E and 4E, both of which I see as great games, were more geared towards filling in the gaps than offering advice and inspiration as to how to make those gaps come alive...and it is in the gaps that imagination lives.

But this goes far beyond Dragonlance, or fantasy novels - and is a cultural issue of the Information Age. We now have this amazing technology that allows us to simulate, categorize, store, and process information in an unprecedented way. We have, as far as I can see, two choices - both in a large sense but moment to moment: We can either take the formulaic/algorithmic route of simulation and be receivers of information flow, or we can take the creative/imaginative route and be participants within the information flow.

It isn't either/or, but the default--and easier route--is the former, and we have to actually work towards maintaining a balance.

That itself is probably an inevitable result of games becoming more and more intricate - it costs a huge amount to produce material, and every "path not taken" is therefore material that is wasted. So, you cut the unused paths to a minimum... and end up with a railroad.

We see much the same in the "Delve Format" adventures for 3e and 4e - each encounter requires a one- or two-page spread, page count is tightly limited, and so to maximise the bang for the buck the designers want to make sure you hit as many encounters as possible. And the easiest way to do that is a railroad.

I've been thinking about this as I'm in the early stages of creating a sandbox environment for a 5E campaign I'm starting up early next year. Being a very busy person, I don't want to put a lot of time into creating encounters that will never be used. I love campaign setting design and take great pleasure out of creating a back-story that will, for the most part, only inform and contextualize the actual game play, but I don't have the time or desire to create intricate encounters that "might be" used.

This is why I hope that 5E takes an approach of providing modular resources for DMs, including adventure modules, encounter locations, etc. So then we have a three-way co-creation of a D&D game:

WotC provides...the rules, resources, modules...
DM creates and tells...the setting, story, and narrative...
Players make...choices that guide the course of story and narration, and what resources and modules the DM employs.

For me, WotC would be most helpful if they can provide a flexible rules set that allows modularity in terms of customization, but also resources and adventure/encounter modules that can easily be placed into my sandbox setting.

So I might say that there's an on old ruin in hex #17c, which is inhabited by a specter. And then I create the backstory of what the ruin is, where it fits into history, and who the specter was. Plus I can I can drop things int that ruin, hints and treasure, that lead to further adventures, even a larger plot or three. WotC provides me with a resources to either easily design a ruin, or pre-made ruins and encounters, plus easy-to-run monsters adaptable to different party levels. Then the players have an interactive environment that can meet them, yet doesn't railroad them in any particular direction.

For more important sites, I can do more of the design work myself. But it would be really nice to have a suite of programs and bunch of books that allow me to grab something on the fly.

There's my own tangential ramble!

 

[howandwhy99]

The Dragonlance modules were incredibly popular, but I don't consider them game modules. I think they are more story paths. These paths even came out before the novels, so you could play them as the characters in the novels before reading the authors' official version of the story.

It's a major shift in intent, but one that needs to be delineated. Do players when sitting down want to play a game like sports athletes do, where their actions and the environment determine the results, or do they want to tell a story like actors performing a play?

I believe early game modules were designed for game play. Players could play them at different tables through different campaigns and the results were significantly different each time. However, like any game these instances of game play could easily result in less than satisfying play, if judged simply on their quality as stories. Blowouts get boring real fast. This is part of the reason for balancing games. Highly repetitive games get boring too, which is one of the reasons massive variety comes out of D&D. Players want to be interested, but they want their actions to have meaning as well. IOW, they want their movements in the game to have consequences beyond what they themselves perceive them to be.

Running games like this, especially complex, highly variable games, is difficult and not easy for an adult much less a 10-year-old kid. Mid-1980s Dragonlance took advantage of a different playstyle, one in the hobby since early on, where players more or less followed a predetermined path. It should be said, Dragonlance did this very well. The stories were evocative and extremely popular both in novel form and adventure publication. Fourteen adventures were published in what? Under 3 years? That would be extremely difficult to do if those modules were game modules and needed to be rigorously balanced and playtested prior to publishing. That TSR had never really playtested its modules too well didn't help matters much.

Follow the path, predetermined storylines for D&D modules became the status quo. Adventures weren't as evocative when you looked at their maps, but they didn't need maps anymore either. Those were unused legacy features for this design. Adventures could be summarized in terms of a path, however loose, the players would follow to complete it. This insures a shared narrative is had by every player who plays it and its quality was as high the module's author could manage. In 2e, adventures were said to suck by gamers who wanted them to be games, but the settings created were considered awesome. As backgrounds to path-based modules, settings became filled with inspiring stories about their people and places. Unfortunately, it was their success which led to the settings' histories and characters often becoming Mary Sues and main characters in Act-Scene scripted adventures for players to follow along in.

The story following style of play is still very popular as it delivers a particular kind of pleasure a game designed for challenging game play usually cannot. Games, puzzles, and sports simply aren't well designed to deliver highly evocative stories every time. But then, that's not the point of almost any of them. What story path adventures do is ensure there will be no boring parts, that every fight will be important to the plot followed, every conversation relevant to it, and all travel to places the PCs need to be for it. Players are there for the plot and that's what modules like the Dragonlance modules delivered in spades. In fact, moving out of the plot to something irrelevant could actually be considered bad design for this adventure style. It wastes players time and sounds like meaningless "random encounters" of the sort found in early Final Fantasy games. You would have to really love the combat mini-game to grind back into those time and again.

 

[delericho]

Not to derail the main topic, but do we know why they were in financial trouble? Could it be that they thought the enormous popularity--the bubble--of the early 80s was sustainable and they, so to speak, took out a mortgage beyond their means?

It's been a while since I read it, but the timeline in the 25th anniversary boxed set gave some details. As I understand it, it was the result of some spectacularly bad mismanagement.

My understanding is the Gary was away at the time (in Hollywood working on the cartoon?), and in his absence TSR made a lot of investments, some of them quite bewildering (I believe one was in a needlework company, or something equally bizarre). Plus, they paid for company cars for a huge number of employees. Basically, it was just a case of spending too much money, too foolishly.

IIRC, the immediate crisis was that Gary returned, they rushed out two hardbacks in quick succession (UA was one, and I think OA was the other), they pushed back their plans for 2nd Edition, and they brought on a couple of new investors. Sadly, those investors later allied with one L. Williams, but that was a while away...

I must stress, however, that this is all half-remembered stuff I read years ago, and it's also only one side of the story. And, as the Vorlons say, truth is a three-edged sword.

This is one of a few reasons why I don't like or play video games. Even when they involve "many more paths," they're still designed around pre-determined options. And even if they have some degree of open-ended randomness involved, its still based upon a formula, an algorithm.

Human imagination is not a formula, not an algorithm.

That's true, but...

If we're still talking about prepublished adventures (e.g. Dragonlance), then the simple fact is that the adventures will always have a limited scope, simply by virtue of the limited page count. Dungeons must be finite (or have bits saying "what lies beyond here is for the DM to fill in"), adventures can only cover a subset of possible interactions with NPCs, etc...

So, while I'll decry many published adventures are "soulless railroads", and while I'll expect a good adventure to support many paths, they still have to have some sort of formula behind them, even if it's a formula unique to this one adventure.

Of course, as soon as we move beyond just talking prepublished adventures, then things open up hugely.

Even 3E and 4E, both of which I see as great games, were more geared towards filling in the gaps than offering advice and inspiration as to how to make those gaps come alive...and it is in the gaps that imagination lives.

Agreed. Though I would actually accuse 1st Edition of that very same flaw - in that edition Gygax massively expanded the material that went before, filling in a lot of gaps, and tried to create a single, comprehensive ruleset for all tables. Indeed, some of his more infamous writings reek of "play it my way, or it's not AD&D!" - though how much of that was hyperbole I'm not sure. (Ironically, it appears that the game he actually played was much lighter than AD&D 1st Ed.)

I actually think that that may be a natural human tendency - the first draft is necessarily light and full of gaps, so we do a new draft that fills in the gaps, we go further and further down that route... and then we realise that the whole thing has become about the rules much more than the fun. (In my own case, at one point my house rules for 2nd Ed amounted to a complete rewrite, including all of the kits... just before "Player's Option" came out and invalidated all my work. Likewise, at one point I had almost completely rewritten Vampire: the Masquerade. And the net effect of all that work was a less-good game. Oops. )

We can either take the formulaic/algorithmic route of simulation and be receivers of information flow, or we can take the creative/imaginative route and be participants within the information flow.

It isn't either/or, but the default--and easier route--is the former, and we have to actually work towards maintaining a balance.

Agreed.

This is why I hope that 5E takes an approach of providing modular resources for DMs, including adventure modules, encounter locations, etc. So then we have a three-way co-creation of a D&D game:

WotC provides...the rules, resources, modules...
DM creates and tells...the setting, story, and narrative...
Players make...choices that guide the course of story and narration, and what resources and modules the DM employs.

For me, WotC would be most helpful if they can provide a flexible rules set that allows modularity in terms of customization, but also resources and adventure/encounter modules that can easily be placed into my sandbox setting.

That would be nice. Given that 3e's "Book of Challenges" appears not to have done very well, and given the rise of the Adventure Path in recent years, I fear you may be disappointed. I'd like to be wrong about that.

 

[Mercurius]

I must stress, however, that this is all half-remembered stuff I read years ago, and it's also only one side of the story. And, as the Vorlons say, truth is a three-edged sword.

That's basically how I remember it. I think a key part was that he went into bed with one Blume brother, who brought another in for financial reasons, and then the Blume brothers ended up owning a majority of the company, and they in turn brought in the more businessy Lorraine Williams.

I think in many ways its an example of why, when a company gets beyond a certain point, there's an inevitable turn in which the cart (profit) starts leading the horse (product). This is why one could argue that hobby industries should never get too big. The most successful companies seem to have a balance where they're still focused on the quality of the product, but they are gently guided by administration. Actually, this works in all institutions. At the small private high school I teach at, there's a tension between teaching faculty and administration. When the faculty run the ship, we get into all kinds of trouble in terms of communication with parents and the community, missing deadlines, etc, whereas when the administration runs the ship we end up more "institutionalized" and lose some of the vibrancy and creativity. Finding a healthy balance is difficult.

If we're still talking about prepublished adventures (e.g. Dragonlance), then the simple fact is that the adventures will always have a limited scope, simply by virtue of the limited page count. Dungeons must be finite (or have bits saying "what lies beyond here is for the DM to fill in"), adventures can only cover a subset of possible interactions with NPCs, etc...

So, while I'll decry many published adventures are "soulless railroads", and while I'll expect a good adventure to support many paths, they still have to have some sort of formula behind them, even if it's a formula unique to this one adventure.

Of course, as soon as we move beyond just talking prepublished adventures, then things open up hugely.

Just to be clear: I like adventure paths. But I want to see WotC nourish both major approaches to the game: the adventure path/meta-plot on one hand, and the old school/sandbox/module approach on the other. I personally like both, and see a place for both (unlike JM, who has a subtle to not-so-subtle element of "my D&D or its not Real D&D").

Agreed. Though I would actually accuse 1st Edition of that very same flaw - in that edition Gygax massively expanded the material that went before, filling in a lot of gaps, and tried to create a single, comprehensive ruleset for all tables. Indeed, some of his more infamous writings reek of "play it my way, or it's not AD&D!" - though how much of that was hyperbole I'm not sure. (Ironically, it appears that the game he actually played was much lighter than AD&D 1st Ed.)

IIRC, everyone I knew who played AD&D saw it, albeit usually unconsciously, as a toolbox that you could pick and choose from. There was a core game that everyone played, but then every new group established house rules and which rules sub-systems (e.g. encumbrance) each table would use. For whatever reason, this was more difficult with 3E and 4E.

I actually think that that may be a natural human tendency - the first draft is necessarily light and full of gaps, so we do a new draft that fills in the gaps, we go further and further down that route... and then we realise that the whole thing has become about the rules much more than the fun. (In my own case, at one point my house rules for 2nd Ed amounted to a complete rewrite, including all of the kits... just before "Player's Option" came out and invalidated all my work. Likewise, at one point I had almost completely rewritten Vampire: the Masquerade. And the net effect of all that work was a less-good game. Oops. )

There may just be an inevitable cycle of fresh new edition, expansion leading to eventual bloat, then floating for awhile, then decline and gradual rebirth (new edition). I think where a lot of fans gets upset, where nerdrage comes in, is when they don't want to change - they want their preferred (current) edition to last forever, which can happen, but WotC - as a company - must move on. Not only do economics require new editions, but professional game designers want to, well, design - and that means trying to evolve and improve the game through new editions.

That would be nice. Given that 3e's "Book of Challenges" appears not to have done very well, and given the rise of the Adventure Path in recent years, I fear you may be disappointed. I'd like to be wrong about that.

Again, I'm hoping for both approaches. I really see no reason why WotC wouldn't try to accommodate both, and it seems that they're wanting to do this. But we'll see!

 

[delericho]

That's basically how I remember it. I think a key part was that he went into bed with one Blume brother, who brought another in for financial reasons, and then the Blume brothers ended up owning a majority of the company, and they in turn brought in the more businessy Lorraine Williams.

Gygax's divorce had a role to play here, too. Again, IIRC, when others came in, he always made sure to retain enough shares to keep control of the company. But with the divorce, his ex-wife got enough shares to break his lock, and she then sold those shares on the LW.

Just to be clear: I like adventure paths. But I want to see WotC nourish both major approaches to the game: the adventure path/meta-plot on one hand, and the old school/sandbox/module approach on the other.[/quote

Agreed.

There may just be an inevitable cycle of fresh new edition, expansion leading to eventual bloat, then floating for awhile, then decline and gradual rebirth (new edition).

While I agree with this also, I was thinking more on a personal level also - certainly, I started with a very light system (BECMI), and gradually proceeded to ever-more-complex systems as I went, always looking for the perfect system that would do everything, cover everything.

Eventually, I realised that that was impossible, of course. And now I spend my time looking for that happy medium of a game that both has fairly coherent rules and also doesn't bog me down with unwanted detail.

(Basically, SWSE-style D&D, although even SWSE has some major issues. I want something more rules-light than even 3.0e core-rules-only, but don't want to go back to 2nd Ed's 'quirks', the same reason I don't go for Castles & Crusades. It does sometimes look like 5e just might be what I want...)