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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 6214350" data-attributes="member: 22424">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...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.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.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!</blockquote>

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