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Message: <blockquote data-quote="howandwhy99" data-source="post: 6214716" data-attributes="member: 3192">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.</blockquote>

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