When I was a regular at the WotC community back in those days, it was assumed that anyone discussing anything on those forums was running their own game.
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My own group tried something with a published adventure in a published setting once, and dropped it quickly, with prejudice. All of the dozens of people that I played with in those days held essentially the same opinion on the subject: that we're playing our game and that published material detracts from our ownership of it.
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If you're playing D&D, that means homebrew; either putting in some work and creating material in advance, or improvising on the spot. That's what D&D is. It's the game where you make stuff up. And as a DM, your job is to create a game experience, and you're judged on how well you do that.
It's only within the last few years and only on ENW that I see the term "module" used to describe something in D&D rather than a part of the Apollo spacecraft
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If someone is actually out there buying Paizo's "adventure paths" (what does those two words together even mean?) and using them to run a game, I don't begrudge them that, but I don't understand it at all, and I wonder why that same person did not, as far as I can tell, exist ten years ago.
For as long as I can remember, Dragon Magazine had adds for setting/story material in it (eg bucketloads of MERP adds back in the 80s), and the racks of FLGSs were full of story material for sale - modules, setting-based games (eg L5R). Back in the 80s ICE was one of the biggest RPG companies after TSR, selling MERP. Another big company was Chaosium, selling Gloranthan material for RQ, and of course CoC.
And D&D players would compare notes on classic modules like the D-series, Keep on the Borderlands, etc.
When I was at university in the early through mid-90s, people played games set in FR, or used modules, or played Vampire games with the story elements taken from the White Wolf sourcebooks. I ran a Rolemaster campaign using a mix of Greyhawk material, ShadowWorld material (an RM campaign world) and my own material. For 10-ish years from the late 90s I ran a Rolemaster campaign using a mix of TSR Oriental Adventures material (both pre-and post-FRisation of Kara Tur), Bushido materials, 3E D&D material, and my own stuff.
Your experience, and your description of it, is wildly different from mine, and different from what I saw on Usenet back in 2000, or messageboards in the years after that (RPGnet, WotC, ENworld), where the idea of paying RPG companies for story elements has been pretty well understood as unexceptional, and even typical.
As to the issue of "ownership" - I don't agree. If I decide to run a game with elves, dwarves etc - an idea borrowed from Tolkien - and/or with knights and castles - an idea borrowed from fairytales and romances - am I forfeting ownership by looking to a game designer to give me mechanical models of elves, dwarves, knights, etc? Or if I read a module - say, Bastion of Broken Souls for 3E - and see some interesting ideas in it - say, a Night Hag dream traveller oracle, or an angel who is a living gate for a pocket plane where a god has been exiled - am I forfeiting ownership by incorporating those ideas into my game? When I used those ideas I had to mechanically translate them from 3E to RM; and I also had to ignore some silly advice from the module writer around framing and NPC motivations and possible actions - but I don't generally buy modules for those sorts of details - I am looking for cool ideas, and for nice maps and locations.
Instead of giving examples of what you do in your own game, people seem to have moved towards discussing a "standard" game experience,
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Maybe it's a 4e thing or even a 3e thing or a WotC thing in general.
I see plenty of 4e people talking about what they do in their own games - me, [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION], [MENTION=305]Storminator[/MENTION], [MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION], [MENTION=59411]Pour[/MENTION], [MENTION=21556]Jester[/MENTION] and others (though some have left the boards due to being fed up with edition-warrior dogpiling).
But different games foster different sorts of techniques, and so different sorts of discussions about them. In a system in which mechanics are conceived of as gameworld physics engines (RM, RQ, most of 3E, good chunks of AD&D's action resolution mechanics) then discussions of techniques naturally drift towards new physics models (falling damage used to be a popular one; hit points and wounding is another perennial; two weapon fighting seems to come up quite a bit too).
In a system in which mechanics are in the first instance conceived of as metagame - ie for resolving a scene or a conflict of narrational authority - then once someone has chosen a system (be it 4e, or HeroWars/Quest, or whatever) then there's probably going to be less discussin of varying the basic mechanic - you'd just change games for that - and more discussion of framing and resolution of conflicts within those mechanics. Among 4e players, this comes out in discussions of how to frame combat encounters, how to use different monsters for different sorts of mechanical or thematic effects, how to frame and narrate skill challenges, etc (I'm thinking of discussions around things like the gorge as a response to the failed riding check, or the rainstorm as a response to the dwarven fighter's failed Diplomacy check when meeting the mayor outdoors). Those conversations have died down a bit since the separate 4e board was shut down, but they still happen.
They may not be conversations that you are personally interested in, given they are relevant for categories of RPGs that (as far as I can tell) you don't play (with the exception of MHRP? In which case discussions about 4e techniques for framing and resolution would be highly applicable). But they are happening.
The inability of some people (and companies) to acknowledge diversity in the D&D gaming world plays into a lot of other negative things and has, to me, been a change for the worse over the last decade.
Probably unsurprisingly, I have my own views on the attitude of ENworld posters to diversity of play and techniques in RPGing.