[EDITION WARZ] Selling Out D&D's Soul?

[MerricB]

I'm afraid I'm going to have to disagree with you about that. The vast majority of the first 60 issues or so of Dragon Magazine are primarily advice. The AD&D1E DMG is packed full of advice. ...

It is probably worth looking at the advice purely in terms of creating adventures... there wasn't all that much in core AD&D (although Moldvay+ Basic D&D did a great job there). Even so, there's a big emphasis on the dungeon style of adventure creation. The balance of monsters to PC is somewhat determined by the dungeon level.

Wilderness adventuring is just deadly for low-level PCs! (One wonders how pioneers survive...)

This "mega-dungeon" balance style can also be called status-quo, where the players determine the difficulty of the adventure by how deep they go into the dungeon. Of course, for PCs who stay on the top level of the dungeon, XP awards are reduced. (See the 1e DMG for challenge adjustments to XP).

With the "Giants" series, we have more of the story-based adventure, where the difficulty of the encounters is based on the level of the participants. There is a caveat here in the case of Giants due to the high level of the PCs - high level PCs have a much easier time of things in AD&D than 3E. They're not invulnerable, but the threats don't instant-kill so much; hit points are high and damage values are much lower... although giants can hit hard!

Tracy Hickman proved a very strong proponent of the story adventure; see Pharoah, Oasis, Lost Tomb, Ravenloft, and, later, Dragonlance.

The Dragonlance saga of adventures is amazing in its scope, vision and execution. It is not perfect. The chug-chug of the railroad is palpable (especially in DL2). However, it brought to the forefront an aspect you won't find in Gygax's adventures: time. Events happen, relentlessly driving the heroes before them. The armies don't stop because the PCs need to explore a dungeon! The world keeps going.

(This isn't to say that those playing, say, Temple of Elemental Evil won't have a sense of time and the world moving around them, but it's entirely in the hands of the DM. The adventure isn't helping much).

The Dragonlance designers also learnt as they went along. Plot-immunity (for PCs and NPCs) was proven to be a bad thing, and died. Things got better.

In Dragonlance you can see the seeds of The Red Hand of Doom.

Advice for story-based adventures? Did it exist in the AD&D days? Well, yes, it did. See the Dungeoneer's Survival Guide (1986) and the Dungeon Master's Design Kit (1988).

This is late AD&D, though. We're moving onto the excesses of the 2e days, and the Avatar Trilogy is on the horizon - one of the worst examples of railroading and NPCs as Gods you've ever seen.

Despite all this, the CR system of 3e is noticably absent, as is advice as to what monsters would be an appropriate challenge for a group of X level characters. 1E comes sort of close with the XP advice, but it's flawed. (A group of 6 1st level PCs need to fight 2 Ogres to get full XP...) There's even less in 2e! (Heck, I'm not quite sure there's a DMG in 2e!)

For those familiar with early issues of The Dragon - was there much in there about balancing encounters? I've got the Dragon CD-ROM Archive, but I can't remember it having that much about dungeon and adventure design (beyond new nasty traps and monsters!)

In a lot of ways, the mega-dungeon environment was expected for the first adventures. It provided training wheels so the DM (and players) could learn how tough monsters were. Later on, the DM could do more story-based stuff, with a much better grasp of how difficult monsters were from experience.

I'm happy with CR - if not least because there's a *lot* of monsters out there now. They can be deceptive as to their power level, and I'm happy to take any further guidance that I can get. Sure, it's not 100% accurate, but it's a good guide.

Cheers!

 

[jdrakeh]

Well, I don't think D&D has "sold out" or anything, but I do think it has changed mechanically (thematially, it's still firmly intact, though). I own a huge lot of AD&D 1e books, as well as the AD&D 3.5 core books. I use adventures for both interchangeably between the two systems (for example, I'm planning to use a lot of the WotC freebies with AD&D in the near future, and I've used a lot of old 1e Dragon adventures with D&D 3.5).

The primary diffference for me is that, when I want slightly more lethal combat, slower level progression, and unpredicatble encounters -- I choose AD&D 1e. When I want actual skills (i.e., learned character aptitudes), cinematic combat, and balanced encounters -- I go with D&D 3.5. Thematically, both games are all about killing things and taking stuff, so what game I play depends on how I want to kill things and take stuff when the mood strikes me.

 

[jdrakeh]

I'm afraid I'm going to have to disagree with you about that. The vast majority of the first 60 issues or so of Dragon Magazine are primarily advice. The AD&D1E DMG is packed full of advice. Gaming conventions and gaming stores were also great sources for advice as well, especially given the limited number of modules initially available. It was very easy to find somebody who had run the slaver series, giant series or drow series before who would give you tips and suggestions.

Agreed -- the AD&D 1e DMG is roughly 70% advice with a few combat systems (the grappling rules, most notably) and random item, location, and encounter generation tables thrown in for good measure.

[Edit: Er... GOOD measure, not GOOF measure.]

 

[MerricB]

Agreed -- the AD&D 1e DMG is roughly 70% advice with a few combat systems (the grappling rules, most notably) and random item, location, and encounter generation tables thrown in for goof measure.

Quoting you now before you edit.

Cheers!

 

[Hussar]

The primary diffference for me is that, when I want slightly more lethal combat, slower level progression, and unpredicatble encounters -- I choose AD&D 1e.

The last two I agree with, but more lethal combat? That certainly wasn't my experience, at least, beyond second level. Good grief, there isn't a creature in 1e other than dragons, that could do enough damage to drop a 4th level fighter in 1 round. Magical effects, maybe, but straight up melee damage? Not a chance. Never mind the 42 hp giants . I have found 3e FAR and away more lethal than 1e. I'm still averaging 1 death every 4 sessions in my World's Largest Dungeon game and the party has 5 PC's and standard wealth.

My mileage really, really varied.

 

[Silver Moon]

Maybe it's because I didn't live in an area with lots of gamers. Unless you had access to some pretty select areas of the country, there was pretty much no help forthcoming.

Okay, I'll admit that I was probably spoiled back then living here in New England, the college capital of the world, where in the early 80's there was no problem finding a D&D game to play in or people to ask advice from.

For those of you with the Dragon CD look up the old "From the Sorceror's Scroll" columns, they are filled with early advice to help get a DM thinking in different directions. And as stated by many earlier in this thread, one other major source was fantasy literature which helped to mold many a campaign.

 

[Melan]

The primary difference in spirit I can put my hands on is how the game has become lost in mechanics. While 3e's rules are superior to older editions - although those were by no means so flawed as to seriously impact gameplay, as evident from D&D's enduring popularity - the sheer mindless focus on fine-tuning these mechanics makes the game as a whole less palatable. The destruction of the rust monster is a prime example of this mindless tinkering, where a cool, if unbalanced, concept got lost in numerically sound and "safe" mediocrity.

Then again, I have already moved on, so wherever WotC goes with D&D is of little concern to me.

 

[FireLance]

The primary difference in spirit I can put my hands on is how the game has become lost in mechanics. While 3e's rules are superior to older editions - although those were by no means so flawed as to seriously impact gameplay, as evident from D&D's enduring popularity - the sheer mindless focus on fine-tuning these mechanics makes the game as a whole less palatable. The destruction of the rust monster is a prime example of this mindless tinkering, where a cool, if unbalanced, concept got lost in numerically sound and "safe" mediocrity.

Oddly, it's the spirit of continuously tinkering with and trying to improve the rules that I like the most about 3e. In the space of a few short years, I've seen many innovative mechanics that are both cool and balanced (in my opinion, anyway): the scout's skirmish ability, the warlock's at will abilities, "true" specialists like the warmage, the dread necromancer and beguiler, systems that balance abilities by the encounter like those in Magic of Incarnum and The Book of Nine Swords, etc.

I'll take cool and balanced over cool and unbalanced any day, and if tinkering can turn cool and unbalanced into cool and balanced, what have we lost?

 

[Henry]

The destruction of the rust monster is a prime example of this mindless tinkering, where a cool, if unbalanced, concept got lost in numerically sound and "safe" mediocrity.

To be fair here, are you talking about Mike Mearls "Reimagining" of the Rust Monster, or the actual 3.0 or 3.5 Rust Monster? The actual Rust Monster still rusts the heck out of metal stuff, even though there is a save involved, as opposed to the old days when it was "10% chance per plus it didn't rust."

Mearls' reimagining of the "Rubber Monster" (the one that added penalties to attack and damage temporarily) is not official, it's just a "what I would do if I were designing him from scratch."

 

[Henry]

I'll take cool and balanced over cool and unbalanced any day, and if tinkering can turn cool and unbalanced into cool and balanced, what have we lost?

In my opinion, we begin to lose the desire of your average gamer to want to tinker with something that doesn't have an official alternative. The current player line of thinking "If' it's not WotC official, it's crap" has begun to increasingly bug me, lately. It's not even WotC's fault, but it's an undercurrent that has increased over the past few years.