NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8211193" data-attributes="member: 18">??? Is that like a prize? Part of my brain is saying it might be.I would award it for D&D to Ravenloft, though not RPGs in general as there have been countless superb horror RPGs, and Ravenloft is merely a setting for D&D which can work okay as a horror RPG under specific circumstances.This has no bearing whatsoever on whether they succeeded as horror settings, only whether you liked it or not. I've read plenty of RPGs where I loved the setting but it didn't actually work the way it was intended. It's almost routine.That's not a rational argument nor a well-reasoned opinion and appears to contradict your directly previous post. Blaming yourself for everything that didn't work, and the setting/writing for nothing is the opposite of making any real attempt to analyze the successes and potential failures of a setting.See, you said this previously, and that's much more of an actual attempt to look at things - it also contradicts the "it's all my fault" angle! Having to work to find an angle was certainly my experience - and most importantly to what I'm saying, often if you could find an angle, it wasn't one the writers appeared to have considered nor supported well.As for "more effective than horror under 3E WotC", I totally agree! Definitely not going to argue with that!WotC in 3E and 4E basically wrote about 75% mediocre-to-terrible adventures. There were some gems, for sure, but in general, the overall quality of their output was extremely low in anything but production-value terms. This is a big part of why Paizo and others were so successful. I don't think Paizo's APs were the apex of adventure design or anything, but they were typically vastly better-designed in everything from layout to understanding how players operate, more inherently "exciting" (subjective but I feel like the extreme success of their products helps bolster this assertion), often more mechanically sound and where they attempted horror, vastly more effective than WotC's attempts at it (but it wasn't typically the focus for either company).Anyway, put it like this, if your contention is "Every single domain and lord, no exceptions, was good, and worked well to produce horror of some kind!", then I personally find that ludicrous and it seems to contradict your own statements. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f44e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt="(n)" title="Thumbs down    (n)"  data-smilie="23"data-shortname="(n)" />But if your contention is "Ravenloft was the best D&D setting at horror and stayed that way!", I agree. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f44d.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt="(y)" title="Thumbs up    (y)"  data-smilie="22"data-shortname="(y)" /> And I think it'll continue, because it looks to me like WotC are making very sensible updates.</blockquote>

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