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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Morrow" data-source="post: 2253758" data-attributes="member: 27012">I think that if you read articles from that period or written about how people played during that period, you'd see that there was plenty of variety and non-dungeon play going on even in the earliest days.  For example, I highly recommend Bill Armintrout's article ("Metamorphosis Alpha Notebook") about his college Metamorphosis Alpha game in The Space Gamer #42 which contains recommendations not only about play balance and building logical settings but also about using story-like sensibilities, having fun with sub-optimal characters, using people to guest star as NPCs, and letting the players participate in the world-building.  The advice is so good that I think it's still an excellent advice column despite being written in 1981 about a game run years earlier.As someone who owned and played a lot of Traveller and read lots of role-playing magazines in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I don't think that's as universally true as you are making it sound.  Sure, there were dungeon-like adventures for Traveller like Annic Nova but they also had books like 76 Patrons that offered something very different from a dungeon crawl.  And plenty of the magazines from that period offered plenty of alternative approaches.My earliest role-playing games consisted of using role-playing rules to play the same sort of imaginative games that my friends and I had played with action figures and toy cars but with record keeping and objective combat and task resolution rules.  My earliest Traveller games had each player playing groups of characters and had no GM.  I know exactly why I embraced role-playing systems that offered character generation rules (including random rolls), objective combat and task resolution systems, record keeping, and setting and equipment information over "just make it up".  And in many ways, I find some of the new "systems" that consist largely of "just decide what happens next" a step backward into the sandbox.  Does everyone else really forget how to play make believe games without rules when they hit puberty so that they really need someone to come along when they area dults and actually tell them that they can play make believe games without rules?The problem with many of the newer games/modules/style of play is that they simply change the group that feels alienated.  It's not a matter of evolution or improvement but simply a matter of favoring a different set of preferences.  What makes arguments discussing "evolution' or "maturity" sound so offensive is that it suggests one style is better than another.  It's like being told in college that people in my dorm used to play D&D as kids until they discovered beer.  One could conclude that drinking to the point where one can't walk is an "evolution" or "more mature" on the basis that those people "grew out" of playing D&D or one could simply conclude that binge drinking is simply another recreational activity and no real evolution or increased maturity is involved in the switch.3rd Edition was designed to offer something for every style so that players of all different styles could have fun with at least part of the game.  Personally, I think that's the ideal approach.  What concerns me about games like those original White Wolf games or the style-specific games advocated by various independent publishers is that they consciously embrace a single style at the expense of others.  As a social hobby, I don't think specialized niche games that cater to one style but alienate others is the solution to keeping it healthy.  I htink that we need more games that try to find the common ground between styles rather than the extreme but specialized forms of each style.</blockquote>

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