Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 2254066" data-attributes="member: 2205">Perhaps, although my memory of it wasn't very strong.  And I certainly don't remember any modules -- any products that really took non-dungeoncrawling adventures that really helped you to go through with the process.  Maybe I just wandered around in the wrong games (I did mostly play TSR games, although I played all of them, in the 1980s) or something, but I distinctly remember seeing modules that were dungeoncrawls, with maybe a bit of outdoor travel to get to the dungeon.  That's certainly all I played, but I refused to run those types of adventures.  That may be why the homebrew tradition was so strongly ingrained in me from the very early days; I had to, or I wasn't having the types of games I wanted to run.My experience is that that was atypical, and quite fortunate for you, though.  Most of us, when we were new, didn't immediately make the cognitive leap to playing beyond what was shown to us.  Oh, sure, I had radical ideas, like players not even ever seeing their character sheets, and stuff like that, but I was never able to get my group of fellow junior high school students to go for anything that radical.  To them, it was a game -- about the tactical battles, the levelling up, the treasure acquisition; in other words, the whole point of roleplaying games, even beyond D&D, was dungeoncrawling.  I was most definitely the odd man out by coming at the game from a fantasy book fan angle, and wanting to replicate more that experience instead.Perhaps I'm dead wrong, but my survey of the products available at the time, and talking to hundreds of folks on the Internet, gamedays, conventions and gamestores around the country is that my experience was typical for folks my age who were playing in the late 70s and early 80s.That statement only makes sense if newer style modules had completely replaced dungeoncrawls and made them obsolete.  Since that is obviously not the case, I don't think you can make a convincing argument that dungeoncrawlers are alienated by the general hobby climate.Maybe all my reading of paleontology has given me a different semantic spin to the words, then.  "More evolved", "more mature", "more advanced," "primitive" and words like that don't have any value judgement inherent in them when discussing evolution, they simply contrast an earlier state to a more derived and evolved later one.Beer?  I thought it was girls we were supposed to discover?  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />I quite agree, and I think that's why d20 has regained a position of unassailable dominance relative to the mid/late 90s when it was unsure if D&D was going to remain the top dog forever, or continue to lose market share to other games.Not all games have to be everything to everyone.  I don't know why that would concern you.  If there are gamers out there who prefer that style of play, more power to them if they can get the product they want!  If, on the other hand, the game advocates a style of play that is actually inimical to being played, or gaining fans, or what-have-you, then you can simply not buy it.  The "more evolved" state of the hobby should be broken down into better defined niches, so as to better cater to the broadest possible consumer base.  As opposed to the early 80s situation, when most games were simply minor twists on D&D.  That's a "more primitive" condition, and one that was inevitable to end.  Clearly not all gamers prefer the classic D&D dungeoncrawling experience.  If the hobby had not matured and advanced into a more broad spectrum of games, that would be something to worry about, not the opposite.  You seem to think that everyone would have continued to play what was offered; I think that we would have lost gamers forever.  I know for a fact that I wouldn't be a gamer today if classic D&D style dungeoncrawling was the only type of gaming I could possibly get.</blockquote>

Verification