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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Morrow" data-source="post: 2255944" data-attributes="member: 27012">Even today, writing adventures or modules that aren't controlled or limited in some way is very difficult.  GMs don't buy modules and adventures so the players can wander outside of the scope of the module or adventure so the GM has to make it up as they go.  And unless you control the scope of the adventure or module in some way, the odds are pretty good that your players will wander into "make it up as you go" territory.I quickly skipped over D&D to Traveller without ever really playing a proper D&D game.  I also figured out what to do on my own without someone telling me what was right or wrong.  I do think that helped, too.  While Traveller certainly had some dungeon-like adventures, the game made it pretty clear that there were plenty of other adventuring possibilities.  I think many of the non-TSR games and particularly the science fiction and non-fantasy games did.Well, I pretty much did homebrew adventures from the start, as did most of the people I knew at that time and met in college.  In fact, I was doing homebrew systems pretty much from the start, too, as were people that I started role-playing with in college (and still role-play with in some cases).  Part of my point is that I'm not sure whether you experience was any more typical or normal.  I'm not just judging from my own experiences but also the experiences of other people in my hometown when I was in high shool (many of whom were role-playing before we met and who seem to have independently come up with some similar ideas, including using role-playing rules to run and create adventures for ourselves without any players), what I was reading in the role-playing magazines of that time, what other people I know have told me about their early experiences, and evidence from things like the jokes in KoDT (e.g., the jokes about GMs writing homebrew rules and such).  I think there was plenty of experimentation and out of the box thinking go on, even very early on.How typical was the experimentation?  I've run into plenty more people who were willing to experiment than stuck to the rules and modules only.  That doesn't make my anecdotal experience any more valid than yours but it does make me wonder if your experience was really any more typical.  Yes, published modules were dungeon-oriented but even today, many published modules are far more staged, linear, and railroaded than many people would consider ideal (e.g., read reviews of some of the highly-regarded Call of Cthulhu modules).  I think that's more a function of the nature of published adventures and modules than an indication of how many GMs run their homebrew adventures.Well, most of the people I know came from teh fantasy and science fiction fandom angle and not the tactical or competative angle.  But even when they did (one person I still game with grew up on a military base and I've role-played with other people he gamed with in high school during that early period), they still never confined their games to dungeons or tactical battles.  I can imagine people who came into role-playing from a boardgame or wargame tradition being more interested in the competative or tactical angle.  I personally also played a lot of board games as a child, but I quickly considered role-playing to be less like a board game and more like playing with action figures.  But again the question is one of how typical either experience is and I'm not sure anecdotal evidence will really answer that question.And I've looked at (and still own) many of the products available at the time, talked to hundreds of folks on the internet and in person from around the country and around the world and while I've run into plenty of horror stories (e.g., the adolescent boys who have character of the lone girl who wants to try to play get raped seems disturbingly common), I haven't talked to anyone who was either dungeon or module bound.  Simply put, your anecdotal evidence isn't meshing with my anecdotal evidence.  That doesn't mean mine is more accurate than yours.  It simply means that I'm not convinced that yours is more reliable.If you look around (here, RPGnet, the Usenet, etc.) you'll find plenty of threads of people who are frustrated by the move away from dungeons and complainging about how they don't have fun anymore.  Heck, this thread asks whether D&D has "lost the dungeon".  If there wasn't a sense among some players that dungeoncrawls have been pushed aside, if not replaced, in the mainstream, then you wouldn't see discussions like that.  And those threads seemed even more common before 3e, when D&D seemed to be in decline.  Note that I'm not just talking about modules or D&D but other systems and the way GMs play them.  A lot of newer games don't have much to offer the traditional dungeoncrawler.In common usage, they certainly have values associated with them.My point about the dungeoncrawlers feeling alienated comes, in part, from Usenet posts in the mid/late 90s when plenty of people were feeling alienated by D&D and other games.  Perhaps D&D 3e has done a good job of correcting that problem.Read this article as an analogy:<a href="http://www.musicradio77.com/died.html" target="_blank">http://www.musicradio77.com/died.html</a>In particular, consider the section where it talks about, "Was something lost?" (you can stop reading about half-way through when it starts talking about that paritulcar day) and consider that this hobby may be too small to remain commercially viable if it fragments the way music did.  Is it the end of the world?  Of course not.  But I also suspect that it's not a good trend.If you want an evolutionary analogy, consider how well generalist species survive changes in the environment compared to how well specialists survive changes in the environment.  Sure, specialists do an excellent job of maximizing things in a particular environment but they have a tendency to go extinct before they can adapt if the environment shifts radically while the generalists are more adaptable.  Being specialized often means optimizing immediate needs at the expense of potential long-term needs.Not at all.  And I suspect that plenty of people still leave the hobby forever because of bad first experiences, which is why I'm so fascinated by discussions about gaming styles and consider the ability to learn role-playing from the book rather than others so important.  What I'm conscerned about is fragmentation of a tiny hobby into pieces too small to be economically viable.In the big scheme of things, I really shouldn't care.  My group has played plenty of homebrew systems and settings so we don't really need published systems, settings, or modules to play.  But in the sense that I'd like to see others enjoy the same hobby, I don't think the hobby is big enough to afford to alienate anyone or fragment into little specialty slices.</blockquote>

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