D&D 5E Help me understand & find the fun in OC/neo-trad play...

I don’t want to invalidate your experience, but are you sure your players enjoyed it as much as you did?

If you asked our DM about the introductory adventure, he would probably say it went well. He was enthusiastically pushing for the adventure (since he is a massive Free League fan and really enjoyed the One Ring) and the players all recognize that as DM he put more work into the adventure than we did.

At the end of the adventure we weren’t about to point out the adventure’s shortcomings as an adventure, particularly since we weren’t starting a One Ring campaign.

We didn’t point out the adamantine rails we were on the entire time, nor that it kind of sucks that the Keeper can just decide when an enemy hit 0 hp that the enemy can just escape, come back to life or be killed by the sun coming up. Or the unnecessary dice rolls. Or that the adventure felt thin on content.
They may not have enjoyed it as much as I did, but they were interested in doing further adventures using the One Ring, especially once the Moria expansion comes out.
Also regarding rails, as a group we tend to stick with published adventures these days as takes less time / stress for us, and recently completed Shadow of the Dark Queen, which I Felt more rail roaded than this outside of the Northern Wastes, and we all enjoyed that nonetheless and played it through to completion, and are working out which game rules / published adventure we will do next.
 

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Just a bit further on it though, I agree with point that I don't see the adventure as being neo-trad, it felt very much Trad like any other published adventure we've run. I just wanted to give an alternative view from someone who did enjoy it, and had enough positive feedback to suggest we could play further using the One Ring.
 

Except they're not doing that. They're not even saying for certain their GM didn't twig to the players' disappointment/s. They're pointing out that it's not always easy to be certain how well a TRPG is going for everyone else at the table.

In particular, as I've noted, players have a not exactly unknown habit of keeping some degree of their problems to themselves with GMs, and this can be for any number of reasons, not all of them because of GM malignity.
 

They may not have enjoyed it as much as I did, but they were interested in doing further adventures using the One Ring, especially once the Moria expansion comes out.
Also regarding rails, as a group we tend to stick with published adventures these days as takes less time / stress for us, and recently completed Shadow of the Dark Queen, which I Felt more rail roaded than this outside of the Northern Wastes, and we all enjoyed that nonetheless and played it through to completion, and are working out which game rules / published adventure we will do next.

The latter is important.

I'm neither a big fan of, nor a massive foe of fairly railroaded adventures; I played through two PF2e Adventure Paths in the last few years, and managed to acquire considerable pleasure out of the experience even though there were parts that were annoying because of the clear rails involved.
 

In particular, as I've noted, players have a not exactly unknown habit of keeping some degree of their problems to themselves with GMs, and this can be for any number of reasons, not all of them because of GM malignity.
I just don't care for the idea of presuming players are being disingenuous with their feelings about a game to their GM.
 

I just don't care for the idea of presuming players are being disingenuous with their feelings about a game to their GM.
It might not be disingenuousness that keeps people quiet. Some folks might keep shtum out of a sense of courtesy to or consideration for the GM, for one thing. I would probably keep quiet if a GM was running something prewritten or with pregens that I didn't care for.
 

The first adventure is Bilbo telling us that he wanted to buy a map from other hobbits but they refused. He wants the map because he thinks that he can decipher the inscriptions to go on an ADVENTURE! He wants us to break into their house and steal it. When we arrive, we realize that the house is actually a local museum.

Bilbo comes off really poorly from the exchange, particularly since he is explicitly sending other people to do his dirty work.
Huh? Did someone ask ChatGPT to translate a Shadowrun adventure into Shire idioms?
 


One thing I've noticed in my One Ring game is that genre drift is a real risk if you don't stay on top of it. We've only been semi-successful.
In my Cortex+ LotR/MERP game Gandalf's player tended to cut loose more than Gandalf as written by JRRT. The upshot was that the Doom Pool grew, and I (as GM) was able to end scenes in a way that meant the Orcs escaped carrying the palantir, etc.

This was broadly genre-appropriate, but I'm not sure if it was fully satisfying RPGing for the players.
 

I just don't care for the idea of presuming players are being disingenuous with their feelings about a game to their GM.

You can feel how you want, but I've seen it enough times with different groups I'm unwilling to write it off.

Though as noted, there's some loading in "disingenuous" that I don't think usually applies, as it implies deliberate manipulation and I don't think that's what's going on.
 

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