TSR How Did I Survive AD&D? Fudging and Railroads, Apparently

[Retreater]

I started playing with AD&D 2nd edition back in 1990. Like many, I got many rules wrong at first (and probably continued to do so for years), but by the mid-1990s I had become a player in a regular campaign and was developing great memories. I would look back to those memories of the cornerstone of my life in RPGs, even today, as nostalgia makes me think of lasting campaigns, great character arcs, memorable villains, and emotional payoffs.

I don’t think I realized how much of that experience was curated by DM fiat (aka fudging) and adventures designed to be complete railroads – both elements of gameplay that have been largely bemoaned in the past two decades. Granted, I didn’t spend a lot of time behind the screen until 3rd edition and later, so I didn’t really look “under the hood” much recently until this week.

I’ll bring you up to speed. I’ve been invited to run a game for my friend’s birthday party out of town in a few weeks. He and his group are old-school style players. I’ve decided to run the adventure module

Spoiler: name of the adventure

Web of Illusion

that we never completed from the mid-1990s in that first campaign, in which we were both players. Granted, it is a Ravenloft adventure, which is already probably more linear and “story-driven” than more site-based adventures like “The Gates of Firestorm Peak” or something.

Here are some elements that fly in the face of modern adventure design:

• No matter what the party does, they will have this planned encounter scene with this monster.
• The villain can see the party’s abilities within his lair and will send easy encounters at them to “play with them.”
• Keep throwing enemies at the party until they’re weak enough to be forced into joining forces with the NPC organization.
• Convince the party their characters have an incurable disease so they have no choice but to go on the quest for the NPC organization to get the cure.
• The party gets a MacGuffin that can kill the overpowered boss enemy with one hit. But whatever you do, the DM can’t let the first hit land, because that’s too easy. “Roll dice behind the screen and frown.”
• Here are Scenes 1-13. Make sure these play out basically in order.
• If the party tries to leave the adventure, magic fog keeps re-routing them to the right path.

So, yes, this is likely an extreme example of railroading from a product line that’s already known for taking away player agency. But (and here’s the big question) … should we do it? Should we go back to this style of game? Would our games feel more epic if we did? If they were better curated, more narrative, etc.? Would campaigns feel more satisfying?

Was this the “proper” way of playing back in the day? Is this why OSR products are considered meat grinders? Because we were all cheating (by today’s standards)?

 

[Argyle King]

I'll need to think about this more.

Generally, I am against fudging and railroading.

However, judging by only only your description, it sounds as though there are multiple degrees to it in this adventure, so it is difficult to make one blanket statement.

I'm not entirely against planned encounters.

But giving the players an item that they need to kill the villain while also making sure to fudge so that the players automatically fail at using the item? That strikes me as bad design and something that would bother me as birth a player and a DM.

I think there are a lot of good lessons to be learned from older design, and some of those lessons should still be used. At the same time, bad design should be left in the past.

Without being familiar with the specifics of the adventure, my default opinion is that a lot of the things on the list could be done differently-without extreme fudging and railroading- and the adventure could still achieve the same result.

For example, if the desire is to avoid killing the BBEG in one shot, why not require 2 MacGuffins? One could be required to debuff the target so that the other can deliver the killing blow. Without the debuff, the item used for the killing blow has no (or a much lesser) effect.

 

[Remathilis]

There is a reason 2nd edition modules rarely make the list of Best D&D modules.

But my experience with AD&D matched yours. 2e was the growing pains edition: the rules were still rooted in OS style play while the tone was very heroic and story driven. 2e wanted the PCs to succeed despite the rules doing everything in their power to sabotage the effort. You had to fudge and cheat because AD&D PCs couldn't wipe their own nose until 5th level (or more) and they were supposed to do great quests.

 

[billd91]

I'd check with the players before springing a Ravenloft module on them. The fairly notorious "being trapped by the Mists of Ravenloft" thing is something that should be consented to by the group. Plus, you prime the mood for semi-gothic horror.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I started earlier than you, but my experience was probably similar - rules gotten wrong or ignored. I absolutely fudged rolls, and I suspect the players did as well. We were young. As a DM, if I wasn't designing a dungeon, the number of choices the adventure accounted for were minimal. It wasn't until 2e came out that I started designing adventures with more nuance, more open-ended options.

Prior, part of it was lack of experience. The resources available to learn how to DM were limited. Heck, the number of other DMs and GMs I encountered back then that weren't players of mine that decided they wanted to take a turn was incredibly limited. Thinking about it, that number was a grand total of 2.

But if I wanted to evoke those olden days, I probably wouldn't fudge the dice or make it a complete railroad. There are plenty of other elements of past gaming that can be employed without making the mistakes of the past.

 

[Retreater]

I'd check with the players before springing a Ravenloft module on them. The fairly notorious "being trapped by the Mists of Ravenloft" thing is something that should be consented to by the group. Plus, you prime the mood for semi-gothic horror.

I mean, it's a one-shot with pre-generated characters, so I doubt they'll be very attached. I'll keep an eye on the horror elements just in case, but I think they're used to some pretty ghastly stuff from their regular DM.

 

[Lanefan]

Here are some elements that fly in the face of modern adventure design:

• No matter what the party does, they will have this planned encounter scene with this monster.
• The villain can see the party’s abilities within his lair and will send easy encounters at them to “play with them.”
• Keep throwing enemies at the party until they’re weak enough to be forced into joining forces with the NPC organization.
• Convince the party their characters have an incurable disease so they have no choice but to go on the quest for the NPC organization to get the cure.
• The party gets a MacGuffin that can kill the overpowered boss enemy with one hit. But whatever you do, the DM can’t let the first hit land, because that’s too easy. “Roll dice behind the screen and frown.”
• Here are Scenes 1-13. Make sure these play out basically in order.
• If the party tries to leave the adventure, magic fog keeps re-routing them to the right path.

Of those seven "not modern design" elements, several still seem to be features of modern APs; namely the second (after a fashion), sixth, and seventh.

The sixth in particular - the WotC APs I've seen are basically set up as "Here's chapters 1-15, make sure they play out more or less in order".

The only one of those I see as outright bad design is the first one; though the fifth one contains awful advice in that if they do get a first-time hit with the kill-the-boss McGuffin it should be allowed to stand.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I started playing with AD&D 2nd edition back in 1990. Like many, I got many rules wrong at first (and probably continued to do so for years), but by the mid-1990s I had become a player in a regular campaign and was developing great memories. I would look back to those memories of the cornerstone of my life in RPGs, even today, as nostalgia makes me think of lasting campaigns, great character arcs, memorable villains, and emotional payoffs.

I don’t think I realized how much of that experience was curated by DM fiat (aka fudging) and adventures designed to be complete railroads – both elements of gameplay that have been largely bemoaned in the past two decades. Granted, I didn’t spend a lot of time behind the screen until 3rd edition and later, so I didn’t really look “under the hood” much recently until this week.

I’ll bring you up to speed. I’ve been invited to run a game for my friend’s birthday party out of town in a few weeks. He and his group are old-school style players. I’ve decided to run the adventure module

Spoiler: name of the adventure

Web of Illusion

that we never completed from the mid-1990s in that first campaign, in which we were both players. Granted, it is a Ravenloft adventure, which is already probably more linear and “story-driven” than more site-based adventures like “The Gates of Firestorm Peak” or something.

Here are some elements that fly in the face of modern adventure design:

• No matter what the party does, they will have this planned encounter scene with this monster.
• The villain can see the party’s abilities within his lair and will send easy encounters at them to “play with them.”
• Keep throwing enemies at the party until they’re weak enough to be forced into joining forces with the NPC organization.
• Convince the party their characters have an incurable disease so they have no choice but to go on the quest for the NPC organization to get the cure.
• The party gets a MacGuffin that can kill the overpowered boss enemy with one hit. But whatever you do, the DM can’t let the first hit land, because that’s too easy. “Roll dice behind the screen and frown.”
• Here are Scenes 1-13. Make sure these play out basically in order.
• If the party tries to leave the adventure, magic fog keeps re-routing them to the right path.

So, yes, this is likely an extreme example of railroading from a product line that’s already known for taking away player agency. But (and here’s the big question) … should we do it? Should we go back to this style of game? Would our games feel more epic if we did? If they were better curated, more narrative, etc.? Would campaigns feel more satisfying?

Was this the “proper” way of playing back in the day? Is this why OSR products are considered meat grinders? Because we were all cheating (by today’s standards)?

The module in question, which I won't name since you used a spoiler tag, wouldn't be my first suggestion for Ravenloft. That said, you basically have two approaches. These are modules written for a style of gaming not particularly fashionable any more (imagine if adventure paths became something people were allergic to and trying to run classic modules in that mold from the last ten or fifteen years). So you can either embrace the style and enjoy it on its own terms, or you can alter it to suit your current tastes. I recently ran some Ravenloft modules as written, in the spirit they were written in. This isn't how I run adventures anymore, and it was more constricting given the focus on telling a story and these moments where things felt railroaded (which I think is partly the time but also just the fact that these were modules they just wanted them to function)....but I did learn to appreciate them on their own terms. There was a level of atmosphere I hadn't felt in a campaign for a long time for instance. There were other upsides. If you do that, just be sure to make sure everyone understands going in you are playing an old module in the style it was intended to be played. If you choose to rework them, which a lot of people did with Ravenloft even back in the day, many of these modules have a lot of great ideas and parts you can rework to make great.

 

[el-remmen]

It is a one-off to blow off steam and have fun with your friends, just run it and wing whatever doesn't work in the moment. No need for hang-wringing. As for going "back" to that 2E style, I mean, I knew people who played that way - but it was not my experience with running 2E - and my guess is you'll find as many different approaches to it as people who ran it. Personally, I found the 2E adventures in Dungeon mag to be for the most part head and shoulders above any officially published 2E module and I still mostly used them for 3e and now 5E as well.

 

[Velderan]

I DMed a lot of 2e and have never as a DM fudged a roll. From what I remember, 2e's lethality was toned down quite a bit just by using the "hovering on death's door" optional rule for death. Playing with a big enough group (we usually had 6 or 7 PCs) made it easier to protect downed PCs.

The only thing I would be concerned about in a 2e Ravenloft adventure is if level drain was a possibility. We played a lot in Dragonlance and later Mystara late in 2e's run when the Karameikos set was released and it didn't come up often in those settings.