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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Shroomy" data-source="post: 3240586" data-attributes="member: 32739">Site-based adventuring is still the foundation of most D&D games, even if the "dungeons" do not happen to be underground, feature "logical" ecologies, and have a more dynamic set-up.  I think what you are seeing is the evolution of the game and that evolution was driven by the expansion of campaign settings.  Once players moved from Dungeon A to Dungeon B, it wouldn't take long for someone to realize that you could have an "adventure" during this actual trip instead of handwaving it; that moving around could introduce variety to the types of dungeons explored; and that spending time in a city or village could be more than a place to heal, buy/sell stuff, and train.  As campaign settings became more and more defined in this manner they tend to develop meta-narratives, more defined NPCs, and ecologies that would influence the placement and design of dungeons (you can't have kobolds in the Caves of Evil, the dwarves killed them all in the Great Kobold-Dwarven War!), which in turn further drove the expansion of campaign settings.  Eventually, the need to address the setting elements, the story, NPCs, etc. put pressure on dungeon designers.  If you only had so many pages to work with, then something had to be cut-out or the project had to be expanded.  So you end up getting smaller dungeons (in terms of room, not description) and larger/linked adventures.  Once you get to larger/linked adventures, you have all kinds of room to expand the campaign setting, etc.Taken to extremes, you end up with adventures which are almost all story and which player action is either rail-roaded to serve the story or has no real effect on the larger story.  This is a charge often leveled at late 1e and 2e adventures, which, not coincidentally, coincides with the greatest expansion of campaign settings during the TSR years.  I actually find 3e adventure design to be a nice hybrid of 1e and 2e style; IMO, the sometimes maligned mechanical aspects of 3e hark back to the game's tactical warmgaming roots while taking up much more space than their antecedents, thus paring down excesses in narrative.  Modern adventures have story and setting elements, but I don't feel like I'm reading a short novella just to get the background information for that night's game!</blockquote>

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