Is The Temple of Elemental Evil a well-designed adventure module?

[Quasqueton]

HUNDREDS of gamers I have personally met who enjoyed the module

Regardless of opinion on this module, I just find your repeated claim to have "personally met" hundreds of gamers who have even played this module a bit hard to believe. And not only have you personally met hundreds of gamers, but you know they have played this module, and you got their personal opinion of it.

Quasqueton

 

[Vigilance]

Regardless of opinion on this module, I just find your repeated claim to have "personally met" hundreds of gamers who have even played this module a bit hard to believe. And not only have you personally met hundreds of gamers, but you know they have played this module, and you got their personal opinion of it.

Quasqueton

Yeah, college gaming is a wonderful thing. I also have worked at various gaming stores and watched various in-store campaigns take place.

When you've been gaming for 20+ years, most of that time in public gaming forums, you meet lots of folks.

 

[Dr Simon]

I think one can judge quality even allowing for 'early days'. For one thing, there is variation within AD&D products of the time, and even EGG-written AD&D products of the time.

Further, other contemporary games (Traveller and RuneQuest being the other two of the 'big three' triumvirate of the time) managed to produce adventure material that combined ease of use with interesting material and flexibility, so these aren't qualities that only came about recently.

One thing I would say from a *design* perspective is that I always found *all* of EGG's modules difficult to navigate since he tended to block out room/encounter descriptions all as one fat paragraph (making it hard to pick out at a glance creature tactics, descriptions and secrets etc.) , and in some cases (Against the Giants being the one that sticks in my mind) misses out all but hit points in monster stat blocks, making a trip to the MM inevitable (annoying on some occasions).

 

[Vigilance]

Organization was not EGG's strongsuit.

The 1E DMG really felt like an arcane tome. There were important rules that seemed like he TRIED to hide them in there.

Still, I think he's the finest adventure writer ever. Id rate his Legion of Gold adventure for Gamma World as the best PA adventure I've ever ran as well.

 

[RFisher]

However, most of its content isn't well suited to the type of adventuring AD&D is designed for.

I don't know. It's easy to look at AD&D & assume that it is "designed for" adventures that use little more than the rules you see. These days, however, I've been looking at games (not just RPGs) a lot more from the perspective of what is not written. (Indeed, sometimes the point of a rule is for it not to come up in play; to discourage certain things.)

Michael Mornard has written in other places online about how--in the earliest days--there were things they thought needed rules & there were things they thought didn't need rules. The line between them may have been somewhat arbitrary, but the actual campaigns that these rules sprang from certainly covered more activities than what the game has rules for.