NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 7056480" data-attributes="member: 37579">It's almost as if the conventions and assumptions of the game have changed and evolved over the almost forty years since those adventures were published. It's almost as if Gygax - with his six or seven years of experience creating adventures and DMing - might not have been as adept at adventure design as someone now who might have two or three decades of continual experience running the game and writing adventures and building on the collective adventure design advances made by dozens of official adventure writers and designers. I respect EGG a lot for his contributions to the hobby. But he was making it up as he went along. I don't think we should be beholden to his ideas of adventure design in 1979 any more than we should be restricted to his ideas of racial or class balance, or required to abide by his worldbuilding tropes.Gygax makes a lot of claims for gameplay in 1e that we often conveniently ignore. Like the importance of having players map dungeons. Acquiring hirelings and gaining a keep. Name levels. Alignment languages. Tracking game time being "of the utmost importance". The thing is, Gygax was continually changing how he wrote adventures. The "D&D tradition" changed dramatically between OD&D and 1e, between Against the Giants to Temple of Elemental Evil. Every year brought new changes and advancements to how he designed adventures. Let alone the stuff he was doing after he left TSR. You can look at a single small sampling of his stuff at the very beginning of his career and say that's definitive. It's like looking at ET, Close Encounters, and Jaws and using that to define the career of Steven Spielberg and how movies should be made. Grognardia puts the blame at Dragonlance. So it's *only* existed for 3/4ths of the lifespan of the hobby. Judging by published products of course. There's no guarantee people weren't creating their own vast GM plots far earlier. But if you're actually curious, books have been written on this:<a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Creation-Narrative-Tabletop-Role-Playing-Games/dp/0786444517" target="_blank">https://www.amazon.ca/Creation-Narrative-Tabletop-Role-Playing-Games/dp/0786444517</a></blockquote>

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