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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6104085" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yeah, when I say "less sophisticated" I don't mean that disparagingly either. I'm not sure I'd quite equate dungeon crawl with the strictures of haiku, but yeah limits and structure are one way to focus creativity. I make functional pottery, it has to work, no abstract sculpture. Its a discipline that forces you to express things in more subtle ways. OTOH I don't think there's anything subtle about dungeon crawls, they're just a format for play which can enhance enjoyment by making the conventions of the game more clear, bringing it down a bit from "anything goes" and invoking a whole set of table conventions and expectations which allow the game to run smoothly and easily without a lot of negotiation. And yeah, I'm sure you can do subtle and clever things in a dungeon.I don't know. I think that the majority of people are happy with "story-light sandbox dungeon hack & slash" but they're not generally the thought leaders or long-term players. My experience is people START there but a year or two of dungeon crawls and you're ready to move on. I think there are a lot of people who are now nostalgic for their first D&D game, and they've forgotten how all that hack & slash got thin after a while and needed some meaty exploration, plot, narrative, and developed mood and setting to stay interesting. MtG is irrelevent. The point is D&D is the INDUSTRY flag-ship RPG, and WotC's flagship (and really only) RPG product. I think that the game needs to remain vital and fresh if it is going to continue to pull all those other products along with it. A stale game that is designed to be barely more than a parlor game isn't going to cut it. The gaming community around it will die eventually and move on to games that do give that kind of depth and offer new and fresh material. You can't sit still or you will die, and if the game dies then the rest is like a hollow tree, it will just rot away and shed limbs until nothing is left. Yeah, I dunno. Vornheim doesn't do that much for me. I think Zak is just one of those people that annoyingly is so into his hip thing that everything else needs to be dissed. It smacks of a deep insecurity or something, I dunno. I mean I could have fun for an evening or two with some people wandering around doing random Vornheim chart lookups, but it is going to get old fast. If that is the only sort of thing that D&D is supposed to be doing and the rules aren't supposed to help support any other type of play except 'crawls' of whatever sort its a dead game to a lot of us. Again, I think there real picture is subtler than trads vs indies. There are good elements of D&D, keeping them is fine. If there's no reason to change how something works or what it means, great, don't. OTOH experimentation and change are what keep something living and vital. I think that's where the majority of people are if they think about it. I think it is only really a question of where exactly you draw your lines. 4e was bold, but it is still IMHO D&D. I think they did what needed to be done and it should be built on. Its fine to consolidate on that now, and narrow the gap between 4e and other editions, but that's not what DDN is. If all it is is 'trad service' then it will fail, even if most people don't care about anything but dungeon crawling the game will still die simply because it is stagnant. Creativity leaves stagnant things behind, and creativity is the real magic of D&D.</blockquote>

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