D&D General Matt Colville: "50 years later we're still arguing about what D&D even is!"

[Ruin Explorer]

That's what head canon is for. Just stop where you want to, or play in an earlier era if you insist on using their story in your game for some reason.

And whether or not something is "awful" or "underwhelming" is of course subjective.

I feel like your opinions on this specific problem are distinctly less important given you've acknowledged you don't use any official settings or adventures except for reading for fun and chopping up for parts. It's like a bunch of people are complaining about how terrible a car is, and you're like "Well I don't think it's terrible because I can take the engine block out and put it in this chassis and use these wheels and hand-manufacture this and then it's really cool for me!". Yeah, thanks man lol.

 

[TiQuinn]

I feel like your opinions are distinctly less important given you've acknowledged you don't use any official settings or adventures except for reading for fun and chopping up for parts. It's like a bunch of people are complaining about how terrible a car is, and you're like "Well I don't think it's terrible because I can take the engine block out and put it in this chassis and use these wheels and hand-manufacture this and then it's really cool for me!". Yeah, thanks man lol.

Not to mention that near constant reminders that opinions are subjective is pretty much the most passive aggressive thing one can say on a message board.

 

[TwoSix]

You're not required to buy anything, especially if the older stuff worked better for you. The story was the story and the game was the game.

That might been true if you're one table. But at the time, I was in college, and there were a pretty wide group of people playing White Wolf games that people moved between.

And particularly with White Wolf games, you needed to be plugged into the setting to play. The game was not friendly to people playing casually and not having familiarity with the intricate lore.

 

[Staffan]

Definitionally that is a perfect example of the PCs being sidelined for the sake of NPCs from a novel. You're not going to find a more perfect example.

There's absolutely no reason for that adventure to exist as it did except because someone wanted to make the NPCs from the truly appalling Prism Pentad series of novels be Big Damn Heroes who the PCs have to get see be super-cool. That's literally it.

I disagree. To me, the adventure is about establishing the PCs in various social contexts: plugging them in with the Veiled Alliance, (depowered) templars, nobles, and (emancipated) slaves. These are fertile grounds for further adventures, and I think one of the most important jobs of an intro adventure is to provide seeds for future adventures.

I also think it helps that the main thing the Big Damn Heroes do is mainly off-screen. Yes, there's a "cut-scene" where Rikus throws a spear at Kalak, but the actual fight happens deep within the ziggurat. The PCs have to deal with the situation outside. I don't see this as any different from "The castle is collapsing and you need to get out before it's too late" – it's just that the "castle" in this case is a life-draining ritual.

It also does kick off the setting meta-plot, but I think that in itself it's fairly inoffensive. Were 2024 Staffan in charge of the development of 1991 Dark Sun, I'd have frozen it after Freedom/Verdant Passage. Having one city-state having thrown off the shackles of their sorcerer-monarch and abolishing slavery makes for a really interesting situation. But much like Eberron, a setting is best served by having a myriad of potential things that could happen rather than having one specific thing happen and leading to another.

A worse example is also from Dark Sun: Black Flames. This has PCs being separated from their caravan by a sandstorm, and winding up in the ruins of Yaramuke where they get tricked by a 22nd level dragon (described as a "minor dragon in the scheme of things) who needs patsies to go get something from the ruins for him (he can't go in himself because some curse, so he needs 3rd-level PCs to do his work for him), and ends with a big fight between said dragon and a sorcerer-monarch who happens to be in the neighborhood because of Reasons.

 

[Staffan]

I think another factor was a lot of metaplot reveals turning out to be awful and/or underwhelming, but they mostly didn't happen until after a few years. I remember a lot of people being really excited about the Shadowrun metaplot, until it turned out to be awful and actively making the setting more lame/silly (I can't even remember what it was at this point!).

I think a big problem with metaplot is something you mention in passing: metaplot reveals. Traditional metaplot relies on treating the GM as a reader who gets to retell a story that you are creating rather than a person who gets to tell their own story based on the elements and plot seeds that you have planted throughout the work. And to keep the reader interested, you need to keep them in the dark and string them along with periodic reveals. Look! The sorcerer-monarchs are actually proto-dragons! And they sacrifice 1000 people every year to keep something trapped! It's their old boss who set them up to commit genocide, whom they turned on when they realized he was going to kill all humans too and turn the world over to the halflings.

Some people enjoy this method of setting building, where they get to make sense of hints here and there and try to figure out where the designers are going with things. I don't. A game setting is not a novel series, and should not be treated the same.

Compare this to Eberron, where the major players and their plans are all set out in the core book, presented as a menu from which the DM can select the threats they want to use in this particular campaign. Later books certainly add nuance to many of these and go into greater detail, and sometimes present more local instances of the big threats (e.g. the plot by the Dreaming Dark to infiltrate house Deneith mentioned in the Sharn sourcebook – having the Dreaming Dark infiltrate things is a core threat, and this is just a local example of it), but they generally don't go "Oh, and here's a new continent with a big army that's about to invade".

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I disagree. To me, the adventure is about establishing the PCs in various social contexts: plugging them in with the Veiled Alliance, (depowered) templars, nobles, and (emancipated) slaves. These are fertile grounds for further adventures, and I think one of the most important jobs of an intro adventure is to provide seeds for future adventures.

I also think it helps that the main thing the Big Damn Heroes do is mainly off-screen. Yes, there's a "cut-scene" where Rikus throws a spear at Kalak, but the actual fight happens deep within the ziggurat. The PCs have to deal with the situation outside. I don't see this as any different from "The castle is collapsing and you need to get out before it's too late" – it's just that the "castle" in this case is a life-draining ritual.

It also does kick off the setting meta-plot, but I think that in itself it's fairly inoffensive. Were 2024 Staffan in charge of the development of 1991 Dark Sun, I'd have frozen it after Freedom/Verdant Passage. Having one city-state having thrown off the shackles of their sorcerer-monarch and abolishing slavery makes for a really interesting situation. But much like Eberron, a setting is best served by having a myriad of potential things that could happen rather than having one specific thing happen and leading to another.

A worse example is also from Dark Sun: Black Flames. This has PCs being separated from their caravan by a sandstorm, and winding up in the ruins of Yaramuke where they get tricked by a 22nd level dragon (described as a "minor dragon in the scheme of things) who needs patsies to go get something from the ruins for him (he can't go in himself because some curse, so he needs 3rd-level PCs to do his work for him), and ends with a big fight between said dragon and a sorcerer-monarch who happens to be in the neighborhood because of Reasons.

I mean, you're welcome to that opinion, but I know that adventure really pissed off people, people with very low standards, people who tolerated other metaplots, back in the 1990s. So it kind of doesn't matter if you've got a view that's different (no matter how reasonable), because it somehow managed to rub people the wrong way. We were far from the only ones I know, too, based on discussions on the early internet, where pretty much no-one defended that adventure.

And I think it's pretty obvious why, re-reading as I just have (well glanced through). It's a really bad and annoying railroad full of assumptions even before that. Like, I think what the problem really was, was the adventure already pisses people off by railroading them hard (a lot of DS adventures do, but it's one of the worst for it) and telling the DM to treat them this way and that way rather than naturally RPing or letting the PCs have much impact at all, all in order to absolutely force them to be on the Grassy Knoll in Dealey Plaza (as it were), which is very much not a natural place for them to be. You could have the same adventure without forcing this specific setup so hard - that's solely to because Troy Denning needed his awful, awful characters to be Big Damn Heroes in a way that was canon to the setting.

Re: difference, the difference is the castle collapsing is 99% of the time because the PCs either killed the Big Bad who inexplicably was stopping that from happening somehow, or pulled the "collapse castle" lever.

(I would particularly note that one of the issues with these characters is that most of them are profoundly unlikeable, in an impressive variety of ways. I think word "dicks" would apply to most of them! This is a stark contrast to say, the Heroes of the Lance, who, aside from Tasslehoff Divisive-foot, are broadly "meh" to "fully likeable", which meant players who had read one or more of the books were further primed to be annoyed by this.)

Were 2024 Staffan in charge of the development of 1991 Dark Sun, I'd have frozen it after Freedom/Verdant Passage.

Personally I would have had the books be an alternative reality, just not reflected by the setting at all, but that wasn't the way things went in the 1990s. Have Kalak dead, sure, but give the DM like three different "truths" about how he died, as was not even uncommon at the time (though it did get more common as time went on). I suspect that's similar to what you're envisioning in practical terms.

A worse example is also from Dark Sun: Black Flames. This has PCs being separated from their caravan by a sandstorm, and winding up in the ruins of Yaramuke where they get tricked by a 22nd level dragon (described as a "minor dragon in the scheme of things) who needs patsies to go get something from the ruins for him (he can't go in himself because some curse, so he needs 3rd-level PCs to do his work for him), and ends with a big fight between said dragon and a sorcerer-monarch who happens to be in the neighborhood because of Reasons.

That does sound pretty annoying, I must admit, but exactly how annoying it gets would depend on how brutal the railroading was up to that ending.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I feel like your opinions on this specific problem are distinctly less important given you've acknowledged you don't use any official settings or adventures except for reading for fun and chopping up for parts. It's like a bunch of people are complaining about how terrible a car is, and you're like "Well I don't think it's terrible because I can take the engine block out and put it in this chassis and use these wheels and hand-manufacture this and then it's really cool for me!". Yeah, thanks man lol.

Doesn't mean I'm not using the car and aren't happy it was manufactured. What difference does it make what I'm using it for in regards to how valid my opinion is? I like, you don't. There's nothing more to it than that.

 

[Micah Sweet]

That might been true if you're one table. But at the time, I was in college, and there were a pretty wide group of people playing White Wolf games that people moved between.

And particularly with White Wolf games, you needed to be plugged into the setting to play. The game was not friendly to people playing casually and not having familiarity with the intricate lore.

Ok. In that case I suppose you take it or leave it and play something else. I really don't see the problem here.

 

[TwoSix]

Ok. In that case I suppose you take it or leave it and play something else. I really don't see the problem here.

I took it, because the game was fun and I don't mind absorbing lore info. But I'm also happy that they stopped doing the behaviors I found annoying.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Not to mention that near constant reminders that opinions are subjective is pretty much the most passive aggressive thing one can say on a message board.

Is it so hard to say, "I don't like this" instead of "this is bad"? Really?