Agreed. By the early to mid '90s, the idea that the player should have a large amount of say in determining how their character should be created was commonplace and still ascending; that paradigm directly conflicted with the idea that the DM should obscure mechanics from the players.
What was interesting re: White Wolf was that they kind of knew they were hypocrites about this, and that things had kind of gone wrong with the way they were presenting adventures/campaigns. Sometime in I think in 1998 one of them wrote about how they'd essentially let the writers of the 1E and 2E adventures/campaigns just write what were basically novels where the PCs just spectated, and sometimes interacted with the edges of, and that they'd never meant to do that, but once it started they found they sold and so they kept doing it. Whoever was writing was saying they hoped to avoid that with future stuff. I haven't read their later work to comment on it generally, but certainly Orpheus was way less of a "railroad where you watch like an audience", and I think God Machine Chronicles was too, so maybe they managed it.
Yea, I think the nWoD in general was a response to the fact that the designers were essentially writing novels hidden in the pages of constant sourcebooks, modules, and revisions. They succeeded in a fashion, but it was certainly a good indicator that a lot of the gaming audience loves that story-centric, "collect the lore tidbits", approach.
Out of curiosity, where was that occurring? I was never a module or novels buyer. The only big example I can think of is Time of Troubles, and how that impacted the 2e FR line.
Which TSR 2E adventures/campaigns would you point to as being particularly bad here? I can't off-hand think of any. I can think of some 3E one I personally think were (but wouldn't want to get into an argument over it lol!). I can also think of settings getting changed to account for bad novels a lot, but that's kind of different (primarily FR and Dark Sun).
White Wolf's publishing model was different than TSR's so it isn't precisely analogous. However, nearly every adventure for the main settings was a railroad, often with the PCs watching as NPCs did the important stuff. And while metaphor was not quite as big a thing for most settings, it was an issue for Dark.Sun, IIRC, and I think Birthright. Plus, of course, the novel lines had precedence over the game lines lore and such.
Vecna Lives and the follow up ones were not as bad but still had stuff being done by NPCs with little input or impact by the PCs.
Aha interesting example - I've never read that! I kind of assumed from the era it was more open, but I guess not!
Oh yea, I forgot about Dark Sun and the post-Prism Pentad stuff. Solid point.
