OD&D and AD&D without the classic modules

[Ariosto]

I'm curious about the aborted attempts.

G1 lasted just one session. We players had a blast, but the novice DM felt that he had made poor rulings and let things get too out of hand, and decided not to continue the scenario. (That may have been wise.) The characters were, I think, the ones from the tournament. Having PCs of such high level would have been a bit unusual in my experience, even had the AD&D rules been out longer. (This may have been my first game with the DMG.)

A1 was in the open gaming room at a convention, and marked the one case in my memory of real DM perfidy. It was a very quick TPK except for the DM's friend (who had assassinated the rest of the party).

Dragonlance, as I recall, just really did not suit our group at all. That particular DM was excellent, and enthusiastic, but the "characters in an epic novel" deal was not for us.

There were a number of forays into the Temple under different DMs, and at least one of those was supposed to be the start of a new campaign that in the event did not come together. (It was really an odd occasion of people running into one another with some time to kill, and a girl had been wanting to run the module.) In the other cases, the place just ended up seeming a dull slog. I think it failed to follow some of the very sound advice that Mr. Gygax had offered in the OD&D and AD&D books.

A departure from those guidelines might be good or even great at typical "module" length -- but for something approaching the scope of a proper dungeon the result was a drag. So, we headed back to the proper dungeons.

All considered, I think the personal touch counted for a lot. I met (as I learned later) bits and pieces from classic modules, and used some myself. Some local fellows did considerable customization of the Drow modules, and of L1 Secret of Bone Hill.

 

[Ranes]

I started c.78. I mostly played (rather than refereed) back then and I distinctly remember my DM dismissing any pre-designed module as 'taking away all the imagination', by which I assume he was talking about the DM's creativity. To be fair, he did understand a module's worth in a tournament but we just read about tournaments back then. We never played in one.

It wasn't until the early eighties that I started reading a lot of these modules and it was the mid eighties before I ran any.

In other words, it was a mostly homebrew experience for me for years. And yes, I saw a lot of lifting of parts of modules, Dragon and White Dwarf adventures during that time.