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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Shaman" data-source="post: 5299120" data-attributes="member: 26473">My impression is less that historical roleplaying games lent themselves to tighter situations and more that those "generic fantasy games" weren't really intended to be quite so open-ended as they proved to be, or perhaps were manipulated to be.I read a lot of essays over the years suggesting that D&D could be used to run this, that, and the other kind of adventure, but often with a caveat along the line of, ". . . if you just change this rule . . ."There's no question that the game fed off the creativity of its players, but there was also a bit of a driving force in the form of the professional writers feeding the hopper of Dragon, White Dwarf, and the other gaming rags back in the day. Where did the DIY-vibe leave off and marketing begin?'cause when I look back at 1e AD&D, I see a pretty tight game with very clear character conceits and rewards. Those characters could be quite versatile in their response to challenges and those rewards could take many forms, but looking at the rules of the game, there's no question to me what 1e AD&D is 'about.'What historical games have in spades over "generic" fantasy games is a richly detailed, readily-accessible setting used in centuries of genre fiction. That's both a blessing and a curse, it would seem.</blockquote>