Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ariosto" data-source="post: 5585585" data-attributes="member: 80487">Let me see:I don't see how this distinguishes any "new school". It might be characteristic of a school with some sort of program related to the history of places, but even if I knew of one I can tell you that it is hardly exclusive to that school.One presumes that a Dungeon Master prepares for publication such material as he or she expects to be interesting to a goodly portion of the audience. How much of that is "back story" may vary from article to article. A writer just doing a job may instead have a quota to fill. This is typical of tournaments. In a tournament, you don't even have the choice of not going to Place X, because there is nowhere else to go except out of the game!Published scenarios more generally tend to offer some assumed context for the nature of the rest of the presentation. Some may offer more than one such 'hook', perhaps with examples of how to modify the default situation accordingly.If the scenario is site-based rather than event-driven, it tends to be easy for the Referee to adjust the material to whatever circumstances may actually provide the impetus for player-characters' investigation.There is indeed a "new school" that takes prescriptive setups as normative for all play. In this school, the old kind of structure referred to as, e.g., "the Blackmoor campaign" or "the Greyhawk campaign" is deprecated. The game is instead routinely structured on the expectation that the DM directs the players.In other words, the relevant "new school" is defined by excluding an aspect of the game. The "old school" includes it in the mix.An individual meal might be "vegetarian" in the sense of not including meat, but it does not follow that it was prepared by or for people committed to vegetarianism! A non-vegetarian can enjoy cereal for breakfast, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch, and a pork pot roast for supper.There is nothing new about that. Ever hear of Dungeon Levels?Once again, it is necessary to point out that the characteristic of the related "new school" is an insistence that it should always be so. That "new school" is defined by its exclusion on principle of encounters that are "too hard" for a given group of characters to beat in combat. I do not know of any "old school" that makes it incumbent on professed members to eschew, and disavow all enjoyment of, tournament scenarios (which would bar most early AD&D modules). There is plenty of room for various situations either in addition to a full-fledged campaign or even, for that matter, within it!No "dungeon module" is likely to be very much like what was called in OD&D "a good dungeon". It may, however, serve as a modular part of such a dungeon, or of a greater campaign milieu.Once again, we have the vegetarian crying, "Look! Look!" at the meat-eater who happens not to have a hamburger in hand at the moment. It is simply not the meat-eater whose ideology is defined by exclusion!Now, if your ideal, if what you want most or all of the time, is to get ushered from room to room (or scene to scene) in sequence, then you may be a member of a "new school".To what "new school" are such matters supposed to belong? What "school" demands that NPCs should be unreasonable, unmotivated, nameless and unprovided for? I do not know of it, unless it be one that takes to a radical extreme the 4e ethos that emphasizes "the encounter".Well, in that case I would think it unfair to include the outcome in tournament scoring. Otherwise, there appears to me to be in the most prominent D&D "old school" no agreement that a DM cannot make such an adjustment. There are some individuals who would prefer never to have that done, but it does not seem to be a shibboleth for the whole affinity group.When I think of prominent DMs of the 1970s, I think of nuanced advice for judges rather than rigid, all-or-nothing prescriptions.On the other hand, to assert that a DM should make such adjustments continually would be to express a view clearly at odds with the "old school" ethos. That is a corollary of the view that the DM should not continually be deciding for the players where they will go and what they will do. There is a mutual support between the two aspects.It is because of lack of player choice that outcomes become the DM's responsibility. It is to give meaning to player choice that outcomes are left to depend on that plus luck of the dice.</blockquote>

Verification