Telas said:
I remember the Tharizdun module. Very creepy and foreboding, once you got past the critters. A lot of the early modules (S1, U1, etc) had that creepy "what's going on?" atmosphere to them that I haven't seen as much these days.
I think that creepy 'what's going on' atmosphere is a casualty of increasing player meta-knowledge.
How many people here have read the introduction to the original DMG?
Do you remember being told that if you the DM found out any player had glanced inside the DMG in order to get a look at the rules, that you the DM were responcible for punishing that player's character ICly in responce to his 'cheating'? And we aren't talking just about 'rules' related to the sort of monsters or treasures that exist in the world, the original PH had no information at all on combat resolution, saving throws, or any other sort of thing not directly related to character creation.
And if the DMG was considered strange arcane knowledge off limits to the players, just consider how much stranger the insides of modules were. I'd been playing the game for a while before I ever read anything out of the inside of a published module. In fact, I owned B2 from the basic set for more than a year before I snuck a peek at the contents with the same sort of feeling as a kid sticking his hand in the cookie jar (it turned out ok though, because shortly there after I starting DM a new group of younger players). If you look at the old modules now (DM's only of course
), you'll find that one of the 'charms' (and frustrations) of the old module is the number of encounters that featured unique situationally specific rules for handling this particular encounter. Every thing was creepy and strange literally because everything was strange and unique. There was nothing like comprehensive mechanics for handling much of anything. Gygaxian magic, as laid out in his traps and special encounters, was fundamentally strange, dangerous, and unpredictable (and incredibly arbitrary in its effects). Remember further that many of these early modules contained the first appearance of monsters that are now fundamental to the game and well known to every player right down to the AC and HD. But when these monsters first appeared, no one playing as a player knew anything at all about them and everything they did was completely new.
Second edition lost that atmosphere completely. Third edition brought some of it back (Monte is particularly good at it), but in turn it really opened the doors to player meta-knowledge wide open.
