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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 9733818" data-attributes="member: 2205">You may be right, but the problem is that your interpretation lacks nuance and is taking the end points as the only points on the spectrum. Trad players don't want to experience a fantasy novel AND have full agency. They want an experience that is MORE LIKE a fantasy novel but WITH agency. Site-based adventuring tends to focus on the agency but feels little like a fantasy novel, and provides little of what the typical trad player sees as the promise of the medium in the first place. Hence the abandonment of site-based published modules (mostly) in the early/mid 80s and the ascendancy of trad; because trad was largely the mainstream and presumably the most common style amongst gamers. In today's fractured market, all kinds of other styles can be adequately supplied, although the prevalence of WotC style campaigns and Paizo style adventure paths suggests to me that trad is still the biggest elephant in the room.EDIT: With the caveat that even most trad style adventures that I've read have some site-based elements integrated. Again, the spectrum isn't two endpoints.But the problem is that I'm not sure how you write a trad adventure that doesn't come across like a railroad. I know how to run one, and I know how to create notes for one that are useful for me, but I don't know how to do so in a way that is useful for anyone else. I'm not convinced that there isn't some method for doing so, but people haven't, as I say, cracked that code.And I think that there are interesting incentives for why they don't. Many more adventures get read than ran, I suspect, so making an adventure product that's interesting to read will drive both sales and enthusiasm with customers. But it also encourages a bad spiral where DMs will be less likely to want to deviate from it.</blockquote>

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